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 […]

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 […]

Tromso–this is not your father’s Ikea furniture

Well actually, it’s not any kind of furniture made of “some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen” (although listening to Jonathan Coulton’s song, it sounds like it could be), but it is another ground station. It’s time to write about the Tromso Satellite Station (however, if you want to start with a smile, […]

Surprise Chinese launch places another “experimental” satellite in orbit

Yup, the Chinese decided to surprise everyone with the launch of a Long March 4b, according to this NASASpaceflight.com article. I can’t even imagine the hullabaloo this created on our SBIRS (Space Based Infrared System) operators if this rocket’s intense heat source was really not expected. Imagine seeing something emerge from a not-so-friendly country–something big that […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 17—The Green Hills of Earth

Green—a word associated with jungles, a description of newbies, in songs sung by muppets about the difficulties of being it, and songs sung by fictional spacefarers about the qualities of their homeworld. Those spacefarers might be fictional, but for certain real space imagery operators, green describes a capability of a satellite payload. Green is one […]