I’ve been saying for a very long time – back to 2006, I think, but the earliest TYReference I can find is that the difference among European countries that hopped into Iraq with both feet and those that didn’t is the difference between those who had independent satellite imaging and those who didn’t. This is…
Read More WhooshSo, #Cosmonauts at the Science Museum. Put it this way: they’ve got Valentina Tereshkova’s ship. More than that, they’ve got documents of Tsiolkovsky’s, an LK-3 lunar lander, an ejection seat for dogs, Vladimir Dzhanibekov’s strides. And that’s saying something. And the volunteers (I think) are really impressive, hopping out from behind artefacts to press information…
Read More #CosmonautsI’ve recently seen someone from the Satellite Applications Catapult come up on the UKNOF mailing list, asking about how best to get dark fibre from their Harwell offices into London with a view to distributing lots of satellite imagery. Obviously a CDN is the way to go, but the first thing that came to mind…
Read More Satellites to new heightsHere’s something cool. According to the Zarya Blog, a Russian Dnepr rocket just orbited no fewer than 32 satellites, including one package that deploys no fewer than nine subsatellites. They’re a huge variety of scientific and engineering experiments. At the same time, a NASA Minotaur rocket was launched from the Wallops Island range, with some…
Read More Links in spaceRemember BuyThisSatellite? So your man heard about Terrestar going bankrupt and one of their comsats going begging, and had the brilliant idea of crowdsourcing the money to buy the thing and redeploy it over Africa or perhaps Iran and, uh, provide Internet access to people who really needed it. So what happened? Well, someone with…
Read More Rewind on a projectI’m not quite as sceptical as some about this. However, it’s not clear to me how this differs from the sort of thing UNOSAT does all the time – here’s their analysis of imagery over Abyei, the key border area between North and South Sudan. Actually it looks like the “Enough Project” is going to…
Read More tasksDid you know the UK briefly had an independent imagery satellite between 2005-2009? You do now, and so do I thanks to Think Defence. Sample pix are here. The satellite was designed to return its data directly to a mobile ground station immediately after collecting an image, allowing far more timely delivery of the information…
Read More Brits In Spaaace! Brown Era EditionThis is one of the most interesting stories in the Wikileaks cable dump. The Saudis use the existence of the French national imagery satellite capability, and David Ignatius’s column in the Washington Post, to resist efforts by the Americans to stop them using US arms and satellite data provided for use on Al-Qa’ida for other…
Read More a glimpse of imagery diplomacySo someone’s trying to raise $150,000 to buy a satellite from the bankruptcy of TerreStar, in order to “Connect Everyone”. I admire the aim, but I’m concerned that this is going to be a round of forgetting that a lot of perfectly good GSM operators are doing just that. Also, I can’t find any reference…
Read More what could possibly go wrong?There are a few details of the latest of Germany’s synthetic-aperture radar imaging satellites at the German version of ScienceBlogs, on the occasion of the latest one being launched on a Russian Dnepr rocket. Tories should be delighted, it’s a PFI. Specifically, the German government contributes the bulk of the cost through its space agency,…
Read More at last, a PFI I actually support