An Air Force academy physicist is developing a new telescope lens that news reports say would revolutionize the spy satellite business. Instead of the current Hubble-size space telescope—with a four-foot glass lens weighing as much as a truck—the lens Geoff Andersen wants to construct would employ lightweight material like aluminum foil and, at 60-feet-wide, would weight just half a pound. He has built a four-inch experimental model at a cost of $1,000 that works better than lenses at 10 times that cost. He says that his 60-foot version would enable one to read a newspaper from a satellite placed in low Earth orbit.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
