Loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back 'decades'

> 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.

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

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...

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.