Similar topic was discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409175 (140 comments)
“Researchers say the satellites themselves are operating normally and do not appear to have suffered any errors that would physically prevent the data from continuing to be collected and distributed, so the abrupt data halt might have been an intentional decision.”
Wait, the U.S. aren’t even going to try selling the satellites? We’re just scrapping them?
The intent is to disable the capability to ignore the data. If you allow access to someone else, you're not preventing the data capture and dissemination. If the data shows hurricanes are intensifying in strength due to climate change, and you no longer capture the data, you can say with a straight face "No it isn't and you can't prove it."
How large systems with exposure to these places (insurance, capital markets) respond is what you should look to next. What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Relevant comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43366311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664750 (top comment of this thread aggressively relevant)
I think it’s even more nefarious than that. They can attack other countries that claim intensifying climate and weather scenarios by saying their data is biased while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons. While this may seem like something unbelievable to you or me it is easily eaten up by their supporters who love propaganda. Like, my republican parents are convinced robotaxi is amaxing after the unreasonably bad debut in Austin. They simply didn’t hear or want to hear that Tesla would not produce a working product.
They could claim that even with the satellites. The "alternate reality" can be anything - if facts aren't inserted into it the people inside won't know.
Idiots will buy it. The courts won’t. Cutting off the data stymies the latter.
The courts are compelled to defer to SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime.
> SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime
If you read SCOTUS's opinions this is obviously false. Alito and Thomas are bought. But the others have their own quirks and agendas.
You could probably imagine that ACB is just very stupid I guess? She's made choices which only make sense if they're out of blind loyalty to the man who gave her a job she shouldn't have or because she's not smart enough to understand the consequences.
For ordinary people it can feel reasonable to keep your head down and hope that somehow this blows over. But for SCOTUS it's entirely within their power to draw a line, and it seems like at best their idea has become "Maybe if we give him what he wants he'll go away?" which is dumb, Kipling wrote his famous poem "Dane-geld" about this, it's well over a century old and it's about a mistake England (or rather one of its Kings) made last millennium (when he wrote it, ie now over 1000 years ago).
> could probably imagine that ACB is just very stupid I guess? She's made choices which only make sense if they're out of blind loyalty to the man who gave her a job
Barrett has sided with the liberals on various decisions. SCOTUS has a problem. But its problem isn't blind loyalty to Trump. It's that there is a deeper conviction about the way the world should work that sometimes aligns with Trump in ways that are deeply damaging to our society.
If you want to see a judge who's blindly deferential to Trump, that's Aileen Cannon.
SCOTUS is essentially blindly local to Trump — pay attention to the latest Constitution-shredding decisions; they sure wouldn’t be doing those under a Dem president, and they’re twisting themselves in knots trying to make the illogical logical — it just manifests differently at their level.
This is clear to all except partisans who put loyalty to their party over their country.
It's not like we're asking for SCOTUS to accept constitutional slights from the left side of the aisle, its about consistency of reasoning regardless of which party is involved.
As you've noted, the conservatives of SCOTUS are working backwards from their desired goals rather than pursuing justice for all.
The ultimate test will be if any future Democrat president (assuming we have fair elections after 2025) is able to use the same powers, justified by the same rulings. I think most people believe that SCOTUS will do a 180 turn and come to entirely opposite legal/Constitutional conclusions if a Dem president tries to argue the same things in front of them.
well we've already seen one 180 degree turn in the past 3 years, the gutting of Chevron deference last year gave local judges massive power over the executive, and last week they undid that by removing the ability of district courts to make national injunctions
Regime indeed
> while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons
"The getaway car was green."
"No it wasn't!"
"What color was it then?"
"I don't know what color it was!"
...
What I find interesting is how clear your media biases shine through even while attempting to make a statement about how this is something that's happening to the other side.
I haven't seen evidence that the Austin robotaxi launch was unreasonably bad. There were a couple viral incidents of undesirable behavior, though no collisions as far as I've heard, which is significantly better performance than one expects from typical human drivers.
You expect a group of less than twenty human drivers to have at least one collision per week?
Between 0 and 1 collisions per week, the actual number significantly more than FSD as a whole system experiences.
