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Our Weather Satellites Are Dying
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that some experts say it is almost certain that the U.S. will soon face a year or more without crucial weather satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks. This is because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launching of the next replacement, known as JPSS-1, has slipped until early 2017. Polar satellites provide 84 percent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking the course of Hurricane Sandy, which at first was expected to amble away harmlessly, but now appears poised to strike the mid-Atlantic states. The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites was recently described as a 'national embarrassment' by a top official of the Commerce Department. A launch mishap or early on-orbit failure of JPSS 1 could lead to a data gap of more than 5 years. The second JPSS satellite — JPSS 2 — is not scheduled for launch until 2022. 'There is no more critical strategic issue for our weather satellite programs than the risk of gaps in satellite coverage,' writes Jane Lubchenco, the under-secretary responsible for the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. 'This dysfunctional program that had become a national embarrassment due to chronic management problems.' As a aside, I know from personal experience that this isn't the first time NOAA has been in this situation. 'In 1992 NOAA's GOES weather satellites were at the end of their useful lives and could have failed at any time,' I wrote as a project manager for AlliedSignal at that time. 'So NOAA made an agreement with the government of Germany to borrow a Meteosat Weather Satellite as a backup and drift it over from Europe to provide weather coverage for the US's Eastern seaboard in the event of an early GOES failure.'"
Why not lease or buy the data from the Russians & the Chinese while we're getting the new ones into orbit... Cheaper and would get the job, or at least some of it, done. 2c
NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pockets may they can pay for one.
Yeah, this coming from someone who has never forecast a day of weather in her life, and doesn't know what the National Weather Service does in the first place...
There are so many "checks and balances" in the system, and so much risk aversion, that the system can not perform. No program manager is ever rewarded for taking a risk, or succeeding, so the best ones are the ones who can redirect blame and reduce risk. Same with the contracting and finance people, and to no small extent, the government engineers. Worse, those who are competent flee the government, leaving us with a population that's not good or representative of their fields at large. I wasn't given the option to enter it (military orders) but I'm leaving as soon as I can, because it's a dead end, morally, emotionally and professionally.
I'm quite certain this is coming from a pinko liberal asshat who is pissed off that the government isn't giving him unlimited money anymore to crank out 'crucial' satellites and research grants for 'global warming catastrophe' now that the guys with the big-boy pants are in charge. The world will do just fine knowing that a hurricane is on the way but not knowing the pressure to the nearest hundredth of a millibar or whether Shitsplat, Nebraska is currently has an above average or just slightly above average of precipitation in 2014 being above the 75 year average. There is point where something is useful, and then a point of diminishing returns where additional investments just are not justified and should be used elsewhere.
Ah yes. A fine representative from the Grand Old Sociopath Party.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why do we need "next generation" satellites? Why not build more of the same, which apparently have worked adequately for quite a while?
Not "sexy".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The new weather satalites will access The Cloud to speed deployment and reduce support costs.
I hope you major party partisan bitches reap what you have sown. It serves you assholes right.
Down with the one party system!
cue the "Kif sigh" from Futurama.
FTFA:
The project is run by the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and NASA.
There's your problem. NASA and the NOAA ?!?! Putting it ALL under the NOAA, where it belongs, would clear up a lot of shit. And then there's this horseshit ...
In response, top Commerce and NOAA officials on Sept. 18 ordered what they called an urgent restructuring — just the latest overhaul of the troubled program. They streamlined the management, said they would fill major vacancies quickly and demanded immediate reports on how the agency planned to cope with the gap.
OMFG! This will have absolutely no effect - whatsoever. All they did was fire some mid-levels - peons who have no real say and it was really for show - but the real problems are still working there (Hint: they're are the ones at the top.).
What needs to be done is for the military and industry (industry clients - NOT the suppliers) to get their bitches in the Senate to restructure this whole thing from the top down.
I'll bet any amount that the people that designed and built the old satellites are not around anymore. "Next generation" is industry speak for "We have to start all over again.". Of course, I have no facts to back this up.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
That will get it funded and running in no time.
Idiot! There aren't any clouds in space!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
22 comments in and not one reference to whether or not Netcraft has confirmed the satellites are dying.
Slashdot is definitely slipping.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
are on the one side glad to support our allies on our axis, but must decline the shipment of data that might harm the religious feelings of many american citizens.
Weather is made by god, man shall not try to understand gods ways, because this would make man a god. Thus weather shall not be understood by the god fearing american people that replace a theory like evolution or the big bang theory by simpler means; creative design and the not so "creative beginning".
A just kidding, take as much data as you need, because if you fear for your life you also sell your soul, aren't you ?
Yes, but are they scared or sad that they are dying?
Better known as 318230.
Perhaps not but the US Department of Defense seems to toss up satellites with cameras on a regular basis. I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why this is so hard. The basic sensing suite should be well established by now. Satellite technology is well established. Certainly there is room for research - better sensors, more communications and whatnot but getting a garden variety weather satellite out just ought not to be so hard.
