Dwayne Day has a depressing report on a symposium last week. It’s both difficult and frightening to contemplate that Milspace is even more screwed up than NASA, but there it is. And there’s no reason to think that it’s going to get any better, particularly under this administration.
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A couple points:
1. The focus of the speech was Intelligence Community (e.g. NRO) systems more than military systems.
2. Military systems (e.g. commsats, GPS, weather birds, SBIRS) have their share of problems, too. Scope creep and unrealistic requirements are a continuing problem.
Today the intelligence community faces increasing challenges. During its peak in the 1960s the military and intelligence communities launched on average 60 satellites a year. By the 1970s that had dropped to 18 satellites per year. Today they launch approximately 12 per year. The military and intelligence communities have “very few programs with very small production runs.” And “almost all the work is done as touch labor by an extremely expensive workforce,” Munson explained. The intelligence community also procures some spacecraft that are unique and for which there is no commercial analogue. “Has anybody ever heard of a commercial sigint provider?” he asked rhetorically.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, those satellites didn’t last very long. A CORONA photographic reconnaissance satellite used film return canisters meaning the satellite life was typically a few weeks at best. Other systems like the first generation commsat was launched in clusters of 6 or 8. A single DSCS-II lasted far longer than those clusters and provided more bandwidth. DSCS-III was even better (10 year design life that was greatly exceeded in practice) and the new WGS satellites provide about 10 times the bandwidth of a DSCS-III. You simply don’t need so many satellites when you have those capabilities. However, that means each satellite tends to be “gold plated”, driving up costs and reducing redundancy.