It’s not truly “Google’s own,” but the internet giant will get exclusive use of the images for mapping purposes, according to Reuters:

GeoEye Inc said it successfully launched into space on Saturday its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the market.

Of course, Google doesn’t need a satellite to watch us all very closely.

Just as climate change makes hurricanes more frequent and dangerous, NOAA says its best tracking satellite is failing and there’s no plan to replace it until 2012.

climate change, NOAA, satellite

CubeSat is Cal Poly’s plan to make space accessible to the rest of us. That is, they want to make it easy and cheap enough to launch satellites that even high schools can get a chance at it. Engadget says they call it “the Apple II of space exploration” (link added). Here, read this:

The CubeSat Project is a international collaboration of over 40 universities, high schools, and private firms developing picosatellites containing scientific, private, and government payloads. A CubeSat is a 10 cm cube with a mass of up to 1 kg.

…we provide a standard, reliable, and flight proven deployment system. The Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD, is a tubular, spring loaded mechanism taking up very little space. It can be integrated into any launch vehicle and protects primary payloads from the CubeSats and vise-vera. By repeatedly flight proving the P-POD design, we hope to instill confidence in launch providers, primary payloads, and organizations interested in flying experiments on CubeSats. We envision a day when P-PODs can manifested into a mission with minimal per launch integration time and engineering costs.

Launch costs are said to be about $40,000, while Engadget figures construction costs will run another $40,000. CubSatKit.com offers parts (price list) that they say fully conform to the design specification (oversized drawing).

The next launch is scheduled January 2005 with 14 satellites from 11 entities, including a private CubeSat from The Aerospace Corporation.

tags: calpoly, cubesat, cubesat project, diy, diy satellite, launch vehicle, microsatellite, pod, pods, satellite, space, space exploration, space race

Macsimum News did a story on satellite internet options a few weeks ago, but reader reports focused on fixed base station solutions for domestic use.

What about mobile data solutions for international use? That’s where companies like Outfitter Satellite come in. They’ve got Inmarsat solutions that can do 64kbps (or bonded to 128kbps) almost anywhere in the world. And, for customers in the Mid-East or Asia, they’ve got a 144kbps RBGAN solution that seems to offer much better throughput at far lower prices. So why don’t we have RBGAN coverage globally?

tags: global coverage, global internet access, inmarsat, internet access, rbgan, remote access, remote data networking, satellite, satellite access, satellite broadband, satellite data, satellite data access, satellite internet