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Proposed NOAA Budget Kills Program Designed to Prevent Satellite Collisions
- tomrod 1y agoI 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.
- nwatson 1y agoSomeone will propose privatization of said program with insurance fees covering the reformulated collision-prevention service. Of course, privatization will leave out crucial aspects, lead to failures, increasing untraceable space debris from which nobody will be safe, and eventually bankruptcy of said privatized program, with no way back. As is happening in other parts of government.
- staplers 1y agoPrivatized profits, socialized costs
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yapyap 1y agoOrrrr said privatized thing will start out relatively cheaper than the norm and eventually end up costing way more than what the government was originally spending when it was still part of the government since the private company eventually outpriced everyone with their cheap prices and then when they finally got their monopoly scaled up their prices as much as they feasibly could and then some.
- slater 1y agoSurely you jest! /s
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Someone will propose privatization of said program Someone would if given the time and infrastructure. This, on the other hand, is more DOGE-style idiocy.
- tetris11 1y agoso, Planetes then
- sho_hn 1y agoI get this reference! Even as an anime grump, I liked this one.
- throwaway6734 1y agoA fantastic show
- Rebelgecko 1y agoThe privatization of this data has always been the plan, IIRC that's why the first Trump administration pulled some of these efforts out of the military
- alistairSH 1y agoIt was never about reducing spending. It was always about the grift. See also the BBB - massive benefits to the donor class, and a shit sandwich for the rest of us.
- conartist6 1y agoBut people who send things to space are often liberal. For example they often have attended college and believe in science. The political intent behind a new dark age makes sense if you think of the goal as being to destroy competent institutions which represent a real threat to an anti-science, post-truth administration
- tomrod 1y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> One uses science as a tool This requires a base rate of literacy and critical thinking that a lot of Americans, unfortunately, lack.
- tomrod 1y agoNot the majority. A bit less than 20%, the remaining support coming from people who think politics is a tribal engagement like watching a sports team. Or those that listen to bags of hot wind like Yarvin, Rogan, or Thiel.
- conartist6 1y agoPeople want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge. What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic). At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)
- tetha 1y ago> 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. This might also be a program in which the goals of a privatized for-profit company are rather bad in the broader context. If you pay me millions to track and possibly control your satellite in orbit so it doesn't collide... I'll invest in rocket companies to launch more satellites. Even if they are very silly satellites. After all, if they collide, the debris will most likely miss the shareholders, and then you get more satellites to get contracts for. And who cares if some of those invaluable scientific systems with year-long plans get knocked out?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> get the desire to reduce government spending It should be incredibly clear that the motivation for these folks isn’t reducing government spending (or cutting waste). The problem is the programme is at NOAA, and NOAA tells a story about the climate that some folks don’t like. So they trash the messenger and his tools.
- moralestapia 1y ago>This type of program has high value per dollar spent. Care to elaborate? What's the value that comes back?
- Rebelgecko 1y agoIf you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead. And that's not even counting the negative externalities of unintended conjunctions. Kessler Syndrome is the boggieman of course, but even a few thousand pieces of debris from a single conjunction makes life harder for everyone who operates in space.
- moralestapia 1y agoHas this ever happened?
- cco 1y agoYes it has.
- moralestapia 1y agoSource? Google doesn't give me anything.
- Bootvis 1y agoThere is a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
- mschuster91 1y agoThere was a collision between two comm satellites about 16 years back [1], and that was with satellites that we could track and theoretically control - with the debris collision of 2005 [2], that makes two events. We've been lucky that this is the only publicly known satellite to collide with another satellite, other than satellites that got shot down as a demonstration of power. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision [2] https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.html https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.h...
- epistasis 1y agoI don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. Except political pork like price supports for large industrial farmers in the Midwest. ;-)
- tomrod 1y agoFor certain industries, there are reasonable arguments to be made to keep domestic and support via price controls. Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no. (I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).
- tbrownaw 1y agoWould something like mandating a significant amount of ethanol (from corn) in gasoline be an effective way to so this?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pstuart 1y agoIt can be, when it's invested in butter rather than guns. Yes, military investments have paid off in new technologies (e.g., Arpanet) but as a whole only reward the owners of the Military Industrial Complex.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoGovernment is expensive because it does a lot. There is a lot of trouble with bureaucrats defending fiefdoms that would be better consolidated, but you can't fix that with an axe.
