WRITTEN BY DR MICHAEL SALLA ON DECEMBER 13, 2019. POSTED IN FEATURED, SPACE PROGRAMS
Barrett and Rogers’ comments were published by Defense News in an article by reporter Nathan Strout with the eye-catching title, “Barrett, Rogers consider declassifying secretive space programs”. Barrett and Rogers were speaking at a panel on “Next Steps in Space: Launching America’s Sixth Military Branch”. In the panel Barrett said:
Declassifying some of what is currently held in secure vaults would be a good idea… You would have to be careful about what we declassify, but there is much more classified than what needs to be.
Rogers, a co-sponsor of the original House of Representatives Bill to create a Space Force/Corps, agreed and said that information about space programs was “overwhelmingly classified”.
Rogers elaborated further on the need to declassify the Air Force’s secret infrastructure in space in order to win public support for Space Force:
As members of the Armed Services Committee and the defense appropriators, we get it. But we have to have our other colleagues in the Congress to be supportive of us making the changes we need and the resources we need into this… It’s not going to happen until they understand the threat and the dependence we have. And I don’t think that can happen until we see significant declassification of what we’re doing in space and what China and Russia are doing, and how space is in their day-to-day lives.