Why Are Satellites Important?

A city in Texas renamed itself to “DISH, Texas” in order to receive free Dish Satellite service for 10 years.

A man received an emergency satellite locator beacon as a present, didn’t read the instructions and ended up triggering 9 false alarms Search and Rescue deployments over the course of 12 weeks.

In 1996, NASA generated electricity with a satellite on a 13-mile long wire, released from Space Shuttle. The wire was clearly visible from Earth and was one of the biggest human-made objects in space.

Former USSR Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear holocaust and potentially WWIII by going with his “gut feeling” and believing that the USSR’s early-warning satellite signal was faulty when it reported that the US had launched 5 ballistic missiles at them.

In 1981, India launched its first satellite that was transported on an ox-cart, with the rocket parts carried on the back of bicycles.

Regardless of what service you get weather information from, almost all of the data comes from the same place. NOAA has the only nationwide weather radar and operates the only weather satellites in the US.  It freely distributes its information into the public domain.

In 1998, one satellite failed and it caused about 80% of the world’s pagers to stop working.

Most of the money George Clooney makes off his Nespresso commercials; he spends on a satellite that surveils over the border of North and South Sudan to keep an eye on criminal and dictator Omar al-Bashir to track his vicious army in an attempt to warn civilians before attacks occur.

TLC was founded in 1972 with the help of NASA and was an informative and instructional network focused on providing real education via television; it was distributed at no cost by NASA satellite.

There is a large area over Brazil where the Earth’s magnetic field has weakened, it is so large that NASA powers down its satellites when passing over.

In 1985, the USAF shot down a satellite with a missile launched from an F-15.

After the 1991 START I treaty between the US and the USSR, the US chopped 365 B52 bombers into 5 pieces each using a 13,000lb steel blade dropped from a crane. It then left the pieces there for 3 months so that Russian satellites could verify their destruction.

Martine Rothblatt made millions by inventing satellite radio. When her daughter was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, she earned a Ph.D. in bioethics and formed a biotech company that licensed drugs to treat her daughter’s illness from other companies, making them much more widely available.

The act of Kinetic Bombardment (firing large metal rods from a satellite into the Earth’s surface at terminal velocity as a weapon) remains legal.

The first nuclear missile test in space “starfish prime” knocked out several allied satellites and disabled communications on Hawaii.

In 2011, NASA’s Terra satellite spotted a 150 km-wide whirlpool in the S. Atlantic. It stood out because it was glowing.

A Canadian inventor tried to create a “supergun” which could fire satellites into orbit from a 512 foot-long barrel embedded inside a hill. When western funding failed, he turned to military application of his ideas for Saddam Hussein, but then he was assassinated in Brussels.

NASA mapping satellites discovered Mayan ruins that were overgrown by the jungle.

Nazi Germany had a research program (Wunderwaffe) that included a stealth bomber, night vision, a 1,500-ton super tank, submarine aircraft carrier, an x-ray gun, and a satellite with a concave mirror to “make an ocean boil or burn a city.”

The UK is the only country to have successfully developed a satellite launch capability and then abandon it.

Metal “whiskers” can grow spontaneously from circuit board components, and have caused the failure of at least one satellite, and were detected in a failed relay at a nuclear power plant.

All 24 GPS satellites are equipped with atomic clocks capable of getting the time stamp to a location to the 100 billionths of a second.

Measuring 4086mi^2, the largest salt pan Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is so flat that rain can’t drain, creating the world’s largest natural mirror. It’s also 5 times better for satellite calibration than the surface of the ocean, and an elevation measurement accuracy of 0.8 inches.

Einstein’s special theory of Relativity predicts a “second” is 8 microseconds longer for a GPS satellite traveling 9000 mph than it is for the GPS unit on the ground. Your GPS unit is programmed to adjust for the difference.

NASA has 2 satellites chasing each other around the Earth tracking the distance between them to measure gravitational anomalies