Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: satellites

FCC approves first Reflect Orbital satellite

TOKYO — The Federal Communications Commission has given its approval for a satellite that will test the ability to reflect sunlight into nighttime regions, a project sharply criticized by astronomers and environmentalists.

The FCC on July 9 formally authorized the launch of Eärendil-1, a satellite developed by Reflect Orbital that will deploy a thin-film reflector 18 meters on a side in low Earth orbit, reflecting sunlight to the ground.

The 142-kilogram spacecraft is scheduled to launch later this year into an orbit 600 to 650 kilometers in altitude, where it will deploy the reflector. The company plans to use the spacecraft to test its ability to direct reflected sunlight to specific areas on Earth for several minutes at a time.

Earth observation satellites pass telecom in European space industry sales

MILAN – European space industry sales rebounded in 2025 after a contraction in 2024, Eurospace reported in its latest Facts and Figures report, presented July 7. The growth is driven in large part by military acquisition of Earth observation satellites, which are now the largest revenue-producing space sector for the continent.

Satellite applications, which Eurospace defines as satellites enabling operational upstream-sector activities and applications within the EO, telecom and navigation segment, were the main area of growth, increasing 23.5% compared with 2023.

“Comparably, the launcher systems segment [which include both development activities and operational systems and parts] have not grown significantly,” Pierre Lionnet, managing director of Eurospace, said during the briefing.

Apolink makes contact with first relay satellite

TAMPA, Fla. — Apolink has made contact with its first satellite after launching on SpaceX’s July 7 rideshare mission, clearing the way for a data relay demonstration using a novel experimental license from the Federal Communications Commission.

“We’ve got a first-of-its-kind experimental license for S-band inter-satellite link operations from the FCC,” Apolink CEO Onkar Batra told SpaceNews, enabling the IPoS-TDsM cubesat to receive signals from other satellites in low Earth orbit.

The license clears the 3U cubesat to receive S-band signals from designated partner satellites on an unprotected and non-interference basis, before storing and forwarding them to approved ground stations.

Iridium folds Aireon aviation safety service into Rocket Lab-bound business

TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium Communications has completed its takeover of Aireon, bringing the aircraft-tracking venture fully in-house ahead of the satellite operator’s planned $8 billion sale to Rocket Lab.

McLean, Virginia-based Iridium said July 6 it had bought the remaining 61% of Aireon it did not already own from air navigation service providers in Canada, England, Denmark, Ireland and Italy.

Aireon, which has provided an aviation safety service since 2019 using Iridium satellites and the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signals aircraft broadcast, will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary following the $367 million deal.

Space sensor could spot hidden nuclear weapons in orbit with 99% accuracy

In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit—the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface—would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet and more.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there’s currently no way to verify satellites don’t contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature.

Why Scientists Think This Is Our Strongest Evidence of Aliens

Did we find evidence of aliens in old astronomical records?

We might not be alone in the Universe. While combing through data from 1949, scientists spotted something impossible: strange, vanishing lights. They look exactly like satellites, but were documented decades before humanity ever launched anything into space. What could they be? Could this be evidence of advanced alien technology?

0:00 Evidence of Aliens?
1:18 Nuremberg Sighting 1561
3:45 Verifying Claims.
4:38 Vanishing Objects.
7:08 Is There Another Explanation?
8:31 Are They Real?
10:45 UAP and Nukes.
13:38 Another Explanation?
16:46 Academic Debate.
18:17 Is It Conclusive?

To stay on top of space news, sign up to the Astrum newsletter: https://astrumspace.kit.com.

A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here to support the channel: https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

Astrum Displate Posters: https://displate.com/artist/astrumspa…

Continue reading “Why Scientists Think This Is Our Strongest Evidence of Aliens” | >

In a First For Science, A Satellite Has Identified What It’s Seeing From Space

The standard approach to satellite imagery is to snap huge batches of pictures and beam them back to Earth, where they can be sifted through by human operators and the best available algorithms.

It’s all worked well so far, but the time, transmission bandwidth, and energy required are starting to become bottlenecks. Modern satellites are simply capturing more pixels than scientists have time to look at.

However, the YAM-9 satellite has just done something different: It has identified and described features in its image scans without needing to check back with ground control.

Sound waves reconstruct Alaska fireball path after cameras miss key details

When a bright fireball streaked across the Alaska sky last spring, the usual tools scientists rely on to track such events—cameras and satellites—did not provide a detailed picture. But the meteoroid left behind something else: low-frequency sound waves that traveled hundreds of miles and were captured by a dense network of earthquake and volcano-monitoring sensors on the ground.

Using those signals, a Sandia National Laboratories-led team of researchers, students and citizen scientists reconstructed the object’s path through the atmosphere, where it broke apart and where debris likely fell.

In a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the team showed how low-frequency sound waves, faint ground vibrations, weather radar data and publicly shared videos can be combined to reconstruct a fireball’s path even when optical coverage is sparse or incomplete.

/* */