Government/Military

By Nick Mitsis Even though The Boeing Company decided to shut down its high-speed broadband communications offering, Connexion by Boeing, in August, the move may have been one of the company’s strongest. Closing departments, services or business plans is always challenging and rarely viewed as a positive in the eyes of the industry, but when...

By Owen D. Kurtin In our June column, we reviewed the history and status of small satellites, generally considered to be those weighing less than 500 kilograms when fully fueled, from the commercial side. The other area in which small satellites will play a growing role is governmental civil and military use. Under the 500-kilogram...

Santa Claus is getting nervous: Judging from satellite images taken last month, the Arctic’s perennial sea ice pack has encountered gaping openings of territory reaching all the way to the North Pole. Observing data from Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument and the AMSR-E instrument aboard the EOS Aqua satellite, scientists have determined that...

If concern about Hurricane Ernesto proved a bit overblown, a new level of preparedness got rolling in the form of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency‘s (NGA) new Domestic Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System (DMIGS). Built on a Pierce fire engine chassis, the mobile, self-contained vehicle allows NGA analysts to drive to a crisis location to provide...

U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are exploring how to improve the access of individual marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen to imagery-derived intelligence products and are leveraging exercises like this week’s Strong Angel III disaster-response drill on the West Coast to learn, according to officials from both organizations. The two...

When a corporation has multiple projects underway simultaneously, and those projects are spread out around the globe, having an advanced network in place that can disseminate a wide range of applications is paramount. But corporate executives face a challenge when it comes to choosing the right network platform to deliver secure, always-on connectivity to the...

An increasing number of organizations are discovering that the only way to guarantee their communication systems stay online during times of crisis is to employ satellite backup systems to their terrestrial networks, which can be knocked out by any number of natural or manmade events. For IT/Network managers, such threats are all too real. Experiencing...

Even though The Boeing Company decided to shut down its high-speed broadband communications offering, Connexion by Boeing, in August, the move may have been one of the company’s strongest. Closing departments, services or business plans is always challenging and rarely viewed as a positive in the eyes of the industry, but when revenue is slow...

In our June column, we reviewed the history and status of small satellites, generally considered to be those weighing less than 500 kilograms when fully fueled, from the commercial side. The other area in which small satellites will play a growing role is governmental civil and military use. Under the 500-kilogram umbrella, a few subcategories...

BA The story of the Iridium satellite telephone service provides a blueprint for savvy investors who may want to rescue Boeing Co.‘s Connexion satellite Internet service by capitalizing on the U.S. government’s demand for commercial satellite bandwidth, according to satellite analyst firm Northern Sky Research (NSR). Boeing announced Aug. 17 that it would shut down...