U.S. Withholding Satellite Data

plover writes "Because of Congressional legislation passed quietly in 2003, the Air Force Space Command will no longer distribute space surveillance data via NASA. There was supposed a three year transitional period where the data was to be made available via a NASA web site, but earlier this month their transitional server went down hard, and NASA has decided to not rebuild it. (It was scheduled to be shut down on 31 March 2005 anyway.) The only way to obtain satellite data now is by signing up with the official Space-Track website. Part of the agreement to obtaining data from their site is that you agree to not redistribute their data. Of course, amateurs are still free to redistribute their observations, including those of classified satellites."

Re:This is bullshit...No it's not

[scheme]

So, I'm back to using a commercial service to get the weather information my tax dollars already paid for. ...and they call the crap on 9/11 terrorism.

The surveillance data that was being provided was of orbital information of satellites that the Air Force was tracking including corrections and orbital decay information. This has nothing to do with weather information.

Re:Once again..

[kir]

Did you even read the links provide? No "knoweledge resource" is being shut down. The TLEs are available on Space Track. There is a convenient little "Create a New Account" link on the main page.

I'm not into Space

You may not be INTO space, but you're definitely IN space... Space Cadet!

Privacy?

[Agret]

In the "Terms of Use" it states By continuing, you consent to your keystrokes and data content being monitored.

Re:Definition of fascism

[Xel'Naga]

...this was Mussolini's definition

Who has the right to make a definition? If he had thought he could have convinced anyone, Mussolini would have defined fascism as paradise. That doesn't necessarily mean it is correct.

Allow me to quote the definition found on Wikipedia (No link, it's currently out):
Definition
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that
* exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual,
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition,
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation.
* engages in corporatism,[1] (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=219369 )
* implements or is a totalitarian regime.

In an article in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, written by Giovanni Gentile and attributed to Benito Mussolini, fascism is described as a system in which "The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad.... For the Fascist, everything is within the State and... neither individuals nor groups are outside the State.... For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative...."

Mussolini, in a speech delivered on October 28, 1925, stated the following maxim that encapsulates the fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato." ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".) Therefore, he reasoned, all individuals' business is the state's business, and the state's existence is the sole duty of the individual.

Historians should judge the leaders of the world - not themselves. And it appears historians consider corporatism a rather small part of fascism. It is later in that article described as more of a means than an end.

Historians often judge people and their deeds quite different from what they would do themselves. Consider this quote: (Translated from German to Danish to english - sorry)

"At this hour I feel, that it is my duty to my own conscience again to appeal to the common sense, both in Great Britain and elsewhere(...)
I can see no reason for this war to continue. Herr Churchill will probably disregard this statement by saying, that it is born of fear and doubt about our final victory. In that case I have relieved my conscience about the things that are to follow." Adolf Hitler - 19. july 1940.

Yet historians put the blame of the atrocities of the second world war on Hitler, rather than Churchill.
(Yes, I know about Godwin's law)

Re:Spies.

[mbrother]

Hubble is no good for looking at the Earth because it's too bright. It would flood and destroy the detectors! We always have to do bright object checks and are restricted with how close we can look at bright objects. They made one exception to look at the moon once, but I believe they had to do some tricky things to manage that.

Some astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute told me about unidentified people from the government coming to see them in the early 1990s. Hubble was having problems with a wobble when moving between light and shadow, and they were making progress in reducing it. I was told these people answered no questions, only asked them. Sounded like they had their own version of Hubble, pointed Earthward. Duh. Don't know its capabilities, but I'm sure it's pretty good.

Re:Definition of fascism

[kir]

I'm a little confused how this event even remotely relates to fascism. The TLE data is still freely available on the Space Track website [space-track.org].

Everything isn't doom and gloom you know. It boggles the mind how you got from this story to fascism so quickly (5 minutes?). Or did you not actually read the links provided?

I smell stormtroopers!!! ;-)

WTF

[jim_v2000]

Commercial site? You mean you pay for weather info? What about Weather.com? Wunderground.com? Or the govt website NOAA.gov? Or hell, turn on the radio at the top of the hour and listen to the weather.

Re:keplerian elements

[FredThompson]

Of course, the commenters aren't reading the articles. Then they'd have to acknowledge the U.S. government is ceasing a project and reducing spending. If they admitted the government is reducing spending by eliminating an unnecessary program, it wouldn't play into their paranoia. "Brown shirts", indeed! Now, if we can just get rid of that underground helium storage project which goes back to WWII...

