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Spaceflight Research is an entrepreneurial company which primarily consists of Charles Phillips but is working with several people to do some very innovative work.
There are many problems of spaceflight that have been identified, but getting the teams and resources to work on these problems is very challenging. Many organizations are working on these technologies and problems, almost all of these are government projects that are subject to the trials of getting and maintaining funding. To start a project it has to be large enough to inspire people to spend time on it, but larger projects are far more difficult to support from concept to operation.
Some of the smaller organizations appear to have a solution and are trying to find a problem to solve.
To even work on some of these problems a group still often needs to develop new capabilities or modify older ones to work with current technology. The first challenge that I had was to develop a way to track satellites (so far just low orbit satellites) with an inexpensive, flexible, and very portable system.
This allows me to set priorities locally, the link below is a page where people can get some initial directions on how to set up an observatory and start tracking satellites (this is a work in progress!) but I am tracking satellites with an inexpensive camera. One caveat: I often only track in the winter here on the US Gulf Coast, when the "seeing" is acceptable. During most of the year it is too humid and the bugs make it very unpleasant to get outside at night. But I can track during dry periods here.
I have several projects in work, these following pages are the part that I am ready to make public. I have been working with an international group of very accomplished astronomers, programmers, and others to contribute to their efforts and to use some of their results in novel ways. One thing that I do today is track satellites - there are a number of objects in the Satellite Catalog for which the Air Force does not release orbital parameters (I call them the off the books satellites). I am a member of a group that tracks many of them, we maintain their orbits and make them available. I am also comparing various satellite catalogs to identify objects that can be reliably tracked, but that do not appear in the (default world's official) satellite catalog.
One thing that I have done while working on techniques is to use the orbits developed by the amateurs to do some analysis of what these satellites are doing. These analyses have resulted in a number of stories that have appeared on "The Space Review".
Partial Results Of Some Of The Studies That I Have Done
I mean to update these and consolidate a few of them.
Errors In The Default Official Satellite Catalog
By default, the US Air Force gives each new satellite a number and "International Designator" but they do an adequate job at best. A project I have is to compare the various satellite catalogs and try to eliminate errors.
The concern is mostly due to the fact that the U.S. government considers some satellites' missions and orbits classified at various levels. But there are other objects that are in one catalog but not another for other reasons. There are numerous omissions in the default official satellite catalog but there is not a good mechanism to point them out. See the "Errors" page for more detail.
Orbits That Are Getting Crowded
There is a group of orbits that are very critical to Earth observation and similar efforts, the Sun Synchronous orbits, that are rapidly getting crowded - this is an area where we all need action to take place but no one is seriously considering this. People in the satellite business should be taking action, some thoughts about that are here:
The Orbits That Are Getting Crowded story.
The promise of some work that we are doing is that we could prevent some breakups or prevent pieces from being scattered in orbit. There are also some orbits with high eccentricities where satellites have broken up and we should take some action there as well, of course there is far more volume for those pieces to disperse over.
Various Satellite Catalogs
One thing that I have found out is that many people think that they understand "Two Line Element Sets" or TLEs but they do not. As I mentioned in my Satellite Catalog article, there are several sources of orbital information but many people do not know where they come from. The main source of satellite orbits is the default international satellite catalog that is maintained by the US Air Force but they have a number of things that you have to live with. International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) has a catalog but it requires considerable knowledge to use. Many people use CelesTrak but do not know that TLEs on that site are from the US Air Force. There are a number of other sources for TLEs but you really have to dig to find them; I am slowly working away at a brief explanation of this.
Other Professional Interests
Partners and I are submitting proposals to the US National Science Foundation to track some objects.
My current project is to try to get funding from the US National Science Foundation to track asteroids - we could help various efforts to improve statistics on asteroids orbits vs rotation, etc. This has been a VERY slow process.
Looking at what satellites are doing in space - where they are and why they are in the orbits that they are in, has been interesting for a long time. I was an Orbital Analyst in what later became the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) and worked there when the Air Force used the original 496L computer system in the Space Defense Center in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. Later we transitioned to the Space Computational Center, using the problematic 427M computer system. Then I moved to Clear Air Force Station, Alaska where we ran the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar, which was also in the middle of a very difficult computer transition. Were we upgrading to an IBM 7090? Being an Orbital Analyst was a neat job that I did not appreciate at the time. Later I got a Master's degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio in "Space Operations". Later I was a Space Shuttle flight controller and then a Spacelab (which flew in the Space Shuttle payload bay) flight controller. Then I worked NASA/Mir, tested payloads that flew to the Mir space station. Then worked on ISS.
If you wonder how a person gets interested in odd projects like this, the US Air Force got me started.
This picture was taken in the Space Defense Center (it is hard to read but this is Aug 13, 1979) and you can tell that we were using pretty basic technology at that time. We had paper tape input and output, we used Hollerith cards and printers to communicate with the computer. We had people who drew the ground trace on our board - by hand. The Space Defense Center became the Space Computational Center (SCC) and later the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) and is currently the Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC). The hardware and the software of all three of them started out as near state of the art but was very poorly maintained. Even today the CSpOC has ancient hardware and software.
By the way - if you get a chance to change from "Classic Sites" to new Google Sites - DO NOT DO IT! The new Google Sites is very difficult to use, the editor is really bad. I will try to NOT ever convert another site to the new version.
Just added - this site is copyrighted by me. No one may use any part of it without permission.
Another Fun Role That I Had
I was also fortunate enough to be a Flight Controller for a Spacelab flight. Earlier missions where I was a Flight Controller the team operated from the Mission Control Center in Houston (at the Johnson Space Center) but for STS-40, Spacelab Life Sciences-1, we operated the Spacelab module from the Payload Operations Control Center (POCC) at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This was a good chance to see how our partner/rival flight controller at Huntsville operated. Here you can see me at the Operations Controller (OC) and Crew Interface Communicator (CIC) console.
During the mission, we normally had the OC and our Alternate Payload Specialist, Dr Bob Phillips, on console but he frequently drifted away to find a camera. Here we see our two CICs - Gary Renfro and Gerry Lewis. So they must have been handing over since Gerry worked with me and Gary worked during the daytime.
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