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A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

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IS MUSK’S SPACEX BEING PUSHED ASIDE?

An individual who wishes to be completely anonymous - hence, I don't even get to thank this individual by mentioning initials, so this will have to do as a thank you - shared this story, and it may be one of those "quiet stories" whose true significance unveils itself only much later. The USSA's new procurement regulations and guidelines appear to be pushing out Elon Musk's SpaceX in favor of "other competitors," and we'll get back to that in a moment. Here's the story:

Lawmakers: Air Force launch procurement strategy undermines SpaceX

US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) have written a letter challenging the new regulations:

They contend that the Air Force, in an effort to broaden the launch playing field, is putting SpaceX at a competitive disadvantage.

In a Feb. 4 letter addressed to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, Feinstein and Calvert — both with strong ties to the space industry — argue that the path the Air Force has chosen to select future launch providers creates an unfair playing field. Although SpaceX is not mentioned in the letter by name, it is clear from the lawmakers’ language that they believe the company is getting a raw deal because, unlike its major competitors, it did not receive Air Force funding to modify its commercial rockets so they meet national security mission requirements.

Feinstein and Calvert in the letter ask Wilson to “review how the Air Force intends to maintain assured access to space while preserving maximum competitive opportunities for all certified launch providers.” A copy of the letter was obtained by SpaceNews.

At issue are Launch Service Agreement contracts the Air Force awarded in October to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and United Launch Alliance. The three companies collectively received $2.3 billion to support the development of space launch vehicles that meet national security requirements. The Air Force started the LSA program in 2016 to ensure future access to space and to end its reliance on ULA’s Atlas 5 and its Russian main engine.

SpaceX was widely considered a front-runner for an award but came away empty-handed. The Air Force did not disclose why SpaceX did not receive LSA funds.

Now, as the individual who noticed and sent this story along speculated, what appears to be happening is that the procurement procedures have been altered to favor Blue Origin, i.e., Jeff Bexos and the Amazon interest, Northrup Grumman, i.e., the military interests (directly), and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martian...er... Lockheed Martin. I also blogged recently about Musk being contacted by CERN to help bore its new tunnels for its Even Bigger Collider, which may, according to my anonymous speculator's lights, be Musk's way of trying to bore back "in" to the "inside."

And I have to admit, I find those speculations to be worth pondering. But I have my own "high octane speculation" corollaries to add to what may be happening. In a nutshell, what may be happening is the attempt to deliberately restructure the emerging space-based economy, and in typical mercantilist fashion, to shape and tailor that economy so that "approved players" remain more or less in control. And crucial to this process, though not mentioned in the article itself, are the recent FASB regulations, which effectively take the entire Federal budget "black". That's a pretty handy thing to have around when you're doing business with the Bexos/Amazon/CIA complex in a skewed procurement process. And that means, for the USA, more inefficiency in space, as large conglomerates can suck even more money from the tetes of an entirely black federal budget in the name of space, for ever smaller returns.

In short, what we're seeing here is that in spite of all the hype about the emerging space-based competitive market, the USSA, for its part, intends to see that the same players have "most favored procurement status." All others need not apply.

There's something else that will result from this, and that is, Europe will respond with its own version, cementing the role of the large French and German defense industries in their space program, leaving independent contractors like Mr. Musk out in the cold once again, unless he plays his cards well there.

But don't lose heart, Mr. Musk, there are lots of other players out there: India, China, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Israel, Luxembourg...

See you on the flip side...

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CERN AND MUSK’S BORING MACHINES

Remember that story last week that I blogged about, conCERNing CERN's desire to build an even bigger collider of approximately 100km underneath a sizeable chunk of Switzerland? Well, guess who they're talking to about boring through all that rock? Here's a hint: I also blogged about Elon Musk's purported new boring tachnology. Yea, you guessed it, CERN is talking to Musk about using that technology to bore the tunnels for its new mega-collider (thanks to the individual who sent this story, who wishes to remain completely anonymous):

Elon Musk says he talked to CERN about building tunnels for its biggest ever particle collider

Now, you might recall that Musk's alleged new boring machines utilize electricity (so we're told) and that they are measurably faster than conventional boring machines. So it comes as no surprise that CERN's conCERN seems to be about the speed that they can build their new monster collider:

Musk said CERN's director, Fabiola Gianotti, talked to him about his tunnelling company potentially digging tunnels for a new particle accelerator, which would be four times larger than the (LHC). Musk's Boring Company is an infrastructure firm mostly focused on building new tunnels to ease traffic congestion.

Musk said the Boring Company could help save billions of euros.

...

Musk founded the Boring Company in 2016, and the company unveiled its first test tunnel in December, and its tunnelling equipment currently makes headway about 14 times slower than a snail— although Musk said at the launch party for the tunnel, "Aspirationally, we should be slightly faster than a snail."

As you might have guessed, this story sent my Suspicion Meter, if not into the red zone, then at least into the orange zone, with the occasional twitch of the needle into the really deep maroon zone, for I have a high octane speculation-as-suspicion here, and it requires reading between the lines. In the previous blog on Musk's boring machine (See MUSK'S NEW BORING MACHINE NOT BORING), I noted the following:

Elon Musk’s Boring Company recently completed a 1.25 mile tunnel in Los Angeles. In 2019, Elon Musk will start building a third generation all-electric tunneling machine which should be fifteen times faster. Currently, tunneling machines have about 20 meters per day speed. The third generation tunneling machine, Prufrock, will have a digging speed of about 300 meters per day.

In other words, and reading between the lines a bit in the present article, CERN is talking to Musk because:

(1) His new technology will save them money, largely in the form of labor costs, because

(2) it can bore much faster than conventional machines, and that means

(3) CERN is in a hurry.

All of this makes me wonder: why the big hurry to build an even larger collider operating at energies and with localized magnetic field strength we can only imagine? Well, if my whole admittedly wild speculations about CERN's machine are correct, and if there is indeed a hidden aspect to this project having little to do with particle physics and everything to do about manipulation of the planet, including, potentially, its magnetosphere in a series of "data correlation" experiments, then it may stand to reason that whatever experiments they were covertly running along those lines (if any), may have been successful, and the beta test (the current collider) is over, and now they need to scale it up to "full size."