Maybe give it to the pros (DOD) or JPL or maybe even Elon Musk. Further, I have to believe with all the money we've spent on military satellites, they don't have spare weather sats sitting in a warehouse someone....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
A proper weather satellite would control the weather, rather than simply observe it.
Then I could write my name in snow, across an entire continent.
Muhahahaha.
I wish, sincerely wish that Slashdot could manage an edit function....
Anyway, what I really wanted to point out was that observation that the US likes to mix up production and research programs. The DOD is a poster child for this (even if they're better at sat tech then NOAA). Want a new fighter? Sure, spec it out so that have the technology doesn't exist yet then get all twizzled that it doesn't get built on time or on budget. Better of making a less sexy fighter (and more of them) with current tech and keeping up the skunk works or whatever for the whizzy stuff.
Christ, the major US bomber (the B-52) is older than I am. LIkewise one of the primary cargo planes (the C-130). Somehow, even though we 'just' have 15 year old F-16's and 18's as the primary fighter we're not involved in dog fights on a weekly basis.
I suspect the same thing is happening with the weather satellites.
Keep it Simple, Stupid. More is better. Murphy hates redundancy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nice strawman. I agree that the first post was bullshit but these satellites are needed and aren't an example of excessive government spending. The excellent storm forecasts we've had over the past decade came about due to these satellites. Lives and property have been saved. When there is a satellite gap, people who are used to knowing if a hurricane or a derecho is going to hit them 3 days in advance will be surprised when they have almost no notice. People who are used to knowing if the next winter storm is going to be an icestorm will be surprised when they get 2 inches of ice instead of 2 ft of snow.
...when you over-spend on military interventions and bullying the world, and under-spend on useful tech.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Mostly so we can better predict weather events down to street-level and beyond. Newer equipment will help us predict for tornadic activity, predict for those really nasty snow storms everybody keeps complaining about, etc.
Why are we building meteorological satellites when we have the Weather Channel?
You're on slashdot, you know technology evolves. The tech on satellites is essentially CMOS cameras and computers to manage sending the data to ground stations. Satellite lifetime: 20 years from design to end of life... "Current" satellite designs are 20 years old. Launch costs are relatively the same. So the choice is to spend a tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars to put up a platform, and operate for fifteen years or so. So do you put one up with technology that will be forty years old by the end of it's service life? It's going to be the same money whether it is 40 year old tech or twenty year old tech. Do you have a twenty year old CCD camera? Overall, Is that likely good value for money?
Why do we need "next generation" satellites? Why not build more of the same, which apparently have worked adequately for quite a while?
Car Analogy Warning: When fuel is your biggest cost, the price difference between launching a Model-T into orbit isn't really that relevant compared to launching a ferrari.
There's also the whole "technology improving" thing.
Imagine the current state of science if we were only using microscopes that "have worked adequately for quite a while"
Heck, feel free to compare and contrast a 1999 cell phone with one made in 2010.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No, they're not, but the engineers today are just as capable. The issue is money.
I work in space science, there are a lot of extremely smart people working on Earth obs and the technology that is available today is leagues ahead of what we used in the past in terms of data resolution and other things - instruments are also a heck of a lot smaller now. So, with respect, you're talking out of your ass.
Weather satellites have pretty much one function, they take data like wind speeds, cloud heights etc, and relay that to a base station. Then organisations take this data and use big hefty algorithms that have been Frankenstein'd over the years to try and work out what's happening next. There is little to no processing on board the birds because you need a room of computers to run the fluid simulations. As a result all that needs upgrading is the sensor precision, data rate and so on.
The weather forecast for today, here? Wrong. Quite often is, even just one day out. Heck, a couple days ago they were saying 0% chance of snow yesterday... and it snowed all evening and night. This, in an area that gets, on average, about 10 inches of moisture total.
The forecast track for Sandy? And the amount of rain coming? And the actual wind impacts? Really quite uncertain -- and we certainly know where these things are (as opposed to where they're going to go) from non-satellite sources when they're closer to home. So we know they're near or here or maybe they're going to go somewhere -- and that's about all we know anyway.
I'm not saying it isn't a good idea to have satellites and to try to learn to predict the weather from them and every other source possible, of course it is, but I *am* saying that should we lack them for five years, I'm not going to see a significant difference in my quality of life, because weather prediction basically sucks in its current state.
It seems to me it's far more important to have doppler radar of high quality and close spacing so we know when severe weather is immanent.
So by all means launch the new sats, and hopefully it'll go well, but I can't see it as it significant WRT weather and me if it doesn't.
Now, if they actually could give reliable predictions... that'd be something else, because I'd be losing something of value. But we're just not there yet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I agree... we should let corporations tell us when weather is bad.
