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Space Spotters Track Secret Satellites
Ponca City, We Love You writes "When government officials announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would come falling out of the sky they said little about the satellite itself. They didn't need to. Spotters equipped with little more than a pair of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, had already uncovered some of the deepest of the government's expensive secrets and shared them on the Internet. Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists doing most of the observing. When a new spy satellite is launched the hobbyists will collaborate on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess at its function. They often share their information on their web site, satobs.org."
It is actually getting harder to identify satellites due to the efforts that certain governments are taking, including building in additional propulsion and stealth features built into the latest launches to alter and conceal orbits from those that might be predicted from launch. This is to prevent not only the ability to track orbits and know when a particular platform may be overhead, but it also prevents many of the current technologies like adaptive optics from being able to identify features of orbiting satellites as shown here .
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No real surprise that folks are spotting these things. It's a little hard to hide something orbiting the earth--it's not like one can really hide it behind a bush or under a rock. ...though it might be interesting to insert a spy satellite into an upper stage of a rocket that delivers an otherwise innocuous communications satellite, come to think of it...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
If you look at the satobs site, it hasn't been updated since 2004. WTF?
Can all fish swim?
to these people that they need to get out more, but it appears they already do.
And:"If Ted can track all these satellites," Mr. Pike said, "so can the Chinese."
That's damn straight. WTF is it with Government when they say shit like this? What, they think the rest of the World is too stupid to do this? Or photos in the airports by security. I got news for the Government: there are folks out there that have great memories and can draw. Go through security, look around, and then draw what you saw when you sit down and no one will no any different.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
The links in TFA aren't very good - theres a site
here that does real time sat tracking (ooh, animated over google maps).
I looked there last week and they didn't have enough data to show the orbit but it seems they have some elements now.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Active camouflage.
In soviet Russia: Spy satellites track hidden satellite spotters... wait...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I'm a big fan of Heavens Above, http://www.heavens-above.com/
Move along now.
1995 called. They want that website back.
Nothing to see here - this gets reported on Slashdot about once a month. Move along.
weren't the size of a small bus, they'd be harder to spot?
These satellites could take some lessons from Mr. Nezbit.
How about these... check out the videos, amazing : http://www.rense.com/Datapages/mystmachinedata.htm
These seem to be HUGE machines in orbit around Earth.
Can these spotters tell whether a secret satellite has a nuke reactor or materials onboard? Because there's no way to know the overall risk those kinds of craft pose to us so long as they're all secret. And if the risks are no impediment to their launch, then they're more likely to be launched. There's no way to know whether we're already suffering from junk nuke craft falling back to Earth.
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make install -not war
They can use it to change the positions of the sats for more than a decade.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
c'mon, you're giving tin-foil wearers and right-wing wing-nuts a bad name here.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Say that three times real fast and you're admitted to the Satellite Stalkers club.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why don't they all just paint their satellites black?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Uh...it's not that they really think the Chinese, for example, are stupid or lack resources. But they're not really trying to hide from the Chinese. (Or more precisely, what they're trying to hide from the Chinese they really try to hide, which means they don't even talk about it in public.)
/. Not because they should be secret per se, but just because one doesn't leave loaded guns lying around where children can get to them.
What they're trying to hide it from is some cheapass Taliban group in the hinterlands of Pakistan, who may, as someone else pointed out, have access to the Internet and be able, once given a satellite's orbit, be able to know when it's over their neck of the woods, and plan operations accordingly.
And it's not that they fear amateurs will compromise black satellites. That can only happen, at best, temporarily. It's that if amateurs start compromising satellites, then they need to build and launch much more expensive black satellites that defy amateur attempts at compromise. Which costs you, the taxpayer, beaucoup additional dollars.
I don't mind people trying to spot black satellites. Fun 'n' games, to be sure. But a certain amount of discretion would be grown-up and helpful. I mean, I happen to know, because of my professional background, how to synthesize meth and other interesting substances. But I wouldn't post the steps on
Put on your skeptical hats. Do you really think there are "huge machines" in low earth orbit that nobody else, aside from the link, can see? John Walson isn't the only one watching the sky. There are people who do this for a living and nobody else can see what he is seeing. As in, not a single person has been able to confirm his "finding". Therefore, one can only conclude that he is full of it.