- ajmurmann 1y agoThe vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military. I'm sure there are other things that could be cut and there is always room for more efficiency but it's always gonna be a drop in the bucket compared to entitlements and military. That said, regulations that make the economy less dynamic and slow stuff down have a high opportunity cost. While it's bureaucrats that write the implementation details and enforce them, it's congress who requires it to happen with AFAIK often little regard to how it would be executed in practice.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago> The vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military. The vast majority of the government budget is "entitlements and military" because donors have their pork classified as those things when they don't want it to be cut. A lot of entitlement programs are structured as handouts to the companies providing those services (e.g. drug and healthcare companies, or landlords) or vote buying of affluent retirees who don't actually need a government subsidy. And I'd like to see someone try to claim with a straight face that there is no waste in the military budget. But even within those budgets, most of the waste and corruption isn't a single program going to a single place. It's millions of programs that each waste millions of dollars and collectively waste trillions of dollars. And then it doesn't matter if you classify the program as military or entitlements or something else; what matters is if the program is worth the candle. The problem is that everybody will say that their program is worth it, many them are lying, and it's hard to tell who isn't. But the thing that's unambiguously true is that the amount of government revenue has been stable as a percentage of GDP for generations and has been growing in terms of real dollars per capita, and yet the amount of government spending has outpaced that by a huge and growing amount. Is DOGE making a hash of things? Maybe, but then let's do a better job instead of using it as an excuse to keep running reckless deficits until the largest item in the federal budget is interest.
- oklder 1y agoSticker shock to prior generations who feel fiat economics valuations aren’t just propaganda …this gossip really matters! Shock to the sort who have seen inflation get to where $600k/yr buying power in 2025 is equivalent to $200k/yr in the 1980s and well beyond the tiny earnings that would have been quite common when Chuck Grassley was a wee lad. It’s biological ossification. Physics is ageist. We should be reminding the elders rather than enable and ignore their ageism against youth they leverage through politics.
- eastbound 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zer00eyz 1y ago> I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions. This is an international issue being funded by the US taxpayer regardless of their own utilization of said services. Programs like these need to exist, but services like starlink should be the ones footing the bill. The military and weather services would need larger budgets to fund their portion of this effort so some of it would come back to "general taxes" but a much smaller amount. Meanwhile, All those other groups and nations with launch capabilities and a vested intrest in NOT having issues could be contributing too. > Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests. These efforts need to be funded with a tax to support them, and not all be drawn from the same general fund. It would make the arguments about "taxes" and "spending" much more reasonable.
- ourmandave 1y agoWhat about a Universal Service Fund, like the FCC has for telecom? https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund Star Link and other companies can charge back their customers what they pay into the fund. Like how AT&T hits me for the Fed USF, the 20 States Fund, and state and local taxes. https://www.att.com/legal/terms.otherWirelessFeeSchedule.html https://www.att.com/legal/terms.otherWirelessFeeSchedule.htm...
- jandrewrogers 1y agoI've worked as a related subject matter expert in a few countries. I can think of a possible reasonable justification for this. In recent years, the operating environment in orbital space has changed rapidly, and it isn't just the number of objects. These changes are outside the design assumptions of traditional orbital traffic systems, degrading their effectiveness. In response to this reality, governments with significant space assets have been investing in orbital traffic systems that are capable of dealing with the modern environment. However, these rely heavily on classified technology and capability to address the limitations of the older systems. An argument could be made that it no longer makes sense to fund a public system that is descending into obsolescence due to lack of capability and which can't be meaningfully fixed because that would require exposing classified technical capabilities that no one is willing to expose. In this scenario, the private sector is acting as an offramp from a system that had no future technically. Space has turned into an interesting place, in the curse sense. It isn't as simple as it used to be.
- counters 1y agoSure. Great. But that explanation isn't being offered by the powers-that-be. So there's no point trying to rationalize it post-hoc. There's no evidence that this is anything more than yet another round of ideologically-fueled maladministration.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoThis isn't an explanation that can be offered, at least politically. It invites questions that governments in several developed countries have clearly decided they don't want as part of the public narrative influencing policy. This is the default choice when the real explanation is more complicated, obscure, or technical than will fit in a soundbite, which would be the case in the scenario I hypothesized. Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to. Much easier to use a plausible soundbite related to the current thing. Most people aren't paying attention anyway.
