I don't know why some people celebrate strength with fear of knowledge. Maybe they're just equally as afraid of knowledge and don't want to look weak and puff out their chests to pretend to be strong. As an American, it really frustrates me to see such bravado celebrated as bravery.

[delayed]

I'd be fine with that as a counterargument if that were the counterargument such people made. I think that's a healthy debate and dialogue, where we could learn from each other. I often think the case is they say climate change is fake and that experts are lying and everyone who has a PhD is lying to you, and those ad hominem attacks often say to me someone who feels insecure about their knowledge or has some vested interest in, say, the oil industry, for example. That was more of my outburst.

With regards to whether a private company could maintain satellites (probably with government regulation and maybe subsidy), I'm open to that. I just worry sometimes that many of these decisions are made in the "Uh oh, this public knowledge might destroy my private profits, so let us get rid of the public knowledge."

> afraid of knowledge and don't want to look weak

I've come to the conclusion this is basically it, aside from corruption.

Intellectual weakness and cowardice, avoiding what you can't actually do or don't understand.

In the case of anything space related though, I'd look to corruption, trying to cut public resources to reduce competition with private equivalents, shifting money from something publicly owned to something privately profited from.

you're assuming this is because of perception of weakness, and not an explicit, decade-long aggressive effort by foreign money + US billionaires to dismantle the US government.

just happens that oil barons & Putin happen to have views that are aligned, and that Trump + his cronies are willing to play ball with the fellow travelers.

i think a decades-long aggressive effort to dismantle the US government might also be from such a place of fear of knowledge or at least, fear of others having control over their right to make profit. I guess I'm just tired of us celebrating the ones who appear strong but really are just acting out of deep fear and wish they (and us) had the courage to see it as fear and express it as such.

For those in power, those that point out the problem, become the problem.

Only if those in power don't actually feel powerful but just want to look powerful.

Don't pay money to give your political opponents facts to help oust you.

politics 101.

They're already going to be ousted. This is about temporarily propping up the price of fossil fuel assets that will never practically be monetized. Even an extra 5-10 years could allow vast sums of fake-wealth to be dumped onto other bagholders.

The asset bust coming to Permian basin via fracking is going to be a doozy.

There are three kinds of satellites that do this sort of earth observation right now. I'd look up the acronyms but frankly it's been weeks since the news dropped and I don't care to educate anyone anymore, you can google it if you want. There's one kind they've been launching every now and then since the 00s and there's only a couple of it's type up there due to short-ish life (like a decade and a half) last few being problematic resulting in a very low (like count on one hand) number of its type in service of which most are at or beyond end of life. Those are being defunded. The programs that maintain the other two types will remain.

It's like the air force saying they're killing the F15C but keeping the F15D and F15E only with space and different acronyms.

Really speaks volumes about the community that news that's basically the space equivalent of the army or navy retiring a class of craft in favor of others that do that jobs is being portrayed like it's the end of the world. If the EOLing were an actual degradation in the organization's capability it would not have gone out of the mainstream so fast.

No; the budget cuts the Earth Science division (encompassing MODIS et al.) in half[0]. You need only query at the budget request itself[1] to see it does so with wilful malice, under the rationale that climate science is "woke" and a "radical ideology"[1].

[0] https://www.space.com/science/climate-change/as-nasas-budget... (.... It called for a 24% overall cut to NASA's budget, including a 47% reduction in Earth science funding...")

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...

> "The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life."

You didn’t address what they said though.

Need the money to pay for moving the retired, defunct Shuttle Discovery to Houston in order to lie to the people that space is being funded.