NEW ORLEANS -- Spooks, suits, generals and geeks gathered here this week to discuss a common goal: an all-seeing, omnipresent set of eyes in the sky
to keep an unblinking view of the entire world at once.
Representatives from the military, spy agencies and the defense industry met to find ways to put a new generation of spy satellites in orbit to aid in
war, homeland security and spy craft. But talking about Big Brother vision in a hotel ballroom is proving to be a whole lot easier than executing it
in orbit. Several of the satellite systems are wrapped in controversy, cost overruns or long delays.
"We need to know something about everything all the time," Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told the gathering of nearly
1,400 at the Geo-Intel 2003 conference here at the French Quarter's edge. "We need an illuminator, throwing into relief all the pictures and
activities on the Earth's surface. And then we need to be able to switch on the spotlight, or alert other systems, to dive deep."
"This system has to be never-blinking, never-straying," added Rich Haver, a Northrop Grumman executive and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
former special assistant for intelligence. "Our enemies can never be sure when they're being looked at."
Space-based radar, or SBR, is Cambone's preferred method for fulfilling these aims. America's current imaging satellites can cover only thin slices
of the Earth at any one time as the spacecraft pass overhead. A constellation of 10 to 24 SBR satellites, slated for 2012 or so, would cover almost
the entire globe at once. Unlike the standard birds now in orbit, whose eyes are blocked by cloud and darkness, the SBR array would use
weather-piercing synthetic aperture radar to look below without interruption. What's more, the radar could track tanks, jeeps and planes, giving
their locations to American bombers and fighter planes.
www.globalsecurity.org...
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Space battles here we come. What is the world coming to?
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Honestly, how far do you think we are from this now? I'd be willing to bet that the technology already exists and is in use.
I doubt if and when this is a reality that it will be announced. Why would they have a conference like this in a public area anyway?
I smell distraction.
Making new tinfoil hat,
BG
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I am interested in to what extent, if any, China's emergence as the next technological and military superpower may have been discussed in corridors
and by water coolers.
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Like we don't already have this? The sky is filled with spy satellites already. I wonder what they are up to. 
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