| I would be concerned about any private agency being responsible. Government is doing it for public interest and a private company is ultimately doing it for commercial gain no matter if it is public or private. While there may be seem to be less financial risk in some cases, a private company can simply go bankrupt and say sorry. That doesn't help get the data. What about cost overruns? It always seems to happen and it would be no different with private companies. Will they get a loan? Demand more money from governments, who would probably be the biggest buyers? Could you display the imagery online to the public? So many countries use satellite data from NOAA. How would you prevent that? Stop the public access and make every country pay for it and only have it internally? Governments need to be able to show that data to people for public safety, A private company is obviously going to do whatever it takes to save money and for this kind of data, it is not worth the risk to possibly save a little bit of money. There are just certain things that you can't outsource to private industry. NASA is somewhat different, though some of the same problems exist. I think there is more that can be done by a lot of competition and there are a lot more things that could be developed when compared to privatizing weather satellites. There is greater demand from more industries because of what could be developed for various NASA projects that are in partnership with private organizations than there would be for the amount of organizations that would use the weather data. I think the weather data is more critical too as you can't really delay it. We could delay going to the moon or Mars, but we can't delay a weather satellite and say we'll go a year without something. Private spacecraft going to the ISS is a good stepping stone to other ambitious private projects. From space tourism to mining other planets or asteroids, it has to start somewhere and private industry is a good fit as there could be a lot of money to be made in the decades to come. It just doesn't work for weather data in my opinion, whether it would be this company trying to sell things to the NWS or when it was AccuWeather years ago trying to kind of become the NWS. |