In last week's column, as an afterthought, I mentioned the unprecedented solar activity of the last few days.

It seems to be continuing, and may end up being the largest solar flare ever recorded.

Of course, this may not mean much, because it's only in the past couple decades that we could seriously study the sun, and it's been burning for billions of years. Such events remind us that while we've learned a great deal about solar physics, there remains much that we don't understand. We've had such a short time during which to study it, we may be mislead into thinking that what we've seen in our own brief lifetimes is indicative of longer-term behavior, when in fact it may have been much hotter, or cooler than normal during what, in geological terms, is a snapshot.

There are several implications of our lack of understanding of these phenomena.

First, as I noted last week, this is a matter of great concern to planners of deep space missions because, beyond the protection of earth's magnetic field, such solar storms could result in a heavy dose of radiation to any space travelers in transit. It could even be fatal, either quickly, or in a more long, drawn out sickness, incapacitating the crew. A better understanding of the potential hazard, and even more importantly, the ability to predict it, would make it much easier and more cost effective to come up with techniques to shield spacecraft against it.

There are implications for non-space travelers as well. After all, if the sun can vary this much, how do we know how much of "global warming" is caused by such variation, and how much by human activity? Given the societal cost that might be incurred by overreactions such as the Kyoto Treaty, it would behoove us to attempt to better understand (and if possible, predict) the effects of variations in solar activity on the global environment.

Finally, while it's unlikely that anything will change in the near term, there is no guarantee that our sun will continue to burn in the moderate range in which life evolved on earth, and in fact, we know from observing other stars that they have life cycles. At some point, it will become first too hot, and then too cold to allow life to be sustained on earth, and perhaps in the solar system itself.

There's an old joke about a man, nodding off during an astronomy lecture, who suddenly jerks awake and asks, "Did you say the sun would burn out in a million years?!" No, the lecturer, explains, it was a billion years. "Well," he replies, "that's a relief."

Million or billion, it's going to happen sometime, and the problem is, we can't be sure that some dire solar event won't occur much sooner than that. It might not wipe out life on earth, but it could make it very unpleasant for humans. This possibility, along with the continuing danger of being hit by a random celestial object and sharing the fate of the dinosaurs, is one of the most powerful arguments for us becoming seriously spacefaring as soon as possible--to get at least some of humanity's precious eggs out of a single fragile basket.

In light of all this, it's somewhat disturbing that Congress is considering deleting the budget for the space weather center at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA).

Given the raging solar storm over the past several days, the squabble seems absurd. The agency request is eight million, the House is offering five million, and the Senate proposes that it be funded by the Air Force, but doesn't allocate any funding for it.

It's particularly disturbing when considering the sums involved--a few million dollars, an infinitesimal fraction of even NOAA's budget, let alone the federal budget, needed in order to continue to forecast events that, even ignoring the longer term issues discussed above, can have profound immediate effects on billion-dollar telecom industries, and navigation and remote sensing for much of the world. Of course, it's not necessarily unreasonable for the Air Force to pay for it, because they have as many critical satellites as anyone, and as much of a need.

But consider--perhaps there's another possibility. From the Space.com article, we see this quote:

Disruptions in communications, increases in radiation exposure to those flying at high altitude and potentially wide areas of power outages all can be blamed on the effects of space weather. Advance warning of a solar storm from the Colorado center, as seen during the past few days, can help institutions prepare for and minimize those effects.

"What would we do without this data? We couldn't live without it," said Robert Hedinger, executive vice president at Loral Skynet, which operates a constellation of Earth orbiting satellites that services much of the nation's cable television programming and corporate communications.

Now, as it happens, Loral is in bankruptcy, but the industry as a whole is one with many billions of dollars of revenue. If, like Loral, they are also unable to "live without it," if it's truly a necessary cost of doing business, surely a consortium of some kind could be set up to fund the center, so that the actual beneficiaries were paying for it rather than the taxpayer.

There might be a free rider problem, of course--some might get the information who didn't pay for it, but there are ways to handle this. It could in fact be funded by subscription--those who really needed the data would get the most timely reports, for a fee. NASA and the Air Force could be subsribers themselves. Of course, industry will no doubt take umbrage at such a proposal, being used to getting the taxpayers to subsidize something that they consider vital, but it seems to me that there's a potential market opportunity, should anyone at NOAA prove to be entrepreneurial.

