NASA Loses Satellite Designed to Study Global Warming

A NASA satellite launched from California failed to reach orbit today, falling into the sea near Antarctica and causing a complete loss of the $273 million mission to study global warming gases.

“The mission is lost,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spokesman Steve Cole said in a telephone interview from the launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

“It’s disappointing because it was giving us novel information to help us move our understanding forward on global warming,” Alan O’Neill, science director of the Reading, U.K.- based Centre for Earth Observation, said in an interview. It will likely take at least two years to replace the satellite and to carry out a new mission.

Considering the complexity of placing satellites in orbit it is is a wonder that more missions don’t end in failure. A failed mission should be a reminder that our technology won’t always work as planned to bail us out of the problems we have created for ourselves on our planet earth.

This type of experience should be a warning to those who think that technology will be the answer in extracting ourselves from a crisis caused by global warming. We are still having difficulties in even understanding the complex nature of the problem.

Those who think that technology will somehow solve our problems of relying upon finite energy resources to power our world should also be concerned. The truth is we depend on a finite resource, crude oil, to such a large degree that replacing it with alternative energy resources in a time frame that will save our world from extreme disruption is highly unlikely.

President Obama’s State of the Union address last night may have hit all the right notes about how the US will fight hard and smart and eventually come out of the Long Crisis but in the end it was all rhetoric. When one of our premier government agencies, NASA, loses a $273 million satellite designed to study global warming one has to wonder what the odds are of less capable government agencies being able to carry out their mission to save the United States from a severe meltdown and drastic reduction in the quality of life.