House appropriators rejected Trump’s plan to put satellite regulation under the Commerce Department and chide Secretary Wilbur Ross for his refusal to testify on the 2020 budget request.

As the Air Force tries to decide — after more than a decade of false starts  — just what weather satellites and sensors it needs to build, a Raytheon executive says his company is conducting an internal assessment of how it could meet any emerging needs. “The Air Force now is going through a process, as… Keep reading →

                CORRECTED: Raytheon Builds VIIRS WASHINGTON: The Trump Administration’s new Space Council should tackle the thorny interagency problem of how much the Air Force will do to provide weather data to the US government, says the chairman of the House subcommittee that deals with space policy. More than… Keep reading →

Commercial space has many military applications, The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency relies heavily on commercial imagery supplied by DigitalGlobe satellites. The National Reconnaissance Office recently joined with NGA in something called the  Commercial GEOINT Activity to buy commercial satellite imagery. A raft of companies are talking about  building and operating satellites to provide imagery and other data.… Keep reading →

The next administration must do a “strategic rebalancing” of means to achieve what have been consistent national space security ends (goals): stability, sustainability and freedom of access. But a significant challenge to both reaffirming ends, and determining and implementing means, is structure, as we point out in a recent Strategy Paper for the Atlantic Council. While space is… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The short view: Congressman slams Air Force for weather satellite fiasco. Long view: Congress, White House, Air Force, NASA, Commerce Department have all screwed up US weather satellite programs. “We could have saved the Air Force and the Congress a lot of aggravation if we put a half of a billion dollars in… Keep reading →

TAMPA: The head of the Intelligence Community, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, told the world’s biggest intelligence conference that he has recommended to the White House that it approve significantly higher resolutions for the nation’s one remaining commercial spy satellite company. Currently, the United States limits the sale of commercial imagery to half a meter. The… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: In the next few weeks an unlikely government agency known more for weather than regulating satellites, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), may decide the international future of America’s commercial satellite imagery industry, dominated now by DigitalGlobe. NOAA licenses American commercial remote sensing satellites, which includes DigitalGlobe’s five satellites currently in orbit. One… Keep reading →