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China not only has the capability of blinding US spy satellites, but it has tried to do so, a weekly defense publication reported on Friday. Sources told the US-based Defense News that China had "fired high-powered lasers at US spy satellites flying over its territory," but were unable to confirm when and how many times such attacks had taken place, or whether they had been successful. The sources did not explain when the attacks first took place, but said that there had been several attacks over the past few years, Defense News said. "Lasers of sufficient power could blind electro-optical...

/begin my translation N. Korean Underground Tunnels, Impregnable Fortresses against Nuclear Attack Eludes U.S. spy satellites by painting radar-absorbing materials(on the entrance)Enough food to last for 3 years -- even equipped with oxygen generators  We set up the new section called 'N. Korean File' to provide you with vivid picture of N. Korean society. (Articles in) this section would be based on internal documents from N. Korea or testimony from N. Korean defectors. As its first article, we investigate underground tunnels in N. Korea, based on content from monthly magazine 'N. Korea.' It is first revealed in S. Korea that N. Korea kept U.S. spy satellites from tracking...

Russian space officials have called off the search for an unmanned rocket and its military satellite payload that crashed just after liftoff from Plesetsk Cosmodrome Tuesday. Recovery of the communication satellite’s remains, which were strewn across Russia’s Tyumen region of Siberia, will resume Wednesday, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. “The search, involving an An-2 aircraft, lasted about five hours,” a spokesman for Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry told Interfax, adding that search operations concluded as the plane ran out of fuel. Molniya satellites work in tandem with other spacecraft to provide uninterrupted video and radio signals for military users....

Excerpt - HOUSTON - On the snowy steppes near Orenburg, southeast of the Ural Mountains in Siberia, teams of military search and rescue experts have spent the last month scanning the ground with metal detectors and probing the snow drifts for suspicious metal objects. Their quest: Russia's most advanced spy satellite, which hasn't been seen since it came down to Earth on Jan. 9. Midwinter cold, short periods of daylight, and blowing snow slowed the teams at every step, and now they appear to have given up. No official announcement of the loss has been made. Observers speculate that's because...

For military and intelligence communities, outer space has become a highground, hide-and-seek arena -- a kind of "now you see me, now you don’t" espionage playing field. Over the decades, spying from space has always earned super-secret status. They are the black projects, fulfilling dark tasks and often bankrolled by blank check.However last month, several U.S. senators openly blew the whistle on a mystery spy satellite program, critical of its high cost while calling to question its utility in today’s post-9/11 world.One lawmaker, Jay D. Rockefeller (D-WV), the vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, openly criticized the program on...

French spy satellite put into orbit PARIS — A Ariane rocket roared into space from a pad in French Guyana yesterday, placing into orbit a surveillance satellite expected to give France's military new abilities to spy worldwide. The satellite and six smaller scientific ones were placed into orbit about an hour after liftoff. The Helios 2A military satellite, the rocket's main cargo, is to rotate in sun-synchronous orbit about 435 miles above the Earth. Among expected functions, the satellite is to monitor possible weapons proliferation, prepare and evaluate military operations and digitally map terrain for cruise-missile guidance, the French Defense...

PARIS, France (AP) -- A European rocket roared into space from a pad in South America on Saturday, placing into orbit a surveillance satellite billed as giving France's military new abilities to spy worldwide. The unmanned craft lifted off smoothly from a launch center in Kourou, French Guiana, at 1:26 p.m. (4:26 p.m. GMT) -- the third and last launch of an Ariane-5 rocket this year, Arianespace said. The satellite and six smaller scientific ones were placed into orbit about an hour after liftoff. It was the first time in 11 years that an Ariane rocket carried as many as...

KOUROU, French Guiana (Reuters) - A European Ariane rocket launched a military surveillance satellite on Saturday, the third in a French-led drive for a European "spy in the sky" independent of the United States. The Ariane-5 rocket blasted off at 1:26 p.m. (1126 EST) from the European Space Agency (ESA) launch site in French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America. An hour after lift-off, space officials said the Helios 2A satellite separated from the rocket. An additional six microsatellites were also released by the rocket Helios 2A, the first of a new generation of spy satellite launched by...

A Lockheed Martin Titan 4B rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 12:29 a.m. EDT (0429 GMT), carrying a giant reconnaissance satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office. Follow the rocket's climb to orbit in our mission status center.

This will be pretty big news in Northeast Asia (in the next few hours).This will be the first attempt by Japan to put spy satellites in orbit. They are moving ahead quickly on this because of the threat from misbehaving North Korea.The time will be: 8:27 p.m. Thursday Eastern Time. The launch site for the H-2 rocket is Tanegashima Island in southern Japan. There is heavy security there. (Open source information). No Japanese websites, (that I have noticed), are planning to webcast, although they have webcast other satellite launches in the past.News stories should break on the Web soon after,...