Yea, I know, it's wild, but for the moment, I'm sticking with it. And it also makes me wonder, how deeply are they planning to bury this thing? And what's the composition of the rock they intend to embed it in? Interestingly enough, so far, there doesn't seem to be much information about these things, nor about the energies they intend to operate this new collider at, nor the magnetic field strengths that will be required...

See you on the flip side...

RUSSIA LOSES CONTROL OF THE “RUSSIAN HUBBLE” TELESCOPE

Speaking of Russia, you may or may not be aware that it has its own version of the problem-plagued "Hubble telescope" called the Spektr-R satellite, over which it has recently lost control, according to this article shared by Mr. G.C.:

Russia loses control over its ONLY ‘Hubble-like’ telescope, but photos are still coming

This article grabbed my attention, not so much for what the article says, but because of the speculation that Mr. G.C. offered in conjunction with it when he shared this story, and that speculation made me sit up and take notice. According to the article, the Russian space agency Roscosmos has lost the ability to control its satellite telescope, which nevertheless continues to send back pictures:

Russia has lost control over its scientific space satellite, Spektr-R, which has one of the largest space telescopes ever sent into orbit. Ground control said it is “still alive,” however, and continues to send photos from space.

It’s been several days since Spektr-R, also known as RadioAstron, stopped responding to commands from the ground in the middle of its space flight, Russian scientists said. Last Thursday, communication between mission control and the space telescope failed, and several other attempts to revive the radio link have proven unsuccessful.

Incredibly, the Spektr-R kept sending data back to Earth, however, which added a bit of intrigue to the incident. “There is still hope – the satellite is indeed alive,” Yuri Kovalev, head of RadioAstron program, wrote on Facebook.

Dubbed the 'Russian Hubble' by the media, Spektr-R is part of a small club of scientific instruments that enjoy the luxury of observing deep space without the interference of the Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike its predecessor from the 90s, however, the Russian telescope detects radio frequencies, not visible light. While its output may not be immediately stunning to the public, it is crucial for cutting-edge scientific discoveries, enabling researchers to study objects not visible or as clear to the 'naked eye,' such as black holes, neutron stars, pulsars and astrophysical masers. Spektr-R excelled at such observations, breaking several records in angular resolution during its mission. (Emphasis added)

Astrophysical masers? Now, I'm not an astrophysicist, but I imagine that there can be certain kinds of natural phenomena that could be considered "astrophysical masers." (Masers are like lasers, but they operate in the radar and microwave end of the spectrum). But, of course, the language could also cover the possibility that "someone out there" is "building masers", for typically, masers are constructed things.  If one wants to let the imagination run wild, one could even envision using an entire star's microwave emissions as the pumping source for the optical cavity of a large artificial maser. That would, of course, be a very large, and deadly, microwave oven. But hey, it would be useful for starting large fires in places where you need to pick up real estate on the cheap. But all that's a digression from my main concern and high octane speculation of the day.

There have been a host of problems surrounding these space-based telescopes, and America's Hubble has been no exception. But Mr. G.C. speculates that behind the language of "we simply lost control" that seems to accompany these incidents, that something else may be going on, that "control" is being lost because someone is interfering with these telescopes, and literally wresting control away from the owners of the satellites, in this case, Russia. After all, cyber systems are notoriously insecure, and one presumes that if hackers can hack into major banks, Sony, the Federal Reserve, and all the other hacking stories we've seen lately, that one could also hack into satellite networks. If so, that raises the stakes considerably, for it would imply that "someone" does not want those satellite telescopes to remain under the control of the nations that launch them. And to extend this high octane speculation a bit, it would make sense: let those nations (and their taxpayers) pay for sophisticated satellite telescopes, and then literally steal them. And of course, there's another implication, for if one did successfully wrest control away from the nations putting them up there, then presumably one could also control what information those nations are allowed to see from there satellites.

If all that sounds wild and woolly, that's because it is. But I cannot help but think of that episode a few years ago when a Russian and an American satellite in orbit collided with each other, with both nations denying they had any responsibility for the incident. Now, of course, one or the other, or both, could be lying. But then again, they could be telling the truth. And that would mean that someone else took control of them, and collided them... a kind of "demonstration of capability." If so, then that would mean there are other players, and they may not be the usual suspects (China, India, Japan, France, Germany &c), but perhaps extra-territorial actors, or even "someone else."

See you on the flip side...

RUSSIA, CHINA, AND THOSE IONOSPHERIC HEATERS AND OTHER STUFF: PART TWO

Yesterday I blogged about a story that seemed to have caught a lot of this website's readers' attention, namely, that Russia and China have been conducting joint experiments in ionospheric heating using the large Russian heater called SURA. My question and speculation yesterday was that they were sending messages, especially since the article reporting the story in The South China Morning Post also mentioned - without comment one way or another - that ionospheric heaters have long been thought by some in the alternative research field to be adaptable to modify the weather, create and/or steer tornadoes and hurricanes, be used for mind manipulation on a regional scale, or in other creative ways in conjunction with chemtrail spraying, like igniting nanothermite, creating weird and anomalous fires, and so on. Indeed, if my high octane speculation yesterday is true and Russia and China are "sending messages", why send them now? As I implied, but perhaps did not explicitly state yesterday, perhaps the timing, coming after the latest round of anomalous fires in California, is not accidental: "We know what you're doing, don't try it here, because we have the technology too."

OK, I grant you: that's crawling way out to the end of the twig of speculation without so much of a whiff of evidence to support it (other than the article's odd mention-without-comment of some of the suspected capabilities of ionosphere heaters).

In that story, however, there was a link to another story, from a few days earlier, but by the same author(Stephen Chen), and like the first, there were a few statements in it that "raised my eyebrows":

Operation Z machine: China’s next big weapon in the nuclear ‘arms race’ could create clean fuel – or deadly bombs

As the story notes, the "Z machine" is the USA's high energy facility to simulate nuclear explosions in order to design more efficient nuclear bombs. Now this is where it gets really interesting:

The machine is being built for the military by the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics at China’s nuclear weapons development base in the city of Mianyang and is expected to be up and running in a few years, according to a Beijing-based nuclear physicist.

It is designed to produce about 60 million joules of energy in an instant – roughly 22 times the 2.7 million joules generated at the Sandia facility.

It does this by firing powerful electrical pulses at a target about the size of a spool of thread consisting of hundreds of tungsten wires, each thinner than a human hair.

