Why space matters–especially when it’s close to home

DigitalGlobe decided to release this blog entry earlier today. The flooding here in Colorado happened on a scale that couldn’t have been predicted. It impacted Longmont, Colorado, where DigitalGlobe has it’s space operations center, pretty badly as well as a lot of other communities along the Front Range. USA Today has a good collection of […]

Space matters, but other options help, too

This story has been going around the net for the past few days. And probably for many of you smart people out there, it’s probably an inevitable outcome of our government’s (the USA) infatuation with drones. But, just like my aside “The Poor Man’s LEO satellite” about the North Dakota balloons being used for imagery, […]

Everyone’s worried but SpaceX

This particular article highlights some interesting differences in philosophy about success and risk (and there is a link) between established players and SpaceX. For opinion, sadly not about space operations, but rather the future of them, read further. The scenario: SpaceX has decided to upgrade their rocket engines to more powerful ones, and update the […]

This is why space matters and a preview of satellite imagery operations

The article on Indiegogo‘s website came to my attention from a Mr. Tobias Nassif, who lives on linked in, but also is the SVP from Skybox Imaging. There’s a SpaceUnited initiative online asking for donations to help buy imagery for relief organizations. This initiative is called the Satellite Humanitarian Imagery Mission (SHIM-1). Just go to the […]

Too much Corona, a Discoverer’s tale seen through the Keyhole

I just came upon this article from the Discovery Channel, and it tickled some memory cells. Back when we just started lobbing imagery satellites up into low earth orbit, we didn’t have the comprehensive ground systems and bandwidth of today. There was no such thing as a digital camera to be used as a payload. […]