Satellites...

I have no basis for presenting this, reall;y, but thought we could vette the topic...as there are many reasons why...

How many are there up in orbit?

And what the hell is their purpose?

I am hoping this can be a pontification thread...what the hell is billions of dollars doing up there?

The way that people tend to be suspicious of cell towers or HAARP is the same way I also feel about some of that space junk. Why? I have no idea...but their potential for misuse, intentional or otherwise, boggles the mind just as much.

Here is a cool site that let's you track the position of various satellites compared to your house:

www.n2yo.com...

I had a conversation with a slightly tweaked individual once. He said he wanted to build the better fragmentation missile. Send us back a few decades on government control.

Build a bb bomb and send it into the same orbit as the spy satellites. The cascade effect of colliding material in orbit would pretty much eliminate the majority of satellites.

Like I said, he was kind of tweaked. Pretty smart guy though.

Well acording to nasa there are over 900+ they keep dibs on

science.nasa.gov...

That does not mean there active satelites. There have been over 4000 launches however.~

imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov...

What are we using them all for indeed. I can understand communication/gps. We need a lot of satellites all around the world to overcome the curvature of the earth and be able to relay signals. But hundreds if not thousands? Well then there is satelite radio, and satellite TV, and government crap on toast.

Too many secrets. Too much space junk. Too many companies not sharing the tech they have. Too much capitalism. It will be great.

I can see the headlines now. The first commercial space launch destroyed by random space junk. Then ATS will be all-abuzz about secret satellites, aliens, and the like.

What a fun world we live in...

Oh there are lots of spy satellites up there.. very HIGH resolution satellites..that are so good they can identify individual persons...which begs the question:

Why the hell do the satellite images we get from the ones orbiting Mars and the Moon look like they were filmed with a 1947 Bell & Howell 8mm camera with your mothers nylon stocking stretched over the fricking lens???

Answer...becuz the lying, cheating thieving Ba***rds are keeping all the good stuff from us peons that they don't want us to see.

Originally posted by endisnighe
Like I said, he was kind of tweaked. Pretty smart guy though.

Really? Did he take into consideration the shear scale of space up there in those orbits, and the relatively very very tiny nature of the BB's?

Unless he has some serious tracking a navigational tech and what else, oh yhea a rocket launcher, several very large piles of money, precise data on the location of the targeted satellites and a network of caves to hide in for the rest of his life.... And a desire to possibly make future space travel very dangerous because he has hit everything from sputnik to the ISS but missing every spy sat! Well...

Food for thought. If there are at least 900 + satellites floating around up in orbit.. how come we don't see any when they take pics of the earth from space?.. Some of those satellites should be between the camera and the earth should they not?

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Most of the sats are probably in a higher orbit than the manned space missions I would of thought... You do sometimes see them as points of light in the black of space, but once there is an Earth background they probably get lost in the detail... You only really see them if they catch the light just right or you are very close.

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


the space station is in a much lower orbit than the satalites. it would be too hazardous if it was above them. (returning to earth, sending supplies etc)

also on a clear night you can see satalites moving ovehead with the naked eye.
it looks like a small star quickly moving along.

Originally posted by s373r3d
Well acording to nasa there are over 900+ they keep dibs on

That does not mean there active satelites. There have been over 4000 launches however.~

What are we using them all for indeed. I can understand communication/gps. We need a lot of satellites all around the world to overcome the curvature of the earth and be able to relay signals. But hundreds if not thousands? Well then there is satelite radio, and satellite TV, and government crap on toast.

I took the liberty of editing out your links in my reply.
As for "What are we using them for?", you have part of the answer in your post. A lot of the satellites orbiting the Earth are inactive. Satellites have several things that can cause them to "die"...the most common are degradation of the solar panels that power the systems, and (particularly for reconnaissance satellites) lack of maneuvering fuel. When a satellite stops generating enough power, or can no longer adjust its orbit, it has to be replaced, and until very recently, the old ones were left in space...sometimes staying up for years. A classic case would be Explorer I. Launched in 1958, active for 111 days, and finally re-entered in 1970.

As for the active ones, bear in mind that most applications require more than one satellite. The GPS system uses between 24 and 32. Russia has the GLONASS system, which uses a similar number. India, China, and Japan have their own satellite navigation systems aiming for either regional or global coverage. Between them, the various navigation systems probably account for almost 100 active satellites. Add in the various communications networks (too many to list, frankly), meteorological satellites (again, too many to individually list), and commercial imaging satellites, and I'm actually surprised that the number of active satellites isn't much higher than 900, just in civilian use. If you add in the military ones from various countries, and the oddballs (like the ISS), the question isn't "what are we using them for?" but "why aren't there more of them?".

Too many secrets. Too much space junk. Too many companies not sharing the tech they have. Too much capitalism. It will be great.

There aren't as many secrets (at least about satellites) as you might think. Exact performance parameters of certain systems are *very* classified (for good reason), but the satellites themselves are almost impossible to keep secret...the launches are obvious, and the vehicles themselves are visible to a variety of ground-based sensors, and vulnerable to signal intercepts.

Too much space junk, I'll grant you. The biggest problem is how to clean it all up, without just creating more of it.

Could it possibly be that this so-called 'hidden' technology isn't being hidden, so much as it's 'niche' technology, and most people aren't in the niche? Most satellites are powered by solar cells...we have those in terrestrial use right now. They use digital radio to communicate with the ground, and with each other...we have that too (holds up cellular phone and wireless laptop). I could go on, but I think you get the idea...most of the tech available to 'too many companies' is already being marketed to the public in one form or another, because those companies like making money.

Too much capitalism? I emphatically disagree with you here. We aren't doing *enough* private work in space. If you're utterly convinced that capitalism is ruining space, feel free to stop using your cellular phone and your cable TV. Stop listening to weather forecasts, and turn off the XM radio, the self-correcting clock, and the GPS system. I'm really curious to know how capitalism is a bad thing in this context. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

I can see the headlines now. The first commercial space launch destroyed by random space junk. Then ATS will be all-abuzz about secret satellites, aliens, and the like.

What a fun world we live in...

You left out the folks who will claim that the government blew it up to keep The Big Secret, and the folks who will insist that space flight simply isn't possible. You're also a bit late in your prediction...I don't know about anyone else, but I know that SpaceX launched a payload into Earth orbit on a Falcon I vehicle on July 14, 2009. That was SpaceX's first commercial orbital launch, and it went just fine. There may have been others before that one, but I didn't hear about them. Long story short, in spite of space junk, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Reptilians, Pleadians, Andromedans, Nibiru, the Templar Knights and the looming end of the Mayan calendar, at least one commercial launch has already gone up without incident.