I am still trying to puzzle through what might have happened to our old friend AFP-731 [the Feb 90 STS "flasher"], in anticipation of the possibility that the upcoming Titan-4 K-2 launch might be a replay of this most puzzling mission. As you may recall, initial March 1990 events, what with the Soviets publicly claiming that the thing had blown up, certainly confirmed either that the AFP-731 survivability elements that were tested at that point in time either left the Soviets actively bewildered, or at least convinced that it was in their interest to convince the US that they were actively bewildered [in this wilderness of mirrors it is always difficult to know how many layers of perception are being managed]. I am guessing in any event that the stuff used in the March display was some of the residual hardware from the *losing* contractor in the program, and certainly not the whole ball of wax, as little would be gained by staging the same show twice, for the repetition of history is folly. OTOH, the October disappearing act seems to have been much more convincing [or at least our Russian colleagues have decided that it is in their interest to attempt to persuade us that they found it convincing, as their FBIS traffic generally ignores the existence of this bird], and upon reflection it is not hard to comprehend why this would have been the case: It would not be neccessary to make AFP-731 entirely invisible, merely to reduce its radar and optical signature to the point that it would blend in with the background debris population -- if one could achieve a one to two order of magnitude RCS and visible magnitude reduction [one might as an exercise attempt to calculate just whate reduction would be required and what would be needed to do this], you would transform something the size of a city bus [which was pretty clearly KH] into something the size of a refrigerator, which would be pretty hard to distinguish from a couple of thousand other objects, if one even took the time to try to do so. I am still having a bit of difficulty precisely comprehending just how one would go about developing and deploying a stealth applique package for a Keyhole. There is not one whole heck of a lotta rattle space inside either the STS or T-4 payload compartment, so the thing would probably have to be deployable, which probably means inflatable. Naively one could just shrink wrap the whole spacecraft, though I am kinda imagining this more along the lines of an inflatable life raft, or something, but I think that we are probably going to have to sit down and actually try to draw the thing in order to comprehend a not implausible way of developing such a configuration. The real trick seems to be twofold: 1 - Really low signature for the initial get-away maneuver [probably have to turn the optics aperture away from the Earth, and have all the dorsal radiators covered or stowed]; 2 - An operational configuration that had an acceptably low nadir RCS -- ie, radar return from the optics aperture and not much else, along with some difficult but not impossible efforts to *redirect* the IR signature away from the belly of the spacecraft to radiate it off the spacecraft's back... I am kinda gettin lost here, as my current model has the back of the SC being the stealthy part during the evasive maneuver, and the belly of the SC being the stealthy side during normal ops, but IMHO I am having an easier time making the back stealthy against radar but not IR and the belly stealthy against IR but not radar, and this fits with totally evading radar during the disappearing act and evading IR and fooling though not entirely hiding from radar during normal MEO ops. In any event, I am increasingly suspecting that this whole sat.track game is a lot less perfected than one might have imagined, in that I think that the elset crowd has less-than-perfect knowledge of what is what -- NORAD's two-day bewilderment as to the fate of Landsat-7 was either an active attempt on their part to convince the Sovs of our incompetence, or a rather shocking demonstration of incompetence [I tend toward the later, though cannot exclude the former]. Based on the dismal Landsat-7 performance, I could easily imagine that a spacetrack system with limited capabilities and limited resources would have a limited appetite for precisely characterizing every last object that ever generated a track file in their database, and that it would not be *ovewhelmingly* difficult to hide a KH in the debris population if suitable steps were taken to reduce and modulate the signature to approximate that of debris. It would be an interesting exercise, currently beyond the scope of my resources [though I would be interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts on this matter], to contemplate whether there exists a debris population in the 1000x5000x63* neighborhood in which one could hide such an object -- that is, is there a preexisting category of rocket body debris from molniya orbit injections into which one might insert an additional object. Indeed, was there another launch coincident with the ~~October 1990 disappearence of AFP-731 that this spacecraft could have used to mask its own maneuver??? Is there any possibility that some of the NOSS-2 debris might in fact be our ole friend AFP-731??? -- John Pike Federation of American Scientists http://www.fas.org/ CyberStrategy Project http://www.fas.org/cp/ Intelligence Reform Project http://www.fas.org/irp/ Military Analysis Network http://www.fas.org/man/ Space Policy Project http://www.fas.org/spp/ Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. - Jefferson