- counters 1y ago
- browningstreet 1y agoThere’s no plausible discussion of reducing spending when the added debt commensurate with that effort is as astronomical as it is. This is privatization and federal dismantling, and it’s happening so fast and recklessly it will also show up as cultural and civil destruction too. He’s wrecking America so that technocrats can buy it all up. There’s no intended upside for citizens or for the society they make up. People die and his supporters shrug and defend. It’s Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish as political policy, but reduced by hyperscaling to “eviscerate”.
- tomrod 1y agoYep. It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
- browningstreet 1y agoOne reason I’m not especially hopeful is that the resistance is mostly still focused on highlighting the breaches with no actual follow-up. There’s no “Team Resistance”. The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future. But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle. So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
- tomrod 1y agoAye. Dominionism winning was not on my mid-2000s Bingo card. Maybe we have elections again and reject this march towards Gilead.
- 1y ago
- ck2 1y agoIt's not about reducing spending (they just added $3+ TRILLION this year out of four) It's about destroying science, not just current science but the future of science. By destroying all existing structure so that it will cost trillions to rebuild so impossible anytime soon. Including academia that seeds the science. They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives".
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago"They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives"." That's how I feel too. "Conservative" should mean "cautious and slow", not "destroy as quickly as possible"
- pstuart 1y agoIt would help if we had consensus on what Government is. Many (including myself) believe that Government should be for "the common good", via a legal system, government investments in shared needs/resources, etc. The current admin believes that Government exists for only two reasons: personal enrichment and punishing perceived enemies. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see that happening.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bpodgursky 1y agoThe fundamental problem is that the public 1. Wants to cut the budget so we don't go broke 2. Punishes anyone who talks about unsustainable retirement, disability, and healthcare entitlement programs. So, they get politicians who try to find a third way, even if it doesn't make a budgetary difference. To get out of this, the public (especially the boomer retiree population) needs to be more mature about the fiscal situation they put the country in and realize they are not living within their means.
- watwut 1y agoCurrent big beautiful bill will: - Make debt larger and risk make usa go broke. - Cut retirement disability, and healthcare entitlement programs. It will however cut taxes for bilionaires and republicans love it.
- root_axis 1y ago> I get the desire to reduce government spending I think we need to stop pretending like anyone cares about reducing government spending, it's a total waste of time and allows the discussion to be misdirected away from the specifics of what the money is actually being spent on.
- bix6 1y ago[flagged]
- fnord77 1y ago> The math for privatization does not make sense to me When everything is considered, privatization rarely makes sense.
- mschuster91 1y ago> The math for privatization does not make sense to me? It does when you assume that some rich person will end up taking that over and the government(s of the world) paying for it. Always, especially with this admin, assume grift of one or another kind behind anything.
- haiku2077 1y ago> I asked Chat what it thinks private systems would cost and it suggests around half+. I am genuinely unsure why someone would think an LLM could accurately estimate that kind of cost and would like to know your reasoning.
- jjtheblunt 1y agomy guess is people lend 'Chat' credibility since it's definitely read more of the internet than any one person. of course (to your point) that credibility overlooks possibilities for algorithmic bugs
- bix6 1y agoYeah the whole point is it’s a quick way to synthesize a lot. It’s not foolproof but neither is anything else on the internet.
- ben_w 1y agoI've set some of these models to work synthesising summaries etc. based on my own blog posts; LLMs are surprisingly middling at synthesising info from documents — I've seen even good models elide significant content, go on distracted rambles about other topics in the same area, and even invert the meanings of points being made. Use them the way you'd have used Wikipedia in 2008: a starting point from which you can do actual research, but you have to watch out for a lot of unverified junk as well.
- OrvalWintermute 1y agoPart 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.
- cowsandmilk 1y agoHaving a joint program across all those would cost far more money.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoThe project managers and consultants to plan such a thing would probably cost several years of the current budget.
- OrvalWintermute 1y agoNot if staffed with a tiny office and reuse of capabilities from each. Potentially very small, platoon sized or smaller 10M annual spend, rest allocated to spend for services
- nsriv 1y agoTrying to save on a $55 million program by standing up a joint agency. I have truly heard it all now.