When the pulses pass through the wires, the tungsten explodes, evaporates and creates a plasma with a magnetic field so strong that the exploded particles are forced inward.

The particles collide, producing intense radiation – mostly X-rays – and creating conditions that more accurately reflect a real nuclear explosion.

Now why is that interesting? Well, in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Michael Riconosciuto maintained that the bomb was a very special bomb. Riconosciuto is a man that hovers quite uncomfortably on the edges of a lot of shenanigans covered by the alternative research field, things like the Inslaw-PROMIS scandal, Danny Casolaro's murder-as-suicide with all the attendant connections to what Casolaro called "the Octopus", and so on. Casolaro, who had contacted Riconosciuto, called the latter "Danger man". Riconosciuto is indeed an odd duck, being highly intelligent, and definitely connected to black projects. To make a long labyrinthine story short, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Riconosciuto maintained to one interviewer that the OKC bomb was a special type of "thermobaric" bomb that had been developed as an offshoot of the nuclear program. In his version, particulate heavy metal and combustible particles are dispersed in the atmosphere, electrically activated to create a "chain molecule" and then again electrically detonated to create a pressure wave equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon, literally crushing and pulverizing anything in its blast field. If effect, it was a kind of "electro-molecular" bomb, using the atmosphere's oxygen as the oxident.

And the "Z machine" was probably intimately involved in the creation of such technologies.

And China wants to build a much bigger one.

As if that's not enough, the article makes mention - again without comment - of another possibility:

Z machines have been used in the development of nuclear weapons, from conventional warheads to the pure fusion bomb – a hydrogen bomb that can in theory be made in any size, cost a fraction of today’s nuclear stockpile and burn “cleanly” without producing radioactive fallout.

What comment does come in the article about this possibility comes near the end of the story, isolated from the above statement:

Lei said there had been costly failures in developing the technology in the US and Chinese scientists faced equal if not greater uncertainties because of their much more ambitious goals.

For instance, fusion could produce a large number of fast flying neutrons that will weaken or damage critical components. While the equipment was durable, researchers had not yet been able to solve the neutron problem, Lei said.

He warned the development of a pure fusion bomb would meant international nuclear weapons treaties would have to be rewritten.

“But I don’t think we need to worry about this, not until we see a real new bomb. The technology is so difficult, it remains more fantasy than real threat.”

Now in case it's not clear what's really being said here, what's really being said is that the bomb-makers are on a quest for a "clean" hydrogen bomb, that's the one with a much bigger bang than an atomic bomb. The "blast yields" of the latter are measured in kilotons, i.e., in thousands of tons of TNT. The blast yields of the former are measured in megatons, i.e., a million tons of TNT. The "bad" news is that in standard publicly-known hydrogen-bomb "how to do its", an atomic bomb is needed as the fuse to create the intense heat and pressure to get hydrogen atoms to fuse. No a-bomb, no h-bomb. And it's the a-bomb that produces all that nasty radioactive fallout.

So in other words, "they" have been chasing the idea of a "clean" thermonuclear bomb, i.e., a "hydrogen" bomb that does not need an a-bomb as its fuse. What's extremely disturbing, and odd about this story, is not just the acknowledgement that this has been a secret goal of covert thermonuclear bomb projects. It's the tense in which it is stated in the article:

Z machines have been used in the development of nuclear weapons, from conventional warheads to the pure fusion bomb – a hydrogen bomb that can in theory be made in any size, cost a fraction of today’s nuclear stockpile and burn “cleanly” without producing radioactive fallout. (emphasis added)

In other words, while the article ends with a disclaimer that such a fusion bomb is all just "theory", it initiates the topic by stating it's already been done. And that Z machines and, for want of a better term, "electro-nuclear" ignition was the key. That they are working on such stuff we can be certain. DARPA (The Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency) at one time during the Reagan era was seriously pursuing the idea of an isomer bomb. Then there was the Red Mercury story of the 1990s, a magical mystical substance that was supposed to be a dark maroon-purplish goo, very heavy, that could initiate fusion explosions without the need for an a-bomb as the fuse. (See REALLY!?!? … RED MERCURY, AGAIN!? PART TWO)

Whatever one makes of all this, I have the uneasy feeling that China "knows something" and that it's sending clear messages. After all, this is the same country that not only wants to build a bigger better Z machine, but a bigger better version of CERN's large hadron collider...

See you on the flip side...

 

NASA’S OSIRIS REX ARRIVES AT BENNU ASTEROID…

This story was one of the top stories  that people passed along this week. NASA's Osiris-Rex asteroid probe has arrived at the asteroid Bennu, and nothing about this mission seems - to me at least - "normal." Forget all the Egyptian lore-trappings around the mission, Osiris-Rex, standing for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith EXplorer.  It's the strange little asteroid itself, plus the curiously worded beginning of this article, that intrigues:

NASA spacecraft arrives at ancient asteroid, its 1st visitor

BEsides being diamond-shaped (from one angle) with what appears to be a parallel set of "craters" running along its equator, the little rock (it's actually not so little, being a little taller than the Empire State Building) has another set of strange features, including a pyramidal-like "something" sticking up from it:

And it's diamond shape is oddly similar to that of Ryugu, the asteroid that Japan has recently landed on:

And let's not forget the asteroid Stein's with it's very anomalous properties, that the European Space Agency a few years ago singled out (by what means we don't know) for it's own asteroid fly-by, which provoked this intriguing analysis by Richard C. Hoagland:

Rosetta Flies By "Something" Very Strange

Add to all of this the strange Oumuamua comet, the appointment of General Mark Milley of "little green men" speech fame, mix, and stir, and one has a veritable stew of strange "space stuff" going on.

So what is my high octane speculation about Bennu? Well, beyond all the religious-Egyptian trappings surrounding it, the suggestion that the Osiris-Rex mission has something to do with "security" is intriguing, and the article implies that the mission is in part designed to learn how to mount planetary defenses against the wayward asteroid (and perhaps, against anyone with the capability of lobbing them in our direction). For those with ears to hear, this conjures not only overtones of Dr. Carol Rosin's famous affidavit about the "order" that Dr. Wernher von Braun told her, the order in which the elites would proceed to argue for the weaponization of space - Communists, terrorists, nations of concern, asteroids, and finally ET threats - but it also conjures resonances of the Allende annotations to the Varo edition of Dr. Morris Jessup's book on UFOs. (See my book Secrets of the Unified Field). And given all the strange "stuff" on the surface of Bennu in some photographs, I'm sticking with my speculation that "they" are also covertly looking for something for the simple reason that when one considers the Japanese, European, and American missions to asteroids, the asteroids in question all have one odd thing in common: they're all diamond shaped (at least, from one point of view). They also seem to have curious "stuff" on their surfaces, leading one to wonder how these small rocks were actually selected for exploration.

