Common Resources

Space Launch Risk Redux

Indemnification, the nation’s approach to managing some of the risks associated with the launch of privately owned rockets carrying our satellites for telecommunications, Earth observations, supplies for the International Space Station, and other services, is on its way to becoming a new annual rite of winter. Specifically, the federal government (taxpayer) indemnifies a portion of […]

Space Launch Risk Redux

Indemnification, the nation’s approach to managing some of the risks associated with the launch of privately owned rockets carrying our satellites for telecommunications, Earth observations, supplies for the International Space Station, and other services, is on its way to becoming a new annual rite of winter. Specifically, the federal government (taxpayer) indemnifies a portion of […]

Using Satellites to Understand Drought

A recent article in The Atlantic Cities highlighted a research paper published in Science by Jay Famiglietti, a professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, and Matt Rodell, Chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Famiglietti and Rodell use data from a new generation of Earth observing […]

Space Launch Indemnification

The “fiscal cliff” isn’t the only issue Congress is addressing largely on a temporary basis. Reauthorization of the 1988 Commercial Space Launch Act was due by December 31 and, just in time, the US Senate and the House of Representatives agreed to extend the Act for one year (after some disagreement as to one versus […]