To what end? What is the benefit of shutting down and ignoring data when for the last decade and a half even with data didn’t matter? I didn’t matter before why would it now?
This is a very reasonable question.
When you control the propaganda that lies between the data and the public, the underlying availability of the data is irrelevant. The propaganda already overwrites the data.
Honestly I would suspect that limiting the data is a strategic asset. The US can use its knowledge of weather events as leverage to cow other countries, or a weapon against countries it dislikes.
"Hello <other_country>, are you worried about the impact of weather on your population? Lower your tariff rate on us and we will be glad to help give you advanced warnings so you evacuate your people"
And likewise they would completely withhold such data from "enemy" countries.
- [deleted]
[dead]
> What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Insurance companies will just be sending up their own satellites, and that is the true goal. Force people to pay money to private entities for a service that used to be provided by the government for free.
Functionally, in such a system there is no difference between that and regular taxes, just in a private system there's opportunities for those in power (because you gotta have a lot of money to send up a powerful satellite) to make even more money.
With the current US administration, always look at the grifting opportunities, that will explain virtually all policy decisions.
(…and guess who’s company they’ll be contracting those launches to?)
- [deleted]
Except they won't. There's no reason to expensively launch your own forecasting system when you can instead just wait for someone else to do it and then use their insurance rates to do your own forecasting.
Which is why the government running satellites it would need to run anyway is much more efficient.
> There's no reason to expensively launch your own forecasting system when you can instead just wait for someone else to do it and then use their insurance rates to do your own forecasting.
Indeed but who's going to do that? The US government will, more likely than not, have lost the ability entirely, and Europe... good luck waiting on us.
> Which is why the government running satellites it would need to run anyway is much more efficient
Indeed. But there is no opportunity for continuous recurring grift revenue in that, and that is all that drives the current administration.
The European tornado models have been superior to the US models for a long time, and the US has relied on them heavily. Not sure if the European models use the data from those satellites though, probably.
Well exactly - it's a classic tragedy of the commons situation. The first one to solve the problem bears all the expense, and worse so long as no one solves the problem you can also just raise rates to cover the broader risk pool. Meanwhile the tax payer has still paid for the actual instrument to be built and operated - they just get no benefit from it.
SpaceX earns less money if we don't relaunch what we already have, and they have a satellite design division, Musk is somewhat on the outs with the admin right now but was behind lots of the cuts like this.
On the other hand, in the first Trump admin the AccuWeather spam site guy was trying to restrict NWS data to private companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers
I think AccuWeather opposed the Project 2025 plan to remove weather tracking frothe government though, they just wanted it to be tax payer paid but exclusively provided to corporations for sale to make competitive upstart weather sites harder to establish (you can bid more if you already have lots of users, without them you have to build something so great and potentially profitable that you can get VC to fund your purchases of the data).
https://www.masslive.com/news/2024/07/accuweather-rejects-pr...
And here it is: https://spacenews.com/spacex-scores-81-6-million-space-force...
- [deleted]
This story is NOT TRUE.
There is one operating satellite in this constellation, and congress voted to shut down the program in 2015.
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli... (scroll up slightly)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Earth_Observation_Syste...
The key facts are:
- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data - These data will continue to be measured after Monday - the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data - This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
Which of the above are “not true”?
thank you!
While you're correct that Congress voted to phase out the program, you're wrong on a number of levels. First, NOAA-19 is not a DMSP satellite. Second, many of the DMSP satellites are still in orbit and functioning - even the very Wikipedia article you linked to shows this. There was no legitimate reason to cut off their data that we've been given. Third, JPSS and GEOS lack some of the capabilities of the DMSP, for example the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder that was still providing highly valuable real-time microwave data, including precipitation rates, sea surface wind speeds, sea ice coverage, water vapor levels and cloud properties.
So to be frank, the only thing that's "NOT TRUE" is nearly all of your post.
That claim does not seem justified.
