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.
The USA have for a long time been trying to track missiles after the main engine has burned out. The recent rise of manoeuvrable hypersonic gliders and cruise missiles has made this need more pressing, since they fly very low compared to ballistic missiles, and consequently they are mostly below the radar horizon. China and… Continue reading The American proliferated LEO architecture
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
Florence Parly, the French Minister of the Armed Forces, gave a speech about Space & Defence on September 7th, 2018.
On July 31st, China added a new member to its Gaofen Earth Observation constellation: Gaofen-11 (GF-11) was launched atop a CZ-4B rocket. While the early Gaofen satellites were openly described by their designers, this one is a bit more obscure. It was not in the list of planned Gaofen satellites, and the launch caught observers… Continue reading GF-11: How do you say KENNEN in Chinese?
Following the previous CNES café about French military space, the French space agency has organized this month a Q&A about Copernicus, the European Earth observation program. The first speaker was Véronique Mariette, from the innovation & science directorate of CNES, Earth environment climate division. She is in charge of relations with the European Space Agency… Continue reading Everything you wanted to know about Copernicus
A summary of a talk by two top French military space officials.
The French parliament recently had a hearing of the French Joint Commander for Space, and since I found it interesting, here is a quick summary as well as an English translation.
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.
SatelliteObservation.net 