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.
There’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”.
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.
We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.
It seems very similar to how a clique bought up a lot of Russia and became their oligarchs. It's another transfer of wealth to the rich and/or Trump's cronies. The destruction of public goods, research, education, and the climate is extremely sad.
Someone 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.
Orrrr 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.
The 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
I'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.
Understand the first part perfectly. Yes, a small portion of newspace involves [or will involve) spacecraft that don't spend most of their life orbiting in nice predictable arcs above ground stations with occasional also predictable small station keeping or conjunction avoidance adjustments, and it stands to reason that the most advanced and classified US SDA capability has access to better sensor data and models.
But that seems like a very poor argument for removing a system which might be approaching obsolescence in military terms but is still relied on for a rapidly increasing number of civil satellites to make rapidly increasing conjunction avoidance manoeuvres (and is also relatively inexpensive). Anything that makes them less aware threatens defence and critical civil government infrastructure too, and the private sector doesn't exactly seem to be embracing it as an exciting opportunity - look at the quote from Slingshot! Plus if anything the changes taking place would seem to be a reason to invest more in orbital traffic control with regulation to make it more like the FAA. You don't have to give away the classified tracking tech if you're barking out move orders rather than simply sharing predictions so operators come to their own conclusions about conjunction risk, and likewise orders and requirements for operators to broadcast position and intent are a much better way of dealing with a future of private servicing missions and space megastructures than "let them buy their own tracking data and make their own decisions"
I work in a related area too. NOAA and others in the space game are great partners. I don't agree with the fundamentals of your assessment, seems post hoc ergo propter hoc.
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.
But 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
I 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. ;-)
It depends what your investment strategy is. If your goal is to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, then government spending is a good idea. But some people would rather all boats not be lifted. They'd just like to lift some boats, but sink others. Still, other people would prefer to sink as many boats as possible while being in control of the remaining boats that float. For people who fit into those later categories, government spending is not a good ROI.
As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs.
Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".
> I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment.
"Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated.
This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean.
Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
> 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?
The 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.
It 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.
Sticker 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.
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.
If 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.
It 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I worked for the UN on more or less this in the 2000s. People have a naive perception of what the UN is like. It was one of the most openly dysfunctional, corrupt, and sclerotic organizations I have ever worked with or for.
It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council. That entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.
REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.
I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.
It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.
Also 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
Yep, 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.
Sure. But if US gov is doing it, there's no clear way for other countries to just jump in and foot the bill. If UN is in charge, other countries could just keep paying for it.
Whether that would happen is to be seen, but now it's down right impossible.
> Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.
Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.
Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.
There's TraCSS, SST, RSSS. Each country needs to have their own satellite tracking program. There is international cooperation but do you really think the US is in charge? "Whoops", says the US as a small cubesat from another country collides with a Russian military space satellite. "Missed that one - my bad".
This isn't about budget, it's about reducing the USA's capability as a leader in science and research as commanded from certain parties in the former soviet union.
I 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.
In 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.
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.
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…
I 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.
Usually 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.
The free market is famously unable to solve problems of diffuse risk and responsibility: air pollution, sea piracy, and in this case -- satellite collision avoidance.
This is a good argument for passing a one-page bill which clarifies "if your sat leaves its assigned orbit, you're responsible for the resulting damages". It's a poor argument for spending $50 million dollars per year.
Handing a natural monopoly to corporate America is a very extremely bad idea. Allowing bean counters to control what could eventually disrupt global communications and a huge military advantage is as bad an idea as allowing an unstable billionaire to control a significant portion of your future space program.
Readit News
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.
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”.
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.
Someone would if given the time and infrastructure. This, on the other hand, is more DOGE-style idiocy.
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.
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.
But that seems like a very poor argument for removing a system which might be approaching obsolescence in military terms but is still relied on for a rapidly increasing number of civil satellites to make rapidly increasing conjunction avoidance manoeuvres (and is also relatively inexpensive). Anything that makes them less aware threatens defence and critical civil government infrastructure too, and the private sector doesn't exactly seem to be embracing it as an exciting opportunity - look at the quote from Slingshot! Plus if anything the changes taking place would seem to be a reason to invest more in orbital traffic control with regulation to make it more like the FAA. You don't have to give away the classified tracking tech if you're barking out move orders rather than simply sharing predictions so operators come to their own conclusions about conjunction risk, and likewise orders and requirements for operators to broadcast position and intent are a much better way of dealing with a future of private servicing missions and space megastructures than "let them buy their own tracking data and make their own decisions"
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.
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
Dead Comment
As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs.
Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".
Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no.
(I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).
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.
"Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated.
This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean.
Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
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?
There is a lot of trouble with bureaucrats defending fiefdoms that would be better consolidated, but you can't fix that with an axe.
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.
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 Comment
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.
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.
Care to elaborate?
What's the value that comes back?
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".
That's how I feel too. "Conservative" should mean "cautious and slow", not "destroy as quickly as possible"
Deleted Comment
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.
- 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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.htm...
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.
It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council. That entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.
REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.
I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.
It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.
Whether that would happen is to be seen, but now it's down right impossible.
While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.
Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.
Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.
Dead Comment
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.