HI, Quite interesting re painting satellites black. If you look at some of the photos of the recent 'wideband gapfiller satellite', the satellite bus is mostly black. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q3/060926b_pr.html has a picture of the satellite in a frame prior to testing. If you look at it, you can see all the communications antennas are black. I'm not sure is this is painted for stealth reasons, or the antennas are made of carbon fiber. I'm sure this is only one example of many recent satellites that have been painted black.Either way, painting a satellite would only solve a small amount of the problem, since pretty much all satellites carry an RF payload which transmits data back to earth, they can be detected this way if they cannot be seen. The article mentions the 'seesat' group which does visual obs, but a parallel group 'hearsat' works with the RF downlinks, identifying satellites purely by their RF fingerprints. In fact several satellites have been detected at RF, orbits computed which were then passed on to the 'seesat' folks for visual confirmation. There are a few sites that you can check out if you are interested in the RF Aspects of satellite detection, www.hearsat.org, www.satellitenwelt.de and www.uhf-satcom.com being just a few.