US Defense Department will stop providing satellite weather data

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...

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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