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Posted by drewr 3 days ago

US Defense Department will stop providing satellite weather data(text.npr.org)
295 points | 152 commentspage 3
jimnotgym 3 days ago|
The rest of the world needs to club closer together, and quickly. The US is no longer a reliable ally.
jzb 3 days ago||
It’s no longer a reliable place to live, either.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3 days ago||
I've seen this argument a lot, but I don't see people clamoring to leave. I don't think anyone is taking makeshift boats to Cuba from the US, for example.

If you live in the US, are you actively looking to leave?

esseph 2 days ago|||
We are 5 months and 9 days into this Presidency.

Check back in a few more months.

jzb 2 days ago|||
No, because it’s not realistic for me - I’m not going to leave my siblings behind, nor my inlaws. If this was happening when I was single? I’d have been out before Trump took office the first time.
GiorgioG 3 days ago||
By all means please do and pay for it yourselves.
bix6 3 days ago|||
Heaven forbid the richest nation on earth that steals resources from everyone else contribute to global improvement.
GiorgioG 3 days ago||
Heaven forbid the rest of the world pays their own share of the bill. We’re not a charity. We treat our own people like shit, don’t expect to be treated better.
jimnotgym 2 days ago|||
The lack of self-awareness here is incredible. Every Visa, Mastercard and PayPal transaction in my country results in us paying tax to the US. You think we couldn't develop our own card schemes?

US tech business gets tax free entry into our market. It uses our roads, our communications, our police and court system. All of this is to the detriment of our local business.

A huge amount of our defence spending goes directly to the US. We buy your planes even when we could make better ones ourselves. We have supported the US in nearly every colonial adventure since WW2.

Why do we allow ourselves to be milked like this? We are paying tribute to the US for being the ally of our colonial masters. Its time we stopped.

GiorgioG 2 days ago||
Yes all these things you don’t do yourselves because you can do it better, cheaper and faster. Listen to yourself.
jimnotgym 1 day ago||
You may recall that Europe has its own card schemes, but the UK doesn't join them, because of the 'special relationship'.

The UK was forced by the US to abandon TSR2, the best jet in the world, to get a cash bailout from the US, that it needed after all of the years fighting WW2 on its own...it spent all of its money buying material...from the USA. The UK invented lots of key military equipment, Radar, proximity fuses, nuclear bombs, jet engines, and gave them all to the US. It is about time the US paid us back, you leeches

GiorgioG 1 day ago||
I don't recall Europe having its own global card schemes.

The TSR-2 was abandoned due to cost overruns. The F-111 would have been cheaper...but even that was abandoned and eventually the Tornado came along...not a US aircraft.

The flow of military inventions flowed both ways during WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_technological_cooperati... Maybe if you hadn't had a coward as a leader in Chamberlain we wouldn't have had to bail you guys out (and lose ~250,000 Americans in Europe.)

bix6 3 days ago||||
When you light a lamp for someone else, it also brightens your path.
justinrubek 2 days ago||||
No, we're not a charity. We've just been the ones not paying our share of the bill. We've arranged it such that we have the best deal and we've gotten greedy now, so we are choosing to jeopardize that.
octo888 3 days ago|||
Much of the world is already VERY accustomed to the US treating it like shit
GiorgioG 2 days ago||
Feel free to spend a trillion dollars on your own DoD annually. Then you don’t need the US anymore. I’d be happy if we stopped policing the world as much as anyone else. And we could maybe spend our taxes on something more productive and useful to the people.
octo888 2 days ago||
Just because the US spends so much on defence is not evidence that level of spending is required
galacticaactual 3 days ago|||
Yep.
tonetheman 3 days ago||
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TrackerFF 3 days ago||
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m-hodges 3 days ago||
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burnt-resistor 3 days ago||
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mtmail 3 days ago||
Russia, China, Europe have similar systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation#Global_na... It'd be a huge disruption but it's not irreplaceable.
oefrha 3 days ago|||
It’s not irreplaceable going forward. It’s irreplaceable for all the non-upgradable devices in the field with GPS only.
tokai 3 days ago|||
With Galileo being interoperable with GPS and more accurate it might not even be that big of a deal.
jimnotgym 3 days ago||
Well done to the EU for forseeing this eventuality
thfuran 3 days ago||
The US used to significantly limit the accuracy of GPS signal available for civilian use, so that's not exactly hard to foresee.
chamomeal 3 days ago|||
Is that possible? I thought GPS works by just listening for signals from GPS satellites?

I’m now realizing I know hardly anything about GPS. Like it was made in the 50’s or something? Do we keep sending more GPS satellites into space? Or are there just the original handful?

hypercube33 3 days ago|||
The basics of it are it's a digital synchronized time signal sent out by a constellation of satellites. Devices listen for at least 3 separate streams of time signals and the. triangulation happens to get a position.

Irrc the satellite signals not encrypted or whatever were randomized to be inaccurate on purpose. This is mitigated these days by using stuff like cell towers - we know exactly where they are. they pick the same signals out and send out corrections to the randomized data which increases accuracy.

jenadine 3 days ago||||
The GPS signal can be encrypted such that only the army can access it. The not encrypted signal can be made less accurate or disabled over specific regions.
esseph 2 days ago|||
Late 80s, early 90s for civilian use.

