US Defense Department will stop providing satellite weather data

Is this an attempt at controlling the narrative around climate change, in line with the impacts at NOAA and other climate-related government agencies?

Don’t look up!

The timing is just, it's atrocious. Okay, at this very moment, I say we sit tight and assess.

Accuweather, who also depend on this same USG sensor data for their modeling…

I don’t think anybody wins from this.

See e.g. https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...

Are there other countries with similar weather satellites? I imagine China or the EU likely have some of their own. I know the US has been pushing this for free so plenty of nations likely piggy back off the free data. But I imagine larger ones might want their own redundant services to some degree to avoid vulnerability.

If so, they might be benefiting, but that’s about it.

SpaceX?

I recommend Ambient Weather instead of Accuweather.

[0] https://ambientweather.net/

"Since its establishment in 2014, the Copernicus program has received consistent investment from ESA, making it the world’s largest and most advanced open data Earth Observation initiative for climate, disaster, and resource management."[0]

Data from the Copernicus program is available for any citizen or organization worldwide. So a lot of free data will still be accessible.

[0] https://newsletter.terrawatchspace.com/global-earth-observat...

That's what got us here in the first place, maybe stop doing that.

>I don't think anybody wins from this...

Take one quick look at any wealth inequality graph over time and "who's winning" will be pretty clear. Someone always wins. This is simply a step at privatizing everything. Straight out of project 2025.

Kagi 2025 noaa. I shouldn't even have to link it. The fact that their entire game was publicly laid out years ago... and still, people act ignorant or are legitimately not paying any attention to politics... We deserve all that this administration will cost us as a collective.

Business as usual there,

SpaceX scores $81.6 million Space Force contract to launch weather satellite

  The contract for the mission designated USSF-178 was awarded on June 27  ( 2025 ) by the Space Systems Command and represents SpaceX’s third consecutive win under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program.

  The mission will carry the Weather System Follow-on – Microwave Space Vehicle 2 (WSF-M2), along with a secondary payload of experimental small satellites called BLAZE-2. 

~ https://spacenews.com/spacex-scores-81-6-million-space-force...

New weather sats going up, just not "free data for taxpayers".

One decision can have multiple motives.

It's probably not even that sophisticated. It's almost certainly a variant of 'Why are we giving this away for free? We should be making money from this!!!' Not understanding the second-order money losing impacts of it going away is pretty much expected.

To where? Stock market ath and free AI for the masses?

This sounds so cheap that we could have thousands of individuals launch their private constellations.

Do you really need to subsidise this anymore?

If anything brining competition to this space (pun intended) might improve the data quality.

It not being publicly published or furnished to NOAA doesn't mean AccuWeather or other private entities won't get this data.

"Sit tight and assess" as used above is probably a reference to the movie "Don't Look Up" from a few years ago, which (heavy-handedly) parodied administrations like Trump I (and which unortunately seem much less like parody in the Trump II era).

Yes. Quoting Projct 225:

> Break Up NOAA ... NOAA consists of six main offices ... Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized. NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.

https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-national-oceanic-and-...

Tldr: shut down NOAA to suppress climate change evidence, research, and preparedness; outsource to private industry the remaining parts that are considered directly useful for commerce.

Is it any wonder that the CEO of Accuweather Barry Myers was a Trump donor who became a NOAA head administrator appointee in Trump's first term? The appointment fortunately failed. Now they're trying again.

^ I’m pretty sure this is a quote from the movie Don’t Look Up, if that’s why y’all are downvoting this comment

Oh geez that… that is upsetting

No, this was cancelled by congress in 2015 and switched to the JPSS program which is running and active.

If we survive this, these people will go down in history as monsters.

A contract to lift a sat to orbit improves data quality as much as a transport contract to deliver furniture improves a chaise lounge.

Satellites are still tricky and time consuming to build and are an entire other ball of wax than a lift to orbit.

What if they're the ones who survive and rewrite history

Of course I'm not arguing sats are easy or simple or whatever, but overall cost has and still is dominated by launch cost, by at least an order of magnitude.

Most of the world looks at the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly the looting of state institutions by the oligarchs in Russia, as a cautionary tale.

The current US regime looks at it as a roadmap.

  A typical weather satellite carries a price tag of $290 million; a spy satellite might cost an additional $100 million

~ https://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite10.htm

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked the aerospace and defense giant to build it at least three, and potentially as many as seven, new next-generation Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) sats. If all options are exercised, the total contract value will reach $2.3 billion.

  Bad news for Lockheed Martin: That works out to $324.3 million per satellite.

~ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/06/30/lockheed-martin-wi...

It's generally agreed that ~ $90 million for a sat launch is less than a third of a ~$300 million per sat build cost.

Then they will do everything in their power to pretend that they didn’t drag us into this.

And have you got a source thats not a nearly 2 decades old and not for government contract?

Edit: here's one thats $30M https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/05/electron-tropics-lau...

> have you got a source thats not a nearly 2 decades old

Such as the Lockheed Martin 2024 contract I linked?

Sure.. try that link, it's from last year and talks about grown up big boy weather sat costs in 2024..

Your $30m SmallSat is not in the same league as a full featured $300m sat .. I'll leave you to work out the differences.

Moreover the launch costs for those $30m sats is under $8m each launch, again refuting an upstream claim about launch costs being higher than sat build costs.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron

   The starting price for delivering payloads to orbit is about US$7.5 million per launch, or US$25,000 per kg, which offers the only dedicated service at this price point.

I had a bit of a chat with chatgpt and I agree the smallsats are not replacement just yet, but in future there's no doubt they are better in most ways - faster iteration, far better resolution and of course lower cost.

That's what they're betting on. It's why suppressing free public access to knowledge and education is part of the agenda.

Definitely. The EU has weather satellites and Asia as well. Luckily, they tend to collect data around the entire world but what we lose here is the on-the-ground infrastructure that is woven together with satellite data to give better information about the facts on the ground.

Funny enough, this came up in the Netherlands a few months ago. The government released their own mobile app based on the data they collect and the private weather apps got all upset that the government was competing. What made it hilarious though, is that the private companies are all using the open source government data to power their apps!

So yea, this data will still be collected in the USA, but then sold to for-profit companies for basically nothing and then they will charge consumers for access to data collected with their collective tax dollars. Pretty messed up imo.

I recommend my tax dollars actually pay for something useful to citizens instead of going directly into some oligarchs off-shore banking account.

Yet, many even here on HN will if not outright defend this, then let it slide, because there is one overarching goal which must not be compromised at any cost: to own the libs.

I agree but that isn't happening so I would recommend not supporting the products that enrich these oligarchs.

History isn't written by the victors. It's written by historians.

Given that despite open knowledge nothing was done for >50 years about climate change, there's plenty of blame to go around. Hell, I like to compare the feedback vs the forcing and the feedback has been going down since 2018. Imho that can only mean the tipping point is very close.

Could more than one thing be goin on?

Historians using highly biased sources from the victors.

having literally never heard of this, despite being in North America, it's a good idea to not make assumptions about who's seen which pop culture thing.