Three Wonks Walk Into a Bar…
…and the middle one (after surveying all the beautiful Italian people) says “Know any good books about missiles?” And the last one says “Why, yes! I like the books from the ‘50s and ‘60s.” And the first one in says…
Geoff Forden
Writing on ACW 2008–2010 · 142 posts
Article·
When in doubt, victimize the victims
Spelled out in Anthrax spores Disease is a funny thing. The general tendency of the public is to blame the ill person. Nothing illustrates this better than the way societies treat people who have acquired AIDS/HIV. However, the public health…
Article·
Target: Dimona
click on the image for a larger version A recent London Times article reports that Israel is worried about Hamas using its artillery rockets to shell the Dimona reactor. I thought it would be interesting to calculate the probability of…
Article·
Because it’s free
File size of daily orbital parameters distributed from the NASA space-track website. This is proportional to the number of satellites tracked each day, or at least listed as tracked each day. I’ve been trying to recall all the space-derived information…
Article·
Little Lost Satellite(s)
It appears that six European satellites have gone missing from the NORAD tracking catalog. All are in highly elliptical orbit and, historically, were “tracked” once each orbit, which in the case of the four Cluster II satellites (used to keep…
Article·
Why do we test things?
I remember having a conversation with a missile engineer some time ago about the North Korean Nodong missile; he said “no one in their right mind would field a missile that has only been successfully tested once!” At the time,…
Article·
Space—Not So Big or Empty After All
Jeffrey writes in his recent post about BX-1 being a Rorschach test and he appears to be right on so many levels. I thought I’d riff off of his excellent post and focus in on one aspect that has been…
Article·
SBIRS—Two Heads are Better than One
click on the image for a larger version The currently active US early warning satellites, SBIRS and DSP: each satellite is removed one at a time to highlight its individual coverage. Orbits have been determined by the amateur satellite observer…
Article·
SBIRS HEO 2 Checkout Picture
The image on the left is a simulation of the Delta II powered trajectory in GoogleEarth, the red portion is the solid rocket boosters; the image on the right is the actual SBIRS photo with the outline of Florida highlighted.…
Article·
SBIRS— Signal and Background
Before analyzing the two SBIRS–HEO images, its necessary to review a little of phenomenology associated with viewing rocket plumes in the infrared. That’s because there are some surprising effects that show up very well in both these photos that, perhaps,…