> 2016 failure of DMSP 19 without replacement[edit] On 11 February 2016, a power failure left both the command-and-control subsystem and its backup without the ability to reach the satellite's processor, according to the U.S. Air Force Space Command investigation released in July 2016 that also announced that DMSP 5D-3/F19 was considered to be 'lost'. The satellite's data can still be used, until it ceases pointing the sensors towards the Earth. The satellite was the most recent on-orbit, having been launched on 3 April 2014.[15]
> The failure only left F16, F17 and F18 – all significantly past their expected 3–5 year lifespan – operational. F19's planned replacement was not carried out because Congress ordered the destruction of the already constructed F20 probe to save money by not having to pay its storage costs. It is unlikely that a new DMSP satellite would be launched before 2023; by then the three remaining satellites should no longer be operational.[16]
To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That's the guardian for you. Remove context. Generate hyperbole. Beg for money.
> To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That doesn't accurately capture the reason why there's outrage here. In the weather community, we're constantly thinking through contingencies because a great deal of things are out of our control - and we rely on aging infrastructure, much of which is already flaky to begin with.
Data outages and data loss happens. But there's no reason to allow a _preventable_ data loss to occur. The DMSP data is still being collected, it's just not being distributed downstream. And the decision to make this policy change was seemingly done rapidly and with no input or feedback from the user community of this data - both inside and outside the federal government.
There's no reason to turn off the spigot of this data. And there certainly is no reason to do so abruptly and with virtually no notice. As a consequence, the community is limited in its ability to adapt. For instance, it would take time (and money) to spin up more hurricane hunting resources to replace the overpass data that the SSMI/S instrument captures. Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
So this isn't hyperbole. This is a really big deal. It might not be visible to you, but there is a panic and scramble occurring in the weather community to figure out what to do from here.
And for the record - yes, the same panic would happen if the DMSP satellites failed suddenly due to natural causes. But this current situation could've - and should've - been prevented.
> Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
That's the goal, actually. You can be sure someone in the admin owns stock of these companies and pushed for this policy for this very reason.
The companies I'm referring to are (generally) not publicly traded, so it's not quite that simple. Is it possible that some sort of backroom shenanigans are going on here? Yeah, absolutely, especially as several knowledgable folks speaking publicly about this episode are pointing their fingers at opaque procedure within Space Force.
But Hanlon's razor ought to apply until shown otherwise.
> companies I'm referring to are (generally) not publicly traded
Stock doesn't have to be publicly traded to be traded.
You're right, but I would stress that this is an over-simplification of the entangled financial interests that _might_ be at play - and there simply isn't any evidence that has been presented pointing in that direction.
Trump uses hanlons razor to improve his grift outcomes.
> But Hanlon's razor ought to apply until shown otherwise
I'm no longer willing to grant this administration this privilege. The last few months were an utter clownshow of corruption.
It just isn't helpful to assume malice. Even for the most ardent, ideological Heartland Institute or Heritage Foundation conservative, there is still a path forward in discussing unintended consequences. Just look at the post-Liberation Day rollback of blanket tariffs. At some point, the consequences of actions are felt. Systems respond even when the firmest hand tries to steady them.
At some point you take your hand off the burning stove, even if it means amputating your arm. Some folks should prepare for that contingency while those of us who can still stomach it pursue reason.
> At some point, the consequences of actions are felt.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” is a truism from before the Trump era, but it still rings true.
That the administration might eventually realize that one of their policies is hurting small business owners, well, that’s cold comfort to someone whose business is struggling or failing now due to unpredictable tariff rates.
It's not a question of "the market." Weather stories very strongly breakthrough in our current media environment. More importantly, weather forecasting and government services related to them enjoy deep and durable bi-partisan support.
It just so happens that the communities most likely to be adversely and quickly impacted by the loss of these data are deep Republican bastions in the South / Gulf Coast.
> At some point, the consequences of actions are felt.
yup, and that's when a Democrat comes in, fixes the worst of the mess, and then a Republican comes in whining about soooo much change. And fiscal stability. And god knows what else. And then, they cut taxes for the rich again and seriously hike the debt.
Part of solving the US debt and deficit problem will require laws mandating balancing long-term (>4 years) expenditures / decreases in revenue with long-term revenue generation.
The "run deficits in my 4 years to pay for nice things, to be paid for by taxes once I'm out of office" shit has to stop.
