[JumpCrisscross]

“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?

[toomuchtodo]

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)

[mnky9800n]

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.

[whatshisface]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

Idiots will buy it. The courts won’t. Cutting off the data stymies the latter.

[pstuart]

The courts are compelled to defer to SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[zeristor]

Regime indeed

[Buttons840]

> 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!"

...

[827a]

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.

[trehalose]

You expect a group of less than twenty human drivers to have at least one collision per week?

[827a]

Between 0 and 1 collisions per week, the actual number significantly more than FSD as a whole system experiences.

[tekknik]

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?

[JeremyNT]

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.

[xnx]

There are a lot of things that Republicans hate, but truth and facts must top the list.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[wk_end]

(…and guess who’s company they’ll be contracting those launches to?)

[XorNot]

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.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[XorNot]

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.

[boxed]

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.

[cma]

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...

[cma]

And here it is: https://spacenews.com/spacex-scores-81-6-million-space-force...

[MikeTheGreat]

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...."?

[slg]

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.

[conartist6]

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

[ars]

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...

[trauco]

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”?

[IAmGraydon]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

thank you!

[timewizard]

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.

[counters]

> 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.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[counters]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> companies I'm referring to are (generally) not publicly traded

Stock doesn't have to be publicly traded to be traded.

[counters]

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.

[cyanydeez]

Trump uses hanlons razor to improve his grift outcomes.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[counters]

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.

[margalabargala]

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?

[mlyle]

The article mentions the three remaining operational satellites.

Generally, you use space hardware until it dies, which is hopefully well beyond the design life.

[trauco]

The satellites that are still up are still collecting critical data. That’s not disputed.