Our Weather Satellites Are Dying 193
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.'"
Subcontract (Score:1)
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Probably because the measurement data from Russia or China would not be too useful. Note the following bit from the summary (emphasis by me): "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."
Link for $13 Billion mismanagement, please !!! (Score:2)
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 ??
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Where did you get $13 billion loss from? It is a $13 billion program that has been poorly managed so the replacement satellite is behind schedule, that does not mean the $13 billion ia a loss. Let me guess you do Romney's books too.
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No, I said nothing of the kind. Perhaps you might read my post again, this time, you know, actually paying attention to the words I used.
Re:Subcontract (Score:4, Interesting)
They probably still have a shitload of high-resolution equipment above the US anyway. Might as well get some money out of it.
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Better yet, sub it all out to Germany. We need data, not to own satellites.
Re:Subcontract (Score:5, Funny)
If you really want to save money have China build the satellites. They might even launch them in geosynchronous orbit over the US for free.
NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pocket (Score:5, Insightful)
NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pockets may they can pay for one.
Re:NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pocket (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and put all the data behind a paywall... Not a good idea.
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Sounds like a great idea. I'd pay 10 cents a day for a good weather service, especially one without management problems like the governments' weather program. SpaceX might make this tech affordable now. Maybe this gap will provide the impetus needed to get a better weather prediction system going.
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No they wouldn't, because there's no way to exclusively capture the value created by the investment.
Insurance companies, at least, have a direct financial stake in this information. But since there's no way to warn their own customers without also warning the other insurance company's customers, so all companies end up benefitting equally - again, no incentive to invest.
Just because everybody would clearly benefit from doing
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I smell an amendment to copyright law...
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Wrong way round, folks.
Guess who lobbied to ensure the US weather data was made "public" (ie. available to Accuweather, local TV networks, etc.)?
There is a nice little story in Ireland about the wren being the king of birds. All the birds got together and had a competition to see who was best.
They decided the matter by a seeing who could fly the highest. The Eagle thought it would win easily, but when it got as high as it could, the little wren, which had been sitting on the eagles shoulder, jumped a foot h
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Re:NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pocket (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they? When they can get the government to do it.
Why would they launch their own satellites if the government did NOT do it for them? Look, they've done well repackaging the text data you've always been able to get from NOAA. They take the raw imagery, doll it up and spin it around in various eye-watering, stomach-churning ways. They're in the data presentation business, not the data production business.
Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment, and in general the investment in substance by information-media has dropped through the floor. News outfits cutting back on things like foreign bureaues and local reporters and shifting their content to opinion; and you expect them to pick up the 655 million dollars it takes to field the JPSS-1 and the 12.6 *billion* of the entire program?
What the American government really seems to do is funnel tax payers money into companies.
Well, sure. If you're going to have a space program, it's either funnel taxpayers' money into companies or into programs staffed by government workers. The question shouldn't be where the money ends up, it should be value for money. A decade of accurate storm tracking is easily worth 12 billion bucks to America as a whole; it's just not worth 12 billion to any single private entity.
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Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment
My bad. The satellite renting that I mentioned in my previous reply was for a 90s program not for the coming gap. I'll just say though that even if you know the gap is going to be there, it's still not much of a competitive advantage since it only lasts for five years. If you're thinking about launching weather satellites (of the sort that'll have the "data gap") anyway, then that could help pay for some of your expenses. But I doubt anyone will start thinking about it just to take advantage of a short gap.
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No problem. I read TFA too and I figured you'd just misread it. You're right about the shortness of the gap, but I took the poster's intent as being that the government shouldn't provide weather data at all, leaving that to the private sector. I was addressing that scenario (the government gets out of the weather data business) rather than the gap scenario.
Re:NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pocket (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would it take that news outfit $12 billion? Just because it costs government a lot, doesn't mean that it should cost a private entity the same.
I would hope that if it costs $13 billion for some weather satellites, that nobody is foolish enough to pay it. Well, of course the government was that foolish.. but hey.
This works out to a years income for 288,888 people at the median ($45K) level. No, not the taxes they pay.. THEIR ENTIRE INCOME.
Or, with that kind of money you can order the production a whopping 260,000 commercial drones at $50,000 per unit. You can *lose* 71 commercial drones per day for 10 years and still not match the cost of these new weather satellites.
