Minotaur escapes the maze

Last Tuesday night, Orbital launched a Minotaur rocket with 29 cubesats aboard. It seems everything went well. But perhaps just showing different pictures of the Minotaur’s ascent will be of interest to you–images like the one above? So here you go–the Washington Post has them all nice and posted for you. This launch is also […]

Tips for the GEOINT geek in your life

Taking a slight break for the NOAA series today. It’s good for both of us, really! NASA’s Earth Observatory team posted a few tips on 18 November which may be useful to those of you interested in understanding imagery better. You can go to their post, How to Interpret a Satellite Image: Five Tips and Strategies, […]

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 […]

Is there really a “Space Race?” (cue “Chariots of Fire”)

“there can be only one?” There are headlines so full of assumptions, you sometimes have to take a step back, and think long and hard about the “angle” of the article. In this instance, I’m referring to The Age, an Australian newspaper with an article, dated November 9, headlined “China to win space race unless […]

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, […]