[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, from Wikipedia."][/caption]Henry Kenyon in Government Computer News reports that radio frequency interference in space is on the rise. "Stewart Sanders, chairman and director of the Space Data Association (SDA), said March 13 during a panel on orbital radio frequency interference issues at the Satellite 2012 conference in Washington [that] there are a number of reasons for this, and most are not related to intentional jamming.... Where it used to take highly advanced nations with highly trained personnel to launch and maintain satellites, technological developments have lowered the entry requirements for space, which has increased the number of players in orbit, he said." Sanders notes there is some intentional jamming, "such as recent attempts to jam Eutelsat transmissions, [but] this only represented about five percent of all detected interference, he said. From a commercial perspective, the vast majority of interference with satellite communications is created by human error, mostly from misaligned antennas and transmitters." Read the full story in Government Computer News.