BJ Johnson, left, and Joy Day designed the Space Foundation’s General James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award sculpture that was presented to Dr. Hans Mark.
The two artists (who are not married to each other) chose to use a globe whose rings surrounded the sculpture’s sphere resembling the path of satellites that surrounded and protected the earth as they would have when Hill was the commander of NORAD.
Their company, Spherical Magic, was commissioned to design the seven foot shared award that commutes yearly between the Space Foundation’s offices in downtown Colorado Springs and the Broadmoor as well as 20 of the yearly individual awards that are presented to the winners.
As a major segment of their business, we asked Raytheon’s VP of Business Development for Intelligence and Information Systems, Bernie Elero, to tell us their view of information assurance.
Coming in on time and well under his 30 second budget (and clearly catching us off guard), the Air Force’s pointman on GPS, Lt. Col. Harold “Stormy” Martin, Space Command’s Command Lead for Positioning Navigation and Timing, encapsulates why we need GPS 3.
For the low, low price of spam in your inbox, symposium goers can trade a business card for a robotic Hex Bug at the TGV booth. Note the delicate antennae that are surely picking up Ka-band signals from some secret situational awareness satellite…
There is an actual product tie-in for this one: TGV Rockets, Inc of Norman, Okla. is developing a reusable vertical take-off and landing rocket that can haul up to 2,000 lbs. of payload 60 to 80 miles up in about 7 minutes. The whole thing is 12 feet in diameter and about 53 feet long – the perfect size to fit on a C-17. Hint, hint, Gordon England. And it’s six-sided, for extra landing-gear stability.
Hex-bug, hex-rocket, yeah, we get it.
Scintillations Exposed This Monday. What?
April 10th, 2008 - 12:20 pm | Posted by Rob Curtis
The Air Force and General Dynamics want you to know that they’re launching the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) Monday.
For those of you that know what scintillation is, you’ve probably got enough to set your Outlook calenders for a quick cheer on Monday. For the rest of you, scintillations are pockets of superheated air that can interrupt satellite signals and cause grief for everyone from commuters who lose their XM radio to combatant commanders who can’t use multi-billion dollar comm and intel systems.
C/NOFS uses 6 onboard sensors to that should allow it to predict which geographic regions will experience satellite signal outages 3 to 6 hours before they occur. With some time under their belts and some fancy math, researchers hope to push estimates out to 120 hours. Howard Stern fans, rejoice.
The US Air Force Research Lab has a developed a system that allows it to build satellites in 6 days. S-I-X days. The technology is called PnPBus and it’s based on a common-system bus architecture they’ve come up with that lets compatible components snap together to build inexpensive, useful sensing and communication platforms with a lifespan of about a year.
The idea here, as project lead USAF 1st Lt. Jonathan Kaiser explained, is that theater commanders would have their own satellites to deploy and use on a nearly tactical level without so much as an SMS to their bosses.
Here’s the kicker – the first of these PnPBus satellites is going to launch in June with an imager and some Navy comms gear on board as a proof-of-concept.
Vice President and General Manager of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems Craig Cooning gives us 700k reasons why Boeing’s recently launched Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) is a good deal for the US Air Force.
Denise Cook-Clampert, Ball Aerospace’s Educational Outreach Manager entertains school kids on the expo show floor with tales of in-flight satellite repair and free stuff. Today, Space Foundation Teacher Liasons escorted all ages of engineering-minded schoolkids through the show floor and into presentations geared toward younger audiences.
Ball Aerospace’s Head Honcho, David Taylor, spends his 30 seconds telling us how important the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) system is and just how screwed we all could be if we are caught with our satellite protecting pants around our ankles.
Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne opened the show today with a speech that touched upon many aspects of American space initiatives.
He likened the current state of space-based militarization to the state of air warfare in the early years of World War I when airpower was absolute.
He went on to say that space is going to follow the same pattern of development and escalation witnessed by airborne warriors throughout the 20th century in which advances in weapons technology were met with more threatening technology.