- OrvalWintermute 1y agoDoesn’t mean it needs much staff if leveraging pre-existing capabilities Could def be done for cheaper than 55M
- wongarsu 1y agoThe US are by far not the only ones with satellites in orbit. Making it a UN body would make sense, just like the International Telecommunications Union coordinates telephone service and the International Postal Union coordinates international mail, and both are now UN bodies (despite predating the UN). I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it
- bedhead 1y ago[flagged]
- throw0101a 1y ago> I see these headlines a lot. Honest question: do we know if these programs actually do anything? The Pentagon themselves seem to think so, "Space Force officials and more than 450 aerospace companies are against the White House's proposal": > Space Force officials are eager to exit the business of warning third-party satellite operators, including rivals such as Russia and China, of possible collisions in orbit. The military would prefer to focus on managing ever-growing threats from satellites, an intensive effort that requires continual monitoring as other nations' increasingly sophisticated spacecraft maneuver from one orbit to another. > But until someone else is ready to take over, the Space Force will remain saddled with the responsibility of issuing these alerts. The Space Force calls these alerts conjunction assessments, and there are national security reasons for sharing the warnings far and wide, because a traffic accident in orbit would endanger the Space Force's own satellites. * https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/nearly-everyone-opposes-trumps-plan-to-kill-space-traffic-control-program/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/nearly-everyone-oppose...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yupitsme123 1y ago[flagged]
- jpalawaga 1y agoYou mean one group that is ignorant costcutters and another group that are subject matter experts? Hmm who to listen to.
- yupitsme123 1y agoNope, just two ignorant groups who have hijacked the entire country.
- djoldman 1y agoHere's the uncomfortable fact: 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> if the goal is to reduce deficit spending Red herring. It’s not. It’s never been. We’re blowing out the deficit by trillions. The motivation isn’t anything about the deficit. It’s that NOAA counters the climate narrative a narrow band of idiots would prefer to believe.
- declan_roberts 1y agoDebt servicing is now more than 16% of our spending and growing. I hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it!
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it No need for past tense. We’re currently in the most intense—the biggest, most beautiful, one might say—phase of deficit accumulation in American history.
- declan_roberts 1y agoThankfully we're getting all this cool stuff. You know like... actually what are we getting?
- tomrod 1y agoMore debt!
- ourmandave 1y agoAre they hoping satellites studying climate change get destroyed? 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-science-denier-hired-at-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.
- macintux 1y agoDuring his first administration I was half-surprised he didn’t nominate a flat earther to head NASA.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoClearly this should be funded by the countries and companies that own the debris and sattlites that need to be tracked. 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?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it Then they’d switch to a user fee. Perhaps even at a profit, such that it’s deficit reducing. That isn’t what they’re doing because that isn’t what this is about.
- cantor_S_drug 1y agoI mentioned this scenario before but I was downvoted. Can a rogue disgruntled state like Iran actually bring about destruction of satellites, say Starlink ones, to set off space debris chain reaction to pollute, poison the earth orbit for everyone. The thinking goes like if I can't have the advantage then no one else should.
- j-bos 1y agoiirc Starlink satellites sit in a low orbit so they'll burn up/down pretty fast.
- squigz 1y agoIn theory, yes, sure, why not? In practice, I would think that any nation with the capacity of launching such an attack would realize that that would be catastrophic not just for their enemies but for themselves. Not to mention that I'm sure various nations have intelligence about any nations that might consider such an attack and would attempt to thwart it.
- Buttons840 1y agoAssuming you mean "Starlink": Don't all Starlink satellites have a plan to deorbit responsibly; specifically, do nothing, which results in a relatively quick deorbitting? Starlink satellites are in low-Earth-orbit which can't accumulate much space debris, because everything deorbits naturally within a few years.
- maxlin 1y agoIf they just figured out a way to not 10x overspend while getting the same results ...
- water9 1y agoonly works if everybody agrees and Noaa is not in charge of everybody
- hdb385 1y agobothered
- Ylpertnodi 1y agoCool and normal.
