As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Pinpoint
Greg Milner explains how GPS satellites moved from Cold War engineering into everyday life, shaping navigation, logistics, smartphones, finance timing, and location-based services. The book follows the system’s technical evolution while staying focused on practical outcomes – how satellite navigation changed travel habits, business operations, and expectations about precision and convenience in the modern world.
GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones
Richard D. Easton presents a history of GPS as both a military capability and a commercial platform. The narrative connects satellite launches, signal design, and policy choices to the rise of mass-market receivers, mapping apps, and timing uses that run quietly in the background of digital infrastructure.
The Global Positioning System: A Shared National Asset
This National Research Council volume looks at GPS as a national system with defense, civil, and commercial stakeholders. It discusses how satellite-based navigation performance, resilience, and modernization affect transportation, emergency response, industry adoption, and long-term management of a public-facing space service.
Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites
This history of the CORONA program describes how early reconnaissance satellites transformed intelligence collection and strategic decision-making. It covers the operational realities of film-return missions, the problem of getting usable imagery from orbit, and how satellite surveillance influenced Cold War stability and risk calculations.
The Corona Project: Americas First Spy Satellites
Curtis Peebles recounts the origins and execution of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite effort, describing how engineering constraints, launch reliability, and intelligence requirements shaped the program. The book links satellite imagery to real-world outcomes, including verification needs and the broader role of space-based observation in national security planning.
Satellite Communications
Dennis Roddy offers a readable foundation for how communications satellites support television distribution, broadband backhaul, maritime and aviation connectivity, and network coverage in remote regions. The book explains the basics behind satellite links – how signals travel, why orbits matter, and what drives real-world service limits such as latency, capacity, and interference.
The Satellite Communication Applications Handbook
Bruce R. Elbert surveys how satellite systems are used across broadcasting, enterprise networks, mobility, and specialized government needs. The book emphasizes application thinking – how missions, ground infrastructure, user equipment, and business constraints shape what satellite communications can deliver in practice.
Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens
Joan Johnson-Freese examines how modern military operations depend on satellites for communications, navigation, missile warning, and reconnaissance. The discussion focuses on strategy and policy as much as technology, outlining why satellites are both valuable enablers and attractive targets in geopolitical competition.
Satellite Meteorology
R. R. Kelkar explains how weather satellites observe clouds, water vapor, storms, and large-scale atmospheric circulation. The book connects satellite sensors and imagery interpretation to forecasting and disaster monitoring, helping readers understand how space-based observation supports daily weather services and severe-weather readiness.
Mission to Earth: LANDSAT Views the World – Volume One
This LANDSAT-focused volume presents Earth observation through satellite imagery of the planet’s surface, showing how remote sensing supports environmental monitoring and geographic understanding. It highlights what satellites reveal at scale – landforms, coastlines, vegetation patterns, and human land use – through carefully curated examples built around space-based imaging.
