My guess is it’s valuable, but nowhere near the $750M price tag it cost to put it up there.
Phrased more accurately: is the value from the sum of the use cases for the data gathered by this satellite greater than the cost of putting it into orbit and operating it? Or even just the continued cost of operating it?
The fact that the article mentions farmers as the only potential non-governmental beneficiary of this information makes me believe the answer to that question is no, it wasn’t.
Our society today worships at the altar of the dollar, which is destroying it from the inside.
Facilitating investment in long-term things that benefit the country or humanity as a whole is literally one of the reasons we have governments. Putting men on the moon didn't make any profit, but a whole slew of discoveries and inventions that happened before that could happen definitely made improvements to everyone's lot.
Do you seriously believe the US government, given its profligate spending over the past three decades, is somehow less short sighted than its corporations, who at least try to maintain their long term financial solvency?
Putting men on the moon provided the know-how to put a nuke on an ICBM and send it straight to the doorstep of the Kremlin. The other benefits and discoveries were purely coincidental.
But at least those benefits were real and valuable. What benefits has this satellite provided that are anywhere close to what we got out of the space program?