Re:keplerian elements

[voisine]

Shooting down a satellite is pretty much impossible with current technology (as far as you know). It's much more likely the information would be used to decide when you should cover up your wmd's since a spy satellite is about to pass overhead. Don't you read Tom Clancy?

celestrak.com

[d_p]

For years, the satellite industry has relied on celestrak.com for easy and open access to TLE's. I have written several applications over the years for satellite ground operations that ftp'd or wget'd from celestrak's ftp site. There is no ftp or http access directly to the files on space-track. You have to log in to the web site, navigate through their cgi crap and copy/paste. Its going to be a major PitA to rework this stuff. I don't have as much of a problem with the restriction of access to this data as much as the poor design of the site.

And contrary to popular belief, I think just about any US citizen can get an account on space-track if you sign up for it. There is a lot more to the story than NASA's OIG server crashing. The Air Force has been warning that this was coming for a very long time.

d_p

Re:Homeland Security?

[will_die]

Nothing about secuirty at all.
A server that was going down at the end of next month is crashing and they are not going to rebuilt it.
No loss of data, no loss of anything unless you were also going to loose it next month.
BTW satellite positions (past and present), along with military ships, and surfaced subs is all unclassified. Granted they would prefer it is not widely known, but if you broadcast it not much they can or will do about it.

Means no more satellite forecast

[scattol]

No orbital information means that you can't make and especially share satellite observation forecasts with your friends

Site like Heavens Above [heavens-above.com] will need alternate source to make their forecast. This is a shame, accurate forecasts were a bonus to amateur observers and essential to observe some satellites.

Those who haven't observed a -8 Iridium [satobs.org] are missing something. They are spectacular

Re:typical /. FUD

[Jonathan McDowell]

Here's the problem: the new site not only forbids redistributing the keps (orbital parameters) to other people, which is a problem for /.-loved sites like http://www.heavens-above.com/ [heavens-above.com] which tell you when things are coming overhead, but also forbids redistributing analysis based on the data. So if you have a business that's a subcontractor to a satellite operator, and your job is to analyse the orbital data and tell the satellite owner if they are drifting off station or something, then as of last week you are theoretically out of business. And even if you are using the data to provide very basic info on satellites that falls short of what you'd need to predict where the satellite is - like my newsletter at http://www.planet4589.org/ [planet4589.org] - it's not clear if you're even allowed to do that.

Now I suspect this is just a bureaucratic screwup, and the intent wasn't to be quite that restrictive. But there was way too little communication between the folks who wrote the law, the folks at USAF and NRO who understand which security concerns are real and which are bogus, and the different set of folks at USAF who run the orbital data service and had to interpret the law with very little guidance when writing up the new rules. In the absence of communication, things tend to be written to be so cover-your-ass that it gums up the works and that's what is happening.

satobs.org

[lecithin]

For a very good discussion on this topic and others dealing with observation of 'satellites', go to http://satobs.org/seesat/ and browse the messages on the topic.

You will get much more than the /. opinions.

Satellite tracking information available...

[Khyron42]

The only change here is that (a) they get to know who's accessing the data, and (b) those who access the data can't restribute it. This doesn't keep them from distributing the result of calculations based on the data, however.

Heavens-above.com [heavens-above.com] has data regarding when satellites are visible from a given location on the earth's surface. I'm not sure if this gives any data on classified satellites. This site does currently still show orbital elements on the "orbit" page of each satellite's detail list - these are probably coming from non-Airforce tracking radars.

JTrack 3D [nasa.gov] is a great little java applet (warning, the applet loads in a separate window) that shows you a real-time view of near-earth space. You can even pull up description pages for each of the satellites shown. The "Launch/Orbital information" link on the detail page is broken, and seems to be the only part of this service affected. Again this is unlikely to ever have shown classified satellites.

Conspiracy theorists, take note. Every spacefaring nation on the planet knows where everything is in space including the orbital elements mentioned, to make sure thier expensive new pr0nosat won't crash into that random chunk of "damaged hardware that can't be de-orbited, oops" that's taking pictures of Osama's outhouse. This just keeps people from anonymously having the US Air Force do their orbit tracking for them.

Re:Withholding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep - the data is still available. Same level of service that was available for years from NASA, but now with some improvements. Like proffesional hosting instead of a dual PPro 200 sitting in somebodies office (I kid you not), managed backup, etc. And now ALL of the data is online for immediate access, vs. the old system that only had the last 5 elsets. Anything older then that had to be requested via email and typically took several days.

There are some rough edges to be worked with respect to the user agreement and compatibility with legacy applications, but overall I'd say it's an improvement. Plenty people will gripe for the sake of griping.