Washington Post December 11, 2004


By Dana Priest


The United States is building a new generation of spy satellites designed to orbit undetected, in a highly classified program that has provoked opposition in closed congressional sessions where lawmakers have questioned its necessity and rapidly escalating price, according to U.S. officials.

The previously undisclosed effort has almost doubled in projected cost -- from $5 billion to nearly $9.5 billion, officials said. The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages spy satellite programs, has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the program, officials said.

The National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA declined to comment. Lockheed Martin Corp., which sources said is the lead contractor on the project, issued a statement saying, "As a matter of policy we do not discuss what we may or may not be doing in regards to classified programs."

The satellite in question would be the third and final version in a series of spacecraft funded under a classified program once known as Misty, officials said.

Stealth technology has been used to cloak military aircraft such as the F-117A fighter and the B-2 bomber.

When radar searches for a stealth craft, it records a signature that is much smaller than its size should indicate. Thus a stealth plane or satellite could appear to radar analysts as airborne debris.

Advanced nations routinely patrol the skies with radar and other equipment to detect spy planes, satellites and other sensors.

About 95 percent of spycraft are detected by other nations, experts say. But "even France and Russia would have a hard time figuring out what they were tracking" if they were to pick up the image of a stealth satellite, said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert on space imagery.

The idea behind a stealth satellite is "so the evildoers wouldn't know we are looking at them," Pike said. "It's just a fundamental principle of operational security that you know when the other guy's satellites are going to be overhead and you plan accordingly."

But, Pike said, "the cover and deception going on today is more systematic and continual. It's not the 'duck and cover' of the Soviet era."

The existence of the maiden stealth satellite launched under the Misty program was first reported by Jeffrey T. Richelson in his 2001 book "The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology." Richelson said that first craft was launched from the space shuttle Atlantis on March 1, 1990.

Circumstantial evidence of that satellite's existence was outlined in the April issue of a Russian space magazine, Novosti Kosmonavtiki. According to a translation for The Washington Post, the article suggested that a satellite launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 1999 may be the second-generation Misty craft and noted that the satellite was put into orbit along with "a large number of debris," a likely deception method.