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Government Space Democrats NASA Power News Politics

President Obama Orders Government To Plan For 'Space Weather' (nbcnews.com) 169

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: President Barack Obama today issued an Executive Order that defines what the nation's response should be to a catastrophic space weather event that takes out large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation. The Executive Order ideally will coordinate the responses across government agencies such as NASA, the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy and others to help minimize economic loss and save lives by enhancing national security, identifying successful mitigation technologies, and ordering the creation of nationwide response and recovery plans and procedures, the White House stated. Further, the Executive Order will enhance the scientific and technical capabilities of the United States, including improved prediction of space-weather events and their effects on infrastructure systems and services. By this action, the Federal Government will lead by example and help motivate State and local governments, and other nations, to create communities that are more resilient to the hazards of space weather. The Executive Order reinforces the formal National Space Weather Strategy and accompanying Action Plan which were announced last year. It also bolsters other work such as the replacement of aging satellites that monitor and help forecast space weather, proposing space-weather standards for both the national and international air space, development of regulations to ensure the continued operation of the electric grid during an extreme space weather event, proposing a new option for replacing crucial Extra High Voltage (EHV) transformers damaged by space weather, and developing domestic production sources for EHV transformers, the White House wrote.
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President Obama Orders Government To Plan For 'Space Weather'

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  • Confused (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Would "Space Weather" be studied by meteorologists?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14, 2016 @03:14AM (#53074513)

    I guess he heard how many people were going to vote for Giant Meteor 2016....

    • by Anonymous Coward


      buried alive...
      buried alive...

    • by Opyros ( 1153335 )
      I wish "being hit by a giant meteor in 2016" were actually on the ballot. It would be somewhat better than our other choices.
  • ... SPACE MADNESS!

  • Someone's been watching too much Family Guy.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Given the increasing "it was the russians" rhetoric for everything, and the escalation in sword rattling (eg. military drills), this seems to me more like a preparation for the result of a nuclear exchange than obama actually caring about space weather (or space anything).

    http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article1618135.ece
    http://uk.businessinsider.com/photos-russias-military-exercise-crimea-2016-9

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      The preparations you'd need for a nuclear attack would be vastly different, although clearly some elements would be in common.

      I've noticed in recent decades that nuclear EMP has become a popular plot device among authors as a way to set up their crypto-cowboy stories. I have nothing against a good adventure yarn, but these authors clearly don't understand the phenomenon very well, and obviously can't be bothered to think though the logic of nuclear strategy. A pre-emptive strike has to wipe out the enemy's

  • by TomGreenhaw ( 929233 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @06:11AM (#53074887)
    Should have been done years ago. Better late than never.
    • Necessary planning? Sure, but it requires funding and accountability which should be passed by Congress and not EO. So much for the US Constitution, people no longer even question the activity of Probably illegal actions.

      • I consider this a serious national defense issue. However it gets done, it needs doing before it's too late.

        If the executive branch waited for congress to agree on something, we might as well have anarchy.
        • by s.petry ( 762400 )

          Does not pass the logic test. Any argument can be framed in that same way. The allegations that Russia is responsible for hacking Podesta and the DNC are "serious national defense" issues if you actually believe that to be true. Allegations that there is a conspiracy to elect a specific person to office is similarly a "serious national defense" issue.

          Facts should be used to determine priorities and projects, not ambiguous fallacies.

          • In 1989 a solar event caused a widespread long duration blackout in Quebec. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea... [nasa.gov]

            If an event like the 1859 Carrington solar event occurred today, our modern infrastructure would be devastated. The geologic record indicates that these occur at least every few hundred years https://mic.com/articles/11774... [mic.com] . At our current state of readiness most of the US could be without power for an estimated six months. The spare parts to repair our power grid simply do not exist. Because s
            • Pointing out that a scary event could happen because there was once a small event is the exact logic failure I wrote about previously. Do you have any non fallacious arguments for why this should be done by Executive order and should not be done by Congress? Make sure you consider that a "Real" project would require tax payer funding and accountability.

              I'm guessing that you can't find any, which is why you went to the appeal to emotion.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    It's far more likely to be preparation against a false-flag "Russian" EMP attack on the USA.
    Just saying ... you know ... if the White House were actually concerned about bad weather and disruption, there might be a little more planning for hurricanes.

  • Carrington Event (Score:5, Informative)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @06:59AM (#53075011)

    A lot of sick, sick burns from the ACs today. Try reading up on the Carrington Event and consider what a geomagnetic storm that generated visible aurora in southern Florida would do to a modern electric grid and telecommunication system. Not quote so funny.

    sPh

    • by Anonymous Coward

      True, it is certainly a valid issue, if one were to take up priorities with monetary coverage then they would be better off focusing on LWAS (Living With A Star). However, it is still doubly effective in terms of having an emergency response to restore communications and power, because like above poster stated, the difference in geo/sun magnetic and electromagnetic is causation. This is more likely for nuclear response.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The comments on this story are a shitshow of idiocy. No good will come of you trying to read them.

