There’s an interesting article over at USNWR about the condition of our spy satellite program. I don’t know whether it’s valid or not, and can’t because the program is so secret (even though some of the curtains have been raised in the last few years) that it remains relatively opaque. I do agree with this part, though, which is at the core of the problem:

“Any time you have secrecy,” says Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a defense think tank, “performance and accountability suffer.”

The article raises some other disturbing questions as well. Among others, why is this man:

Peter Teets, was forced to resign as president of Lockheed Martin Corp. in 1999 because of management failures in its Titan rocket program, according to government and industry sources. The NRO and the military lost three satellites during Teets’s run as Lockheed Martin’s top boss. In one case, a rocket blew up on launch; in the two other cases, the satellites were launched into useless orbits. Teets declined to discuss his removal.

…holding down two jobs, as both the head of the NRO and an undersecretary for the Air Force? And not to defend Boeing, but wasn’t there a conflict of interest for him to be involved with the decision to shift launch contracts from that company to Lockmart?

In many ways, I think that military space is even more ripe for reform than NASA, if for no other reason than our lives may depend on it in the near term. Unfortunately, it may prove just as resistant.