But beyond this, there's that curious statement at the beginning of this particular article:

After a two-year chase, a NASA spacecraft arrived Monday at the ancient asteroid Bennu, its first visitor in billions of years.

First visitor in billions of years? You mean, it had other visitors? When? by whom? And while we're at it, how do you know? Or is this just a bit of bad diction and careless writing? Or is the date of "billions of years" overstated to keep the standard cosmological narrative going?

Taken on its own, I'd opt for "careless writing" for the sake of "dramatization" and a bit of rhetorical melodrama. But in the context of the Japanese mission to Ryugu, of the European mission to Stein's, of Generals making statements about fighting "hybrid armies" and "little green men" being appointed to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the Space Force President, I suspect that the statement may not be, after all, just a bit of careless dramatization.

See you on the slip side...

REMEMBER THAT GENERAL’S “LITTLE GREEN MEN” ...

Do you remember that US Army General who gave that funny little speech to military graduates to be prepared to "fight little green men"? Well, in case you don't, here's that story from 2016, and patience, because we're getting to today's story by way of it:

Army chief to leaders: Winning is everything in combat

Now, the General in question was General Mark Milley, at the time the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and here's his "little green men" reference in context:

"If the world if 1916 was complex, or the world of 1945 was complex, the world of 2016 is intensely complex, and I can tell you that from personal experience," he said. "You'll be dealing with terrorists, you'll be dealing with hybrid armies, you'll be dealing with little green men, you'll be dealing with tribes, you're going to be dealing with it all, and you're going to be dealing with it simultaneously." (Emphasis added)

At the time, this reference had everyone speculating that the General was referring to some sort of space threat from extraterrestrials. But, "not to worry," we were reassured; the reference was simply "US Army code-speak" for "foreign troops (See, for example, the Faux News article US Army's top general: Be prepared to fight 'little green men'):

Military officials told The Army Times that “little green men” is typically used to refer to foreign troops who dress in green attire instead of military uniforms.

“It does not mean fighting troops from outer space,” an official said.

Nothing to see here, nothing unusual, it's just "code". Move along.

But, back in 2016, I pointed out the following:

Ok guys, sorry, but once again: while it may or may not be code to the US Army, it is also a phrase with a popular colloquial meaning, and no US Army General is going to be ignorant of that fact. And in the light of yesterday's and today's blogs, the statement does take on disturbingly multi-layered interpretive possibilities. (See: TIDBIT: US ARMY GENERAL AND FIGHTING LITTLE GREEN MEN)

In fact, we could go so far as to say that speeches by generals to graduating classes of military cadets are a fairly common occurrence, and are not likely to be picked up or covered by major lamestream media outlets, unless one drops in an odd reference or two to "hybrid armies" and "little green men." And when such references are coming from the Chief of Staff of the Army himself, such references coming out of the mouths of four-star generals are probably going to attract attention, because they're meant to do so.

All of this is background to this story shared by Ms. K.C.:

Trump Appoints Gen. Mark Milley Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff

Yes, you read that correctly, General "Little Green Men" Mark Milley has been appointed by President Trump to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Coming from a President who makes statements about the USA needing another "space force" (really? You mean, we already have one and now we need another one? What for?) I find this more than just odd, I find it downright compelling. "Hybrid armies" doesn't take much imagination, especially when DARPA wants to create super soldiers, robots, and so on. The really high octane speculative question is: hybrids of what? Humans and machines? Humans and animals? (Don't forget, folks, that the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency is researching dolphins to find out how they can literally have half their brain sleeping, while the other half is wide awake, for the purposes of creating soldiers who need little to no sleep. The idea even made its appearance in an old X Files episode.) Or Humans and "someone else" ala Genesis Nephilim and Mesopotamian Annunaki fame? We don't know, but when that part of General Milley's speech is viewed in that way, the following reference of hybrid armies to "little green men" has a context altogether not suggestive of just being a coded reference to foreign soldiers dressing in "green attire."

So why General Milley as Joint Chiefs Chairman from the "Space Force President"? Hang on, because I'm going to walk right off the end of the speculation twig on this one. Suppose, for a moment, that you've been funding a secret research and development program for advanced and exotic space technologies for decades, using a hidden system of finance in the hands of the national security establishment, and running to the tune of trillions (if not quadrillions) of dollars since the end of World War Two. Suppose you had even collateralized space assets with strange bearer bonds that everyone says are counterfeits. Suppose, in addition to all of this, you were using pump and dump schemes, mortgage fraud, credit default swaps and other derivatives to fund all of this, in addition to skimming a few trillion that go "missing" that you can't account for. Suppose, over time, that the very corporations that have been doing all of this work have so broken away from any sort of government control or oversight that they've become a major extra-territorial, and perhaps extra-terrestrial, player in their own right, given all their access to all that data and all that secret technology and the secret infrastructure where it's being developed. Suppose you needed to reassert a measure of control over the whole process, budgetary and otherwise.

How would you do that? You'd invoke a threat, and establish a command structure firmly in the hands of the military, and hence of the executive... call it a "space force", and issue regulations and orders appropriately, after having carefully set the stage by references to having to fight hybrid armies and little green men, only these "hybrid armies" and "little green men" might be a reference to that whole infrastructure that has "broken away"...

Enter General Milley, stage right...

See you on the flip side...

 

CHINA: SEE YOU ON THE FAR SIDE…

...of the Moon, that is.

That's right. That mission of China to land a probe on the far side of the Moon that I have blogged about before, is finally under way according to these stories shared by Mr. E.J. and Mr. H.B.:

Meet you on the dark side of the moon: China launches historic lunar exploration mission

China launches rover for first far side of the moon landing

As one might imagine, this has the high octane speculation part of my mind pondering all sorts of weird "coincidences," but before we get to that, there are a few details from both stories to note. First, there's this from the RT article:

Friday’s successful launch sent China’s Chang'e-4 into orbit, scheduled to make an unprecedented touch down on the dark side of the moon in January of next year, Chinese state media reports. The rover will land in the 3.9 billion year old “Von Kármán” crater, where it will take measurements and conduct experiments with the potential to uncover new information about the moon's formation and history.

