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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

I mean, with all the money the US currently spends on military budgets, I can't for the life of me figure out why it is so hard to find the 50-100mil or so (estimated) it would cost for a few orbital IR telescopes and just deal with this problem once and for all.

A Pegasus XL rocket can lift 976 pounds (443 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit for about $13.5 million...put two "budget" telescopes on one launch and get to work.

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There are plenty of satellites out there that monitor for missile launches using IR cameras. These might detecting all of these meteor explosions and the military is not reporting them due to not wanting their operational capacity being known. The previous generation of missile detection missiles could see Scud launches during Desert Storm in 1991. I'm sure the military sees all kinds of weird space stuff and doesn't mention a word.

Latest generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System

Yep, they sent satellites to the moon in 1968 ahead of the Apollo mission. They had to noise the images they took so the world wouldn't know precisely their level of capability, but the photos taken of the entire moon had super high, crisp resolution.

>but the photos taken of the entire moon had super high, crisp resolution.

At the time, wouldn't they be film based images? If so, well, obviously the resolution would be high and crisp, especially if it was medium/large format.

These images were developed, digitized, compressed, and transmitted back to NASA from the Lunar orbiters. This article has the story of how they were recovered recently.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/16/ampex-fr-900-drives.html

It is expected to happen only about 3 times in a century (from article).

In other words, building this system of telescopes won't affect the next elections in any positive way.

Everyone else likely missed it, but I want you to know I appreciate this joke.

> Everyone else likely missed it

I’m sure you’re the only one to notice the obvious joke.

Sure it's a joke?

NASA actually receive lots of funding(might be second after military). Most of their work doesn't align with any of the politics promises, even then they receive good chunk of budget spending.

NASA 2018 budget is $20.7B. It is not in any way "second after military".

NIH 2018 budget is $37B, NSF is $7.8B. DOD budget just for R&D and test/evaluation is $88B.

At least there is the benefit of DOD tech trickling down to NASA tech at some point.

So, 3rd behind military and NIH then?

No, no, no. I just picked a couple of numbers of relevant research-related agencies as a general comparative. ("This is is the kind of league NASA is in.") Other comparatives might be DOE, NOAA, USGS, NIST.

The federal budget is about $4000B. Discretionary spending is about $1200B. NASA is so far down in the noise of this that it's not funny (20B/1200B ~ 1.7%).

As an example, Federal highway spending (not state) is $44B.

Health and Human Services was $1.7 Trillion, Social Security was $1.1 Trillion, Defense was $1.1 Trillion, NASA is pretty far down the list (~19th), at $24 Billion, .35% of budget:

https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency

In the end, it's always about politics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Political_oppos...

Isn’t everything?

These already exist. My old boss ran space command at NORAD at the end of the Cold War. Their problem wasn’t capturing the data but filtering it out when looking for artificial events. Unfortunately this data isn’t being collected and used by the civilian sector which is a crying shame.

My old boss ran space command at NORAD at the end of the Cold War.

That’s amazing. You should tell us everything.

A study team looked at space-based and ground-based visible and IR options. Their 2017 report is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/doc/2017_neo_sdt_final_e-version.... (long PDF)

The cost estimate for development, launch, and operations varies a lot, but is in the $0.8-$2.0B range. See the cost roll-up on page 163 of the above document. It's ~0.5-1.0 meter telescope, and detector cooling and data rates are an issue.

The scientist quoted in the above article, Amy Mainzer, is leading a more detailed study which is among a handful of proposal concepts (not all NEO-related) that NASA will select from.

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