Russia’s Okno and Krona space surveillance systems are profiled in a newly updated open-source documentary collection (pdf) by former CIA analyst Allen Thomson.
The precise location of the Okno facility, which is in Tajikistan, has not been publicly identified.
But last year, observed Mr. Thomson, a new “Krona-N radar site near Nakhodka was found in Google Earth (not by me) and the head of the Russian Space Forces says it’s going to be put into operation starting this year.”
“Like Krona Classic in the Caucasus, this is going to be an imaging radar,” he said. “Together with the 3-meter adaptive optics telescope being built in Siberia, the Krona radars will give Russia an excellent, all-weather capability to get high-resolution images of foreign satellites of interest. The new National Reconnaissance Office spysats scheduled for launch in the next few years seem likely to be among those.”
The new documentary collection is mostly in Russian, with selected translations and some nice images. See “Sourcebook on the Okno and Krona Space Surveillance Sites” by Allen Thomson.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.