Because paying for information to be told a tornado is coming is a good idea.
Paying to be told a hurricane is coming is a good idea.
Preventing loss of life should be secondary to profits.
Also, none of that is bribing to save lives, its just good business.
If only we were less short sighted than profits and more caring about people. But fuck it, PROFITS!
Why not take the same design, but incrementally replace old tech by newer tech ? The first priority should be to launch on the scheduled date. While you have a chance, improve the technology, but don't let the launch date slip because you're waiting for even better designs.
Its a fact. We need to stop collecting data that might disprove it.
Two reasons: 1st is that it's not that simple. Systems engineering is actually very complex and difficult. That's the technical reason most large computer projects and all large DoD projects fail. Incremental change is a good approach, but by replacing a substantial amount of the old tech (bus and sensor) you're basically re-designing the satellite, re-qualifying the system, and eating most of the expense and a large fraction of the risk that would come from starting from scratch, and you might not actually meet the current requirements.
Second: Given incompetent program management in an acquisition system that's designed to prevent any risk, the program will most certainly fail.
Europe just launched a brandy new fancy weather satellite. I wonder if there is a little bit of envy going on here. Things are great when we just got brand new stuff but then time goes by and then other people get newer stuff and then our stuff isn't so cool anymore.
The Magellanic cloud hereby invites you to a party. Also attending will be the Oort cloud, the Milky Way gas clouds, a molecular cloud from Andromeda, and an alcohol cloud of considerable refinement*. CHON will be served. Entertainment will be provided by black holes stripping electrons.
*Only those from planets understood to be older than 6000 years may attend.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We have a complete set of functional weather satellites at the ready. The military has their own even more sophisticated constellation that can provide equivalent information, if its information is "blurred" a bit. Think GPS as a more extreme analog where there aren't any civilian satellites at all. Why does the military run its own weather program? It routes flights, navigates seas, secures facilities and does a lot of off-roading to schedule and needs to prepare for expected challenges, just like you do when you commute to work and back home, and while you're on vacation.
"chronic management problems". Maybe that's what all the bullets are for?
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Well they have a difficult job to do planning and engineering the next generation to get the carbon footprint of the launch down to zero, make sure that only minerals from non-somthing-or-other Countries are used, make sure all the associated engineers and staff were hired under proper E.E.O. guidelines, and a whole bunch of other things. Its just a hard job with the tight budgets of only a few billion and these underpaid bureaucrats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula
The companies that made the advanced multispectral imagers for US weather satellites have been doing plenty of business selling them to other countries for their satellites (Japan's Himawari, for example). It helps when you don't have half your country's politicians trying to actively deny that a global weather phenomena exists.
Just to clear up any potential confusion here, in the case of the satellite, it's the rocket, not the fuel, that costs the most. I have a feeling the parent got this, but it didn't come through in the analogy. The price of the Oxygen and Hydrogen(or RP1) to get something into orbit isn't actually very high.
Of course, the analogy doesn't stop there, because it would cost considerably more to either build a new Model-T from scratch, since there is no production line, or to find an existing, working Model-T and pry it from the hands of its owner than it originally cost to build them. Maybe not as much as a Ferrari, but still a considerable heap of change. The same, of course, is true with old satellite tech, with the exception that it would take a very, very eccentric collector to keep an old, still working weather satellite in his garage.
Our weather satellites are dying, Senator. We must do something quickly to stop the loss of long term forecasts.
Mesa day startin pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Gettin very scared and runnin from that lightning, and POW! Mesa here! Mesa gettin' very very scared! Flashy lightning not insa forecast!
So NOAA made an agreement with the government of Germany to borrow a Meteosat Weather Satellite as a backup
Are you sure about this? Trusting our fate to a satellite we hardly know?
The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites was recently described as a 'national embarrassment'
“American politics. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
“These forecasts — too accurate for Farmer's Almanacs. Only weather satellites are so precise.”
“If this is a weather station, where is the meteorologist? — Commander, tear this place apart until you’ve found those satellite plans.”
...bridges, roads, highways and satellites crumble away because nobody wants to pay their fucking taxes.
Film at 11.
See? More evidence that the government should get out of the satellite weather monitoring business and let private industry take care of it.
[lawl]
Huge overlap in many of their respective missions.
After merging them, fund them. They account for a drop in the bucket of the entire budget so to speak.
The day a large american city is devastated by a tornado, and an evacuation was not organized in time because of no weather satellite, you'll wish there was a "Model-T" of a weather satellite sent into orbit.
Don't take it personally, but I think you can take your car analogy and shove it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'll probably get some troll points for this, but after watching the recent Frontline titled Climate of Doubt, I wonder if there aren't some pretty powerful forces out there that just plain don't want weather/climate data all that much. The interviews in that show seem to indicate that the big money behind that effort (which over the last four years has somehow convinced half of the U.S. population that man made climate change is a myth, while science has gone in the opposite direction), is way more about Ayn Randian ideology than science.
