U.S. lawmakers, as well as the American public, have every right to be up in arms over the government's bungled acqui-sition of a new generation of civil-military weather satellites, but calls for the dismissal of the top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are both misguided and unfair. The problems that have delayed and inflated the cost of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) have plagued just about every other major U.S. space program. Like the U.S. Air Force's Space Based Infrared System and Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite system, NPOESS stalled when one of its several parallel development efforts stumbled, and costs ballooned as a result. On NPOESS, the problems likely were compounded by the fact that it is jointly managed by the Air Force and NOAA, with NASA as a junior partner.
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