I am amazed at how often the cost that these projects consume doesnt greatly offend peoples senses. $10 billion costs $77 per household. Money like that adds up quickly.. a couple hundred projects like that and you've got the american government in a nutshell.
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Are these really just weather satellites?
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Egads, $13BN is a horrifying price. The current mission to Mars was $2.6BN, and that's with a kickass rover flying itself to the surface.
Are these really just weather satellites?
A good question.
Given that there have been many examples of DoD "piggybacking" military functions onto "pure science" missions before (starting from GRAB [wikipedia.org] and continuing through TDRSS [fas.org]), and that polar orbits are very valuable for planetary mapping of all kinds, tricky and expensive to launch into, and very dangerous if not strictly controlled, because of the danger of intersecting any amount of space junk and going 'splat' - I'd lay somegood money that most of these "weather" satellites are actually dual-mi
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As AC pointed out below, this cost likely includes the design, build, launch and maintenance for the satellite. Before Space-x The launch alone could have been a tenth or more of that total $13B, as most weather satellites are around 3000 kg (http://noaasis.noaa.gov/NOAASIS/ml/genlsatl.html), but with Space-X's projected costs per payload ($850/lb from Delta Heavy's $8600/lb) (http://www.nss.org/articles/falconheavy.html) this cost likely can now be in the single $M range.
While economies of scale wo
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Don't bother with logic, the right wingers have no logic anymore. I say let them have there cuts, I hope he is on the east coast and suddenly wakes up to a hurricane taking out his home. It will be the 1800's all over again...good times. They can have there falling bridges, pot hole riddled streets, lead filled paint, disease riddled food and no weather satellites, I assume they wont complain as long as the rich have there tax cuts and a at least one war to justify the extra spending on the military. Me, ill be moving to Canada.
Their's a flaw in your plan somewhere. Perhaps if they're were better education there wouldn't people of such profound ignorance out their. Maybe it's all the lead in they're food.
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The alternative to that deficit is completely destroying the economy. We aren't out of the recession yet, cutting govt spending during a recession amplifies the recession and you get a double-dip like in the UK or the 30s.
Re:NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pocket (Score:4, Informative)
Estimates are it takes 1-5 M/ mile of coastline to evacuate before a hurricane.
Improved observations from the 1970s cut the estimates for where a hurricane will make landfall from ~300miles to ~50 miles radius,
(24 hours out, I think; I'm not an American, but remembering numbers quoted from a US colleague in the business).
So, better forecasts cut the cost of evacuating from a hurricane by ~100 Million a time, easy to save 12 gigabucks a decade.
Yes, we do measure this. Every met service I know of (e.g. NOAA) has to explain its budget.
I'm not sure of the US numbers, but in the UK the return on investment in meteorology is ~x11 fold, according to external auditors.
The Federal Acquisitions System is Broken (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Federal Acquisitions System is Broken (Score:5, Interesting)
We had a guest speaker at an ASME meeting a month and a half ago talking about this very issue, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar. She was speaking about her talks with congress about the importance of replacing these weather satellites and the response she got from the representatives was "why do we need satellites, can't we just get our weather from the internet".
A republic only works if you send your best and brightest off to handle the day-to-day decisions.Representatives that got their job via a popularity contest are usually no more fit make technical decisions than guys and gals who won the homecoming king & queen positions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrrj9Wc2L84 [youtube.com]
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Re:The Federal Acquisitions System is Broken (Score:4, Interesting)
why do we need satellites, can't we just get our weather from the internet
Obviously ridiculous, but I do have to point out that at least for weather data from populated areas, the Internet is potentially a very useful tool. Scattering large numbers of inexpensive, land-based, Internet-connected weather stations could be done for a tiny fraction of the cost of a satellite launch. I'd be thrilled to install one at my house, for example.
Of course, those sorts of stations wouldn't provide coverage of un-populated areas, water-covered areas, etc., and wouldn't provide the same sort of information, so they're not a replacement. Seems like they would be useful, though.
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Citizen Weather Observer Program:
http://www.wxqa.com/index.html [wxqa.com]
And to quell the alarm from the AC below:
http://www.wxqa.com/aprswxnetqc.html [wxqa.com] talks about the accuracy of the data and feedback to the user, along with a lot of good info about siting your station.
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They really wouldn't be all that useful, because they don't provide any information other than what's happening locally at ground level - a very detailed 2D look at a tiny slice of a 3D system.