/. of all places. Wow....how far we've fallen.
There is no mystery because there are no machines.
I can't believe the parent got modded up on
An interesting fact I learned listening to some of the MIT lectures available online about the history and development of the Shuttle: One of the military requirements of the Shuttle was that it had at least 1400 miles crossrange. This was so for example, in a time of crisis (the shuttle was designed during the Cold War after all), the Shuttle could be launched from Vandenberg AFB into a polar orbit, immediately drop a spy satellite into orbit on the first go around (to prevent an enemy from learning the projected orbital path of the spy satellite by tracking the shuttle through multiple orbits), and then come right back to land on the west coast. Of course the earth would have rotated eastwards during that 90 minute orbit, so the shuttle needed the crossrange to be able to also glide eastwards and make a landing. Some original designs showed the shuttle having straight wings; apparently one of the major reasons NASA went with a delta-wing configuration was to meet the crossrange requirement.
Doc, you need to subscribe to some technical literature instead of the nuclear paranoia you seem to subscribe to. This situation is pretty obvious if you bother to think instead of knee-jkerk react. You seem to start with the pre-judeged assumption that some sort of comic-book conspiracy of evil overlords runs the US Intelligence agencies and will irrationally choose evil nukes over engineering practicality, in order to be more menacing.
Wrong. Be rational. There are solid engineering and budgetary reasons at work here. No "secrecy" can hide those issues, no matter the classification fo the satellite. Physics, like mathematics, sooner or later breaks attempts at classifying it. And there are limits on the money spent, even in a "black" budget project. If things go bad, you can bet overspending will leak out. Google SBIRS-High for a good example - look at the globalsecurity.org entry (pic is taken looking S from Buckley AFB - I used to live to the west of that hill full of houses in Aurora CO).
The weight and expense to power ratio for plutonium or other decay based power systems is too high compared to solar arrays and batteries when in low earth orbit. The stuff that uses nukes is generally interplanetary in nature and cannot depend on solar. This is especially true with US launched stuff. Plus, nuclear power units have too high a heat signature to be used for "stealthy" sats, and are heavy and too expensive to launch if there is a cost-worthy alternative. Which there is: good ol' solar arrays, nice and thin.
The intelligence agencies would much rather have more gizmos if given the choice. Solar arrays provide them with better weight tradeoffs, and more power as well -- meaning they can add more stuff and use more power hungry stuff. And they are cheaper to deploy, and less likely to run afoul of regulatory issues i.e. try dragging a nuc design for LOE (low earth orbit) in front of an Engineering Design Review board - they'll laugh you out of the room for being politically stupid.
And if you are talking about the voiced concerns that the satellite in question (US-193, NROL-21) has hazardous material, well that hazmat is rocket fuel for orbital manuvering - the full load of it given that the sat never deployed the solar arrays, nor attemted to manuver to a more stable higher orbit. Chemicals. Not nukes.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
HI, Quite interesting re painting satellites black. If you look at some of the photos of the recent 'wideband gapfiller satellite', the satellite bus is mostly black. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q3/060926b_pr.html has a picture of the satellite in a frame prior to testing. If you look at it, you can see all the communications antennas are black. I'm not sure is this is painted for stealth reasons, or the antennas are made of carbon fiber. I'm sure this is only one example of many recent satellites that have been painted black.Either way, painting a satellite would only solve a small amount of the problem, since pretty much all satellites carry an RF payload which transmits data back to earth, they can be detected this way if they cannot be seen. The article mentions the 'seesat' group which does visual obs, but a parallel group 'hearsat' works with the RF downlinks, identifying satellites purely by their RF fingerprints. In fact several satellites have been detected at RF, orbits computed which were then passed on to the 'seesat' folks for visual confirmation. There are a few sites that you can check out if you are interested in the RF Aspects of satellite detection, www.hearsat.org, www.satellitenwelt.de and www.uhf-satcom.com being just a few.
Hah! Your pathetic plan to down the site using the old "Slashdotting" DDoS attack has failed. Now your secrets are available to the whole world!
Bwahahahahahahahaha!
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Useless.
Unless we teach these satellites how not to be seen.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Teat-hers?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The NASA link at the bottom of the page linked in your post has already been squashed. Poof.
I'd also like to point out that in the time it took me to read down this far, then refresh my screen, at least 4 posts have been REMOVED FROM THIS THREAD. WTF!???
