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 […]

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 […]

United States Government adding to the polar low earth orbiting constellation

This article caught my eye, if only because of the inaccuracy of the headline. The nation’s largest rocket was actually the Saturn V. When someone prints a headline like that, it normally means they just took the public release, and reprinted or copy/pasted it. I think they mean the nation’s largest, currently, which might be […]

Polygraphs and belief

This article on the Clearancejobs.com website isn’t really an eye-opener (at least it shouldn’t be). And it isn’t that hard to find information about how unreliable polygraphs are. Turns out belief in the system’s infallibility plays a big part. So it’s kind of like religion that way. I do like the part where they […]