Bruce MacDonald wrote: > I must admit that I always thought it odd that the US > Government provided a free service such as this to foreigners > over the internet. Not only orbital data, but information about most activities of the U.S. Government are highly available to its citizens and to the world. For example, take a look at FDA.gov, or SEC.gov (two of my favourites), and show me the counterparts of any other nation that provide anywhere near the depth and breadth of information. Historically, the U.S. has been one of the most open of the world's democracies, which I have always admired and believed to be key to its success. > I would be sorry to see OIG go, but then > with the axe hovering over them it might explain why their > cataloguing was becoming so shoddy of late. A common misconception is that OIG maintains the catalogue. It is USSTRATCOM that maintains the catalogue, and then transmits additions and revisions to OIG, which simply makes them available to the world. > It seems to me that the key questions for satellite observers > are these. Is the USAF (or its contractor, eg Lockheed > Martin or Boeing) likely to continue to issue elsets and > other notices to hobbyists? And would they make a better job > of cataloguing satellites than the civil servants of NASA? In fact, OIG has been operated by a civilian contractor for as long as I can remember, which as a result of a corporate merger, today is part of Honeywell Inc. > I can see the hobby taking a big step back in the sense that > most casual satellite watchers will miss out on the easy sats > like the ISS if that information is not put into the public > domain. I strongly suspect that elsets of ISS, shuttle and a number of other general interest objects will remain readily available. > Then it would be up to the hard core of See-saters > to keep track of a restricted list of interesting objects. Let there always be hard core casual observers, and hard core positional observers, and hard core flash observers, etc - something for everyone! Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Dec 20 2003 - 10:29:06 EST