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They really wouldn't be all that useful, because they don't provide any information other than what's happening locally at ground level - a very detailed 2D look at a tiny slice of a 3D system.
Certainly it wouldn't do away with the need for weather balloons and satellites. My friends at NCAR disagree that it wouldn't be useful.
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NCAR of course isn't in the business of weather forecasting... which renders their opinion irrelevant to some degree. Useful for research isn't the same thing as useful for operations.
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NCAR of course isn't in the business of weather forecasting... which renders their opinion irrelevant to some degree. Useful for research isn't the same thing as useful for operations.
Because research has no effect on operations. Right.
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I didn't say that. I just pointed out that the topic at hand is operations, not research. Reading comprehension is your friend.
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I didn't say that. I just pointed out that the topic at hand is operations, not research. Reading comprehension is your friend.
Is it really? Satellites are only used for operations, not research?
Obviously, operations and research go hand in hand; both use the same data sources, experience from operational weather prediction provides input for research and research provides new tools for operations. I don't think you can divide them quite so neatly. My friends at NCAR would agree, and so would the folks who operate MADIS -- which in fact integrates data of exactly the sort I suggest in to the data sets used for operational weat
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Since the cheapest reliable, accurate and internet enabled sensor suite is about $1500 (I just bought 125 rainwise portaloggers for a company I work for ) exactly who will pay for these sensors?
I'm skeptical they couldn't be purchased in large volume for much less, but you could buy several thousand at that price for the cost of a single satellite, without even considering launch cost. Who? The NWS, obviously, though I might actually be willing to chip in a bit myself. I've been considering installing one of the commercially-available options, actually, just for fun.
Who will do the quality control?
What quality control? Device quality control should be done by the manufacturer. Siting quality control could be done by providi
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I'll answer your complaints point by point because it's fun, but there's really a single-"word" answer to nearly everything you said:
CWOP. Google it.
Please try talking to vendors and find one, just one mind you, that is willing to deliver thousands of sensor suites in say a year. When you find one that won't charge a premium for your order call me I'll buy a thousand.
You don't understand how volume purchasing works. You go to a vendor and commit to buy several thousand units per year and you will get a discount. Guaranteed high-volume contracts are extremely valuable to manufacturers.
You mean when a bird builds a nest under the transmitter/receiver head on an ultrasonic anemometer the manufacturer will come out an clean out the nest? Maybe you mean when spiders build a dense web across the mouth of the rain gauge the manufacturer will come out and clean it?
Is there some reason I couldn't do that myself?
Better yet as the RH sensor degrades due to pollution you will accept as realistic the RH the sensor reports.
I might, but I'm sure the NWS knows how to compensate for such issues.
Your private network has a level of robustness that it won't fail to transmit your data, when several thousands of people hit your server to suck the data down?
Bah, that's an easy
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My neighborhood is littered with ~$500 weather stations (I think mostly oregon scientific) that are all connected to the internet and report to weather underground. I thought for a while about getting my own, and realized it was silly as it was pretty easy to interpolate from 3-4 stations within a half mile of me. They generally report data consistent with one another (temp, RH, wind, rainfall) and most update pretty frequently. I googled the Rainwise, and it looks like it has features that aren't critic
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In fact the cost to create enough weather bouys and pay their on-going failure/replacement rate would greatly exceed the cost of a single weather satellite covering the same territory.
Satellites and weather balloons (I'm guessing that's what you meant by "buoys") gather different, and complementary, kinds of information. Neither is a replacement for the other.
best and brightest (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If ever there were a post that should be allowed to be +10 insightful, this is it.
We the people of germany. (Score:5, Funny)
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 ?
Re:We the people of germany. (Score:5, Funny)
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I usually don't reply to ACs, as an AC or not, but I had to reply to this AC who replied to the other AC to say that I think replying to ACs is all right as long as you don't reply to ACs who post about replying to ACs. If you must reply to an AC who posts about replying to ACs, at least do so as an AC. Thanks.
Re:We the people of germany. (Score:5, Funny)
Although German engineers excel at terrestrial technology, like BMW and Porsche, their space technology has not been nurtured. After the war, the Russians took their German scientists, to build their Russian space program, and the US took their German scientists, to build their US space program. Anyone who was left over in Germany was like the nerdy kid to get picked last for a team in school sports.
