New Chinese Launch–another three satellites in one.

The Chinese launched another three satellites from Jiuquan (map below), China, according to this article. One supposedly has a electro-optical payload, another has synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and the third has possibly a ELINT/SIGINT payload. All are suspected, according to the NASA Spaceflight.org page, to be used for maritime vehicle tracking. I don’t know, but suspect these are probably going […]

The poor man’s LEO satellite

This is a good reminder that while satellite technology and operations are cool, sometimes the cheap ways will work just fine, too. Balloons are great if you want to look at areas that are easy to fly over. Just too bad these people feel compelled to do it over North Dakota. I don’t have anything […]

Satellites and terrorists

Okay, now that I’ve recovered from my previous aside and post of old information, here’s something that shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone paying attention. According to this article from the Washington Post, satellites of all sorts were used to help find and monitor Osama Bin Laden. Some SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) here, a little IMINT […]

Thanks and good-bye to one of the first space operators

Darn it–the internet and search engines got me on this one. Caught this as soon as I posted it. Of course he died last year, so thanks to anyone shaking their head and bothering to cluck under their breath. Sorry about that! Please just ignore this one. Now I know why I didn’t see this […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 9–cutting the cheese

Hopefully the beer was tasty and nutritious. The question I posed in my previous post to you, dear (inebriated?) reader: Why is it that moving the plane of a satellite’s orbit against the direction of the Earth’s rotation (backwards) is helpful to those operators of imagery ilk? Let me clarify some terms here before we […]