Ah, so basically if you have a car that's 5 years out of warranty but still runs fine, and the government comes in and takes your keys so you can't drive it, that would be your fault for not having gotten a new car sooner?
The article mentions the three remaining operational satellites.
Generally, you use space hardware until it dies, which is hopefully well beyond the design life.
The satellites that are still up are still collecting critical data. That’s not disputed.
It feels like the title here isn't accurate - we haven't lost the satellite at all. It wasn't destroyed, it wasn't de-orbited (on purpose or accidentally), it wasn't hacked or hijacked.
Can we ask dang to change the title to something like "Blocking of key US satellite data could...."?
Are you maybe skipping over the word "data" in the headline? The headline doesn't imply the satellite itself is lost, just the data coming from the satellite.
Well there's your problem. They were tracking the arctic! That means they were bad satellites that hurt people. They contradict the government's idea that climate science doesn't exist
NOAA-20 is better and will still be available.
Also from NOAA: “Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.”
Decommissioning old sensors?
https://michaelrlowry.substack.com/p/critical-hurricane-fore...
“The ATMS sounder that remains is far inferior to hurricane forecasters than the SSMIS instrument the Department of Defense is discontinuing. Unlike the SSMIS which scans at a continuous resolution, the quality of the ATMS degrades considerably on its edges, rendering the sounder useless for most operational hurricane forecasts. The example below shows the difference between the scans from both instruments for Hurricane Erick last Wednesday, June 18th.”
There is also a useful figure included.
This figure is laterally an edge case. NOAA-21 images the earth twice a day with higher resolution
NOAA is not safe from political maneuvering.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
It's part of the Administration's war on ... Florida?
I was about to say this -- the impact is to deep red states -- Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.
They all voted for this with extreme skew towards the current policies. What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
I strongly suspect that said states will still find a way to get federal funds for relief, whether from the president directly (since Trump's stated plan is to replace FEMA with his own discretion) or, in an emergency, through a very quick act from congress. Of course, it's much cheaper to mitigate hurricane damage _before_ it's done so gutting all the planning related services as the Trump administration seems wont to do will only either hurt a lot of people in red states or, more likely, cost the country more than if they'd left NOAA and FEMA alone.
Republican governors will demand the aid and sometimes get it, but at the federal level it doesn't count against them to deny the aid. What are the constituents going to do, vote for a Democrat?
There may come a day when they have saved up enough grievance against the Republicans to look for an alternative. But right now they have a solid foundation of anti-woke grievance and they can be counted on to keep voting the same way.
I mean CA does nothing to mitigate fire risk and still gets funding and cries when they don’t. So why would any other state be different?
> What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
Because people still should not suffer... jeez.
Do you realize how little people in these areas pay attention to these forecasts? Hurricanes until you hit CAT 5 are viewed as bad rain storms that may or may not take the power out for a week. There is little evacuation or prep for the majority of people there as they are consistently prepared. Even still, the real threat of a hurricane isn’t the hurricane itself but the storm surge and all the tornadoes they create. Neither of those can be predicted with any accuracy so please help me understand why pathing is important?
When you have a president who can predict the paths of hurricanes with a sharpie you don't really need all those expensive satellites.
And threaten to nuke them if they don't go where he says.
The writing has been on the wall for decades, especially since 2015 or so when Congress basically started shuttering DMSP.
> It's part of the Administration's war on ... Florida?
The administration of Florida has a war on the idea of climate change:
* "Ron DeSantis signs bill scrubbing ‘climate change’ from Florida state laws": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/desa...
* "Florida Officials Barred from Referencing “Climate Change”: https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/florida-officials-b...
This allows (certain) Florida politicians to put their head in the sand even more than they already have.
This is such a bad article. They shut down this specific program in 2015, and switched to JPSS instead.
There is no war on anyone, and this has nothing to do with Trump, DOGS, or Climate change. Rather there were too many satellite failures, leaving just a single operating one in orbit.
This is true, however it does provide unending entertainment as seen by the top voted comments wondering how this is a secret war on the courts and Europe - lol
There was no reason not to continue providing the data from the satellite. It’s still operational.
Funding was stopped by congress in 2015. The time to complain about this was 10 years ago.
I agree with both of you. Unnecessary fear mongering, but also a shortsighted pointless (malicious?) move.