The Von Karman crater is in the southern hemisphere on the Moon's far side, close to the southern pole of the Moon, which may or may not be significant, but we'll get back to that:

The Moon's Farside Von Kármán Crater

As the phys.org version of the story notes, should China's Chang-e 4 lander succeed, it will be the first time anyone has landed a probe on the far side of the Moon. The problem is of course that the lander will need to communicate with Earth, and the only way to do this is to place a relay satellite in orbit around the Moon, and this China has already done:

A major challenge for such a mission is communicating with the robotic lander: as the far side of the moon always points away from earth, there is no direct "line of sight" for signals.

As a solution, China in May blasted the Queqiao ("Magpie Bridge") satellite into the moon's orbit, positioning it so that it can relay data and commands between the lander and earth.

Adding to the difficulties, Chang'e-4 is being sent to the Aitken Basin in the lunar south pole region—known for its craggy and complex terrain—state media has said.

Again, it is to be noted that the lander will land toward the southern polar region, and as this article also notes the Chang-e 4 will be followed up by another lander which will collect samples and return them to the Earth.

It's this fascination with the south polar region of the Moon that has me intrigued. Already it is thought that the southern polar region is a good bet for the presence of water in the form of ice, deep in craters or perhaps even subsurface, and China has already expressed an interest in the region for a potential base.
But there's some things that intrigue about this story, not the least of which is the relay satellite China has placed in orbit around the Moon. Little is stated in either article about the expected "shelf life" of this satellite, but I rather suspect, given China's space ambitions and the expense and delicacy of placing a satellite in orbit, that it's meant to be a long-term "investment."
It's the south polar region itself, however, that really intrigues me. A few years ago NASA made a big hullaballoo about its L-CROSS satellite mission to crash a probe into the lunar surface and observe the ejecta. The story was it was looking for evidence of water which it would be able to detect by spectography of the ejecta. The run up to the mission was that everyone would be able to see the crash and explosion from Earth, so more than a few eyes were turned skyward for "the big event," which, when it happened, appeared to be a big nothing burger. But the nothing burger may have been an even bigger event than the originally hyped explosion, for Mr. Richard Hoagland made a strong argument that the reason there was no gigantic explosion was that the L-CROSS crash landing might have penetrated a hollow area (See NASA's Smoking Gun: Part II LCROSS' (and LRO's) Secret NASA Mission to the Moon ....) . One of the more interesting features Mr. Hoagland stressed in his analysis of the L-CROSS "nothing burger" was the presence of numerous rectilinear features near the impact zone which suggested artificiality and structure. In more "out there" analyses, speculation ramped-up, too, over the name "L-CROSS" itself, for it was argued that four "L's" in the shape of a "cross" makes (here it comes) a swastika.
In other words, something caught NASA's eye in the southern polar regions of Luna, and whatever it was, it may have had to be "taken out." Speculation? To be sure, but then came the news that India wanted to take a look "down there" as well, with it's Chandrayaan 2 lander, remember? (See INDIA’S CHANDRAYAAN 2 TO LAND AT LUNAR SOUTH POLE). And what a flood of information has been coming out of that lander, right?
So now China wants to land on the far side of the Moon, in the southern polar region.
So - bottom line - what do I make of all of this? Well, public stories notwithstanding, the presence of the L-CROSS mission in the context of this interest in the lunar southern polar region implies to me at least that they're (1) aware of something and they're not telling, and (2) they're looking for something. And isn't it very interesting that China wants to do it by looking on the far side, and as it controls the relay satellite for the probe-to-Earth communications link, that's a mighty convenient thing to have in case you find something, and don't want to tell...
See you on the flip side...

ENTANGLEMENT BECOMING MORE MACROCOSMIC…

Mr. P.J. spotted this one, and it's a doozie, because scientists have now demonstrated that entanglement - that strange non-local phenomenon where particles "entangled" with information stay coupled with each other, no matter the distance between them - is no longer an affair to be limited simply to individual particles, but to several, or in this case, billions of them:

Synopsis: Quantum Entanglement With 10 Billion Atoms

Before we get to this article, in my most recent book Microcosm and Medium I noted how the physicist Wheeler, one of the "inventors" of the multi-verse theory of quantum mechanics, was fascinated by the question of whether or not the observer principle of quantum mechanics was operative at a much more macrocosmic level, not just at the level of particles, but in the larger universe; he was spurred to this question by a consideration of group observers, and whether they could, so to speak, bend the fabric of reality by an agreed-upon group intention. The implications of his speculations are such that the idea of entanglement of information between two particles could be extended to whole systems.

With that idea of "whole systems" in mind, ponder these two paragraphs from the above story at phys.org:

While certain quantum behaviors are currently limited to atomic systems, researchers keep searching for hints of quantum physics in more massive objects. Now Simon Gröblacher, of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and colleagues have pushed the boundaries of quantum weirdness to macroscopic scales. They demonstrated quantum entanglement and violations of Bell’s inequality—a canonical test of the principle that all influences on a particle are local and that particle states exist independently of the observer. They used two mechanical resonators, each containing roughly 10 billion atoms.

In their experiments, the team placed two 10-μm -long resonators, made of strips of silicon, 20 cm apart in separate arms of an optical interferometer. A laser pulse shot through a beam splitter mechanically excited one of the two resonators, but there was no way to tell which one. The excited resonator emitted a photon, which passed through a second beam splitter and registered at one of two detectors. The emission of this photon signaled entanglement of the mechanical states of the two resonators. A second laser pulse verified the entanglement by converting the excited resonator’s excitation into a second photon, which was also recorded by the detectors. (Emphasis added)

Let that one sink in for a moment: the experiment involved the entanglement not of two particles, but two whole mechanical resonators, two systems of a much more macrocosmic scale, consisting of billions of atoms. With a little "tweaking" such a system could be used to create networks of entangled resonators - think of it like a complex hyper-dimensional artificial set of neurons - which would be beneficial for quantum computing:

The team hopes to test quantum mechanics on an even larger scale by creating more complex quantum states of optomechanical systems. Also, by improving the lifetime of the mechanical excitations of the resonators—currently limited to just a few microseconds—the team says that this setup could operate as a memory node in a quantum network.