There have been several iterations of satellites and systems.

defrost 2 days ago||
Late 70s:

  In February 1978, the first Block I developmental Navstar/GPS satellite launched, with three more Navstar satellites launched by the end of 1978.
esseph 2 days ago||
We're coming at this from different angles.

Probably easiest for the OP just read the Wikipedia article.

defrost 2 days ago||
Not sure about yourself, I'm coming at it from the angle of the dates the local (Nor'West Australia) ham operators started picking GPS signals from navigation satellites .. that and recording transmissions from the Harold Holt submarine communications base passed the time.

There were off book non US reverse engineered Navstar recievers cobbled together on benches in the mid 80s being trialed as alternatives to LORAN use.

That's a little earlier than your statement of "late 80s".

It'd be documented in, say, Geoscience Australia metadata notes to air surveys of the era.

Of course that'd be a primary source and not wikipedia, nor a wikipedia secondary reference newspaper article.

esseph 2 days ago||
Early Block I was mostly used for testing.

If you're just concerned with the first satellite launch, ehhhh, sure. As a useable global system it was much later.

"The GPS project was launched in the United States in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems,[15] combining ideas from several predecessors, including classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Defense developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites, for use by the United States military, and became fully operational in 1993. Civilian use was allowed from the 1980s. "

Here's the current list, marked by launch date and Block:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GPS_satellites

XorNot 3 days ago|||
Which would be hilarious because one of the primary reasons GPS became generally accessible was because consumer GPS being accurate made it easier and cheaper to stick GPS in absolutely everything the military uses.

Basically trying to deny accurate positioning tends to not help your own forces as much as it being trivial for them to call back to your giant logistics machine with accurate positioning.

dzhiurgis 3 days ago||
It’s already been discontinued by jamming in many places.

Ironically best fit for replacement is Starlink constellation.

IMHO after seeing what Ukraine pulled off in Russia recently - un-jammable gnss is kinda dangerous until drones like Skydio trickle down to the masses.

jimnotgym 3 days ago||
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ars 3 days ago||
It has nothing to do with 2025, this program was cancelled in 2015.
thegrim33 3 days ago||
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moneycantbuy 3 days ago||
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fnordpiglet 3 days ago|
Vote.
jimnotgym 3 days ago||
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rhyperior 3 days ago|
Even though a majority voted for him, tens of millions did not.
ivape 3 days ago||
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1over137 3 days ago||
>It certainly can’t be as silly as to throw red meat to a base that hates climate data.

Why not? ;(

fragmede 3 days ago|||
John Oliver had a whole episode about this

https://youtu.be/qMGn9T37eR8

tl;dw: AccuWeather, whos CEO donated to Trump's campaign.

9283409232 3 days ago|||
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CharlesW 3 days ago||
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skiboyec 3 days ago|
My hunch is that the location of the satellites can be deduced from the weather data. These satellites would be a target in a time of war.
gpm 3 days ago||
The location of the satellites is public knowledge. Satellites are trivially tracked from the ground - the amateur community does this whenever someone tries to keep the location of one secret: https://www.popsci.com/zuma-spy-satellite-amateur-astronomer...

They also don't exactly move much, it takes precious fuel to change a satellites orbit.

3-5105 3 days ago|||
Satellites using sun-synchronous orbits can circle the Earth multiple times in a day.Compared with a stationary observer on the ground,they are moving at a relatively fast speed.Therefore,as long as they delay the release of observational data by a random time period,there won't be this issue.Only geostationary satellites would have this problem.

But a bigger problem comes before the above issue:most of the current human meteorological satellites do not have stealth capabilities.You can see them directly.Perhaps your idea will become a practical problem when satellite stealth technology matures.

This is a translation.

skiboyec 3 days ago||
I did not see your comment before I left mine! But yes the second half makes sense.

I do think you might able to deduce the orbit even if the data release is delayed by a random time period. If you’re a foreign adversary that has its own satellites, you can measure the same information from a known orbit. Then one could compare the published data with one’s known dataset to deduce things like the angle from which the data was measured.

dmix 3 days ago|||
Most plausible reason. National security hawks have always been extremely protective of intelligence even when the risk is tiny. Probably some DoD people (or person) wanted to keep it closed and new hawkish leadership let them do it.

Who knows, the Navy hasn't released any statement beyond "cyber security risks" so there's only politics to fill in the blanks.

It seems to be this agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Numerical_Meteorology_an...

Who recently got a supercomputer system https://www.montereycountynow.com/news/local_news/a-new-supe...

bix6 3 days ago|||
So why does The King get to tweet pictures from our spy satellites then?
justinrubek 2 days ago|||
It's not even close to being a plausible reason when project 2025 states that this needs to happen.
skiboyec 3 days ago||
Hmm I think I’m wrong. From what I can tell satellites , especially those in LEO can be optically tracked pretty easily
sorcerer-mar 3 days ago||
Yeah I was going to say: you can also know where satellites are by looking at them. Obviously we're not publishing weather data from the ones with important natsec equipment onboard.