The Glass Ceiling
Chapter 10: Satellites

The Great Conspiracy

They were all lying to us all the time. Everybody is in on it but me!

No, it's not like that at all.

NASA hires top engineers and scientists shaped by the same Rhodes/Carnegie indoctrination we all endured. They grew up on dreams of space as did we all, but now they live their dreams.

NASA is owned by the Department of Defense and is highly compartmentalized. Each worker has a specific job and no access to information beyond their "need to know".

How many have a need to know about the biggest lie of all time? By my estimate, no more than three to five dozen. Information is disseminated through tightly controlled official channels and everybody else believes.

People at NASA actually build satellites and pontificate on scientific papers of the day. They do real science with the best information they have.

NASA is happy to nourish its back story and is unconcerned about the cost given that its white budget is sixty million dollars a day. It is in their interest to put on a big show. Televised big rocket launches. Interview vids with heroes returning from the space station. Great new stories of how space based experiments are going to save the world. Lately there are lots of stories about killer asteroids and how close we came to destruction when a big one got too close. But soon we'll explain how we can fix it all if you give us lots more money and let us do dangerous things. The crowd cheers: yes, yes NASA, save us, we'll pay, we'll pay twice!

Oddly, none of these asteroids ever whack our communications satellites or the ISS.

Satellites

Perhaps it is time to discuss satellites, what they are and aren't, what we know and don't.

One thing we do know is that all of our information about satellites comes to us through our trusted single source. The same source handles everything we get from observatories and the educational supercomputer grid.

Something is there because we can point a dish at it. Yet if satellites are what they are said to be, we should have no need for friendly skies flyovers, spy planes, or AWACs. And we would have thousands of actual pictures of the Earth.

There seems to be a small disagreement as to the number of satellites orbiting in space. A chart from astronomy.com claims 1,300, Pixalytics says about 4,500, and the Daily Mail has 377,000 including space junk. India claims to have launched 1,300 "nano-satellites" this week.


This hilarious rendering was built from published positions of the satellites.

Consider: The Earth is turning. That's not a pincushion, it's a 20 thousand mile per hour raceway. Only geostationary satellites stick to the Earth. The rest of them have to cross the equator at least twice a day. Geostationary orbits can only exist directly above the equator.

Satellites are very polite and avoid collisions (no no, after you). They are very durable and unharmed by the caustic vacuum and thin mach28 jetstream. Their electronics keep working happily, unconcerned by extreme temperature differentials and unfiltered solar wind. And best of all, they just stay up there and never run out of gas.

If it really worked this way, three satellites a day would crash and burn. But we get GPS.

An Alaskan in Juno can point a satellite dish low to the horizon and get direct TV. But he is not seeing a geostationary satellite because the Earth's bulge occludes that orbit. What then, is he seeing?

My best guess at this time is that the low elevation of his dish lets him see a ground station reflected off the firmament.

I saw a vid recently by a guy who claims that satellites are coherent reflection spots in the firmament. I can't disprove this but will hold judgement as I am not convinced the coherent reflection phenomenon exists outside Bearden's pseudo scientific papers. One of my Bearden favorites was a patent on time domain coherent reflection so we could go back and cause accidents to unhappen.

As to GPS? It is not commonly known that GPS systems require at least one cell tower to operate. Your GPS will not work if you are 100 miles offshore. If I was the guy programming the last mile hookup, I wouldn't even look at the satellites. If I can find 3 cell towers I know exactly where I am. Two will do in a pinch.

It is curious that NASA is the world's largest user of helium. They have overt and covert balloon programs. If a balloon was high enough it would not be seen even from commercial air lanes.

I can't fathom the logistics of tethering the balloon, but perhaps engineers were not joking and there is such a thing as a firmament anchor. Various ancient writings speak of the firmament's inner surface as somehow gelatinous. Could it be possible to partially embed some kind of fixment? Somebody way above my pay grade knows this.

Well, if I had all the answers I wouldn't need to be on a search for truth.

Perhaps the answer is known, at least collectively by HAMs and DX-ers. If we all put heads together, can we triangulate this problem?

Perhaps an insider might go rogue and post photos of the balloon equipment they don't show us.

Data is transmitted and commercial users get billed for the bandwidth, so something is happening.

Even so, the trans Atlantic cable remains in heavy use, though its core technology is so old as to be restrictive to today's electronics.

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