It could help lower insurance costs.
That's not at all how insurance companies price risk. Unknown risk is more risk, and more risk is more expensive. Therefore, unknown hurricane data is more risky and thus more expensive.
If you know your car's engine is going to need replaced after exactly 100,000 miles, you know to save up for a new engine or a new car - and you know how long you have to save, so you can precisely set aside an appropriate figure every month.
If you know your car's engine will die sometime within the next 15,000 miles, you know you need to start saving up immediately, but b/c you don't know when in the next 15,000 miles you have to rush your saving.
If you have no idea when your car's engine is going to die, you are likely to end up dead engine and little to no savings.
Hurricane risk has been grossly exaggerated for years. Every year people say it will be the end of Florida as we know it. But those promised hurricanes never come. The worst is some flooding and damage at coastal areas, but it’s always anti-climactic.
The real reason insurance is high is because of fraudulent claim risk. Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida. That data is useless.
> Hurricane risk has been grossly exaggerated for years
Year-over-year, economic impacts and disruptions due to tropical cyclones are dramatically rising. Most of this is an exposure issue. But long-tail events - like Andrew's utter devastation of Homestead in 1992 or Katrina's unique confluence of storm surge in urban/suburban parishes in LA - can and do happen.
One day, there will be another Galveston or Homestead.
That day being essentially yesterday.
Since Katrina, the next 10 costliest hurricanes are all after.
We don't dwell on the Ikes, Idas, and Helenes because they often happen to smaller communities and they've become common enough that we've gotten a little fatigued.
Well put.
There won’t be another Andrew because the building codes were changed so that all new construction must withstand category 5 storm force, which when Andrew came around was not a requirement. Over time, there is a natural selection that occurs where destroyed buildings are replaced with stronger buildings with stricter codes.
> There won’t be another Andrew because the building codes were changed so that all new construction must withstand category 5 storm force
I sincerely hope you're right, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that this will not be the case, owing to a multitude of factors:
- not all housing stock is <30 years old and has been properly retrofitted to meet state specs
- the climates around the Gulf, which tend to be more humid, can lead to premature degradation of things like strengthened anchor bolts and roof attachments
- there continue to be immense factors related to cost and time-to-build which provide significant negative pressure towards cutting corners and minimum-compliance which may mitigate some of the attendant benefits of strengthened building codes
An event like Andrew _is the selection event_ that you're referring to.
What about the flooding?
....all of which makes them more expensive to insure (and build, obviously)...
I'm from Florida - born and raised. I've never once heard anyone call any hurricane "the end of Florida as we know it". What I have heard, and seen, is extreme damages caused to homes and cars even hundreds of miles away from the eye of the storm.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused extreme flooding in the Orlando-region, including in areas that have never suffered from hurricane flooding before. For me personally, all 3 cars parked at my house were total losses b/c of the flood damage.
The extreme and extensive damages in the Appalachian region last fall is another great example of hurricane risk not being "grossly exaggerated".
> Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida.
I'm going to go with less, though I suppose you could call "experience widespread destruction, get bailed out by the federal government, rebuild in the same spot" to be a permanent solution.
Florida has maybe solved cat 1-2 hurricanes.
>The worst is some flooding and damage at coastal areas, but it’s always anti-climactic.
The residents of what used to be Ft. Meyers Beach would probably disagree with you.
>Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida.
I have been in Florida for nearly a decade now. I'd say that the above statement is at best, disingenuous. It's just not true. MAYBE Cat1 hurricanes are a solved problem, but nothing above that. The busiest economic center in Florida (Miami's Brickell area) is 6 feet above sea level. Any major storm locks that part of town down for days. My own building's parking lot is 5 feet above sea level, and yes, it's flooded every time we have a storm.
"I'm not moving the goalposts because my argument doesn't have any"
Insurance companies aren't going to charge less for not knowing, they'll charge more.
The rebuilds happen with federal FEMA dollars and there is an entire cottage industry of re-builders who take federal funds, rebuild homes -- and then do it again two years later. https://www.fema.gov/node/what-home-repair-assistance
But, isn’t European data modeling of hurricanes better than that of the USA? I assume this is only the USA forecasting that is being set back?
