Blog

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is making a major shift in how it collects weather and environmental data. NOAA has expanded its Commercial Data Program, selecting 14 private-sector companies to supply satellite data across seven different categories. And this is not a short experiment. The new Space-Based Environmental Monitoring contract runs for five years, with another five-year option — potentially taking the program through 2036. The companies will provide data ranging from atmospheric profiles and ocean observations to wildfire imagery, microwave sounding, radar and space-weather measurements. Among the selected companies are Spire Global, PlanetiQ, Tomorrow.io, Muon Space, Hydrosat, ICEYE US, Umbra and others. The interesting part is the direction NOAA is taking. Government satellites are no longer expected to do everything. Instead, NOAA is building a hybrid system, combining government spacecraft with data purchased from commercial satellite constella...

  Long before the United States became a scientific power, a revolution was already taking place in the way humanity understood the Universe. Copernicus moved Earth from the center of the Universe. Kepler discovered that planets move around the Sun in elliptical orbits. Galileo turned the telescope toward the sky and revealed a Universe far more complex than anyone had imagined. Then, in 1687, Isaac Newton explained the motion of planets and other bodies through the universal law of gravity. These discoveries changed more than astronomy. They changed the way educated people thought about order, nature and the world around them. When the American Revolution began, these ideas were already part of intellectual life in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was interested in science, and John Winthrop, Harvard’s professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, was an accomplished astronomer. In 1761, Winthrop travelled to Newfoundland to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun — one of t...