This week’s print issue of Space News includes a short article about a speech last Thursday by Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) at the U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Industry Conference in Washington (one floor up and around the corner from the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference, taking place at the same time.) Udall has long advocated increased use of remote sensing for various applications, including sponsoring legislation that was later incorporated into the NASA authorization bill last year that sets up a pilot program of grants for state and local use of such data. The article includes this interesting passage:
Udall said there needs to be as much of an emphasis on funding Earth science projects as there is on funding the rest of NASA’s research.
“There are a lot more humans living on this Earth right now than there are on Mars,” he said.
I checked to see if the text of his speech was available on his web site, but no luck: he posted a speech he made Monday night, but the one before that dates back to February 2003.
Udall has a point.
Unfortunately, it’s the wrong one. More people live in the United States than Antarctica, yet we still spend lots of money sending scientists to study the latter.
— Donald
Why should remote sensing remain a function of NASA? Why not NOAA or USGS? These are not the bleeding edge fields they once were.
Better yet, why not just buy data from the private sector and make governement a customer? I cannot see why other than for national security purposes, the governemnt should remain anything but a consumer of private remote sensing services.
I can see very good reasons for keeping the Landsat record going, but I agree that it should belong to the USGS or NOAA (or even a military service before NASA). Also, I can think of no reason today why 30m to 10m multispectral imaging should cost what Landsat costs; this should be an inexpensive smallsat product. If so, it could probably be commercialized.
— Donald