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/which-hurricane-models-sh...
HAFS is often the best
https://www.noaa.gov/news/new-noaa-system-ushers-in-next-gen...
European models assimilate in data from US satellites and vice versa
Welp, guess I'll start investing in carrier pigeons with tiny barometers. Back to the old ways!
This is likely because the DMSP satellites are outdated: "In 2015, Congress voted to terminate the DMSP program and to scrap the DMSP 5D-3/F20 satellite, ordering the Air Force to move on to a next-generation system." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli...
The GOES-R satellites seem to have equal or better resolution: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/4/4/1520-042... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-16
DMSP resolves to 600m, while GOES-R resolves to 500m (don't confuse it with the older GOES satellites mentioned in the article).
I recommend readng this article https://michaelrlowry.substack.com/p/critical-hurricane-fore...
The problem of important projects surviving political change is a tough one.
A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
I realize privatization is an ugly word, but could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Can we make it possible to fund initiatives in a multinational manner where countries contribute to these efforts, but if one country blinks out, then you still have it go along?
> A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.
What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.
If a president can ignore the laws requiring those projects to exist, the president can ignore the laws protecting private companies from being nationalized and shut down.
> could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Yes, but the key man problem still exists. For instance, SpaceX could build/operate a network of weather satellites for various nations but the instability of the founder leads to similar issues.
> who is the president every four years...could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
A president cares about election every four years. Private sector cares about it every quarter. I doubt privatization is improvement if you want to focus on long term.
This project was actually shut down in 2015.
So IIRC for the last 50 years the DMSP satellites broadcast all their data in the clear. If the program is only shutting down the ground stations and data distribution, it seems like an opportunity for some researchers to buy some SDRs and start collecting their own data.
I'm actually surprised that the successors to DMSP don't meet the same needs. Or is the problem that they do and the government just doesn't share that data?
DMSP satellites broadcast on 2.2-2.3 GHz S-band with relatively simple modulation, making reception possible with a 1.5m dish and ~$300 in SDR equipment.
Its almost as if a totalitarian government is trying to isolate its population from objective reality, and make them dependent of the state narrative for understanding of the world.
Is the satellite link encrypted? Maybe radio amateurs can continue to receive its signals.
No encryption*. I think they broadcast on S-band which isn't necessarily compatible with a $20 hobbyist rtl-sdr, but still possible with more advanced amateur setups
* Ok that's an oversimplification. They actually turn encryption on while the satellite is over certain areas. But if you're in the Continental US I think it's in the clear
I know what Hari Seldon’s conclusion would be..
Translation:>The loss of DMSP comes as Noaa’s weather and climate monitoring services have become critically understaffed this year as Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative has instilled draconian cuts to federal environmental programs."We can't actually say this was DOGE, so we're going to imply it using emotionally charged words, and 90% of folks with bad media literacy will come away thinking it was DOGE (just check the reddit comments)."
This in-vogue method of "lying without lying" is shockingly common nowadays, but apparently it's okay for media to lie because Bad Man Bad.
I don’t understand what you’re complaining about here. Lying?
Yes, when the media lies it's bad. People used to understand that fact.
Now media gets a free pass on certain lies because Bad Man Bad, and (evidently) people aren't even allowed to point out the lie.
Hint: when the media can make up whatever they want about someone, they can quickly twist perception to make anyone into the Bad Man.
Did DOGE not ditch hundreds of probationary employees at NOAA, cancel numerous contracts, get 1000 people to take early retirement offers, get rid of buildings, etc?
And now the current funding request enacts a ~30% funding cut.
I'm not sure the factual issue you're seeing. Is it that the statement wasn't definitive enough in saying that DOGE apparently was a large part of instituting these cuts?
(Yes, I know OPM implemented many of these programs, but they're apparently at DOGE's request, named after the "Fork in the Road" initiative at Twitter, using data gathered by DOGE IT staffers, &c. If we give credit for any cuts, we have to give them credit for significant cuts at NOAA.)
My understanding is this was set up to happen roughly a decade ago and is just now manifesting. It has pretty much nothing to do with DOGE.
We don't if, or to what extent, DOGE was involved or influential in the decision-making here.