- sitzkrieg 1y agowhat next, osha? safety sure is a waste of time to these myopic tech idiots
- wnevets 1y agoDefund ICE and use that money to stop satellites from crashing into each other
- DonHopkins 1y agoCrash satellites into ICE!
- apwell23 1y agoIcrease H1B fees to 30k and quota to 3 million and use that money to stop satellites from crashing into each other.
- JSR_FDED 1y agoLet’s not overthink this. Anything long-term is toast.
- ccorcos 1y agoWhy 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…
- duxup 1y agoI feel like this is like "free market should build roads thing" we fund roads so everyone has access and goods can move freely / more economic activity can take place without problems. What would the free market solution be here? Someone builds all the infrastructure to track all the satellites, and maybe more than one (if not you have a monopoly) person does it. Then they charge for it? But someone doesn't use it an now we have more space junk ... If anything a government organizing this and everyone utilizing it seems like it makes for more efficient / lower risk situation with satellites. Everyone just gets on with more important business.
- OtherShrezzing 1y agoUsually I’d agree with you on this type of thing, but in this case I think the insurance industry could and should be picking this up. They’re the bag holder here, and this system could be built for a marginal hit to their bottom line in exchange for a huge amount of de-risking across their entire supply chain.
- duxup 1y agoI don't think the insurance industry is all that interested providing services or enhancing commerce. They'd have some very mixed motivations all at once if they tried doing this. Including anything technical.
- ccorcos 1y agoSide story regarding roads: I was recently in Shelter Cove, CA and was thinking that the is road probably exceeds the entire economic value of the town… Why is this road even here? It turns out, they used to harvest tan oak bark for the tannins to tan leather in the late 1800s which was a huge industry back then. Lots of logging roads out there since then… Free markets do build a lot of roads! Insurance companies have the right incentive but they don’t need to be the ones building it. Safer cars get cheaper insurance, so there’s clear market pressure there without insurance companies having to build their own cars… Pollution, kinds that suffer the “tragedy of the common”, are a good example where regulation is necessary to prevent a race to the bottom. But that’s a pretty simple and straightforward thing to democratically vote on without government spending. I think the solution is fairly simple: private companies build these capabilities and offer them as a service. The idea that there won’t be a marketplace for this service seems misguided too. Adversarial militaries will want their own systems, likely contracted out to private companies, which will likely offer civilian use around the world…
- stego-tech 1y agoThis - 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.
- dgrin91 1y agoAlso the practicality of this is that most of the UN funding will come from the US. When a situation like this where US is cutting funding arises you get the same problem. Almost all finding will dry up overnight and they won't have sufficient funding to continue
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoI sort of wonder when the UN is getting thrown out of New York by the current administration.
- chgs 1y agoI have no doubt China would offer a far better location somewhere like Shanghai. The intelligence benefits of so many foreign diplomats and spies walking your street, drinking in your bars, paying your hookers, is incalculable.
- stego-tech 1y agoYep, keenly aware of that, but if we’re building a new future that’s resilient to modern structural collapse and civilizational crises, then part of that is changing the structure of the UN, dues/fees, and its functions. There’s a lot to discuss there once enough folks have accepted the era of US Hegemony is over.
- ben_w 1y agoI mean, that's one way for Trump to punish Musk…
- TylerJaacks 1y agoI would love to hear a reason why this is a good idea?
- clircle 1y agoSpace is very big and satellites are very small.
- saagarjha 1y agoSpace is not actually very big when you’re talking about a thin slice above the earth.
- EasyMark 1y agoThese satellites are in a rather thin band of space and it's clearly a problem as debris has already hit the space station and satellites. Tracking satellites is clearly a necessity. Could we use some partners? Probably worth look into with the ESA and Japan/India to share cost, burden, and information. Not doing it because of a trite expression doesn't seem like a good idea.
- squigz 1y agoIs this a serious comment?
- JackMorgan 1y agoNot 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. https://spacebook.com/ 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.
- more_corn 1y agoThis will go badly. We have probably reached the point where a major collision will cause a cascading effect.
- mycatisblack 1y agoIt starts looks like a solution in the Fermi Paradox: intelligent species that aren’t intelligent enough will cut themselves of from space travel.
- HumblyTossed 1y agoI really hate the slash and burn style this admin is using to cut everything. It's almost as if there's another agenda.