Presumably Space-X wasn't willing to take an entire chunk of staff and dedicate them to military-only missions and/or had staff that couldn't even pass the stringent security clearance requirements. The US government still wants to utilize them for missions, especially with starship and its payload capacity on the near horizon.
But it also culturally leads to the default behavior being "don't share information." Which in turn leads to things being more highly classified than they really need to be, which in turn is a huge bureaucratic drag on getting things done beyond just what may involve SpaceX or Boeing. This reads to be as much or more an effort to make sure things are classified at a sane level, and that the right information is sharable to allies and partners who have the proper clearances. Foreign disclosure of classified and managing information sharing between allied governments is already a huge administrative PITA that gets worse the more closely held the information is. So this seems to be an effort to take a step back and say "OK, let's not go round the bend with secrecy, let's balance protecting our interests with sharing what our allies and partners need to know."
Can attest to this.
That and our messed up procurement process has caused too much info getting siloed, and slowing down development [0]
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...
Government/governance runs on public trust, which is maintained by governments doing things. If the government won't talk about & share what it does, if everything is secret, people will not believe in that government.
The government can generate belief in itself by talking about & sharing the cool stuff it does. I'm excited for that to happen more.
It was so so cool & weirdly motivational seeing KH-9 Hexagon unveiled at Air and Space in 2011! I dropped everything last minute to go see it. So cool. Hexagon was 40 year old film-bssed satellite, but still so amazing to see, huge & wildly ambitious. I hope this kind of reveal can happen again, can increase in frequency, decrease in number of decades kept cloaked.
Exactly. The default should be "everything is shared unless there's a very good reason for it to be secret", and overclassification leads to the opposite mindset, "everything is (top) secret unless someone goes to a great deal of effort to declassify it".
There is only a very small number of people at SpaceX that need secret clearances for DOD or AF missions, and it’s mostly mission managers, not even most engineers. There’s a point of contact regarding the payload adapter (how the satellite hooks and talks to the launch vehicle). But again, that is a very minor thing.
There’s maybe engineers with secret clearances working on military projects, but those are isolated projects.
And if you need secret clearances they government will happily screen your employees, or you poach people who have them. They are most definitely not a hindrance in the big scheme of things.
It's good to see the changes happening to help better support our R&D capacity.
The old method of having a single contractor monopolize an entire SKU was slowing down innovation and procurement.
BDS and BCA are both essentially independent of each other.
If this is a move to give Boeing's competitors (eg: Lockheed Martin, SpaceX) more bidding power, I welcome it.
Where do you get this? KC46 problem is not because it can’t refuel.
> F-15EX Eagle II and its failing to deliver on marketing promises
Which promises? It’s supposed to be a missile truck, working in conjunction with F35, and it works well in that role.
> V-22 Osprey and its many crashes including the most recent in November that led to a grounding across the services
It’s called Bell Boeing V22 for a reason. Bell is the lead vendor and Boeing is the secondary. It was a Bell’s design. Bell Valor 280 which is a new tilt rotor design won FLRAA contract last year.
Boeing make Chinook helicopter, well known for its reliability.
It has had constant problems with its digital camera system for the refueling boom, which effectively means the tanker can't refuel.
>Which promises? It’s supposed to be a missile truck,
The F-15EX was touted to carry 22 (or was it 21?) missiles. However, nearly half of that is dependent on pylons located on the conformal fuel tanks. Guess what happened? Boeing can't figure out how to install the conformal fuel tanks. Fuel tanks that the F-15E has been using for literally decades.
>It’s called Bell Boeing V22 for a reason.
So? It's Boeing. It crashes. It's grounded. Entire flight crews have died, emphasis on plural.
And as a Plan B - any satellites filled with secret sauce could easily be babysat (while in SpaceX's hands) by trusty USSF TSgt Top-Secret, who's been trained in what to do if things go horribly wrong.
Tell me that and I'll tell you what the bird is going to do. Specific orbits have very specific purposes, usually. And knowing the size and mass of a satellite gives a lot of information, especially if I can look at it or even just a blurry photograph of it.