At Thursday’s Women in Aerospace breakfast event in Washington, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco passed along this anecdote from Capitol Hill:
I was visiting the Hill, talking to members of Congress about the importance of our satellite systems, and a member of Congress who shall go unnamed said to me, “I don’t need your satellites. I have The Weather Channel.”
Lubchenco may have decided to keep this member anonymous, but inquiring minds want to know: who in Congress thinks that NOAA’s satellites are redundant because of The Weather Channel? I’ve heard variations of this over the years, which leads me to wonder who—if anyone—made that claim.
I remember someone telling me a variation on this story in 1996. I suppose there are are one or more congressmen who have said this on multiple occasions over the years but it seems equally likely that the story is apocryphal and keeps getting repeated.
It could be any number of the 535 who serve as our “elite” representatives…one could pick names out of the phone book and probably do better.
Robert G. Oler
Variants of this crack (“I don’t need your comsats; I’ve got DirectTV”) havre been around for a couple of decades. So whoever said this was making a joke, either for the sake of the joke, or to signal that he/she did not want to begin a discussion of the topic.
I did hear from an eyewitness that a State Legislator in a major NASA state really did not understand that the Space Station goes around the earth.