This article titled “Russian satellite missing within hours of takeoff” was written by Tom Parfitt in Moscow, for The Guardian on Thursday 18th August 2011 18.35 UTC

A Russian communications satellite, the biggest to be built in Europe, went missing hours after takeoff on Thursday.

The £146m satellite was sent into orbit by a Proton rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and disappeared just as flight controllers began to celebrate the launch.

If the Express-A4M satellite is irretrievable it will be a bruising failure for Russia; three navigational satellites for the Glonass global positioning system crashed into the Pacific, off Hawaii, shortly after blasting off in December.

Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the satellite’s Briz-M unit, the engine block responsible for positioning it correctly in high orbit, had fired correctly over four stages but contact was lost before the final firing.

The agency said it had established the location of the engine block but the whereabouts of the satellite remained unknown. “The radio systems are not detecting the satellite in its fixed orbit. There are no signals from the satellite,” a source told Interfax news agency.

The satellite weighed 5.8 tonnes and was fitted with 63 transponders and 10 antennae. It was designed to provide digital television, telephone and internet services across the former Soviet Union.

Space industry sources suggested Russia would turn to Norad, the US-Canadian aerospace defence command, and the Toulouse space centre in France for help in locating the satellite.

The incident is especially embarrassing for Roscosmos after Vladimir Popovkin, head of the agency, said on Wednesday that the organisation would be moving resources away from manned spaceflight.

Popovkin said the satellite launch represented “a change of priorities”. “For us the main thing is becoming the satisfaction of Russia’s demands for satellite information, including communications services and broadcasting.”

The agency said on Thursday it was setting up a commission to investigate the failed launch.

The satellite was jointly built by the Khrunichev centre in Moscow – named after a Soviet-era aviation minister, Mikhail Khrunichev – and Astrium, a Paris-based aerospace company. It was commissioned by the Russian ministry of communications.

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This article titled “George Clooney and Google launch satellite plan to avert Sudan violence” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 29th December 2010 20.58 UTC

Google has joined the UN, Harvard University and a pressure group founded by George Clooney to use satellites to scour Sudan for evidence of state-organised violence before next month’s referendum that could see the country split in two.

Clooney said that he had launched the Satellite Sentinel Project to “stop a war before it starts” by warning the government in Khartoum that it would not be able to hide war crimes from the rest of the world, as it did for so long in Darfur, if there is violence in southern Sudan, which is likely to vote on 9 January to secede.

The project plans to reduce the waiting time for satellite images from more than a fortnight to less than 36 hours. The images will be scrutinised by the UN for evidence of mass movements of people, destruction of villages and other indicators of organised violence. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative will also study the pictures.

The images will immediately be made public. If there is evidence of war crimes, appeals for action will be led in part by the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organisation led by the author and activist John Prendergast.

Clooney and Prendergast said today in a statement that there was a serious threat of violence.

“The government in Khartoum has armed militias in contested bordering regions, the government air force has bombed border areas, and both sides have massed military units and equipment along the hottest border spots,” they said. “These areas have witnessed some of the most deadly conflict in the world since world war two. The former director of national intelligence says that southern Sudan is the place in the world most likely to experience genocide.

“We were late to Rwanda. We were late to the Congo. We were late to Darfur. There is no time to wait.”

The referendum is the result of a 2005 peace deal to end more than two decades of civil war that cost more than two million lives. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has committed himself to respecting the result of the oil-rich south’s vote. But there has already been violence amid accusations that the government is funding armed groups opposed to independence. Last week, the US vice president, Joe Biden, called Sudan’s second vice president, Ali Osman Mohmed Taha, to express Washington’s concern about potential violence.

Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project said that advances in technology had given humanitarian organisations an advantage that should help not only expose violence but prevent it. “This project is leveraging Google map makers open source platform to wage peace. Unlike previous satellite imagery gathering projects which were after-the-fact documentation exercises, this project aims to stop a war before it starts,” he said. “War criminals thrive in the dark. They behave differently when you shine a media spotlight on them, when you give them notice that satellite imagery can be quickly shared with the world. This is an open source public platform for waging peace and this transforms anti-war efforts from now on.”

“Passing over Sudan at any given time are perhaps a dozen commercial satellites that have high resolution images available for purchase. The cost barrier has been the key factor that has limited the effective use of satellite imagery analysis in the human rights field,” Hutson added.

The Sudan initiative is being funded for six months by Not On Our Watch, an organisation co-founded by Clooney and other film stars such as Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. “We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,” said Clooney.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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The US Air Force launched the largest super-secret spy satellite in history Monday morning. The satellite is believed to be an eavesdropping satellite for the National Security Agency. The antenna used to intercept electronic communications is believed to span around 328 feet — the largest ever. Experts believe this satellite is the fifth in a series of NSA satellites known as “Advanced Orion.”

Here’s the launch:

Russia has launched the final three satellites needed to complete it’s own GPS system known as GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System).

The military-run GLONASS mapping system works over most of Russia and is expected to cover the globe by the end of 2009, once all its 24 navigational satellites are operating.

Officials said GLONASS would mainly be used alongside the U.S. global positioning system, which Washington can switch off for civilian subscribers, as it did during recent military operations in Iraq.

A Chinese submarine will send test signals that could change the course of a satellite when China launches its first moon orbiter, as part of the country’s effort to develop space war technology.

two survey ships are deployed in the South Pacific Ocean and South Atlantic Ocean to send signals to maneuver the lunar exploration satellite, expected to be launched Wednesday. At the same time, a nuclear-powered submarine will send simulated signals to the satellite as a test.

Once the satellite-maneuvering technology matures, China would have the know-how to destroy other satellites in space in wartime.

China could launch cheaply-made weapon-carrying objects into space and change their courses to destroy or damage satellites of other countries by sending signals from submarines.