No funding or turning a blind eye

NASA can’t afford to keep many of its satellite programs funded, so several projects like LANDSAT, EOS, and other land use and climate monitoring systems are being canceled or put at risk of having major service interruptions.

Since many of these satellites give us an idea of what global climate change may be occurring, or how it may be affecting land cover and such, I can’t help but think of this as the current administration turning a high-tech blind eye on the whole climate change argument. The logic of the move? My guess is that it comes down to this:

“If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

I realize these budget things take a long time, but it seems that the cost of disasters like Katrina and the importance of remote sensing would underscore the importance of satellite programs. I guess this plays in to another suspicion of mine – that cuts like this are huge boosts to private companies like Geo Eye (recently merged) that can provide some remote sensing services. I know nothing of the politics involved, but the benefit that these public satellite programs is almost immeasurable, and benefit more than just the folks that can afford the data.

3 thoughts on “No funding or turning a blind eye”

  1. You forget that Katrina had nothing to do with global warming or any other natural phenomena. Rather it was God punishing all the heritics in New Orleans.

  2. So what are we going to do about it? Fight I say. No, I’ll let my tax dollars speak for themselves and pay for another sports arena in seattle.

Comments are closed.