Add some nano-technology engineering of the materials of such resonators themselves to improve (presumably) the efficiency of the entanglement of such resonators or their life-time of operability, and you get the idea. Nano-engineering, in other words, is the key to "creating more complex quantum states" of such "optomechanical systems."

Now let's walk off the end of the twig of high octane speculation and scale the idea up even more: imagine creating such resonators with a regularity of construction on the size, say, of whole buildings (think pyramids, folks), and one has a system of entangled analogue optomehcanical resonators that are, gee whiz, lookie lookie, piezo-electric in nature, and they're spread all over the surface of the planet to boot (and, if some suggestive photographs of our celestial neighbors are any indication, "elsewhere" as well). And if those resonators are coupled oscillators to their home planet(s) and other bodies as well, then one might be looking at a gigantic celestial machine...

Kardashev anyone?

See you on the flip side...

BILLIONS MISSING FROM RUSSIAN SPACE AGENCY

There's an old adage: once is unusual, twice is a coincidence (or perhaps, a "synchronicity") but three or more is a pattern. Well, this story was shared by Catherine Austin Fitts, and Mr. T.M., and as one might imagine, it has my high octane speculation motor running in overdrive. Why? Well, there has been (finally) an acknowledgement in the lamestream media that there is a lot of missing money in the US Federal budget, trillions of dollars' worth of missing money. Now, this is not news for those who've been following Ms. Fitts' regular blogs, interviews and articles over the years. Recently Dr. Mark Scidmore also has chimed in. And of course, let's not forget former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who revealed that about two trillion dollars could not be accounted for, on September 10th, 2001. Of course, that story was quickly forgotten in the aftermath of 9/11. Nor is it news for those who've been following my speculations about hidden systems of finance, obfuscated amounts of gold and so on, over the years in connection to the bearer bonds scandals.

What is different about this story is that this missing money is not dollars, but rubles - 785.5 billion of them - missing from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos:

Russia space agency targeted over "stolen" billions

Now, as the article notes, 785.5 billion rubles is a "mere" 11.9 billion dollars, a veritable drop in the bucket compared to the trillions mentioned by Mr. Rumsfeld, or tracked by Ms. Fitts or Dr. Scidmore. Nonetheless, the article contains some intriguing statements, and more interestingly, does not contain other statements:

The Russian space agency Roscosmos, whose reputation has already been hit by the failure of a Soyuz rocket last month, was on Sunday targeted by the country's audit court over financial irregularities including "stolen" billions.

"We have serious problems with Roscosmos," the Accounts Chamber chairman Alexe� Kudrin said in televised comments.

"Procurement procedures are bad, prices are too high, many projects are unfinished or halted, and funds stand unused for months, and several billion have been lost - stolen - and investigations are ongoing, " the former finance minister added.

A 2017 report by the court signalled(sic) a total of 151 irregularities within the space agency accounts, totalling(sic) 785.5 billion rubles ($11.9 billion), Russian news agency reported.

What's interesting in what it does say is that the explanations given for the lost money have been placed on the usual culprits in the former Communist nation: bad procurement procedures, inflated prices, unused funds, and just plain good old fashioned theft. Well, if "bad procurement procedures" are to blame, then Russia is a bastion of fiscal responsibility and efficiency, compared to Rumsfeld's Pentagon or the federal budgetary "process" in America.

But I find much more interesting the things that are not being said. The impression given in the article is that this loss was just for 2017, yet that is not explicit. We're left with a mere impression. We don't really know how many years the investigation covered, nor are we given any indication of who supposedly stole some of the money, and what percentage of this 785.5 billion rubles was thought to be stolen, not simply missing or gobbled up in "bad procurement procedures".

It's the absence of explanation of that stolen money that intrigues me, and as one might guess, has my high octane speculation running in overdrive. A mere 785.5 billion rubles, or a mere 11.9 billion dollars in missing and/or stolen money might not seem like much in the context of American missing money stories, but as I've pointed out in other contexts, while Russia spends far less than the USA on military and space matters, it gets more bang for the ruble, for one of the consequences of a hidden system of finance, lots of missing money, and reserve currency status, is that prices inflate, corruption dominates the system, and comparative technologies becomes higher priced in the one context that might cost a fraction of that in the other.

So with that somewhat simplistic idea in mind, I turn to my high octane speculation of the day:

Recently in one of this website's members' vidchats, the question was asked if I thought there was a similar hidden financial system, and "breakaway civilization" or "secret space program" in other countries, particularly Russia. My answer was yes, and then the observation was made that one never hears about massive amounts of missing money from Russia, which is why I find this story so interesting. Recently I observed that the amounts of missing money in the US federal budget were now so astronomically huge, that the old explanation of $20,000 toilet seats and $10,000 wrenches and coffee makers were no longer an adequate cover for inflating ledger prices of supplies to cover the diversion of money into classified and deep projects. Thus the possibility emerges that Russia - with its smaller economy - might still be in the era of cooking the books to divert funds into deeper classified projects. And the fact that this is occurring within Roscosmos is suggestive enough that one possibility for that diversion of funds is into classified secret space projects.

See you on the flip side...

PORTUGAL’S SPACEPORT IN THE AZORES

This story that was shared by Mr. T.M. (who deserves a big thank you for spotting it) really grabbed my attention. Portugal, it seems, has now joined the very small but growing list of countries planning space ports, but this one, in the Azores, has some very unusual features that form the context for today's high octane speculation. Here's the story:

Portugal builds spaceport in the Azores

Here's the part that made my suspicion meter flip all the way into the red zone:

One of the islands of the Azores archipelago, Santa Maria, may soon become a base for launching small satellites, unique in Europe (the spaceport will deal with launching only small satellites, unlike the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana). Currently, companies from eight countries are competing for the right to use the port.

Fourteen enterprises from the US, Russia, Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal have submitted applications for the first stage of Atlantic International Satellite Launch Programme.

...

For example, in July the Portuguese sent a recent study to the agency outlining the reasons for building a spaceport on the Azores. The document mentions that the location of the island of Santa Maria is well suited for launching such objects.

