{"id":1724,"date":"2010-11-19T12:43:02","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T17:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harvardnsj.com\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2013-04-03T22:42:44","modified_gmt":"2013-04-04T02:42:44","slug":"1724","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/2010\/11\/1724\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Much Inter-Agency Cooperation?: A Warning from Aborted Satellite Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Joseph Borson —<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In early 2010, the White House quietly canceled<\/a> the long-troubled National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).\u00a0 The project would have consolidated almost all new U.S. polar orbit weather satellites into a single administrative structure, jointly run by the Department of Defense (DoD), NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).\u00a0 These satellites, because of their unique orbital geometries, are critical for long-term climate change modeling <\/a> (as opposed to hour-to-hour weather forecasts a la \u201cweather.com\u201d), and the original hope was that sharing satellite assets among different interested agencies would allow for efficiencies of scale, the sharing of technical expertise, and ultimately, better information.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t work out that way. Instead, the program\u2019s budget ballooned<\/a> from $6.5B in 2002 to nearly $14B in 2010, and the project suffered technical delays<\/a> in satellite integration and imaging instrument installation \u2013 in other words, the satellites were blind. These types of issues are far from uncommon in satellite design programs. But, in the assessment<\/a> of House Science Committee Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC), the program was ultimately felled because it was \u201ccrippled by a management structure that delayed decisions at critical moments.\u201d The three agencies could not harmonize their distinct operational requirements, and ultimately, tried to create a project that could serve everyone \u2013 and a result, ended up serving no one. The remnants of the NPOESS project will ultimately be devolved<\/a> back to the constituent agencies, with the DoD and NOAA each running a separate set of satellites. Data will hopefully be still be shared<\/a>, but the dream of a single U.S. climate satellite system appears to be dead.<\/p>\n

But is that such a bad thing?<\/p>\n

From the perspective of modeling information, the answer is unequivocally yes. U.S. agencies had been depending on NPOESS as a source for critical forecasting information for the 2010s, and as old polar orbiting satellite systems wear out<\/a>, there will be a gap<\/a> when there is really nothing that can serve as a capable replacement. But without good data, there is no way to create the effective climate models necessary to determine the potential effectiveness of climate change policy. And as policymakers continue to recognize climate change as an increasingly important threat to national security<\/a>, and one worthy of a significant regulatory response<\/a>, the idea that they would implement policies while blinding themselves to the data necessary to inform that policy-making process is inexcusably short-sighted. The U.S. plans to try to mitigate damages by keeping satellites in orbit beyond their planned life, and by sharing data with international partners, but stop-gap responses simply cannot substitute for an effective space infrastructure.<\/p>\n

But from the point of view of shared military-civilian scientific programs, NPOESS may serve as a practical reminder of the benefits \u2013 and limitations \u2013 of cross agency cooperation. NPOESS ultimately failed because incompatible institutions and institutional needs could not be grafted together in the interest of cost savings.\u00a0 This is not unique to satellite constellations; back in the 1970s, the DoD insisted<\/a> that the space shuttle be designed so it could service military payloads, which it did regularly throughout the 1980s. But this forced design compromises in the shuttle itself which made it unwieldy and expensive, and ultimately helped to make it a far less economical \u2013 and useful \u2013 vehicle than its proponents had hoped.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that all military-civilian cooperative efforts are doomed to fail.\u00a0 Indeed, one of the best examples of success is on your screen; the internet\u2019s history as a joint project designed to facilitate university communication (and post-nuclear war communication) is well known.\u00a0 The earliest satellites<\/a> of the 1950s were also the products of civilian-military cooperation \u2013 which eventually led to the development of GPS, communication, and (perhaps ironically, given the current history) weather satellites. Failure is certainly not pre-ordained.<\/p>\n

So what policy lessons can we take for structuring future civilian-military scientific programs? <\/strong><\/p>\n