Yes, the DMSP program was aging and slated to wind down as replacements - both federal and commercial - came online in the second half of the 2020's. But in general, if valid and useful data continues to stream from these types of satellites, you use it and monitor for disruption.
As someone who uses the DMSP data every single day, let me be very clear: there was no warning or expectation that such an abrupt change was going to happen. Yes, we all have contingency plans for if a satellite fails or a data link goes down. But to be given basically 5 days notice that a significant, mission-critical asset would be taken offline? That doesn't - and shouldn't - happen.
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The sentence that is quoted is about how both of these things are simultaneously happening right now, even if one was precipitated earlier
Your premise that they're "lying" is unsubstantiated. Your comments read only like dress around the "fake news" bit.
Before you claim there's nothing happening and The Guardian didn't mean it, check social media comments elsewhere to see how many people misinterpret this news item into "DOGE/Elon did it."
I would bet you, but that money's too easy. :)
Again, this exact conversation is the genius behind 'lying _without lying_.' You can always claim in high-literacy communities like HN that no, nobody would ever be silly enough misread it like that, all while watching your misinformation spread across the low-literacy communities like facebook and reddit.
The Guardian et al has done this too often for plausible deniability. Even I can pick up on the pattern, and that's without access to the big boy's social media engagement and sentiment tracking tools.
>check social media comments elsewhere to see how many people misinterpret this news item into "DOGE/Elon did it."
No, post news sources and researched articles. Your vibes about the Internet are irrelevant
> high-literacy communities like HN [..] low-literacy communities like facebook and reddit
I see this sentiment a lot lately, and I see your HN join date is similar to mine. HN is more mainstream than it used to be, for better or worse. There is a lot more overlap between commenters on HN and Reddit nowadays, especially in certain categories of subreddits.
Personally, I lament the web being a high-literacy community.
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Can't I disagree with someone, but also not support lies about them, even if their supporters are fine with lying? My standard is no lies at all, even for a "good cause".
Sure but check the loaded language of that comment. I was just pointing about double standard of particular POV. Even mirroring the comment so you can address it level above.
It's an agreeable assessment that "the media" suffers from accuracy and bias in its reporting. Being that humans are involved, that's unavoidable.
But a couple of things should be considered here:
Intention is a core element of assessing "crimes", with homicide being the most serious one of all we factor it out into: accidental, intentional but clouded by mental conditions in the heat of the moment, and pre-meditated. This is a reasonable metric to apply to the crime of "misreporting" as well.* Intention * Degree * ImpactDegree is likewise to be noted, where it can range from lost nuance to outright lies.
Impact is also a concern if it is a concern. A news article that compels people to randomly attack their neighbors is more of an issue than one that tempts you to buy a new snack.
And most importantly of all: "the media" is not a singular entity and they vary strongly in their veracity and scope, as well as their agendas. Some are at their core intending to serve the public, others are a business to sell advertising, and others are literally propaganda outfits to serve vested interests (e.g., Fox News was created to be the PR arm of the GOP -- this is a fact and not conjecture).
So yes, the NYT can get things wrong (like the lead up to the Iraq invasion), I trust them more than Fox News (which destroyed a community by spreading lies about their new immigrant neighbors eating people's pets).
Hope this helps!
> We can't actually say this was DOGE
The article is saying it was DOGE. DOGE directly attacked our hurricane-forecasting capacity [1]. OMB, i.e. Vought, continues that attack [2].
Given the top three states by hurricane risk voted for Trump in ‘24 [3][4] this should make for an entertaining hurricane season. (Particularly if both a red and blue state get hit and request federal assistance.)
[1] https://apnews.com/article/national-weather-service-layoffs-...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presid...
[3] https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/states-most-at-risk-for-...
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
> The article is saying it was DOGE
Yah, but it's the guardian. They aren't exactly reliable.
For it to be DOGE would require a time machine, because this project was shut down in 2015.
> but it's the guardian. They aren't exactly reliable
This is valid and I'm open to someone calling out the reporting as non-factual with evidence.
Pretending The Guardian is trying to imply this was DOGE when it straight out says as much, on the other hand, is closer to a reading-comprehension issue.
