Secret Space Program

I've been frequenting the conspiracy theorist-type archives, and though I am loath to admit it, I am finding one line of though those sorts tend to have plausible. Not enough for me to outright believe it, but enough to allow for willing suspension of disbelief as far as my fiction goes. What I speak of is the idea that within our own solar system one group or another has established an off-Earth presence without the vast majority of the general populace knowing of this. Allow me to explain why I find this so plausible before you throw the rotten tomatoes...

Such a scenario would require but the following things to be possible in the first place: 1. At least one Earthbound faction with the technical know-how and resources to HAVE a space program in the first place, 2. An inclination to keep this capability secret from the general public rather than sharing, 3. The complicity of the general public. Inevitably, SOMEONE will find out. The first to suspect will probably be astronomers who detect something anomalous out there only to be sworn to secrecy, with the general public none the wiser. It's when commercial space travel catches up to government program which may or may not (in this hypothetical scenario) be a smokescreen for either travel and/or communication extend far enough into our solar system, whatever evidence IS found will hardly be enough to change the status quo. And thus the secret space program continues...

As for who would do this sort of thing or why? That's what I'm asking you folks. All I'm establishing is that theoretically such a thing as a secret space program IS possible and may even be plausible. So how about it: who might have done this and why would they have?

Okay, couple of problems with this idea. 1) Finding stuff on conspiracy websites plausible

But more seriously there's a key problem. "An inclination to keep this capability secret from the general public rather than sharing". That's not your problem. Inclination to secrecy or not, it's the capability to keep something like this secret and that's damn near impossible.

Something equivalent to a Saturn V launch (and it will need to be that powerful) is visible for hundreds of kilometres away and detectable even further away by seismograph. Plus once you're in Low Earth Orbit there's no way to hide from anyone with a half decent set of binoculars. And unless you're parked in the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point or on the dark side of the moon or the Earth-Sun L3 Lagrange point, there's nowhere to hide anywhere else.

As for co-opting the general public who does find out... I think you grossly underestimate the number of people you would have to control. There's the hundreds (probably thousands or tens of thousands) of workers assembling the equivalent of Saturn V equivalent rockets you'd need just to get the project off the ground (and the assorted infrastructure they'd need). Then there's the members of your own pace agency who'd have to know so they could at least adjust schedules so there are no suspicious incidents generating unwanted publicity. Next is the real kick in the pants. The members of the foreign space agencies who'd have the means of detecting and monitoring your launches. Plus the foreign and domestic members of academia that would be have ancillary means of detecting launches, mostly seismologists and meteorologists. Finally and most damningly every amateur astronomer of the planet at which point the numbers are running into the millions.

The sheer logistical effort of keeping all those people from spilling your secret, even by accident, would be staggering beyond belief and doom any such conspiracy to failure sooner or later.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a trebuchet full of rotten tomatoes with your name on it that I need to fire.

Pretty much everything on the above with an added thing.

If a foreign power is less than friendly and finds this out, you've got a massive political disaster.

It's why more or less every argument for a faked moon landing doesn't work. The Soviets had a simply massive intelligence network, if it was faked they would have found out and that would have just been a huge shitstorm.

So imagine if this faction was found out.

Presumably a very powerful country is moving advanced equipment off planet and keeping it secret from it's own citizens and possibly allies? That's a pretty big political fuckup.

To wildly paraphrase Terry Pratchett:

Given the levels of competence displayed by most governments, what makes you think they'd be any good at covering up something like this?

There was an episode of Dark Skies where a secret group of military astronauts embarked on intelligence/espionage missions against the Soviet Union and the alien threat in the show (the series was made in the 90's and set in the 1960's). It was revealed that many unmanned test missions were actually manned by these astronauts, who were a distinct group from the astronauts in the Apollo Program, and were kept secret from the public.

edited 4th Dec '13 11:45:23 AM by fulltimeD

True, but the sort of operation that Op was taking about is on an order of magnitude above simply passing off manned missions as unmanned drones. We are talking about a establishing a space colony here. This is an undertaking on par with the ISS. For the reasons mentioned above, there is no way any country will be able to transport that kind of material into space without anyone noticing.

Frankly, there is really no reason to keep the secret space base a secret when it would cost so much to do so and has a list of failure points the length of my arm. A far more plausible scenario would be to let the public know of it's existence, but classify the more sensitive bits.

Say, the space base has a giant planet destroying laser mounted on it, which would cause a major political incident if anyone found out. So you just disguise the important bits as industrial equipment, such as range detecting lasers or laser cutters for precision manufacturing. It would also help if they are mixed with a cargo full of the stuff you are actually claiming it is, and you also have an actual use for a laser cutter. Then you suddenly have a world destroying laser that no one is the wiser about, until you decided to hold the world ransom for one million dollars or whatever.