This Blog will be Moving to www.satellitespy.net

Just to let you know that I'm in the process of moving this blog from it's current location on Blogger to the main www.satellitespy.net website. This is to enable more features to be added which hopefully will provide a better user experience.

The big advantage from a visitor's point of view is that it will permit lots of interesting, factual stuff to be easily available directly from the blog.

The process might take a few days, and I'm looking at automatically redirecting visitors who come to the current location here, at http://satellitespy.blogspot.com.
This automatic redirection (including RSS feeds) may not work perfectly, as I have been known to screw things up now and then!. If it doesn't, then just go to the new www.satellitespy.net website and "Follow" and/or "Register" there.

The www.satellitespy.net site as a whole is being rebuilt to make it database-driven, so not all pages and features will be available immediately. Please bear with me, and apologies for any inconvenience.

I will put up further posts here to report progress on the move.

Oh Deer – The MX Missile, a Flying Coffin and the Twin Towers

The 10^th anniversary of the atrocity committed against the USA has triggered memories of a day some 30 years ago which culminated in a picture-perfect flight into NYC’s La Guardia airport, the approach being down the Hudson River with a sharp turn to port across Manhattan onto the final approach. A stunning afternoon view of Manhattan and the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.

However, the story starts the day before. I was marketing & sales director of a company that I’ll call F-Corp (if there’s a real company called F-Corp, I apologise. It’s not you!). I’d been in the States visiting customers and I flew into the town of Binghamton in upstate New York at about 9:00pm one evening. It was early spring, very cold and with recent snow on the ground.

Why Binghamton? Well, F-Corp had developed a completely new technology for very high-performance, small, light weight microwave filters. These devices had major advantages in airborne and space applications where light weight and stability in extremes of temperature and pressure were essential. They met the US military’s MIL STD 5400E environmental 

specifications.

MX Peacekeeper LGM-118A

F-Corp had been approached by IBM Federal Systems Division (Now part of Lockheed Martin. You know, the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the Skunk Works, Area 51 and all that) about the possibility of supplying customised versions of these devices for use in the guidance systems of the MX intercontinental ballistic missile. This later became known as the Peacekeeper MIRV ICBM, which was operational between 1986 and 2005. For details, see below.
I went to visit IBM in Owego, New York to sort out the commercials of the contract, and Binghamton was the nearest airport.

As an aside, I remember chatting with IBM’s procurement officer, Jim McNulty, and asking him where he’d studied. I’ll never forget his reply “I went to the school of hard knocks”. What a character, an excellent negotiator and a credit to IBM.

Oh Deer - My Stag Night !

I got off the plane, went to the Hertz desk and picked up a rental car. On leaving this quiet, provincial airport I set out to drive to Owego to the motel I’d booked for the night prior to the next day’s meeting with IBM. Have you ever seen signs on a highway “Beware of Deer Crossing”? Everyone has, but how often do you actually see one? Well I did on that night. I came round a left hand bend on this deserted, snow-covered road through a pine forest to see this massive stag appear in the headlights. Screech of brakes and a slide into the ditch to narrowly avoid this arrogant beast that just stood in the middle of the road looking down its nose at the car. It then walked calmly back into the trees from whence it came, leaving me to dig the car out with no shovel!

The next day, following the meeting with IBM I set off back to Binghamton airport for my flight to New York City. It was a bright, sunny day with patchy cumulous clouds driven by quite high winds. When I saw the plane my heart sank. It was a Short Brothers 330, affectionately known by all who flew in it as the Flying Coffin. Not because it was unsafe – on the contrary, they had an excellent safety record. Rather the boxy rectangular shape of the fuselage, coupled with its tetchy roll/pitch/yaw behaviour, endowed it with a very uncomfortable ride in cross winds.

The Infamous Flying Coffin

Well, what a ride! It’s the only flight I can remember where the flight attendant spent the whole trip strapped in to her jump seat at the back, continually throwing up into a sick bag. My only problem was attempting to compensate for the plane’s motion with a half-full cup of coffee in hand. Not easy (remind me to tell the Al Italia story of the cup of scalding coffee that ended up in my lap – ouch).

So, an interesting 24 hours and a view of Manhattan never to be seen again.

Reading List and References

1. MX Peacekeeper MIRV ICBM. Details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper.
2. Failure to prevent the 9/11 Twin Towers attack. Get the book “The Shadow Factory” by James Bamford. ISBN 978-0-307-27939-2. If you want the REAL reasons for the failings, then order this book from the Amazon link on the right.

Deepest, Darkest Borneo

It might be a week or so before my next post as I’m about to depart from the connected world for a bit. Internet availability in Borneo is expected to be patchy – that’s why they’ll benefit from more satellite communications.

If I manage to survive the jungle, the mosquitoes, leeches, snakes, spiders and the occasional Orang-utan I hope to surface eventually in Singapore. Then immediately travelling on to colder climes.

After having made some 6,000 flights I never really want to see another plane again. At least I usually manage to be asleep before they even push back from the stand.

That reminds me of the time I boarded the wrong plane in Stockholm and nearly spent Christmas in Helsinki instead of at home – but that’s another story in itself, involving a smoked leg of reindeer, a very rapid trot through Dutch customs and wrecking a Christmas day for a whole bunch of friends.
I might save that story for 25^th December.

