Satellite Spotters Make Government Uneasy

An anonymous reader found an interesting little story about satellite spotters and how, not surprisingly, their painstakingly methodical hobby doesn't exactly make gazillion dollar government agencies all that excited. Of course the article raises the very obvious point that if a guy with a pair of binoculars in his back yard can spot a satellite, so can the Chinese government.

Comments

well

[someone1234]

If they are spotted, they failed. I think they should thank the spotters for the free bugtesting.

Re:well

[morgan_greywolf]

Um, maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but if you have an object in low Earth orbit, it would seem to me that as long as there is line of sight to it, there's no way you can really hide it.

Re:well

[phil reed]

Black absorbs sunlight. The satellite would overheat.

Re:well

[maxume]

If I did have a way to hide satellites, I would make damn sure that I had some satellites that weren't hidden, and I would publicly complain about the fact that people were tracking them.

Nothing like a little misdirection in the morning.

(That the Allies sent spotter planes out to get spotted by the enemy that they had located by intercepting and decrypting message traffic, and gave the enemy time to radio home that they had been spotted, is one of my favorite things, ever.)

Re:well

[gnick]

Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please. My speculation is that, if you were to refer to the average Chinese person as an "Asian-American", he would be confused at a minimum and possibly upset.

Re:well

[dotancohen]

Paint it black And how would the satellite dissipate all the heat that it would absorb? Arm chair spy-satellite engineering might be fun, but trust me, you are not going to come up with something so obvious such as "paint it black" that the _real_ engineers did not think of first.

Re:well

[Eternauta3k]

I don't know what spy satellites look like A dot of light (even if you have a telescope)

Remove all blinking lights It's actually the reflection from the Sun that lets you see it (maybe the black paint could help, along with frying the satellite and rendering the solar panels useless (unless they have a RTG)).

Re:well

[besalope]

It's more along the lines of looking for objects in unpublicized flight paths that gives away spy satellites. If you're looking where there should be nothing and there's a moving object, red flags go up real quick. Now if they made dual use satellites (e.g. Weather/Spy) and publicized the flight paths, that would hide them far better. Than painting it black or changing the exterior. After all, the best place to hide things is in plain sight.

Sorry, governments...

[TripMaster Monkey]

...but the sky is pretty much Public Domain. Or are you going to outlaw looking up?

What's this new obsession with the Chinese...

[kaos07]

Seriously, two articles in the same day scaremongering about China. Slashdot is turning into The New York Times in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

If the Chinese can develop tiny robots good for them. If the Chinese can spot satellites, good for them. Why the summary decided to single out China, I don't know. I'm sure if a guy with binoculars can do it, so can just about every government in the world, including the United States government. Remember, you guys aren't the only with satellites up these days.

First of all we aren't all American here so we don't all quite understand this paranoia about the Chinese. Secondly, I highly doubt the average Slashdotter, who is generally well educated, has the kind of irrational paranoia that Slashdot seems to be provoking in these articles.

GOOD!!

[krygny]

The people charged with our defense and national security are *supposed* to be uneasy, ...lay awake nights, ... constantly wonder if all they've done is enough. That way, the rest of us don't have to.

Many LEO satellites are visible to the naked eye, and certainly with only a little optical assistance. Spotting one and speculating what it's doing are two different things. But maybe it's time to employ a little stealth for satellites too.

They Already Know

[Anonymous Coward]

The US government isn't worried about China or vice versa. We both know where each other's satellites are; both public and "secret". You don't put two billion dollar objects in orbit on a potential crash course. It just doesn't happen. That's why they know, we know they know, they know we know they know, and we're all comfortable with that.

Next question?

Re:Why China?

[Scrameustache]

When did China become "The Enemy"? I thought you were still working on Al-Qaeda. Did I miss a memo? America has always been at war with China.
Good news about our increased chocolate rations, though!

What enemy??

[pembo13]

Is the whole rest of the world enemy to the US now?

You're out of your fucking mind

[Anonymous Coward]

you realize we, no joke, have more nukes in a single submarine than they do in their entire military.

LOL, where the hell did you get that "fact"? You do realise China's been nuclear-capable since the late '60s, right?

How many nukes China does or does not have is one of the world's most closely guarded secrets and frankly, unless you're some top level NSA operative, you have no fucking idea.

The *only* credible information about the Chinese nuclear arsenal was the HK leak which emerged in 1996, which indicated China had in excess of 2,300 warheads. Look it up. That was close to an order of magnitude above any prior western media report - I somehow doubt they have given up making them since then.

They have ICBMs easily capable of reaching anywhere in the US. Accuracy doesn't really matter with nukes. If you think 2,300 nuclear warheads - and that was over *10 years ago* - isn't a significant deterrent to the US, you're out of your god damn mind.

I do not claim to have any special knowledge but I do take an interest in geopolitics and have a few friends in (Australian) intelligence circles who would laugh in your face if you tried to claim the USA would automatically win in an all out war with China. They would say, and I'm inclined to agree, that the USA is more likely to automatically *lose* anything other than for-real "all out war" with China - by default - because the US government cannot take any action which leads to nuclear retaliation by China, but the Chinese Govt couldn't give a shit. You think the US is going to risk getting nuked to save Taiwan? LOL!

Free inquiry makes authoritarians uneasy

[dpbsmith]

Any sort of free intellectual activity, following what interests you to see where it leads, makes authoritarians uneasy. Bad governments seek to exercise power by restricting information. Anyone who's just naturally curious and follows their bliss for the sheer joy of finding things out represents a danger to authoritarians.

It's not just political speech that's dangerous, it's anything that seeks truth that might not always align with propaganda.

That's why the freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution are so precious.