Of course, some may ask, if space weather can be privatized, why can't terrestrial weather, which is of much more value to many people on the planet, and is offered on commercial venues, such as local television stations and newspapers, be fully privatized as well?

To which my response is...good question.

"Of course, some may ask, if space weather can be privatized, why can't terrestrial weather, which is of much more value to many people on the planet, and is offered on commercial venues, such as local television stations and newspapers, be fully privatized as well?

To which my response is...good question."

Well, one question I have immediately is, how much does terrestrial weather forecasting cost? Would it be cost-effective to privatize NOAA and the NWS? Or would be it be too expensive to maintain all of the facilities and equipment that NWS uses? I'm asking an honest question here. I really don't have any clue (as should be obvious!) about how it could work. It is an intriguing idea, though.

Timescales for variations in solar activity go from seconds to gigayears, depending on the parameter of interest. It's quite possible that at least some mass extinctions were caused by relatively rapid changes in solar activity. It'd be nice to have even better monitoring than we have now, along with solid theoretical support.

As far as privatization goes, that's probably workable for studies of short term phenomena, but there's little incentive to devote much time to the longer term (100+ year timescales) variability. Chances are good that the really large excursions from the average take place on longer timescales, for fairly basic physical reasons. Of all the places the feds could cut funding, this seems to me a lousy choice. When we've gotten rid of ethanol subsidies, the War on Some Drugs, etc., we should take a close look at which segments of solar physics research should be privatized (perhaps all - after all, if I can have back the chunk of my paycheck that currently goes to locking people up for self-medicating, I'll be more likely to write a check to support long term solar forecasting - I doubt I'm alone on this point).

Rand,

I came to the same conclusion myself last week with regards to privatizing space weather forecasting. If it is really only an $8M/year cost of operations for the government, a private company could likely operate for even less (admittedly, they'd need to pay rent for use of currently government owned satellites). Since getting this data is quite critical to commercial and government groups around the world, it would be hard to believe that some form of subscription service couldn't be made. There are billions of
dollars of orbital assets that would be effected, so the cost of subscription could be held to a couple thousand dollars per month per satellite. Or it could be charged per customer (at which point it would be a bit heftier, maybe half a million a year per customer).

Privatizing the service would also likely encourage further innovation. If the company providing the analysis were able to increase the forecasting capabilities, it would be worth quite a bit to its customers. They would also likely move to lower cost infrastructure over time (say more reliance on microsats, etc), which would allow them to increase profitability......

All in all, I think our sentiment on this point is dead on. I think a real business case could be made.....

I guess its nice that we can actually agree on one area of thought (space policy). Now if I could just get you to think rationally about foreign and domestic policy.......

;-)

~Jon

I would think that satellite insurers would be most interested in funding the relevant solar monitoring.

It's my understanding that most weather forecasting is already private -- the publicly-funded sector mostly does only the front-end data acquisition.

I am glad we agree on something, Jonathan. Of course, we used to disagree about space policy quite a bit as well, until you grew older and wiser. It will be an ongoing process. ;-)

And best wishes on your marriage. I'm sorry I was unable to attend the wedding.

And yes, Jay, that's why I said fully privatized.

As I recall sometime about 1993 the astrophysicist Robert Jastrow published a statistical study of the variations in solar activity and variations in global temperatures and came to the conclusion that over 90 percent of the variations in global temperatures could be explained as due to variations in solar output. That did not sit well with the 'greenhouse gases' school of global warming but if true then it makes a mockery of Kyoto Traty political attempts to subject global warming to human ecological control.

I am not an astrophysicist but I made note of the report of the Jastrow study at that time because of its relevance to the global warming debate.

Sean Anderson

There is more to space weather than just the satellite sensors. There are also a large number of ground-based sensors, including optical and radio telescopes, along with ionospheric sounders and a bunch of others. They have the advantage of being under the protection of the atmosphere and magnetic field. If that X28 flare from two days ago had been earth-directed, you'd have a few less satellites spinning around right now, I guarantee that.

I'm all for privatization where it will be to the government's advantage. But then again, seeing how other contracted services have sometimes resulted in, shall we say, less than stellar results, I'm always a bit leery.

Let's just keep the responsibility with NOAA and the USAF for now. When we reach a better understanding of the sun and develop more reliable tools (the current optical telescope that supports the SEC at Boulder is a 30-year-old design), then we can talk about privatizing.

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