All pretty scary if you ask me...like we're getting closer and closer to witch burning every day...
Your politics aren't even interesting. When Romney guts wherever you or your family works and you all lose your jobs you may appreciate having the health benefits Obama wants to give you. Unless you live in MA and already enjoy what Romney gave you.
"Tornados also give you wings!" Cut to 30 second commercial.
Technically we did collectively pay to be told a hurricane is coming. The current satellites were paid for with taxes and we paid taxes. Continuing operation of the satellite (which does require constant regular human intervention, because oddly enough, maintaining an orbit isn't automatic) is also paid for with taxes, and that is an ongoing expense. So yes, sarcasm aside, paying to be told a hurricane is coming IS a good idea and we ARE paying for it, all the time, and we should and indeed must continue paying for it.
Your great wagonloads of sarcasm are appropriate for the concept that it would be a good idea to introduce a profit motive into that situation, but I think it bears repeating that we are in fact paying--we are paying with taxes, and this is one of the reasons why government is good and taxes are necessary; it's how we successfully keep the profit motive out of things which are deadly dangerous when operated for profit.
(I leave the application of the concept to healthcare as an exercise for the reader.)
I don't even think the issue is money, or at least not lack of it. They had a $12 billion budget. Compare that to the $2.5 billion they spent on the Mars Curiosity mission, which is much more complicated than a weather satellite. They should have given them a $500 million budget instead, and then it would have much bigger chance of success. The bigger the budget, the higher the risk of making it too complex.
You say it like "us assholes" want it the way it is.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Piggy-back WHORE, see what it got you? ZERO mod points! Nuthin' !!!
No need to save the exact same 20-year old design and copy it. People launch satellites on a regular basis, and most of them are not too expensive. Apparently, there's quite a bit of knowledge on how to make a reasonably priced, earth orbiting satellite that can do basic housekeeping, and maintain a up/down data link to ground stations. To make it a weather satellite, just slap some useful instruments on it, and call it good.
Feel free to compare NASA's budget 2 decades ago with todays budget. Its about the same. Somehow the technology in the space sector has gotten more expensive over time, unlike the cell phones that you are talking about.
The space shuttle only cost $1.7 billion per craft and only $450 million per launch.. thats the fucking space shuttle!! Now a few weather satellites cost $13 billion to make and deploy? These is corporations gorging themselves at the trough of runaway government deficits.
"His name was James Damore."
Ah, but launch costs are NOT relatively the same. SpaceX launches cost an order of magnitude less than ULA launches. (For obvious reasons. ULA when it was created was an illegal monopoly that should never have been allowed to form in the first place.) It's now possible to do ten launches for the old price of a single launch. If the new design is trapped in a bureaucratic morasse, build a duplicate of the old design and put it on a SpaceX Falcon 9 for cheap while you figure out the new design properly.
Of course, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the real problem is the company building the satellite has suffered severe brain drain. The original brains that knew how to build the existing satellite are long gone, and the new guys have never done it. This has been the problem with a great many things in the space program. If you only do something once every generation, you are essentially starting from scratch every single time. No one involved has any prior experience in the job they are doing.
So building a duplicate of the old design is only barely more likely to succeed than a new design, simply because fabrication of either one is new to the people doing it. Assuming the old design is even available anymore. Corporations are very bad at preserving documentation for twenty years, and space corporations have been disastrously worse, actively destroying documentation. And of course, since the existing satellite was a one-off, or at best a member of a very tiny family, inevitably, many things were left out of the documentation, because people just did them, knowing they would never have to do it again, and forgot to write down what they did. Undoubtedly something critical has been left out, even if the documentation still exists.
So you're right, but for the wrong reasons.
Or at least ones that know their limitations and have good advisors to turn to when they hit those limits so they can make informed decisions.
Not eveyone knows everything.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The CRU data has been available for a while now. What have the "deniers" done with it, exactly ?
Corporations have incentive to provide timely, accurate information as long as there's competition. The government, on the other hand, don't give a crap about efficiency they only care about effectiveness. Much more bang for your buck with commercial launch and with commercial satellites. Weather satellites are a national defense issue but this could be farmed out to companies...the launch business is mostly companies the government contracts out to so why not weather satellites? Ask yourself, when's the last time the government did something and you were amazed at how little it cost.
Or have we reached you too late after you've drank the liberal Kool-Aid? Think for yourself and stop regurgitating the lies. Repeat after me (in a non-zombie-like voice), "companies not inherently bad...government not inherently good...fire hot..."
the skeptics are conspiracy theorists? ... I wish you guys would make up your mind
Welfare? Can you explain to me how welfare is costing $1 Trillion a year? Or are you mistaken, and thinking of Social Security?
Hold on, you're echoing the Idiot Republican talking points.
They didn't want his data. They wanted everything else so they could hang him with lies and insinuation.
