This ought to give the Iranians headaches:
“With Ofek 9, Israel now has about 10 satellites working in a joint system – a commercial amount,” ISA Chairman Isaac Ben-Israel told Ynet on Wednesday night. “One of them completes a round every 90 minutes, then the second one comes along, then the third one, and so on. At a given moment, there is not one place which interests us in the Middle East and is not being shot.
“In fact, a country will not be able to conduct any secret operations in the Middle East without the area being covered by one of our satellites, as there are no longer such moments. Iran won’t be able to transfer different materials without us noticing,” Ben-Israel explained.
The pessimist in me says that it doesn’t matter how much evidence Israel has, the world will still ignore the Iranian push to get nuclear weapons. But the realist in me says that when Israel presents the intel to other nations, they will be listened to. There is no longer a Korean-aided nuclear plant in the Syrian desert. You may remember that the IAF bombed the hell out of it, and the UN has confirmed there was radioactive material there—after harumphing at first that there was not. So the Ofek 9 comes out as a good thing in my scorecard. A successful launch, and within a couple of days, a gathering of more intel against Israel’s enemies. Win-win.
“At a given moment, there is not one place which interests us in the Middle East and is not being shot.”
Translation – we have continuous, real time targeting info on every possible threat in the Middle East…to go with our unmanned bomber.
I wonder if the attack will come before or after our up coming elections?
Its a shame, but the only country in the world that has to launch to the west instead of east is Israel. A satellite launch to the east picks up the Earths rotation, whereas a launch to the west has to overcome the Earths rotation. Thus payload on the Shavit is severely reduced.
Two basic issues. 1) Scaring the pants of all the arabs that it is a ballistic missle launch. 2) In case of a problem, debris would fall over populated areas. (Well not really that populated… Lots of desert out there).
Since Israelis usually have a good sense of humor in how they mess with their terrorists friend,
I’d like to see them call Ahmadinejad and tell him their Ofek 9 noticed a little lesion on the
back of his neck that he might want to have looked at.
Veeshir,
What a great idea. Put the wind up the scum.
Geofc, that’s a very interesting observation about the west-to east launch over the Mediterranean. I never thought about that.
Seems like they could contract with NASA to do launches.
What would really be cool would be Israel acquiring an overseas territory with ocean to the east. Maybe Mauritius… Or Malta…