NOAA’s low hanging problem–Part 3

The past few posts have been about the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s “urgent” satellite need using the Independent Review Team’s (IRT) recommendation from the November 2013 report. In the last post, you were introduced to the systems status pages of satellite NOAA-16 in the hopes of showing you the satellite’s overall health. The only […]

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 […]

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 […]

Too much XS–in government space

Every now and then, an article, like this one posted in USA Today, shows up. The gist of the article is: the Pentagon is looking for a “cheap” way to get satellites into space. In this particular case they’re looking at a “space plane” called XS-1. We’ve heard this before, with pretty much the same […]