You can't get the parts any more. They have been building more of the same since the 1980s but you get to a point where you have to redesign it.
It's a brilliant example of one category of tragedy of the commons. The dollars spent are easily seen and tracked. The dollars saved are invisible.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
But you know as well as I do that we aren't giving each of them $60K annually. In fact, they explicitly included Medicare to inflate the number.
I'm trying to find a corroborating analysis but there's lots of noise from the "we hate Obama" camps. In fact, whenever I try to search on welfare to get any numbers I get Fox News, Heritage, and Cato, all well known neoconservative think tanks and media organizations that hate Obama more than anything else. Further searching does nothing to support your numbers, but does pull in madhouses like Free Republic.
But the truth is that you're angry that the lower 50% of this country is in need of assistance because wages are so bad and jobs are so scarce for them. Not because things are so bad for them, but because this takes money away from the super rich whose taxes, quite frankly, should be higher. The true solution rather than just forcing people into abject poverty would be to give them jobs, but the people at the helm of the companies I noted above are busy ensuring that there are as few good paying jobs out there as possible.
Idiot neoconservative persecution complex. Of course, that's why you linked me to a neoconservative website that's all-in on Mitt Romney (or whoever is the Republican candidate) and anti-Obama (for not being Republican.)
Of course, what would you rather spend it on? Bombs and guns? Or would you just ensure that it's given back to the richest in this country so they can sit on it while sending more jobs out of the country while continuing to whine about taxes?
The voting records indicate exactly that.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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It has 100% uptime and works flawlessly in all browsers.
The polar orbiting satellites are the quiet achievers of weather forecasting. Everyone sees the geostationary sat images on TV and think that's it, but there's a lot more going on with the polar sats.
They orbit north/south over the poles at about 800km. They are sun-synchronous (so the sun is always behind them illuminating the earth on their daylight run) and they do an orbit about every 90 minutes or so. The earth turns underneath them as they orbit, so they cover the entire globe. The current POES status is here
They transmit a heap of data - the data I receive here in Australia is the APT transmissions, which is 4 x 4 km per pixel resolution images in the visible and IR wavelength, which run constantly. As the satellite clears the horizon, you pick up the signal at two lines per second and about 15 minutes later on a directly overhead pass it sets again and you've got a nice, 2000km x 4000km image of your immediate area, just like if it came off a fax machine. The two wavelengths offered in the analog mode give you a visible image and allow you to read temperatures, so you can find thunderheads and cold fronts, for example. The APT transmissions just require a 137Mhz FM receiver and a simple antenna to pick up, so it's easy to get images.
They also have a digital mode - HRPT - with the entire range of 6 imaging sensors onboard and 1x1km per pixel resolution and you can do a lot with that - highlight vegetation, measure and and sea surface temps, locate and track fires and such.
Onboard there are also charge sensors for measuring auroral densities, and you can visit a webpage that shows the current auroral activity. The satellites can also receive, process and retransmit data from Search and Rescue beacon transmitters, and automatic data collection platforms on land, ocean buoys, or aboard free-floating balloons, as well as detect and map the ozone holes that appear yearly over the poles.
Their capabilities completely outclass the geosynchronous satellites and I hope that NOAA gets their act together and back on track with the launches.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The solution is let china does the lunch for a deep discount.
Our elected representatives (I don't care which party you support) have:
- refused to BALANCE THE BUDGET, ie their main job
- chosen superficial feel-good measures ahead of everything else
- continue to rabidly borrow for everything
- cut all long term investment in favor of more bread, more circuses
- for the last 30 years they've passed measures that cut taxes or raise spending today, with 'promised cuts' or 'promised revenues' later that never seem to arrive.
We don't have enough $$ coming in to pay our commitments.
Instead of (the quickest route) cutting spending, we begin debating who we should take more money from, as if tax revenue is inexhaustible.
How is this at all surprising?
-Styopa
Oh Good
Can I get invited to the funeral?
Funerals can be fun... if you know how
You had a semi-decent argument until "liberal Kool-Aid".
It appears you are the angry one. I specifically pointed out we spend the equivalent of $60,000 per poverty family (triple the poverty limit) YET still have 15% living in poverty. The point being if we just GAVE it to them no one would be in poverty. However, we are spending that money and STILL not helping people.
How much would you suggest spending on poverty? $2 Trillion a year, $3 Trillion a year? It isn't working. As a matter of fact, since welfare began poverty was at around 15%, so in addition to not helping its not helping one tiny bit.
I'll come to the conclusion I always do discussing things with liberals. Once they give up on facts and turn to name calling I consider it a win for me on the topic at hand. You have just lost completely and fully and shown everyone else who reads this that not only has liberalism lost, it has lost in a manner that it can't even come up with a cognative point to refute its complete failure. Liberalism is the lack of helping others and showing bigotry and intollerance for other people's opinins.
