Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; The Geocarb Project cancellation leaves a lot of questions – like how NASA managed to spend $170 million on the CO2 monitoring project without putting anything into space.
NASA cancels greenhouse gas monitoring satellite due to cost
By SETH BORENSTEIN November 30, 2022
NASA is canceling a planned satellite that was going to intensely monitor greenhouse gases over the Americas because it got too costly and complicated.
But the space agency said it will still be watching human-caused carbon pollution but in different ways.
…
When it was announced six years ago, it was supposed to cost $166 million, but the latest NASA figures show costs would balloon to more than $600 million and it was years late, according to NASA Earth Sciences Director Karen St. Germain.
Unlike other satellites that monitor greenhouse gases from low Earth orbit and get different parts of the globe in a big picture, GeoCarb was supposed to be at a much higher altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) from one fixed place in orbit and focus intently on North and South America. That different and further perspective proved too difficult and costly to get done on budget and on time, St. Germain said.
The equipment alone has more than doubled in price and then there were non-technical issues that would have added more, she said. The agency has already spent $170 million on the now-canceled program and won’t spend any more.
…
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/space-exploration-science-south-america-business-pollution-c3b6ea27eed442bbf9b57d310f7255c2
How could it possibly cost $600 million to launch two satellites to geostationary orbit? How did the agency manage to spend $170 million without launching a satellite?
I’d love to see an audit into the project, to see how much money if any was diverted to allegedly dual use purposes. Perhaps the incoming Republican congress could launch an investigation into NASA’s expenditure on “non technical issues”.
NASA may still proceed with another Earth focussed project, according to the AP article. Let us hope the new project doesn’t suffer cost blowouts and “non-technical” issues.
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And then there is SpaceX….
That’s what I was going to say: just ask Elon Musk to put some CO2 detectors on new Starlink satellites.
SpaceX has a leader that knows what he wants to do and he focuses all his attention on getting those things done. He eliminates the bureaucratic decision-making.
NASA is completely the opposite. All bureaucracy and no focus from the leadership.
NASA should hire Musk to design and orbit a Carbon Dioxide monitor, if they feel the need for one, and cut the unwieldy NASA bureaucracy out of the process.
The bureaucracy is the problem. NASA leadership is a contributing problem because they give the bureaucracy free rein.
Once again, I had one simple request to have a satellite with frickin’ laser beams on its head, but my cycloptic friend here informs me that’s not possible. What do we have?
The cynical part of me thinks that the results from the previous CO2-measuring satellite did not show what they wanted to see, so there was no push to collect more data that didn’t support their cause.
Ding-ding-ding!!! Loren wins the prize.
What results? The results are a NASA secret, as far as I can tell.
$160 million for not getting it up.
Yes, testosterone levels really are on the decline.
It sounds like an amazingly successful mission. Without even launching anything into orbit, they discovered the astronomical phenomenon known as the “budgetary black hole”…
Federal departments are usually incompetent when estimating costs. i.e., you know those estimates use 2020 interest and workhour rates.
My sense is that there might be a couple of agendas here. One is that money was sucked up by the Webb telescope and secondly, I bet they didn’t want to find out what they thought they would find out undermining the political green agenda.
non technical issues, aka GRAFT.
You only have to look at the rainbow coalition of sub-par individuals NASA put in front of the cameras during the JWST “reveal” to understand the ballooning costs. It took teams of dozens of face diapered, equity hires over an hour to show us five frickin images.
If they want to know where the CO2 is coming from they need to park over SE Asia, not the Americas.
We are one of the major consumers of the goods produced there. Therefore, we have indirect culpability for the CO2.
Satellite maps showing more CO2 over the Congo and Amazon forests than over major cities were clearly “data non grata”