Thursday, May 23, 2013

Bidding going on to build a "Space Fence" to keep an eye on the Space Junk

Even as spending is cut across the military, the final stage of a battle over billions of defense dollars is taking place at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, where Waltham-based Raytheon and Maryland’s Lockheed Martin are locked in a competition to build a first-of-its-kind “Space Fence” to track orbital junk. 
Air Force officials, with the help of engineers at nearby MIT Lincoln Labs and the government-funded, Bedford-based Mitre Corporation, expect to pick one of the companies’ designs this summer for a powerful radar system to track more of the estimated half a million pieces of man-made debris that imperil weather forecasting, navigation, and communication satellites. Even the International Space Station recently had a pair of close calls with debris, requiring astronauts to scramble to escape pods.
The Space Fence project is expected to cost nearly $3 billion, not including the expense of operating it. The project would use a massive radar beam, generated from a remote Pacific island and possibly another in Western Australia, that reaches into space to track debris. 
“It is going to be pretty significant and receive significant financial support for decades in the future. It is a massive program,” said C. Zachary Hofer, a defense electronics analyst at Forecast International, a Newtown, Conn., aerospace consulting firm. “This has been a long time in the making. It is replacing a system that began service in 1961.”
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I have to confess, the first thought that came into my head when I read the article was, they can build a space fence to track space junk, but they can't build a border fence to keep out the human junk. And yes, if you come here illegally, I don't mind using the term, 'Human Junk'.

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1 comment:

BOSMAN said...

I have to confess, the first thought that came into my head when I read the article was, they can build a space fence to track space junk, but they can't build a damn border fence to keep out the human junk. And yes, if you come here illegally, I don't mind using the term, 'Human Junk'.