You silly class warfare people. How many times fo I have to tell you that the stockholders need that money!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Not that I want to get in the way of a rant with momentum (+5? Really?), but you do realize that at present the vast majority of people in the United States get their warnings about bad weather, approaching tornados, and hurricanes heading towards shore, from their local television and radio stations? You do realize that the vast majority of them are commercial enterprises? You know: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, the Weather Channel, etc.? You do realize what those organizations are, don't you? They are called "corporations," and I haven't noticed any mass slaughter going on due to lack of warning - quite the opposite. But it gets worse - the satellites that provide the weather information - built by corporations under contract. There is a growing chance that the next weather satellites will be carried into orbit by commercial space lift - rockets owned and operated by corporations. Still worse, the warnings about bad weather are transmitted on commercial equipment, in some cases on commercial communications satellites. The horror! How is it that we manage to avoid daily disaster, given your thinking? Is it possible there is a piece of the puzzle you aren't accounting for? (One piece? More than that I think.)
"Government" is just a word for things we do together. "Corporation" is just a word for things we do together voluntarily. -- David Burgeâ@iowahawkblog
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I presume that someone is already 'guilty' of not getting this right ('this' being "able to see into the future" and predicting the need for weather satellites) so, the person(s) need to be charged, found giulty, and incarcerated. After all, that will always make a positive impression on scientists and engineers, as it did recently in Italy. This also applies to those responsible for the launcher, and the weather forecasters who clear the launch window, the space-junk trackers who clear the window, and so on...... :-)
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
And you're quoting crap numbers that are being spouted exclusively throughout the neoconservative echo chamber. Take Medicare out of it, and its way smaller. And this goes back into the healthcare cost fiasco that the Republican party absolutely refuses to allow to be solved.
Perhaps that's because just throwing money at the problem like this won't solve it. People fall into poverty because costs for everything rise but their wages are stagnant.
Welfare isn't supposed to reduce poverty. It's to keep those who are suffering from poverty or are at risk from starving or living in their cars or on the streets.
Which is what, exactly? Give up, mumble something, claim "victory" and run away? There's a reason you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. Like that lady on CNN who screamed that Obama was a communist, but was mentally incapable of defending her irrational, baseless statement when pressed and ran away.
Nonsense. Your point is utterly ridiculous and full of holes. You scream that something is a problem, use a number arrived at via bad means deliberately designed to rile the base up, and offer no solutions whatsoever. None. And you expect to be taken seriously.
What? You made no point to refute! You simply spout an invalid number and use it as an excuse to do what? Cut welfare? Why? What will you do with the people whose welfare you cut? "Make them get jobs?" What jobs? What will you do about the richest in this nation who move jobs out of the country? People end up on welfare because they can't support themselves for some reason and while I'm sure you console yourself by thinking "it's cause they're lazy" I am pretty sure that there are millions of people out there who WANT to work but can't because the jobs aren't there, or ARE working but are still suffering from poverty because the pay is crap.
No. That's just your twisted, self-centered view on those who reject your destructive worldview, namely that cutting taxes is the only solution, the poor should live in their cars (if they have them), the sick should die in the streets, and the only thing that matters are corporate profits and the size of the portfolios of the richest in the nation.
It costs millions to design and orbit a satellite, even if you're launching from a facility you didn't build on a launcher you didn't design.
The ability to compete in a market is dependent on the capital costs to enter the market. Go ahead, start this business. Put your money where your mouth is. Oh, you don't have it? Well go fucking figure.
Think for yourself ... Repeat after me ...
I wish it were physically painful to be this stupid.
Is it nominally the same or the same adjusted for inflation. I'm asking sincerely because I don't know. If it's nominally the same then it has about 50% less purchasing power. I do know that as a percentage of GDP Nasa is pretty low compared to its height during the space race.
Our voting does not matter and campaigning is just a gigantic waste of time and resources. Hence movements like this.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Space launch is something that costs billions of dollars. That's why the government uses commercial companies to help them out after the government-only launch programs stagnated years ago. Who is able to "put their money where there mouth is" regarding space launch or satellite design/build/deploy? If I did then why would I be posting on /. using a TRS-80?
The "liberal Kool-Aid" comment was referring to jhoegl's post that sounded like a Democratic talking paper. Didn't mean to jump the rails but comments like that really wear me down, unfortunately they are far too common as we're inundated with commercials and talking points ad nauseam.
I stand by the fact the government's role is not to design, build, launch, and operate satellites the boosters and the launch facilities. The government's role is to to state the strategic vision of the country, put incentives in place for corporations to meet those needs (unless military specific like GPS [originally] or DSP), and get out of the way.
http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=96
Your analogy would make sense if launch costs were a significant fraction of the total.
They're about $100M per sat.
Try again.
