THE US Department of Defense (DoD) has moved to declassify secret space programmes in an effort to boost the country's military edge in space.

The move would allow private companies, such as the likes of SpaceX, to develop never-before-seen technology in droves.

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US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks recently green lit a policy that "completely rewrites" a decades-old document that kept these missions a secret.

It essentially lets armed services lower the classification level of a number of top-secret space programs and technologies for private industry and the US' allies.

The DoD wants this information declassified, as the world's superpowers continue to invest in the militarisation of space.

Just like how Nasa enlisted the help of private companies to boost the pace of its scientific research in space.

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"What the classification memo does, generally, is it overwrites — it really completely rewrites — a legacy document that had its roots 20 years ago, and it's just no longer applicable to the current environment that involves national security space," DoD Assistant Secretary for Space Policy, John Plumb, said last week, according to Breaking Defense.

The policy does not mean that these programmes and technologies will be fully unclassified and unveiled to the public.

It will, instead, help the US build an "asymmetric advantage and force multiplier that neither China nor Russia could ever hope to match," Plumb said in a separate DoD . 

Why does the US care about space defence?

Analysis by Millie Turner, Tech & Science Reporter for The Sun

Peace in space, and the ability to defend it, has become an increasingly central pillar to not only the US' national security interests, but its allies and non-allies.

These days, space-enabled threats can range anywhere from physical attacks against satellites or spacecraft to electronic spoofing attacks to GPS systems on Earth.

Sure, space warfare isn't quite what it looks like in the movies.

But such attacks can have devastating financial impacts, and blow big holes in a nation's security protocol.

For example, a rogue state could wipe out a country's satellite communications by taking their orbital hardware out of action.

Similar to how companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX have completely revolutionised how agencies like Nasa get to space - revealing Pentagon secrets to private industry and allies will only support the US' efforts to defend itself from space warfare.

Not only that, but it will boost the defences of its allies, which include the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France and Germany.

The programmes of interest are what's known as Special Access Programmes (SAPs), where security protocols severely restrict the sharing of highly sensitive and classified information about them.

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While some SAPs are acknowledged, meaning their existence is known to the public but their details haven't been revealed, others have their entire existence kept secret.  

Plumb said the new policy will remove SAP status from a handful of the Pentagon's most valuable space programs.

Rather than operate under a blanket DoD policy across all military space programs and tech, each branch of the US armed services can decide their own classification levels.

"Anything we can bring from a SAP level to a Top Secret level for example, brings massive value to the warfighter, massive value to the department, and frankly, my hope is over time [it] will also allow us to share more information with allies and partners that they might not currently be able to share," Plumb said.