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> "Entertaining" in that red states will get their requests approved
Between the cost of the damage (and us blowing the card preëmptively on this big, beautiful bill), reduction in state capacity to respond to disasters as a result of DOGE and an increasingly-fracturing Congressional GOP I'm not sure they will.
A reduction of state capacity doesn't mean an elimination though - eg the military isn't going anywhere, and can always be sent in to "keep order" and distribute supplies (regardless of how long the highest-briber actually takes to deliver the supplies). More money can always be printed, regardless of the inflationary effects later (like the big ugly spending bill, it's only something to complain about when the democrats might do it). If Congress really does manage to stop rubber stamping, then money can be diverted from elsewhere or maybe we'll just the hear "full faith and credit" argument trotted out not just about the debt ceiling, but the financial commitments of the executive.
(Also I don't know why my original comment was flagged. I guess the autocracy enthusiasts not appreciating me openly calling it autocracy rather than sparkling unitary executive theory or whatever? Or maybe they're in denial that we now have a concentration camp?)
What? They basically say it was the cuts by Doge?
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DOGE did not exist in 2015. This project was shut down in 2015.
How was it shut down in 2015 when the article claims it has been shut down abruptly just recently?
Do you mean it was planned to be shut down in 2015? And where does that come from?
If it was planned in 2015, then I agree that's a relevant detail omitted by the article. Although it also doesn't take away completely from the larger context of government cuts and privatization.
Congress voted in 2015 to shut down the program. This should have been zero surprise to anyone.
The hyperbolic comments about project 2025 and war on the courts, and climate change are just so crazy.
So they voted to shut it down in 2015, which is a very different statement than it being shut down in 2015 (your original statement). And did they plan the shutdown to take place at this exact time of year 2025, or was the date not set back then?
It seems you also got many of the facts wrong based on replies from others anyway.
I know nothing about this particular one, just trying to understand what actually happened.
Is loss of automobiles and reverting to horses next?
We can all become Amish while Bezos, Trump, etc. fly around in their privately owned 747s. Perfect society for our capital and power ownership class… that is until the hounds are at the door threatening the security of their capital or the economy downturn makes it far enough their wealth and power won’t buy the level of opulence they expect on the daily. Difficult to fly around if no one’s producing runways and jet fuel, etc.
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Did Trump stop the distribution of this data because he doesn't like what it says?
Someone in the USA should litigate to forestall any irreversible shut down/sunsetting of these satellites. Under automatic systems they might last until the midterms when a 'night of the long knives' might reap a huge harvest - perhaps a dual supermajority to allow for some reforms?
How can it be set back decades? Even if you had to design new satellites and send them up it would not take a decade to do.
Decades is how far they were set back, not the duration of the setback.
Thank you, Elon Musk
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Do they have cameras on them?
Good grief. American KH-11 electro-optical spy satellites have 2.4 meter primary mirrors and orbit at ~300km or less. Ease yourself off the anti-Musk subreddits or wherever you're getting this incoherent nonsense.
Additional context for those unfamiliar: KH-11s are thought to weigh 30-40 thousand pounds (~20k kg).
The mirror itself would dwarf anything launched for Starlink, multiple times over.
Starlink is 65x closer to earth. If a geostationary satellite was 1 km away, Starlink would be ~15 meters.
Dramatically different scale.
Thanks for the extra context, that's helpful.
How big would the optics on a satellite in Starlink's orbit need to be to achieve similar clarity, then?
A little bit bigger, the starlink sats have a uniform height, the optical spy sats with the big mirrors have a similar mean orbital height but are in elliptic orbits that come in closer, then further away. The best photos are taken closer to the earth than a typical starlink sat is.
The above comment about geostationary orbits is confused .. the spy sats with mirrors relay their data out to geostationary relay sats and then back to earth ground stations.
If you're curious you can read more in the wikipedia link (and other references) I linked in a peer comment.
The communication relay sats are in a geosync orbit at 35,786 km constant.
The imaging satellites with the mirrors and telescopes are more dynamic and in eccentric LEO orbits at a similar height to the starlink sats.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN (and the heading Resolution and ground sample distance indicating the close approach height being closer to earth's surface than typical starlink sat).
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