I REPEAT! WTF!??
Blah blah blah.
What about a satellite that doesn't want to depend on solar power, like a satellite killer, or just one immune to that kind of satellite attack?
Oh yeah, there have already been nukes have already powered satellites, and the same physics and engineering requirements would make them appropriate again.
And I don't think that the spooks with the nukes are afraid of having to pass regulatory boards when they don't want to.
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make install -not war
You want to be very precise and point out that plutonium-238 (not -239, the weapons material) is used solely as a heat source, to drive in effect a reverse Peltier-junction electrical source.
... "plutonium ... BAAAAAD!!". A small quantity of plutonium is a respectable coffee boiler.
Unfortunately, many people reflexively twitch when they hear the word "plutonium". You know
- A dromedary has one hump, while a camel has a high-gain antenna, transponder and solar panel array.
- Aren't you, in fact, a satellite trainspotter?
You're no fun anymore.
- Now look here, if anybody else pinches my phrase, I'll blast them in a suborbital trajectory under a camel.
- If you can spot one (snickers).
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
& I guess I missed it last month.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
You win the cookie for the reference. :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Doc Paranoid, you probably could have just said, "you win, EQ, I concede."
At least he presented his reasoning. You just present your own self-serving conclusions as if they are self-evident.
Their "reasoning" consists of calling me paranoid, and denying that nuke powered satellites would ever be launched because of physics and engineering problems, and the superiority of solar alternatives.
So I showed not only cases where nukes would be used because solar isn't good enough, but actual examples of nuke satellites already used.
So what if you nuke fetishists cannot even bother to read the simple reasons that debunk your absolute assertions. You're incurable. But at least you are quickly and easily beaten in public - a public which has grown to expect your lies.
Thanks for making it easy to not just win this argument, but to discredit the basic thinking skills of you people mesmerized by the nuke glow.
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make install -not war
Hey, should I reply to this post the same way you did? With "Blah, blah, blah" as if that actually conveys reasoning? I mean, you did it, so it must be effective, right?
... will irrationally choose evil nukes over engineering practicality, in order to be more menacing." They will not, for the reasons he noted. He did not say that no satellites would ever be nuclear.
"Their 'reasoning' consists of calling me paranoid, and denying that nuke powered satellites would ever be launched because of physics and engineering problems, and the superiority of solar alternatives."
No, wrong. Again. He was illustrating why there are a LOT of costs involved with nukes. He didn't "deny that nuke powered satellites would ever be launched..." he noted that their costs make them a far less likely choice given the nature of intelligence gathering--you need lots of eyes, not just one.
"So I showed not only cases where nukes would be used because solar isn't good enough, but actual examples of nuke satellites already used."
Which, of course, wasn't his point. He said that specifically when he said: "There are solid engineering and budgetary reasons at work here. No 'secrecy' can hide those issues, no matter the classification fo the satellite. Physics, like mathematics, sooner or later breaks attempts at classifying it. And there are limits on the money spent, even in a 'black' budget project. If things go bad, you can bet overspending will leak out." You see, he was using this as evidence of his assertion that you think that "the US Intelligence agencies
"So what if you nuke fetishists cannot even bother to read the simple reasons that debunk your absolute assertions. You're incurable. But at least you are quickly and easily beaten in public - a public which has grown to expect your lies.
"Thanks for making it easy to not just win this argument, but to discredit the basic thinking skills of you people mesmerized by the nuke glow."
Then you make this unfounded, sweeping generalization. Read carefully: I didn't take a position either way, I simply noted that your empty response was just that. Empty. From there you decide that I am a "nuke fetishist[]," that I don't bother to read, and I'm "incurable" whatever the hell that means, and (in another unfounded generalization) you speak for all of the "public." Lovely. Except none of that has any bearing on what I said, nor can you rationally derive those conclusions from what I said.
Which simply suggests that you are too aligned with your political ideology for anyone to take seriously any arguments you do happen to make. That doesn't help your cause, it hurts your cause, because it calls into doubt your basic reading skills as well as your "basic thinking skills."
What a smart plan.
Their post called me "paranoid" and then went on as if it had an airtight case against nuke satellites existing. If that's not their implication, then what's the point of their argument?