The crowd that insists that government is the problem, and we shouldn't be spending money on anything that is only understood by an educated elite, and sending things into space is a waste (as if we grind up the money and throw it up there), has kept un-funding things. Oddly enough a lot of them come from farming and natural-resource states where whether predictions can make a huge difference.
:-)
OTOH corporate interests should be enticed, by allowing them to advertise support. Get the people making cameras that survive crazy sports stunts involved in putting their stuff a little higher.
OTOOH maybe all the weather broadcasters should start paying for the images and information NOAA produces, like the GPS and map websites have to pay for map information (and spend their own money on their own camera crews).
From TFA:
The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites ...
Would someone please provide a link to the above quote?
And can someone please explain to us why is there no one has been punished for the $13 Billion loss due to mismanagement ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
than a year or 5 years. The economy is going to collapse from the excessive borrowing and ballooning of the interest rate on the debt, and we won't be launching ANY satellites for several decades, if ever again. If we get a debt up to 30, 40, 50 trillion, we'll likely never, ever be able to pay it off, and it will consume our entire economic output just to pay the interest. At that point, we become a 3rd world country. The only way out might be to simply cease to exist as the United States of America, and form a new country or several new countries that don't owe anything... I don't think there is any national equivalent to bankruptcy other than to cease to exist.
Yeah, let's go to Mars, a real smart use of space and money.
E Proelio Veritas.
The CRU data has been available for a while now. What have the "deniers" done with it, exactly ?
Let's just replace "deniers" with "critics", and use as our exemplar Steve McIntyre:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/04/25/cru-refuses-foi-request-for-yamal-climategate-chronology/ :
"Probably no single issue damages the reputation of the climate science community more than the refusal to show the data that supports their work, even under an FOI request. The public believes that scientists who purport to be concerned about the future of the planet should not place their own financial interests, including future grants, ahead of this concern, particularly when their research has been done with public funds.
Recently I sent an FOI request to the University of East Anglia for a regional chronology combining Yamal, Polar Urals and shorter (presumably Schweingruber) chronologies referred to in Climategate email 1146252894.txt, as well as a request for even a simple list of sites used to make the chronology. This request is for data that is central to Climategate. Yamal was in controversy in the days prior to Climategate. I drew particular attention to this issue and this series in my own submission. Unfortunately, the "inquiries" avoided the issue.
Not only did East Anglia refuse my request for the regional chronology, they even refused to identify the sites. The University claimed that even identifying the sites would result in "financial harm" to the university though an adverse impact on their "ability to attract research funding"."
Our voting does not matter...
You'll never know until you try.. People actually have to vote for alternatives to see if they work. Until then, they don't have much to complain about.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This graph shows both the nominal value and the inflation adjusted values up to 2005
Note that since 1988, the budget adjusted for inflation is higher than any time during the period 1973 to 1988 (the space shuttle began operational service in 1982)
It isnt that I think we shouldnt invest billions of dollars on space stuff, its that it is quite clearly obvious that NASA is a corrupt government organization shoveling money at corporations willy-nilly.
"His name was James Damore."
Repairing satellites in orbit seems like a perfect job for the space shuttles. Get in synchronous orbit, open the cargo doors, use the robot arm to pluck the satellite our of orbit, fix it, then place it back in orbit. Too bad they retired them all.
One could argue that corporate weather satellites would create a monopoly. We know how well those work out,
NOAA & NASA funds were cut to the bone by a 3 out past four congresses that disliked climate change. This alone doesnt explain the who situation. Articles say that NOAA project management has not been that good.
Perhaps not but the US Department of Defense seems to toss up satellites with cameras on a regular basis. I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why this is so hard. The basic sensing suite should be well established by now.
Taking the pictures is easy. Taking pictures at better resolution than the Russians/Chinese while keeping the technology advances needed to do that secret from them; that's probably where the money goes.
Oh, you wanted pictures of "weather"? Yes, we can do that. As long as it's "weather" that looks like tall pointy things that go "whoosh boom"...
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Quiet! Why do you think the Administration hasn't funded the satellite replacements!
It's the same as having PDE-propelled Aurora aircraft standing in for the SR-71s, or HAARP standing in for.. well, you get the idea. When you have weather control, you can leave weather reconaissance to the European satellite community... let THEM put it on the Internet. Did you think Tesla and then Langmuir were just allowed to look stupid and incompetent?
Now all we need is a fancy Burson & Marstellar campaign, like the one for the technology behind the Say-'n-Bank initiative in the Clinton administration. You remember -- the one that used the old CIA technology for B of A's initiative: it picked your request for bank balance information or whatever off the fillings in your teeth, relayed it via the NRO constellation to those silver antennae rotating on the billboards, and only you could read the data there...
Ask yourself, when's the last time the government did something and you were amazed at how little it cost.
Curiosity to Mars?
