PlanetIQ's Plan: Swap US Weather Sats For Private Ones 128
We've mentioned over the last few years several times the funding problems that mean the U.S. government's weather satellite stable is thinner than we might prefer. A story at the Weather Underground outlines the plan of a company called PlanetIQ to fill the needs met with the current constellation of weather sats with private ones instead. From the article, describing testimony last week before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce:
"PlanetIQ's solution includes launching a constellation of 12 small satellites in low-Earth orbit to collect weather data, which PlanetIQ says the federal government could access at less cost and risk than current government-funded efforts. ... [PlanetIQ Anne Hale] Miglarese added that within 28 to 34 months from the beginning of their manufacture, all 12 satellites could be in orbit. As for the cost, she says, "We estimate that for all U.S. civilian and defense needs globally for both terrestrial and space weather applications, the cost to government agencies in the U.S. will be less than $70 million per year. As the satellites collect data, PlanetIQ would sell the data to government weather services around the world as well as the U.S. Air Force. The most recently launched polar-orbiting satellite, sent into space by the U.S. in 2011, cost $1.5 billion."
Re:hmm, where have I heard this one before... (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm, you've heard it from SpaceX?
They actually are doing it cheaper....
Re:Car Salesmen (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, there is some truth to that statement. Often, the money is made on sales incentives. If you sell 30 cars, you get an extra $10,000 from the car maker, or something along those lines.
Re:Conspiracy Theory.. (Score:2, Informative)
I am a meteorologist. The reporting at the time linked the Rick Santorum sponsored bill to AccuWeather. I have never heard this attributed to weather.com/Weather Channel.
Here is the submitted bill, which did not pass and is not law. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:s786:
Re:Who Owns the Data? (Score:4, Informative)
Here's an example of government-generated data http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed [nih.gov]
Pubmed is a database of essentially every medical journal article, prepared by the National Institutes of Health. A computer scientist one told me that it was the best-designed database (in terms of user searching) that he knew of. He's probably right. Pubmed is now one of the main tools of medical research and clinical practice.
One of Al Gore's real accomplishments was to make Pubmed free online. Before then, it was sold through private contractors who, at one time, charged $1 a citation. The incremental cost of making Pubmed free was almost nothing, because the NIH library had to prepare it anyway. If they had done it as a paid-subscription service, they would have gotten maybe 10,000 subscriptions from medical school libraries, pharmaceutical companies, and malpractice lawyers. Now, there are millions of people using it around the world, including high school biology students, patients researching their disease, and everyone who writes about medicine on Wikipedia.
An interesting contrast is Lexis and Westlaw, the proprietary services that lawyers use to look up court cases. Those services charge a fortune. I don't know what the current fees are, but they used to be around $200 a month for a lawyer in private practice (correct me if I'm wrong). Westlaw had an annoying policy of not providing service to public libraries, so it was impossible for an ordinary citizen with no legal affiliation to get access. They carried the full text of the decisions, but these were public record, and in principle owned by the taxpayers and citizens, so they were selling our own public domain information back to us. They did add a certain value -- they had a reference system like the Internet before the Internet. But a well-run government database could provide the same service to everyone free (through taxes, of course) that the private vendors sell to only to the few thousand people who can afford to pay their high fees. Now the Internet is catching up with them with Findlaw, Cornell law school, etc.
Well-run government services can often do the job cheaper, and make information accessible to a lot more people, than private companies. Everybody pays a lot less through taxes than they would through private subscriptions.