Except that we're letting them die.
Ninety is the combined number of Earth-observing instruments on NASA and NOAA satellites that are currently monitoring our planet. And that number is about to plunge, according to a National Research Council report released in May 2012. By 2020, there could be less than 20 instruments in orbit, and the total number of missions is expected to fall from 23 to just 6.I can make book on the fact that you don't care. The technology, the data and the knowledge is, as far as most people are concerned, well outside their daily limits of concern.
That's not wrong-headed, unless the weather is of concern to you. Or perhaps the fact that your house may be swallowed up by salt water in the next 50 years. Or, maybe, you need to know when a volcano erupts. Forget it. You'll know about it when the ash kills the engines on your trans-Atlantic flight.
If you're so inclined, take a read of this paper. A Midterm Assessment of NASA's Implementation of the Decadal Survey. If not, well, be assured that the authors are issuing a dire warning - without proper space-based instruments we will have no idea of what is happening on our little blue planet and we will have no idea how to deal with changes. (The global warming deniers can go find another place to suck their thumbs).
Funding, from all countries, for space-based research is drying up because the legislative bodies of those countries see little political value in supporting it. It gets to the bottom line - it's too expensive to know how this planet is doing.
But they do support spying on you. Big time. It's never too expensive to ignore the health of the planet and develop the capability to read your last email instead.
So, while the US lets NASA starve, and the Harperites fail to fund space-based research, we go blind while the government gets big new ears.