Messina explained: "The island is in the middle of the Atlantic, far from other populated territories, which provides greater security of launches."

Now why did all this make my suspicion meter go into the red zone? From the standpoint of rocket launches, having a base as close to the equator as possible makes some physics sense, as the angular velocity of the Earth can be used to enhance the lift of the rockets. But that's not what the article focuses on. Rather, it focuses on two things: (1) the international nature of the spaceport facility, with corporations and various nations vying for a spot, and (2) the fact that the island is isolated, and can provide "greater security of launches." Given that yesterday I blogged about the possibility of some sort of covert international coordination of the early American and Soviet space programs, this little bit about "security for launches" has me once again entertaining similar suspicions...

... and not just because of the international aspect of the project, but also because of the presumed technology (rockets), versus the possibility that some other, more exotic methods might be envisioned, and that "people" would want to keep such "more exotic methods" far from the prying eyes of the public, especially if such "exotic methods" were part of some international consortium.

And while we're entertaining such high octane speculations, there's another possibility, namely, that such a remote place could also be used, not just for launches, but for "return flights", so to speak...

So, yes, I'm suspicious that we're not being told the whole story here, and part of that suspicion comes from the fact that while this is billed as a Portuguese project, that government appears to be but the cover for this deeper international activity, as it's only putting up a mere five million euros to the project, mere blue chicken feed by space program standards.

 

ROSCOSMOS: WHEN WE GO TO THE MOON, WE’LL CHECK IF THE AMERICANS ...

Just a short time ago I blogged about Russia's Moon plans, and as a follow-up, Mr. N.P. and Mr. B (and a few others), noticed this curious story: It seems that Mr. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia's Roscosmos, joked to reporters about Russia's plans to verify if the USA actually went to the Moon during the Apollo program, or not. Here's two versions of the story:

Russia's top space official says their mission to the moon will help verify conspiracy theory

Russia will check if Americans really went to the Moon – Roscosmos chief

And here's the Business Insider's (the first link above) version:

The head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency has said that a proposed Russian mission to the moon will be tasked with verifying that the American moon landings were real.

"We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not," said Dmitry Rogozin in a video posted Saturday on Twitter.

Rogozin was responding to a question about whether or not NASA actually landed on the moon nearly 50 years ago. He appeared to be joking, as he smirked and shrugged while answering. But conspiracies surrounding NASA's moon missions are common in Russia.

The Soviet Union abandoned its lunar program in the mid-1970s after four experimental moon rockets exploded.

In 2015, a former spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee called for an investigation into NASA moon landings. (Emphasis added)

And here's RT's version (the second link above):

Have the Americans been on the Moon or it’s just a hoax as conspiracy theorists claim? All questions will be answered when the Russian cosmonauts visit the Earth’s satellite, Russia’s space boss, promised.

“We’ve set such a task – to go there and check if they were there or not,” Dmitry Rogozin joked in response to the popular question about the moon exploration. “The Americans say – they’ve been there. We’ll verify that.”

Switching to a more serious tone, he said that no country is currently capable of fulfilling a successful lunar program on its own. Russia (is) expecting to cooperate with the US in exploring the Earth’s satellite, Rogozin said as he visited a Russian spacecraft engine manufacturer in Moscow. (Boldface emphasis added)

Now, if you're like me, you like to read between the lines a bit, especially when it's coming from Russia, and especially when it's coming from the head of its space program, and especially if the head of said Russian space program appears to be joking. Uh huh.... nod nod, wink wink, elbow jab. Now, just for the record, I'm not an Apollo hoaxer, i.e., I'm not one of those who believe we didn't go at all, and that the whole thing was hoaxed on a movie set, in some versions, courtesy of Stanley Kubrick. But on the other hand, I'm not one of those entirely dismissive of the "problems" that the hoaxers have spotted, some of which to my mind are not real problems, and others which honestly are. So I'm one of those who questions certain details in the overall narrative. One of my chiefest problems with the "complete hoax" scenario has always been why the Soviet Union didn't blow the lid off of it right away, which they could easily have done. Why remain silent about it? After all, the Cold War was in full swing, Richard Nixon was in the White House, Leonid Brezhnev was in the Kremlin.

The upshot of it is, when the head of Russia's space program gets asked a question about the Apollo missions, and jokes about Russia finding out for certain whether or not it actually did happen (or, for those of you who are in my position that it happened, but not like we've been told it happened), then I sit up and pay attention, because of course it gets my high octane speculation juices flowing. In this case, I have a few crock pots of various suspicion casseroles simmering as well.

Suspicion One: Rogozin is sending messages, mainly to NASA, but also to "other interested parties." The other interested parties are, of course, all those other nations that have sent probes to, or around, the Moon: China, Japan, India, Europe (aka Germany-France). The problem here is: what's the message? If you know, keep quiet about it, let us be the point men? But as far as NASA goes, Rogozin has already indicated that the Russian mission will be heavily reliant upon robots to do the initial scouting, and preparations, for a human lunar base. Certainly those robots could be landed close to the Apollo sites, and meander on over for a closer look at... what? Nothing? or at some sort of technology that changes the whole narrative (including the possibility of technology that the USA did not bring there, but found there)?

Suspicion Two: After Rogozin had his little "joke," he then goes on, according to the RT article, to state that no one country is now capable of "fulfilling a successful lunar program on its own." Ok, I thought, tell that to China, Japan, and India, which seem to be doing pretty good so far. But then, after his joke, the real bombshell comes with his statement that Russia is "expecting to cooperate with the US in exploring the Earth's satellite." Say what? I thought we were supposed to be mad at each other, and that there were sanctions and all that. The remark is made all the more curious, in that the USA has no heavy lift vehicles capable of lunar missions, and is currently reliant upon private contractors (and Russia) to get anything from "down here" to "up there." So what's going on here? Did President Trump pull a leaf from President Kennedy's playbook, and quietly offer to have a joint lunar mission with Mr. Khrushche....er... I mean... Mr. Putin? Is this another subtle but tacit admission that there may be, and may have been, other technologies besides big bottle rockets in play? Or, conversely, is this another admission that there is a "deep fix in" to keep whatever happened(or didn't happen) with Project Apollo under firm Russo-American wraps?

