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posted by hubie on Friday May 20 2022, @04:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the stuck-on-guard-duty-in-the-Sea-of-Tranquility dept.

U.S. Space Force sees future demand for surveillance beyond Earth orbit

An international race back to the moon is already underway, with the United States, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates all at various stages of planning future lunar missions.

Growing activity in outer space beyond Earth orbit — known as xGEO or cislunar space — could turn this region into a contested domain as countries seek access to lunar resources and stake out areas of jurisdiction. As a result, the U.S. military will likely have to pay more attention to what's happening in xGEO, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force's Space Operations Command.

"We are now seeing other actors go to the moon, go to lunar orbit and we do need to be concerned and interested in what they are doing there," Whiting said May 16 at a Mitchell Institute event.

Current sensors used by the military for space domain awareness were designed to track satellites in Earth orbits, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer, and not for cislunar space which extends out 385,000 kilometers and has different orbital trajectories. Scientists have pointed out that most activities in cislunar space are largely unmonitored and only self-reported.

Whiting noted that keeping watch of Earth orbit alone is "a huge challenge" but nevertheless the military has to prepare to extend its surveillance capabilities.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @10:53AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @10:53AM (#1246536)

    more money!!!

    So we can be safe.
    In the words of our humanitarian NATO leader, ~Freedom comes at a cost~

    God bless America and our Space Farting protectorates!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @05:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @05:21PM (#1246630)

      Flamebait? Actually, I think this comment should be modded "Insightful". Just my opinion, of course.

  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 20 2022, @02:01PM (3 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Friday May 20 2022, @02:01PM (#1246573) Journal

    With the serious privacy intrusions and mass data gathering that's going on nowadays. Surveillance has almost become a dirty word. Used to be, you would hear the word Surveillance and you would think. "Police trying to catch Criminals" or "That spy stuff." Nowadays, you need to think much more about the privacy violations that businesses as well as the government are committing.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 20 2022, @02:37PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 20 2022, @02:37PM (#1246583)

      The violations were always there, they were just better at covering them up in the past.

      Today the new challenge is sifting the signals from the noise. When they would launch a LEO satellite in the 1970s taking high res film images, they could 100% trust what they saw on the film after it was recovered and developed. Today you might see a video of ... whatever ... on the internet and the first things you have to question are: original context? what was edited / cropped? how much of it was deep-faked?

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday May 20 2022, @02:56PM (1 child)

        by Freeman (732) on Friday May 20 2022, @02:56PM (#1246587) Journal

        They didn't have the level of surveillance that today's technology afford them. They may have always been interested in it, but they weren't able to realize those visions, until modern technology came into play. Now, they can use AI to filter through a billion images in a few minutes. They just couldn't have done that back in the day, no matter how much they wanted to. Also, people were a lot more privacy conscious in the past. People actually valued their right to privacy. Privacy laws haven't kept up with the times and businesses are constantly lobbying to keep it that way. People need to teach their children about their right to privacy, but the parents don't care enough either. The whole "what do you have to hide" concept is perverse. Just as one should be innocent until proven guilty. One should be able to expect a certain level of privacy, without needing to check who is watching. Yes, if you leave the windows wide open and you're changing in front of it, expect that someone might see you naked and do something to prevent that. Talking privately in your own home, you shouldn't need to think. "Oh, I better turn off that smart speaker." Or worse yet, I better make sure I turn off the computer / phone, etc. While the right to privacy may benefit a criminal in some way. The benefits to the average person are much greater than one might suspect.

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 20 2022, @06:13PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 20 2022, @06:13PM (#1246647)

          Also, people were a lot more privacy conscious in the past. People actually valued their right to privacy.

          I think that was a technology thing more than conscious choice - you were more private because it cost a lot to expose yourself. Witness: high rise city apartments with open bedroom curtains. That didn't start recently, more like: as soon as there were high rise city apartments.

          I agree there has been an erosion of commonly held ideas of "right to privacy" but I think it's more a matter of the technology allowing people to drop their standards willingly than it is the technology pulling the standards down actively. Your phone number would find its way on to cold-call marketing lists back in the 1960s and 1970s, and people were just about as irate, and impotent, about it back then as they are today. Corporations collected such information on you as they could, and most people didn't object to the free catalogs that would arrive in the mail. It's gotten 1000x more invasive, but that's more because costs to be invasive have dropped than the majority of people dropping their standards of what is worth fighting for.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 20 2022, @02:32PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 20 2022, @02:32PM (#1246581)

    Or was that Hydra? Is there a difference?

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 20 2022, @02:58PM

      by Freeman (732) on Friday May 20 2022, @02:58PM (#1246588) Journal

      You're mixing your fictions, but Hydra was deeply embedded into the Nazis. So, you could have a crossover.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
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