Our Weather Satellites Are Dying
Why would they? When they can get the government to do it.
Why would they launch their own satellites if the government did NOT do it for them? Look, they've done well repackaging the text data you've always been able to get from NOAA. They take the raw imagery, doll it up and spin it around in various eye-watering, stomach-churning ways. They're in the data presentation business, not the data production business.
Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment, and in general the investment in substance by information-media has dropped through the floor. News outfits cutting back on things like foreign bureaues and local reporters and shifting their content to opinion; and you expect them to pick up the 655 million dollars it takes to field the JPSS-1 and the 12.6 *billion* of the entire program?
What the American government really seems to do is funnel tax payers money into companies.
Well, sure. If you're going to have a space program, it's either funnel taxpayers' money into companies or into programs staffed by government workers. The question shouldn't be where the money ends up, it should be value for money. A decade of accurate storm tracking is easily worth 12 billion bucks to America as a whole; it's just not worth 12 billion to any single private entity.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/cgGoGs2PS4Q/our-weather-satellites-are-dying
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