I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions.
This type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large.
Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
Part of the problem is you need to track all orbits for all constellations and free flyers as well as all orbital debris, and communicate across many communities of interest.
It is more national security & military adjacent
I’d stand up a joint agency for this requirement across DOD, NASA, NOAA, FAA, and Commercial Space/Newspace.
If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:
1. Social Security
2. Medicare & Medicaid
3. National Defense
4. Net Interest on the Public Debt
5. Income Security
6. Veterans Benefits & Services
7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability
... the US would still have a sizable deficit.
All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
Why isn’t the free market capable of doing this? Seems odd to spend money just to spend money. There’s plenty of incentive for other people to be doing this already…
This - among many other reasons - is why I’m increasingly throwing my opinions behind shoving these roles onto the United Nations instead of nation states or private companies. Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
Not to toot my own horn, but I've been building this free site with space weather and a lot of free data for folks to be able to do their own satellite conjunctions. We've even got a 7 day forecast with covariance so it's even easier.
We want to give out all the data we possibly can for free.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadThis type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large.
Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
It is more national security & military adjacent
I’d stand up a joint agency for this requirement across DOD, NASA, NOAA, FAA, and Commercial Space/Newspace.
If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:
1. Social Security
2. Medicare & Medicaid
3. National Defense
4. Net Interest on the Public Debt
5. Income Security
6. Veterans Benefits & Services
7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability
... the US would still have a sizable deficit.
All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
Also let's not forget Sharpie Gate and how the petty Orange Emperor appointed a climate science denier to a top position in NOAA.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...
Yet another systemic rat fucking so somebody can make a buck. It's only ever about the money.
Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it.
Then there are various spy satellites countries have that they dont want tracked? Or does the data from NOAA include spy satellites in strange orbits?
A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
We want to give out all the data we possibly can for free.
https://spacebook.com/
It's paid for by our enterprise SSA tools, but the spacebook site will always be free and not need a login to get access to the public APIs.
Next month we're rolling out a historical API so you can get the data all the way back to the 1950s and visualize it in the explorer.