Plan for the future

摘要

President Barack Obama's administration released its first national strategy for civil Earth observations on 19 April. The report comes six years after the US National Research Council (NRC) warned that inadequate funding and mismanagement had put 'at great risk' the United States' ability to monitor Earth from space. The strategy does little to reassure. The 60-page document, written by a federal task force, lays out a process to determine the types of observations that deserve government support. But it does not provide what is most urgently needed: clear and specific guidance from the White House on what the government considers to be the most important Earth-science satellite missions - or when they should be launched.