Pseudosatellites are airborne platforms that can fill some mission traditionally dedicated to regular satellites, like communications and observation, with 24/7 persistence, at a reasonable cost. The representatives of three French companies gathered to give an overview of their progress.
Let us finish this series on 2023 French newspace, by touching upon the small satellites services the armed forces are procuring, namely the FLORE SIGINT satellite, the Hyp4U hyperspectral one, and the policy behind these choices.
To start off 2023, the Chief of Staff of the French Air Force organized a colloquium on Very High Altitude Operations, meaning operations between conventional airplane altitudes, under 20km, and "orbital space" above 100km. It featured Air Force officials, but also the companies and research institutes involved in developing platforms able to fly at these… Continue reading France debates its near-space policy
This article initially appeared on eastpendulum.com, a French-language blog about the Chinese military and aerospace industry The Chinese Yaogan-30 constellation has already been the topic of two previous articles, but this one is probably the last: with the launch of the seventh trio of satellites, the constellation has now six equally-spaced planes, so it has… Continue reading China completes the Yaogan-30 constellation
I recently wrote about the TJS-4 satellite, which the Chinese put into geostationary orbit. Based on the picture released during launch, I concluded it was a signal intelligence satellite, capable of collecting signals of "250MHz to 1.5GHz of frequency. It is even possible that smaller elements, not visible on the image, allow the satellite to… Continue reading TJS-4 antenna design documents uncovered
This article initially appeared on eastpendulum.com, a French-language blog about the Chinese military and aerospace industry On October 17th, 2019, China launched the TJS-4 satellite from the Xichang Space Center. It was carried towards geostationary orbit by a Long March 3B rocket. However, contrary to the civilian communication satellites which are often launched to this… Continue reading TJS-4, the ears of Beijing
This article initially appeared on eastpendulum.com, a French-language blog about the Chinese military and aerospace industry A few years ago, I wrote about the Yaogan-30 constellation, which is made out of Chinese military satellites in Low Earth Orbit. By then, it had two groups of three satellites each, with the second group still having to… Continue reading Some news on the Yaogan-30 constellation
China is launching mysterious trios of spy satellites. What are they doing once in orbit?
An analysis of the USA-202 ORION satellite and its capabilities, based on classified documents.
Following our previous article which described what kind of Soviet emitters the USA could target, here is a timeline of the satellites that performed the collection.
SatelliteObservation.net 