Photo courtesy of and copyright © Ralph Arbus. He has a very interesting website at www.orangutanpix.info

First and Last Launches of the Space Shuttle

Well spotted. The internal photo isn’t a picture of the Space Shuttle. It’s the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) first astronaut, Wubbo Ockels, inside the ESA Spacelab D1 in the Shuttle’s cargo bay (both pictures are courtesy of and copyright © NASA).

I’m writing this piece now because today is to be the very last flight of a space shuttle. As I type, the launch is scheduled for about 5 hours’ time, weather at Cocoa Beach permitting.

Spacelab was developed in parallel and in conjunction with NASA’s space shuttle to be the orbiting laboratory in the Shuttle’s cargo bay, as a follow-on for Skylab and prior to the ISS (International Space Station).

The Spacelab programme was run from ESA’s ESTEC facility (European Space Technology Centre) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. I worked at ESTEC all through the 1970s – not on Spacelab but on different communications satellites.

I had many friends and colleagues who were working on Spacelab. A number of them were American, having previously worked on the life-support systems for the Apollo missions to the Moon. My next door neighbour was the quality manager for the Spacelab programme.

Being so close to the ins and outs of the shuttle development programme revealed all sorts of interesting snippets of information. The most disturbing surrounded the decisions taken to prevent the programme going way over budget and significantly slipping the first launch date. In a nutshell, the testing at component, equipment, subsystem and system levels had to be pared back.

On the day of that first Columbia launch I sweated - literally. I seriously feared that that there might be just one little thing that hadn’t been picked up in testing and would jeopardise the mission. My relief (and disbelief?) at a perfect first launch and mission is hard to describe. YES, YES, YES – you did it, guys!

So, my best wishes and congratulations now go to the thousands of people who have worked on the Shuttle and Spacelab programmes over some 30 years. Good on’ya! And for today’s Atlantis crew – God speed and God bless.

Following and Commenting

A couple of people have had questions about following and posting comments on the blog.

If you want to follow, then click the blue-background ‘Join this site’ button on the right. That should take you to some sign-up options. You can then follow using your Google, Yahoo or Twitter sign-ins.

If you’re already a Blogger member you can sign in via the ‘Already a member’ link underneath the Followers’ pictures.

I’ve tried to set this up so that only Followers can post comments. To post a comment click the “n comments” link underneath the blog post text. Right now, it’s set up so that I have the option to moderate all comments. Why? Well there are a few folks I know where the language could become somewhat florid! Let’s see how it goes.

Now, I hope the above is clear and that I’ve set things up correctly. I’m not very good with programming things like TV remotes or DVD recorders. In fact, I shouldn't really be let loose on any equipment or control mechanisms at all. I remember once carrying out some antenna pattern tests on a geostationary communications satellite 36,000 km up and located over the equator at a few degrees East. Some users thought the downlink power wasn’t what it should have been:

“Let’s nudge the satellite pitch axis a bit and see if we can check the transmit antenna gain roll-off”.

“OK, that’s good. The downlink EIRP (Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power) decreased by 0.7dB. Let’s nudge the pitch by another 1.0 degrees and see what it does”.

“OK, that’s good. The EIRP is down by another 1.1dB. Let’s nudge the pitch by another 1.0 degrees and see what we get”.

“Oh S**t – we’ve lost the spacecraft!”.

A couple of the IRESs (infrared earth sensors) lost Earth-lock, the on-board AOCS (Attitude & Orbit Control System) panicked and initiated an Emergency Sun Acquisition, which caused the satellite to flip onto its back and track the Sun. How embarrassing!
(More details on this and how we recovered the satellite will be in a later Post).

I hope you have better luck with Following and Commenting.

Prologue : Satellite Spy’s First Blog Post

How do you start a blog that you know will go on for years? My answer: Dive in at the deep end!

This is the book I’ve wanted to write for years, but organising a book, spending months getting everything organised and in the right order is just plain boring. When, if ever, it’s finished it’ll be out of date, things will be missing and it’ll need a re-write.

No, much better to tell the story as it flows and let events and readers’ responses trigger half-forgotten incidents. Thank goodness someone invented blogs.

I’ve been into space and communications ever since I can remember, as evidenced by the photo. Yes, that’s really me back in the 1950s in my space suit with plastic (a new invention!) helmet and an old valve radio/TV chassis.

Never in those days did I even dream that I would end up with a PhD in Microwave & Telecommunications Engineering and be designing and operating satellites - they hadn’t been invented then. No, I was into Martians, Robby the Robot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot) and pre-pubescent thoughts about beautiful, unattainable female aliens.

The only problem with imagining female aliens when wearing a space helmet in a UK winter was that the thing would steam up inside. Then I’d trip over because I couldn’t see, and end up with a bloody knee and a torn space suit – my God, all the air will be sucked out into space and I'll suffocate!

My female alien childhood dreams weren’t realised until I saw the film Avatar on a flight from Singapore to Frankfurt last year.

If you’ve read this far then there’s no hope for you either. I plan to entertain you and to bring you insights into the REAL world of space, communications, satellites and related high-tech, military and EW things that most people only get a sanitised, skim view of via the “sound bite” media. It’ll be sprinkled with some interesting stories, hilarious moments and anecdotes along the way.

There may be a few people out there who will read this, figure out who I am and think “Oh No! He’s not going to spill the beans on XXX is he?”. My message to you, friends, is relax. There are limits and lines drawn in the sand. Also, I don’t particularly relish being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by men in black, bundled into a black SUV with tinted windows and driven off into the sunset (well, sunrise) never to be seen again.