NOAA’s low hanging problem–Part 2

I mentioned yesterday two sites had reported about the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) urgency to build a replacement satellite. This urgency was established in an Independent Review Team (IRT) report produced on November 8 of this year. I have a link to a copy of the IRT report here. But it probably wouldn’t hurt […]

NOAA’s low hanging problem — Part 1

SpacePolicyonline.com and The Weather Channel both posted stories last week about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “urgent” need for a new weather satellite. You can read the stories from both sites here and here. According to their posts, there is a projected satellite and data gap for sun-synchronous low earth orbiting (go here […]

I don’t think Hell has frozen over (yet)

Under the exasperated sighs of “Riiiiight” and “Surrrre,” Boeing has proudly announced on November 8 a “partnership” (read “monopoly”) with the United States Air Force (USAF). This partnership is supposed to help everyone involved to reduce “supply chain costs.” As I’ve noted before, the government and military’s acquisitions systems are broken. This system affects the […]

United Nations has a space fleet?

Did you know the United Nations (UN) has a space fleet ready for disasters? The UN doesn’t really run the constellation, but there’s a signed charter, the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, which has about 23 members involved with it. Some United States organizations are members, such as DigitalGlobe (hence Tomnod), National Oceanic and […]

You can sit in a chair at home and help the Philippines

At least you can help find the interesting things with this website: Tomnod. Right now, Tomnod has images of the Philippines and other super typhoon affected countries, from DigitalGlobe’s imagery collections that were taken from their satellites’ payload as they happened to zoom overhead. Tomnod’s is an old idea applied to imagery: crowdsourcing. Let people […]