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 […]

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 […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 18—“Look at the stars, look how they shine for you…”

“…Yeah, they were all yellow.” So, a small confession before continuing: One of the reasons you haven’t seen any lessons for the past few weeks regarding the imagery colors is because I’ve been stuck on this color thing for a little while. I think part of dilemma is just going through, color by color, has been […]