The political intent behind a new dark age makes sense if you think of the goal as being to destroy competent institutions which represent a real threat to an anti-science, post-truth administration

This might also be a program in which the goals of a privatized for-profit company are rather bad in the broader context. If you pay me millions to track and possibly control your satellite in orbit so it doesn't collide... I'll invest in rocket companies to launch more satellites. Even if they are very silly satellites.

After all, if they collide, the debris will most likely miss the shareholders, and then you get more satellites to get contracts for.

And who cares if some of those invaluable scientific systems with year-long plans get knocked out?

Care to elaborate?

What's the value that comes back?

There is a lot of trouble with bureaucrats defending fiefdoms that would be better consolidated, but you can't fix that with an axe.

It should be incredibly clear that the motivation for these folks isn’t reducing government spending (or cutting waste).

The problem is the programme is at NOAA, and NOAA tells a story about the climate that some folks don’t like. So they trash the messenger and his tools.

This is an international issue being funded by the US taxpayer regardless of their own utilization of said services.

Programs like these need to exist, but services like starlink should be the ones footing the bill. The military and weather services would need larger budgets to fund their portion of this effort so some of it would come back to "general taxes" but a much smaller amount.

Meanwhile, All those other groups and nations with launch capabilities and a vested intrest in NOT having issues could be contributing too.

> Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.

These efforts need to be funded with a tax to support them, and not all be drawn from the same general fund. It would make the arguments about "taxes" and "spending" much more reasonable.

In recent years, the operating environment in orbital space has changed rapidly, and it isn't just the number of objects. These changes are outside the design assumptions of traditional orbital traffic systems, degrading their effectiveness. In response to this reality, governments with significant space assets have been investing in orbital traffic systems that are capable of dealing with the modern environment. However, these rely heavily on classified technology and capability to address the limitations of the older systems.

An argument could be made that it no longer makes sense to fund a public system that is descending into obsolescence due to lack of capability and which can't be meaningfully fixed because that would require exposing classified technical capabilities that no one is willing to expose. In this scenario, the private sector is acting as an offramp from a system that had no future technically.

Space has turned into an interesting place, in the curse sense. It isn't as simple as it used to be.

This is privatization and federal dismantling, and it’s happening so fast and recklessly it will also show up as cultural and civil destruction too. He’s wrecking America so that technocrats can buy it all up.

There’s no intended upside for citizens or for the society they make up. People die and his supporters shrug and defend. It’s Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish as political policy, but reduced by hyperscaling to “eviscerate”.

It's about destroying science, not just current science but the future of science.

By destroying all existing structure so that it will cost trillions to rebuild so impossible anytime soon.

Including academia that seeds the science.

They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives".

Many (including myself) believe that Government should be for "the common good", via a legal system, government investments in shared needs/resources, etc.

The current admin believes that Government exists for only two reasons: personal enrichment and punishing perceived enemies. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see that happening.

1. Wants to cut the budget so we don't go broke

2. Punishes anyone who talks about unsustainable retirement, disability, and healthcare entitlement programs.

So, they get politicians who try to find a third way, even if it doesn't make a budgetary difference. To get out of this, the public (especially the boomer retiree population) needs to be more mature about the fiscal situation they put the country in and realize they are not living within their means.

I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it

Red herring. It’s not. It’s never been. We’re blowing out the deficit by trillions.

The motivation isn’t anything about the deficit. It’s that NOAA counters the climate narrative a narrow band of idiots would prefer to believe.

I hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it!

Then they’d switch to a user fee. Perhaps even at a profit, such that it’s deficit reducing.

That isn’t what they’re doing because that isn’t what this is about.

Don't all Starlink satellites have a plan to deorbit responsibly; specifically, do nothing, which results in a relatively quick deorbitting?

Starlink satellites are in low-Earth-orbit which can't accumulate much space debris, because everything deorbits naturally within a few years.

What would the free market solution be here? Someone builds all the infrastructure to track all the satellites, and maybe more than one (if not you have a monopoly) person does it. Then they charge for it?

But someone doesn't use it an now we have more space junk ...

If anything a government organizing this and everyone utilizing it seems like it makes for more efficient / lower risk situation with satellites. Everyone just gets on with more important business.

While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.

Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.

Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.

It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council. That entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.

REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.

I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.

It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.