I Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny

The New York Times article on the X-37 contains two very weak assertions. How about this one: “The craft’s payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed, suggesting that it can not only expose experiments to the void of outer space but also deploy and retrieve small satellites.”  (emphasis added) I guess you [...]

USAF Plans For Reusable Booster

Groan.  Wasn’t the shuttle a reusable booster?  Didn’t EELV promise cost savings? Here’s the link to the Aviation Week article… When I read about savings of over 50%, I think about EELV and the cost savings it was asserted to create.  EELV was a massive ‘cost avoidance’ program, that is, by creating and using new [...]

She Blinded Me With Lasers!

New Scientist reports that astronomers are concerned about restrictions on the use of lasers.  Astronomers use lasers to focus their telescopes.  The lasers, which are needed to adjust the adaptive optics of the telescopes, also appear to be capable of disrupting certain satellite sensors. Air Force Space Command has “restricted when and where US observatories can [...]

Space Wargames

Taylor Dinerman runs The Space Review, a highly interesting once-a-week space site.  This week, he’s come up with a piece that argues the Schriever series of space wargames has not been beneficial, but rather, has led to self-deterring, self-limiting, and ineffective actions.  He writes: “Instead of inspiring an urgent program of hardening and protecting the [...]

Space Traffic and The Growing Space Surveillance Mission

Air Force Space Command is responding to the on-orbit collision of a dead but still orbiting Russian Cosmos satellite and a functional Iridium satellite back in February 2009. The response includes plussing-up the number of operators working conjunction analysis from five to nine. Eventually AFSPC is looking at a 24-person staff to perform this mission [...]