Suspicion Three: That "deep fix" idea may not sound entirely plausible, until one recalls that curious circumstance that I mentioned back in 2006 in my book The SS Brotherhood of the Bell, namely, that when one looked at a table of Soviet and American lunar probe launches prior to Apollo, the one thing that becomes immediately apparent is the pattern: first the Soviets would launch a few probes, then go quiet. Then the Americans would launch a few probes, then go quiet, as the Soviets took their turn again, and so on. Back in the day, this was presented by American (and Soviet) media as a "space race." The coincidental pattern was just that: a coincidental pattern that resulted from the "race."  In short, we were provided a narrative by which to interpret the data. But turn off the narrative being blocked and rathered by SeeBS News and Walter Concrete and Dan Blather for a moment, and just look at the pattern itself, and there's two basic ways, and not just one, to interpret that pattern: (1) it's a coincidence resulting from the "race," or (2) it's the result of deeper coordination between the two programs. And if we really want to cook this particular suspicion casserole, throw in a little sauce de Alternative Three, where that idea of hidden coordination was first broached in the late 1970s by a major western television outlet: Britain's East Anglia television. That idea may not qualify as a secret space program as such, but it is at least a "secret international coordination of public space programs" that's worth entertaining over a plate of blue chicken wings. As I put it in the book, that hypothesis would have required the presence in both countries of people that could pull off such coordination, and there was only one group of people with such a heavy presence (at least, initially) in both countries' space programs...

Suspicion Four: The Business Insider version of this story adds that the Soviet Union abandoned its manned lunar missions after four of its enormous Saturn-V-sized boosters exploded on their test launches, and that a 2015 investigation on the lunar landings was called for. I've no doubt that such an investigation was probably underway throughout the entire Apollo program, and probably reached a very fevered pitch from Apollo 8 onwards, and that those investigations might have included investigations of the Soviet launch failures, which could very well have been sabotage. So what, exactly, was the 2015 call within Russia for an investigation? More message sending, perhaps, that they were going to reveal the results of those classified KGB studies and analyses under the guise of a new investigation?

The bottom line here, for me at least, is that messages are definitely being sent. The difficulty is, what is the message, and to whom is it being sent?

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

 

NASA’S AUDIT OF HISTORICAL PROPERTY

Every now and then I get not an article, but a document that someone has found, and today is one of those times, and I simply have to blog about it, because it is, in a word (or two words), a whopper doozie. It was shared by Mr. G.P., and ... well, there's nothing for it but to let you see it:

NASA Office of Inspector General Office of Audits Report No. IG - 19 - 002 A UDIT OF NASA’ S H ISTORIC P ROPERTY

Now, there's a paragraph towards the beginning of this document that leapt out at me, but first, a little context. You might recall a few years ago, Mr. Richard Hoagland broke the story that NASA had actually destroyed some of its Apollo program films and photographs. A NASA insider managed, quite literally, to save some of this. Other films and photos have curiously "gone missing" to the extent that it has fueled justifiable speculations that NASA was "hiding" something by tinkering and tampering with its archival record. With that in mind, consider this paragraph from page three:

NASA’s processes for loaning and disposing of historic personal property have improved over the past 6 decades, but a significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency’s lack of adequate procedures. Reclaiming this historic property has proven challenging because of the significant effort required to find the property as well as the Agency’s reluctance at times to assert an ownership claim over the items. In addition, past efforts to recover historic personal property have been thwarted by NASA’s poor record keeping and a lack of established processes for timely coordination of recovery efforts. for example, poor record
keeping contributed to the Agency losing possession of a n Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles. In other cases, NASA’s delay or reluctance in asserting ownership of an item has led to missed opportunities to retrieve historical property. For example, a U.S. Air Force historian noticed what he thought was a NASA prototype
Lunar Rover Vehicle in a residential neighborhood in Alabama and reported his sighting to NASA, who then referred the information to the OIG . The OIG contacted the individual in possession of the rover, who expressed interest in returning the vehicle to NASA . The OIG requested NASA assert ownership of the rover and, if appropriate, make plans to accept it
as a donation; however, after waiting more than 4 months for a decision from the Agency , the individual sold the rover to a scrap metal company. NASA officials subsequently offered to buy the rover, but the scrap yard owner refused and, realizing its historical value, sold the vehicle at auction for an undisclosed sum.(Emphasis added)
Now, this may seem the most obvious thing in the world: if one is going to do space exploration, having a thoroughly thought-out archival procedure for identification, and tracking, of "space stuff" would simply seem to be common sense. Yet, the implication of this one paragraph is that in all the meticulous preparation for Apollo and the lead-ups to it - Projects Mercury and Gemini - NASA simply forgot to do so! There simply is no system. At all.
Nothing. Zilch. Nodda.
If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, cheap. No checks, no credit cards, no electronic blips or crypto-currencies. Cash and carry only.
As you might imagine, I have some high octane speculation about this, and it's regarding that statement that things were simply taken by former employees and contractors. That speculation can be stated in the form of a simple question: What if the lack of a system was deliberate? A policy designed to allow the archiving of artifacts privately, and corporately, by not having a policy? I suspect, in other words, that what we might be looking at is the ultimate system of hiding things; I've said it before, and I'll say it again: what better way to keep secrets, than to make them proprietary, to make them "intellectual property" by hiding them in corporations?
Let's crawl out further toward the end of the speculation twig: What if this non-system system was not only deliberate, but a quid pro quo with the very contractors that built all the equipment for those programs, both manned and unmanned? "You build this for us, and we'll give you special and exclusive rights to what is found." Indeed, if you followed the controversy surrounding Malin space science systems and the Mars probes of the 1990s, you'll recall that Michael Malin seemed to occupy a curious position: both as a NASA scientist involving the Mars probe (the Mars Orbiter and camera system) and  the Mars Pathfinder project, and the CEO of a company that designed and built the imaging systems. Indeed, during that episode, it was Malin's dual role that gave him and his corporation a virtual monopoly on what to photograph, and what to share with the public.
The bottom line? If you think getting a straight answer from NASA about what is "out there" is difficult, just wait until the space corporations have complete control. In that respect, perhaps the NASA study is a realization - perhaps to late - that contractors are just that, contractors, and that the government needs to reestablish control over its own space archive. Perhaps, in a sense, the study is an admission that things are being hidden, even from it, and its public space program. It's an admission, perhaps, that an essential component of any secret space program is an archive... a secret one.
See you on the flip side.