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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a LANDSAT fan to the extreme. But I suspect that Planet will step up and provide a (subscription based) alternative, at zero up-front cost to the US Government. Over short time horizons, this is cheaper. Over long ones ... who knows?

I think the main thing is the US government doesn't want to subsidise anyone studying it. Sure even without LandSat hardware the US Government can get the data from Planet and dozens of other commercial EO constellations, for free from ESA's Sentinel programme and random academic and small country CubeSat projects. But will they?

The “Planet” being L3harris/peter theill?

https://www.planet.com/

I couldn't find anything that suggests where their major profits (≈ major income) would come from. I assume finance: Hedge funds? Insurance industry?

Are government and science users just secondary sources of income?

I'm fairly sure government is a primary consumer, up there with hedge fund types. They do some primary analysis, but the big market is in "processed" data, if I understand it correctly, so people will buy this data wholesale, hook up a subscription API, and feed it directly into their analysis pipelines.

https://www.planet.com/company/customer-stories/

Government users includes the defence sector...

The climate truths remain inconvenient.

Maybe it could be a boon to the sentinel program in the same way as the current administration strengthened the European defense posture, by weakening our own. If that happens it could actually be good, because America military will no doubt spend as much as it can on science as soon as they get debt back under control. Sadly that seems like it won’t happen in 2025, but with enough growth maybe by 2030 we’ll be back, and better.

Trump is trying to kill it, but at the end of the day congress decides how much they want to incorporate the president's request into the budget. They were pretty happy to ignore them in the past so I wouldn't be surprised if that streak continues, with some token cuts.

The way things are right now, the president decides how much he wants to actually spend out of what Congress allocates. It doesn't matter if Congress funds Landsat Next, if the administration refuses to spend that money.

>They were pretty happy to ignore them in the past

Sad to say, with that budget bill waiting to be pass, this time I thing you may be wrong. In any case Trump is ignoring what Congress passed in the past and even now, I doubt that will change.

(I really hope you are right)

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