If you wanted to "lose" a satellite by launching it into a known orbit, you could design a satellite that is matte black, physically stealthy, with a very large supply of xenon propellant and ion thruster so that over a period of many months it could totally change its orbital plane into something new.
Plane change maneuvers are very expensive in terms of delta-V, but the US certainly has the money to launch things that have a thousand kg of extra propellant on board.
Or some combination of plane change and movement into a highly elliptical/molniya type orbit.
Thereby making it quite difficult for opposing nation-state level agencies to locate.
edit: the easy way to know if spacex screwed up or not is if they receive future "national security" launch missions. If no further such missions occur, and the feds continue shoveling money at United Launch Alliance, that would be telling.
The USAF figured out how to detect such satellites back in the 1980s.[1] The Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) looks at the sky with three 40-inch telescopes per site. This automatic system has a big star catalog, and can detect when something blocks its view of a star. The telescopes are some distance apart, and so they can see time differences between something occulting a star and compute range. The multiple telescopes allow disambiguating problems such as clouds, aircraft, and birds.
If something looks interesting enough, one of the telescopes is switched to laser mode, and a laser flash is used to illuminate the target. Even black objects reflect some light.
GEODSS was the first fully computerized telescope system, and it generated far more usable data than film-based systems. One of the old GEODSS sites was used to look for near-earth asteroids for years, and found most of the known ones. Now, of course, everybody has multi-megapixel imagers on telescopes and enough computer power to analyze the results.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
I was referring to this part.
And 99.965% absorption is still visible in a bright light.
"The Worlds Blackest Black vs The Worlds Brightest Flashlight (32,000 lumen)—Which Will Win?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFdCvnV8PM
To summarize, the flashlight wins, and it's reasonable to expect the effect would be the same with a laser and sensitive detection equipment.
That isn't Vantablack as such though, is it? Afaik, Vantablack proper requires a specific application process [1], which I've mentally envisaged as being something akin to growing diamonds in a lab on a substrate, or applying flocking to materials.
I'd be quite curious to know what the reflectivity would be like on some clever coating consisting of vertically-laid carbon nano tubes, etc.
[1] - https://www.surreynanosystems.com/vantablack/applying-vantab...
Since failure is always possible, including from various forms of human error, and is often exacerbated by extreme conditions (such as launching to space) it is quite likely that we'll never know for sure.
It really /would/ be nice if there was a mandatory sunset period for de-classification (which required /active/ effort to keep reviewing and punting classified status forward).
The payload adapter was not the SpaceX built hardware SpaceX usually uses, but was built by Northrop Grumman
they were, as I said, "black body radiators" which are not theoretically ideal black bodies, but still manage to radiate black body radiation.
In terms of my life and future of my children, I am not afraid of AI, Mr Musk. I am afraid of you launching top secret government payloads, one after another.
20ish years ago, when I started my career, Google and Facebook didn't exist. Amazon sold only books and was considered a bold experiment. No AWS. People argued about whether linux would be ever be used in production. The iPhone didn't exist. Wifi was a newish spec, but most people getting online (which wasn't most people!) relied on modems, or isdn if you happened to live in certain places. There was no "internet of things" - heck "information superhighway" metaphors were finally starting to phase out, and the average American would still talk about The World Wide Web so awkwardly you could hear the capital letters. Self driving cars were total sci fi that could never happen because it's hard, plus who would you sue? (Plus cest la change, plus cest la meme chose)
(I might be off by a year or two, but the point remains)
I entered the profession about 20 years ago and have seen all of this change. At my age, I can expect to be in the industry for most of the NEXT 20 years. Before I even retire. Given that the rate of change accelerates - https://ddcvqwvagfyuw.cloudfront.net/content/uploads/2015/12... - we have no idea what to expect by then, but can expect it to be very different, all while we are still struggling with how to deal with the impact on society that faster travel and communication introduced from before I was even born.
Do I think AI will exist and turn on humanity in that time? Can't say. AI predictions have been notoriously bad. (Usually overconfident, but also in the other direction. 20 years ago it was obvious computers would be able to beat any grandmaster in chess sometime in our lives, but go was considered to be something dramatically past that.
So I don't know if it will happen or even be able to happen. But I'm not convinced by anyone pointing out failures in current tech. That's like saying human flight can't happen because a lot of people failed at it, or that cars won't replace horses because they break down too much. Tech changes and it is change at a growing rate.
To cite a metaphor: if you have a pond. A lily pad gets there. Next day you see there are 2. 4 the next day. Will they overgrow the pond? If you wait until the pond is half covered to worry about it (e.g. 20 days), you have only 1 day to handle it before 'maybe' is proven 'yes', not 20.
As humans have no understanding of intelligence and certainly not human intelligence, their ability to create an artificial one is effectively non-existent. Compared to the existing natural biological systems that we find around us, we cannot even duplicate their simplest processes with any aplomb. Our attempts are extremely inefficient in all areas, energy, speed, production purity, etc.
If one looks around, one will see much change occurring. Yet, in so many ways, little changes. People remain people, the problems that plague people remain the same the same. If anything, our technology is only speeding up the rate at which these problems are occurring. Much of this is because we don't actually sit down and ask if we should be doing something at all.
Just because we have varying success at developing various kinds of technology, doesn't mean we actually have the wisdom or understanding to use that technology properly or that we will achieve duplication of intelligence in a non-biological system.
In regards to your pond analogy, instead of using exponential growth, I think we could say that it is logarithmic growth.
> Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission?
You mean like Zuma which SpaceX launched and then was declared as "lost" but might have secretly been designed to look like it was lost?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16866806/spacex-zuma-missi...