There are plenty of places the government does things well; they just aren't racked up and noticed as such. There are plenty of things private corporations couldn't do right on less overall money too... take various aspects of the Internet, where there are both positive examples and cautionary tales (like effective latency of an OC-3 backbone that allows either telephone packets or VOIP traffic to fill some of the 'unused' bandwidth...)
This isn't a 'conservative vs. liberal' or 'government vs. corporations' argument. It's a get-it-done-right argument, with get-it-done-cost-effectively as a comparatively minor secondary point. One of those things, like widespread SCORES-backed microlending programs, that will be effective regardless of nominal ideology (or nitwit name-calling...)
Corporations have the same incentive as government for efficiency, albeit enforced by different mechanisms.
It's just that in some cases, in some parts of the economy, the mechanisms that regulate a private company are better. Most of all, this applies to sectors of the economy where the rules of the business can change rapidly, where you have multiple competitors in a situation where the customers are equipped to make a truly well-informed decision, and where the benefit of cooperation does not exceed the positive outcomes of competition. To me, the best example of this is the computing industry, and a comparison between the US and Soviet computer industries are profoundly striking.
Now, that does not apply for all things, just a large amount of them. And one rather extreme counter-example is a weather service, where you're basically dealing with - first, basic research, which never makes fiscal sense to MBAs and so long-run R&D departments tend to get cut quite severely when parent organizations are privatized. Secondly, it's data processing based on the maximum number of data collection points. It's called a "natural monopoly"; Essentially, you want a monopoly rather than three or four organizations competing with a third or a fourth of the sensor coverage, so the task is best executed by a monopoly.
Besides, the US Weather Service is really pretty excellent. Their ability to constantly improve their quality of output is striking, and they are masters of prediction.
Private companies are quite robust because they always have a bottom line they can steer by. If you're in the black, you're doing fine. Government institutions can really only steer by the expectations of the voters, and by constantly lowering them that inherently causes the government efficiency to drop - so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Expecting efficiency from the public sector really does work.
I'm a big fan of the private market, but the extent to which a lot of people oversimplify its strengths and ignore weaknesses is counterproductive. The world is full of nuances.
toresbe
Errr... you have a point insofar as people more or less ignoring NOAA's own weather reports in preference to commercial alternatives goes, but you're dead wrong about satellites and radar. Those commercial stations depend upon the constellation of satellites and array of radar sites that are operated by NOAA, regardless of whether the actual construction was done by a government employee or contracted out to someone.
Yes, there are a few TV stations that have their own X-band weather radar, but they're mostly eye candy for the local audience (limited range, limited features). For their real forecasting work, they grab the level 2 data from NOAA's radar. You can argue about the need for NOAA's meteorologists, but you'd have to be completely delusional to think their data reconnaissance services could be adequately replaced by commercial alternatives. Not even The Weather Channel has the resources to send out the hurricane hunter planes, let alone maintain its own constellation of satellites and operate an array of radar sites with anything close to the scope and capabilities of NEXRAD and TDWR.
Would a 100% commercial enterprise be more efficient? Certainly. However, efficiency isn't everything. Availability matters, too. It's "efficient" (for the profits of an investor-owned power company) to just accept rolling blackouts for a day or two per year, instead of "over-building" their capacity to make sure it never, ever happens. That doesn't change the fact that it really sucks to be in one of those areas when the blackouts happen, and the cost of coming up with your own backup power is several orders of magnitude more than what it would have cost in higher monthly bills had the network just been engineered to a higher standard in the first place. A private company would roll the dice and risk the loss of a satellite or two for a few years, even though the marginal cost of the spares (spread across ~300 million taxpayers) is next to nothing. A private company can't do that, because it only has a few (compared to 300 million) paying customers, so the extra satellite goes from an extra cent or two per year in taxes to doubled (or more) monthly/annual subscription fees.
Plus, I should probably point out that weather affects interstate commerce in a major way, and is probably one of the most constitutionally-unambiguous responsibilities OF the federal government to handle.
In any case, if you think a spare satellite or two is expensive, take a wild guess how much it would cost to relocate SBX-1 to some location in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, or 200 miles off the east coast between Jacksonville and Cape Hatteras, to do stand-in duty as the most expensive weather radar platform in the history of meteorology (not to mention the damage it would almost certainly sustain if it were literally put in the path of a half-dozen hurricanes in a single year).
The Curiosity rover went overbudget and cost US taxpayers $2.5B (http://www.space.com/10762-nasa-mars-rover-overbudget.html). When America is running a $16T deficit and borrowing $T+ each year I think "nice to have" things like space exploration should take a back seat to feeding our citizens and keeping them/us safe. The US government is working on self-actualization yet US citizens are more focused on physiological and safety needs.
And accomplish just about everything with STRATOSPHERIC AUTONOMOUS AIRSHIPS, at a mere 25 miles out.
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/floattospace.html
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/NASASatelliteReEntryDanger.html
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/MonsterMarsRocket.html
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/4spaceprogramerrors.html