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @08:17AM (#53075207) Journal

    ...there have been conversations about the consequences of such for 30+ years (certainly since the concept of EMP gained widespread understanding).

    If the country's emergency planners haven't already taken that into account (insofar as they're able with whatever budget they're given) they should be fired.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      That is precisely the problem. They have NOT been planning on this. A Carrington event is going to happen again. We just don't know when. An EMP may or may not happen, but given that we continue to do nothing to stop N. Korea (why don't we just use Aegis cruisers to shoot down all their missiles???) the likelihood is not going down. We should at least stockpile transformers and the like, a very cheap precaution, but we don't even do that. Some day, WHEN this happens, you'll wish you'd stocked up on th

      • Re:Umm (Score:5, Informative)

        by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @11:40AM (#53076047) Homepage Journal

        I don't know about "not been planning". The Bill Clinton administration proposed and initiated NASA's "Living with a Star" program, which GWB continued to fund throughout his administration, so if this is some kind of Democratic conspiracy, the Bush administration was in on it Obama's administration has been working on space weather for years, to their credit, although to be fair that's after this issue has been discussed by scientifically literate people ever since the '89 event.

        The reason that conspiracy theorists come swarming out of the woodwork when something like this makes the news is that they get their news from lunatic fringe news sources. Ironically the mainstream media pays more attention to what is being said by crackpots than it does to articles in science and policy journals. For better or worse ignorant conspiracy theorists drive public discourse. If they haven't noticed the government has been working on this, then it must be new -- an therefore sinister.

        • Specifically they like the space weather data from STEREO, which comes down highly compressed on 30m dishes, rather than the larger Deep Space Network dishes. (70m?).

          They keep insisting that image artifacts are evidence of space ships larger than earth that travel million of miles an hour. This of course assumes that what's being seen in the images are 1 AU away, and not simply particles that are inches away from the telescope (or even hitting the detector directly)

          (I was designated 'Emergency On

          • by hey! ( 33014 )

            You can almost envy people like that. I had a friend in high school who believed all that kind of stuff: UFO abductions, crypto-biology, pyramid power, orgone energy. He once built a UFO detector which he assured me he knew worked perfectly because it went off all the time. If you went for a walk in the woods with him, he actually believed there was a chance you'd run across what I can only describe as fairies.

            The thing was he ended up in a cult. I ran into him a few years after he'd been out of it and

  • Would you like to know more?

  • by p51d007 ( 656414 )
    Like the government could fix anything.
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      The EPA did a good job of cleaning up the air after the 60s and 70s showed just how bad it could get. The NTSB does a good job of forcing transportation failures to get fixed so they do not re-occur. The NiH does a good job of fixing diseases so you don't die from them, sure the job remains unfinished but they've had many successes. SS as fixed Grandma coming to live with you because she has no other means of support. The FDA does a good job keeping Joe's Bait and Wholistic Drug Emporium from selling you ra

  • I'm glad to see someone taking the risk of a Carrington event seriously. However, an executive order is simply not enough. Electric utilities, comm. carriers are not going to spend money to protect themselves from a very high impact, low probability event. It will take Congressional action to allocate money to harden to infrastructure to protect against such an event. Anything less is just political posturing.

    • by belthize ( 990217 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @09:46AM (#53075527)

      They did. Last year they passed this:https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3410 which was an extension of the original 2013 CIPA and included language about 'space weather'.

      And as directed the WH released in October of 2015 their directive to DHS and other departments to develop a plan for studying the impact of such an event.

      This year the amended 2016 bill https://www.congress.gov/bill/... [congress.gov] stalled (from what I can tell) and the WH issued an executive order to develop a plan for responding to such an event as directed by congress.

      I know, particularly on sites like /. that it's cool to throw stones at the government and cast the rest of the world as incompetent but this is an example of government working, not government failing.

  • This should have been one of their top priorities for the stimulus spending in 2009. Better late than never; but if an event happens before they implement it wont matter will it?
  • One thing to remember is that if a global event happened taking out much of the planet's electronics happened, even though our military is hardened against EMP, not EVERYTHING is the military is. I'm sure the Pentagon has wargamed this out, but if you are another power looking to take advantage of the chaos that would be the time to do it.
  • There is a lot of overlap between preparing for solar caused events like the 1859 Carrington event and modern EMP weapon detonation (which would be similar to a man-made Carrington event).

    Based on the 1859 event accounts, we could expect massive infrastructure failure in certain parts of the world if such an event would repeat itself. The storm was a nuisance with the main damages being to telegraph operators and equipment back then. Today, it could be catastrophic.

    There have been large solar events that

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