A space program suffering from long-running problems, including schedule delays and cost overruns, is radically reshaped in the FY 2011 budget proposal announced Monday. And hardly anyone notices.
Obviously, we’re not talking about Constellation.
Instead, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Satellite System (NPOESS) underwent a shakeup in the budget proposal, right down to its name: it’s now called the Joint Polar Satellite System, at least on the NOAA side. NPOESS has been a joint effort of NOAA, NASA, and DoD to develop a new generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites that can serve both civil government and military weather forecasting and climatology needs. NPOESS, though, had suffered from serious problems that resulted in billions of dollars and cost overruns and schedule slips that caused some to worry about the continuity of weather data from such spacecraft.
Now, instead of being a single combined program, NOAA and NASA will split responsibility for the program with DOD. NOAA/NASA will be responsible for the satellites that will fly in “afternoon” orbits (because they pass over sunlit regions of the Earth at local afternoon) while DOD will take control of the spacecraft that will go in early morning orbits. The two groups will procure their satellites separately; for the civil government side, NASA will perform the acquisition management in much the same way it handles such tasks for NOAA’s geostationary weather satellites.
OSTP has more details about this shift, including details on the responsibilities of the various agencies in the post-NPOESS environment; NOAA’s budget document has some additional information. The change, though, has attracted very little media attention so far: thanks at least in part to NASA’s big announcements, no doubt.
About damn time. NPOESS started as a Clinton Administration reorganization and should have been fixed during Bush II. There was no reason to let this critical capability suffer so blatantly for so long. The various White Houses had years to fix (or just change course). Very neglectful.
FWIW…
another example of taking a satellite system that was working fine (NOAA and DMSP) and frackening it up
Robert G. Oler
@ Space Politics
Maybe it’s time to change the image at the top right on this web site?
They didn’t consider privatizing the thing? I thought we all understood that the wonderful free enterprise will always build better weather satellites than any number of government agencies! Think of the money that could have been saved!
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More seriously, yeah, I saw that at Space Policy Online yesterday. I won’t make any judgement about the solution arrived at; what really struck me was that somewhere at the White House or Pentagon there was obviously a crew of space policy wonks rabid for work.
“They didn’t consider privatizing the thing?”
NPOESS was part research program and incorporated a number of new instruments. Not a viable data purchase candidate.
FWIW…
We are real and honest you can depend on.
“Maybe it’s time to change the image at the top right on this web site?”
Change it to what?
To something not Constellation
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