Military space programs and US satellite espionage programs suffer from serious flaws

The Pentagon Commission discovered "serious and systematic problems" in a number of large American military-space programs and satellite espionage programs. The list of problematic also included two key programs supervised by Boeing and Lockheed Martin corporations - the elimination of problems in them has already required an additional investment of $ 7 billion, writes The Wall Street Journal .

The duration of the development process and the high cost are the two main scourges of almost all satellite programs for which the government has been taken over the past 10 years.

According to the commission headed by Thomas Young, the root of the problems is to reduce the defense budget after the end of the Cold War, in too optimistic assessments of the cost and complexity of tasks by government officials and defense enterprises, as well as in the industrial consolidation of the 1990s, as a result of which there were only three major military-space companies. At the same time, the need for the use of high technologies in the military sphere of high technologies has called the reliability and relevance of existing satellites - many of them are more than a dozen years old - and exacerbated the need for new modern production facilities, which are able to cope with additional loads.

Although at the moment, according to the commission, the industry as a whole is able to cope with space programs, soon as a result of the factor of labor aging, the experience accumulated for decades together with the employees will “retire”, while the technological tasks become more complex.

As the chief specialist of the US Air Force on the development of space, Peter Tits, said at a meeting with Yang, separate problems covered in the report of the commission, already on the path to elimination.

In particular, in January, the US National Intelligence Directorate increased the budget of the new Boeing created by the Future Imagery Architecture satellite spying for $ 4 billion, which was the answer to the commission’s decree that this program “suffers from underfunding” and “technically defects”.

Last year, the Air Force invested another $ 3 billion in the Space Based Infrared-High satellite program overshadowed by Lockheed Martin. This program is one of the most important elements of the new missile defense system, since it provides earlier the identification of small enemy blows to the United States.