Chris Cantell Discusses US News: Pentagon will keep an eye on us with new satellites by Zuzana Zelenakova

The U.S. Government has been pursuing more than expensive program to develop a new spy satellite system for several years now. It plans to buy one or two commercial satellites and build another one with special spying use. The new system is called BASIC (The Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collector) and will cost $2 billion to $4 billion. These photo reconnaissance satellites are used to gather visual information from space about the activities of different terrorist groups, for example their militant training camps, but also provide information about natural disasters, such as hurricanes or floods, and found out the extent of the damage. Hopefully, there will be no difficulties and the program will run smooth. U.S. Officials still remember very well 2005 failure of Future Imagery Architecture, when after six years and billions of dollars the National Reconnaissance Office was forced to pull out the major component of the program. The main contractor Boeing had experienced some technical difficulties in the development of the satellite and exceeded the budget immensely before Pentagon stepped out of the whole thing. “They grossly underestimated the cost of the program, as well as the technological feasibility,” said back then John Pike, a space expert who heads GlobalSecurity.org. “FIA was a hallucination.” However, the new program is considerably less ambitious than the one it is about to replace. These additional satellites will enable to visit a particular place on Earth several times a day, a single satellite can do that only once or twice. The BASIC program will be bought and operated by National Reconnaissance Office, which beat Air Force. “The battlefield today is so dynamic the warfighter needs to be able to respond at a moment´s notice. Knowing they have the opportunity to have assured tasking in the next pass of satellite becomes very critical and helpful in the planning of their operations,” said Josh Hartman, the Pentagon director for space and intelligence capability acquisition.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080701/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/spy_satellites;_ylt=An8.16xKurTiq3mMExXJsYCs0NUE

by Zuzana Zelenakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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posted by Lucia Adamova