In fact, the last German weather satellite was a total failure. It was called Satelliten Chefkoch Hauptleitungsabzweigklemme Überwachungstechnik Leitungsschutzschalter Teleauskunft Zeitverschiebung, or SCHULTZ for short. When queried about the weather, it simply replied:
"I see NOTHING . . . NOTHING!"
Anthropomorphism (Score:3)
Yes, but are they scared or sad that they are dying?
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Weather control satellite? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
This is what you get... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is what you get... (Score:4, Insightful)
"...when you over-spend on military interventions and bullying the world, and under-spend on useful tech."
Where do you think SATELLITE technology and the ability to LAUNCH them came from? The Peaceful Space Tech Fairie?
Serious question (Score:5, Funny)
Why are we building meteorological satellites when we have the Weather Channel?
Perhaps weather data isn't a priority to some(??) (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll probably get some troll points for this, but after watching the recent Frontline titled Climate of Doubt [pbs.org], 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...
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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.
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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
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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.
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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/ [climateaudit.org] :
"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
Perhaps I should enlighten a few people here. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [noaa.gov]
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 [noaa.gov] 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.
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Very interesting - thanks for posting. I had no idea that sun-syncronous orbits existed, let alone how they worked (wiki helped with that). It sounds like it would be a great orbit to be in if you were a space tourist - the view you'd get riding the terminator would be very dramatic.
Re: the weather satellites, if things get really bad, maybe NOAA can take over that spy sat that DOD donated to NASA (as I heard it, NASA got a late-model spy sat to use for astronomy but doesn't have the cash to launch it). (re [space.com]
Not surprised (Score:2)
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 commit
Hey! (Score:2)
Action Plan: Charge and incarcerate the guilty (Score:2)
Small-government anti-science space-is-a-waste ... (Score:2)
OTOH corporate interests should be enticed, by allowing them to advertise support. Get the people making cameras
combination climate funding & inept management (Score:2)
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You say it like "us assholes" want it the way it is.
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Our voting does not matter and campaigning is just a gigantic waste of time and resources. Hence movements like this. [nationalpopularvote.com]
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Ah yes. A fine representative from the Grand Old Sociopath Party.
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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
Re:Your one party system has failed you (Score:5, Insightful)
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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!
Tornado Warning brought to you by Red Bull (Score:5, Funny)
"Tornados also give you wings!" Cut to 30 second commercial.
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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
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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 p
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Re:Your one party system has failed you (Score:4, Informative)
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 [twitter.com]
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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 mostl
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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".
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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.
O
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I agree with you, but the problem is that the first usable satellites were all launched at roughly the same time - so you are stuck on a 20-year cycle. Having all satellites flying from the same generation probably makes support less complicated as well.
For what it's worth, my company has been incrementally improving the same platform since the early 90s, and it has been a pretty successful strategy. Every time some hot-shot manager flies in and tries to change things too much, he falls on his face and is g
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Good idea, but expensive. As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, historically, the launch has been so overwhelmingly expensive that there has been a tendency to overengineer every satellite into a Ferrari in an effort to do only one launch instead of 4. And, knowing you only get one launch, you get paranoid about trying to make that Ferrari be as reliable as a... very reliable brand of car. So you end up with two opposing forces, which tear the program to bits. You can't build a reliable Ferra
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According to the GAO [gao.gov], the average cost of an Atlas V launch this year is $200 million. That's up somewhat from years past, but not radically higher. So for years now, that's been the cost of a launch. Talking about per ton doesn't really mean much because you couldn't select a lower capacity launch vehicle for less money--there wasn't one available. A Falcon 9 [spacex.com] today costs $54 million complete, including insurance. (Since the government typically self-insures, presumably it could be less for an NOAA lau
Re:Next generation? (Score:5, Funny)
The new weather satalites will access The Cloud to speed deployment and reduce support costs.
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Idiot! There aren't any clouds in space!
Space Cloudz (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Next generation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Next generation? (Score:4, Interesting)
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....
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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 an
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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"...
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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.
Re:Next generation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [tqn.com]
Heck, feel free to compare and contrast a 1999 cell phone with one made in 2010.
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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.
Re:Next generation? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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If it helps, Netcraft has confirmed the death of Netcraft confirmations.
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Close. Plenty of people pay their taxes, whether they want to or not.
The problem is that politicians would then rather spend those taxes on something new and shiny than on maintaining the existing infrastructure. New and shiny gets votes, repair jobs don't.
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