Satellite manufacturers are seeing their sales flag as older satellites exceed their expected life expectancy, sometimes by two to three times longer than anticipated.

Amnesty International and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are collaborating on Eyes on Darfur (eyesondarfur.org), a Web site that shows before and after satellite images of areas the human rights organizations believe are, or could be at risk of, being under siege.

An international meeting of hundreds of aerospace safety experts from America, Europe, Russia, and China has begun work on a blueprint for a key building block of a space arms control regime: a civilian space situational awareness system.

The imagery provided by Google Earth and other commercial satellites has transformed global security in fundamental ways, forcing even the most powerful nations to hide facilities and activities that are visible not only to rival nations, but even to their own citizens.

A decade of effort and anxiety all comes down to a single moment next summer when South Korea attempts to launch its first satellite into orbit. A successful launch would make it the ninth country in the world to launch a home-made satellite from its own soil and mark a huge step forward in its ambition to have a man on the moon by 2020.

The sharpest commercial imaging satellite ever launched is now orbiting the Earth, sweeping over the North Pole and under the South Pole every 98 minutes, collecting high-resolution images of the scene below. From 423 miles up, the GeoEye-1 satellite can spot objects as small as 16 inches across.

The world's first and highest resolution commercial imagery satellite, the Google-sponsored GeoEye-1, has achieved first light, returning a 0.5 meter resolution satellite image of a small university in Pennslyvania. The imagery is the first .5 meter image to be released since the U.S. defense department allowed domestic firms to sell imagery below 1 meter resolution.

America has become so lousy at building spy satellites that "the United
States is losing its preeminence in space," a Congressional
intelligence report declares. What's worse, this decline comes as
"emerging space powers such as Russia, India and China" are getting
better and better at snooping from above.

Iran plans to launch a satellite into space soon using an Iranian-made rocket, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said.

Images from high-resolution military spacecraft, combined with powerful change detection software at ground processing facilities, is enabling the space-based identification and tracking of specific Taliban and al Qaeda individuals in the isolated villages and rugged terrain of Afghanistan.