So I responded in kind with "blah blah blah". So what? That's the level of respect they invoked, so they got it. What matters is that I completely countered their argument denying nuke satellites with facts and logic.
And if their argument wasn't that there are no nuke satellites, so what? What are they saying? It doesn't matter, because my argument shows that there are nuke satellites, there will continue to be arguments for them, the ones arguing will win when they want.
These satellites are a risk. If you're going to try arguing against that with arguments you yourself imply are irrelevant to the point, then don't bother.
So I called you out as a nuke fetishist. Because I saw through you, as only nuke fetishists have the illogic and devotion to nukes to talk the way you both did. My "political ideology" is self preservation, underwritten by working logic and knowledge of history. Too bad that you're politically opposed to that. Because that puts you on the losing side. Especially when you try your own hand at the kind of obvious inferences I successfully derived from your posts, that you try to put down, but fail to pull off yourself.
People defending nuke deployments have a hallmark obsession with both cherrypicked logic and inability to relate to human nature. It's like you sat too close to the TV too long when you you were kids.
Bottom line: nuke launches are a risk when secret, they've been launched in secret, they can be launched in secret. You both are defending that, with weak arguments.
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make install -not war
"Their post called me "paranoid" and then went on as if it had an airtight case against nuke satellites existing. If that's not their implication, then what's the point of their argument?"
Again: He wasn't making an air tight case against nuke satellites existing. His point was clear, and he stated it explicitly, "You seem to start with the pre-judeged assumption that some sort of comic-book conspiracy of evil overlords runs the US Intelligence agencies and will irrationally choose evil nukes over engineering practicality, in order to be more menacing." He did not say he had an airtight case against nuke satellites existing--that you responded to an implication that you thought you saw is on you.
"So I responded in kind with "blah blah blah". So what? That's the level of respect they invoked, so they got it. What matters is that I completely countered their argument denying nuke satellites with facts and logic."
My god. Except that he didn't deny nuke satellites at all. You either read it wrong or didn't understand it and replied to an argument he didn't make.
"And if their argument wasn't that there are no nuke satellites, so what? What are they saying? It doesn't matter, because my argument shows that there are nuke satellites, there will continue to be arguments for them, the ones arguing will win when they want."
It doesn't matter that your argument shows that there are nuclear satellites, that was never in question. He never made the point that there weren't. He did make the point that by no means are they an effective way to accomplish intelligence missions--their costs are too high given the necessity of having as many eyes as possible.
"These satellites are a risk. If you're going to try arguing against that with arguments you yourself imply are irrelevant to the point, then don't bother."
That you say they are a risk isn't an argument. Walking outside your home each day is a MUCH higher risk, by orders of magnitude. However, I haven't taken a side either way--I've been demonstrating why your vague hand-waving is ineffective at convincing others.
"So I called you out as a nuke fetishist. Because I saw through you, as only nuke fetishists have the illogic and devotion to nukes to talk the way you both did. My "political ideology" is self preservation, underwritten by working logic and knowledge of history. Too bad that you're politically opposed to that. Because that puts you on the losing side. Especially when you try your own hand at the kind of obvious inferences I successfully derived from your posts, that you try to put down, but fail to pull off yourself."
Again, this is all empty speculation on your part--again suggesting that you read what you want to read, and are incapable of understanding that others can note your failures at presenting your point without addressing whether nuclear satellites are a risk or not. That you happen to make nearly non-existent arguments does not imply any position of mine. No matter what you choose to believe about me.
"People defending nuke deployments have a hallmark obsession with both cherrypicked logic and inability to relate to human nature. It's like you sat too close to the TV too long when you you were kids.
"Bottom line: nuke launches are a risk when secret, they've been launched in secret, they can be launched in secret. You both are defending that, with weak arguments."
This is just getting funny now. I have neither defended the use of any types of nuclear technology, nor have I referred to launching satellites in secret, nor have I defended those launches at all.
All I have noted is that your self-serving, ideological conclusions do not serve as effective arguments to convince others of your position. In fact, they suggest to others that your position is nothing more than blind ideology, and therefore they can easily dismiss it. Oh, hey, I've got an idea, why don't you make up a bunch more unfounded stuff about me and post that as if it's an argument for your position. I'm sure that THIS time that will *really* convince those that disagree with you.
I'll repeat myself: smart plan.