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Trump's DNI Just Discovered Cubesats – And India's PSLV

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 5, 2017
Filed under ,
Trump's DNI Just Discovered Cubesats – And India's PSLV

The US intelligence nominee can’t believe India just launched 104 satellites, Ars Technica
“During his confirmation hearing this week, the Trump administration’s nominee for this cabinet-level [Director of National Intelligence] position, former Senator Dan Coats, assured the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he would remain vigilant in keeping the nation’s reconnaissance satellites ahead of the global curve. The United States would also speed up the process by which it gets new technologies into space, he said. However, when citing an example to make this point, Coats pointed toward the launch of the Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle earlier this month and its deployment of 104 satellites. “I was shocked the other day to read that the nation of India, on one rocket launch, deposited more than a hundred satellites in space,” he said, according to Space News. “They may be small in size with different functions and so forth, but one rocket can send up [more than 100] platforms … We’ve seen now 11 nations that have the capacity to launch instruments into space.”
Keith’s note: As reader MarcNBarrett notes: “I wonder, is he also aware that India has an orbiter around Mars?” — or that they send a spacecraft to orbit the Moon …

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “Trump's DNI Just Discovered Cubesats – And India's PSLV”

  1. MarcNBarrett says:
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    I wonder, is he also aware that India has an orbiter around Mars?

  2. fcrary says:
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    I’m not all that surprised he isn’t too familiar with CubeSats. The idea that they can be used for real, serious science is fairly new. There are plenty of senior scientists who still talk about them in a very dismissive way, as if their main value is to teach and train young scientists, so they will be ready to work on “real” missions. If the academic community is still picking up on the value of small satellites, I’m not shocked that the intelligence community hasn’t gotten the message.

    • John Carlton Mankins says:
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      Technological surprise is of the highest importance, and one of the major risks we now face. I expect that the “right” individuals in intelligence community have certainly “gotten the message”. (DARPA played a key role in creating this revolution back in the early 1990s.) It is vitally important that the leadership of key government agencies get briefings regularly from the right folks, with diverse and deep technical knowledge. I hope it is happening.

    • savuporo says:
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      I’ve heard that the idea of real, serious science isn’t all that popular over in ‘political community’ these days in general.

    • Carlos G. Niederstrasser says:
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      It’s not about CubeSats. The fact that a foreign power has the ability to loft 104 different objects should not come to a surprise to anyone remotely involved in this arena.

  3. Michael Spencer says:
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    In other news, Sen. Coats expressed surprise that there are countries on the other side of the planet. “But how do you see them?”, asked the Senator.