[kergonath]

Again, there are operators in that space that don’t have any incentive to keep your program secret. And I am not talking about complete transparency.

People retire or fall out, documents get lost, someone slips somewhere. It does not take much for the existence of a project to become public knowledge. It’s the other side of the OPSEC coin: a single mistake and some information gets available.

Still, I am not saying this is impossible, merely improbable. Which, combined with the other factors, makes the story being a secret military project implausible.