The United States has 413 satellites...more than the rest of the world has.

link

WASHINGTON - The United States has 413 satellites in space snooping for the government, checking on the weather and relaying the latest pop music, a new database says. That's more than the 382 the rest of the world has spinning above the Earth.

The inventory, developed by the Union of Concerned Scientists and released Wednesday, provides details on some of the Pentagon's most secret satellites, which may gather images in the dark or take high-resolution pictures from 12,000 miles away.

"Until now, the general public didn't have easy access to information about all active satellites," said Dr. Laura Grego, a Cambridge astrophysicist who was on a team that spent several years compiling information on the nearly 800 active satellites. "No one owns space, so everyone has a right to know what's up there."

The material was gleaned from corporations, academics, governments and satellite watchers who as a hobby spend their nights watching the skies for flickers of light.

The group's inventory lists 21 different details on satellites with missions ranging from weather forecasting to transmitting music and news for companies like Sirius Satellite Radio. Perhaps most controversially, the repository includes what's known about top-secret spy satellites run by the U.S. and other governments.

Thats one hell of alot of satellites. Of course many are owned by the govt. But its pretty impressive to see how many satellites are launched and controlled by the U.S. compare to the rest of the world.

Facts about the secretive Lacrosse satellites also are included in the database. Information about that program became public by accident in 2000 when the National Reconnaissance Office distributed patches to agency employees to celebrate the launch of the Titan IV.

The patches revealed the rocket's secret passenger: the Lacrosse-4, which uses radar to gather images in the dark.

Satellite watchers used clues on the patch, including the embroidered path of four satellites, to figure out where the new Lacrosse orbited.

"We own the night," the patch said.

Dont know much about this satellite but Ill look into it.



MOD EDIT: Gettin' that bold out!

[edit on 12/8/2005 by cmdrkeenkid]

[edit on 8-12-2005 by sanctum]

Good info. Thanks - altho if you can, it would be good to fix the bold formatting.

...Personally, I'm not that impressed that we create so much space junk. Most likely, we could do the same jobs with half the satellites. Why don't we?

I wonder where the number of 300+ more then anyone else is comming from.

Did they compare the US number to each and every EU country seperatly or did they compare it to them combined?

Looking at the graph onwww.ucsusa.org..." " target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow">link it seems they did the comparison with all EU nations seperatly and then added them in the graph as "other" where you can see that the EU probably has only about 100 less satelites in orbit then the US does.

It's always fun to take a laptop out at night and watch Jtrack.
science.nasa.gov...

Whats the current number of Mcdonald franchises worldwide?

Is it true they don't count the fox network satellite?

Originally posted by soficrow
...Personally, I'm not that impressed that we create so much space junk. Most likely, we could do the same jobs with half the satellites. Why don't we?

When it comes to satellites especialls telecommunications and earth observation sats the more the merrier. Google Earth and Maps would not be what it is today without satellite technology and it could be alot better with more camera satellites. Also we could theoretically get by with 100 satellites with current technology except for the fact that it costs alot of money to launch the things which in itself has a risk of failing as they sometimes do. They also degrade and with no repair capabilities it's good to have redundancy as our society is becoming more and more dependant on them.

[edit on 7-12-2005 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by Munro_DreadGod
Whats the current number of Mcdonald franchises worldwide?

There are 25,663 McDonald's restaurants world wide.
I bet you didn't expect an answer, huh?

Likely some of McDonald's money is actually going directly or indirectly into a few of these satellites.

Well a useful breakdown would be

how many civilian satellites?

how many military?

how many top secret?

What is the average cost to put them in orbit which leads to the combined cost of putting them all there. Break that down into cost per head of population and well was it worth it?

Yeh, but how many of them are privately owned by pay-tv companies and internet companies and all that?

Originally posted by Munro_DreadGod
Well a useful breakdown would be

how many civilian satellites?

how many military?

how many top secret?

What is the average cost to put them in orbit which leads to the combined cost of putting them all there. Break that down into cost per head of population and well was it worth it?

You'll never get an accurate number on military satellites.

They don't report on stuff like that.

Interesting to see the spreadsheet of them all.....

The USA has several satelites named 'UFO'

I am guessing that the Military satelites classified as comunications could be the ones used to target ICMB's??

If this is the case, its interesting to see which countries can launch their own ICBM's without the USA or NATO turning off their satelites!! I know the UK had big problems with this in the early 80's (hidden budget that didnt remain hidden!!)

Originally posted by Quest

Originally posted by Munro_DreadGod
Well a useful breakdown would be

how many civilian satellites?

how many military?

how many top secret?

What is the average cost to put them in orbit which leads to the combined cost of putting them all there. Break that down into cost per head of population and well was it worth it?

You'll never get an accurate number on military satellites.

They don't report on stuff like that.

www.ucsusa.org...
they have a graph and evertyhing

Not that I belive that any of the militaries are "fessing up" to the total amount of sats. The cia alone prob has 413 sats. I know for a fact that they have "disposable" micro-sats, and are developing more and smaller ones all the time.

[edit on 8-12-2005 by Wgatenson]

At the bottom of the page, it reads

We welcome corrections, additions, and suggestions. These can be emailed to the Database manager at [email protected]

Emphasis added.

Woosh...that's the sound of credibility going out the window.

I'd like to know how they can claim to know how many stealth sats the US has up there.

But I found a cool add in for google earth that shows the paths of all the various satellites in real time, fantastic!!

I found it at google earth hacks, one of m new favorite websites, apart from ATS