The Trump administration’s unannounced plan to overhaul the country’s next-generation of weather satellites starts with cutting their advanced capabilities—and imposing an architecture that current and former NOAA officials fear will undermine the network’s reliability.
Geo Uh Oh: The Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) program is intended to replace America’s existing GEO weather sats in 2032. The $19.6B program, as currently constituted, would have Lockheed Martin building six spacecraft and lightning detectors, while L3Harris and BAE Systems build other next-gen sensors to collect weather data.
Under instructions from the White House, NOAA is canceling or recompeting all of those contracts, according to internal documents seen by Payload and confirmed by current and former NOAA officials who aren’t authorized to speak publicly. The goal is to spend just $500M a year, and less than $12B in total.
Getting there: To meet these proposed cuts, NOAA intends to buy four sats instead of the planned six. NOAA is already cancelling contracts with BAE Systems worth $852M, for two sensors that track air quality and the ocean, according to documents outlining the program’s new architecture.
The agency is also considering terminating two other new sensors:
- A sounder, which is an infrared camera that measures temperature and moisture in the atmosphere
- A new lightning mapper, which would be used for improved storm tracking.
The rest of the contracts are expected to be converted to firm, fixed-price contracts instead of the current cost-plus structure.
A Lockheed spokesperson said its contracts “could be well-suited for a commercial, firm fixed-price structure.” An L3Harris spokesperson said the company is “committed to helping [NOAA] smoothly navigate any upcoming program changes.” BAE declined to comment.
Deadline pressure: To meet the 2032 target for launching the first spacecraft amid the changes, the agency plans to pull a spare imaging sensor from storage and assemble a lightning mapper from parts, rather than obtain new instruments.
A NOAA spokesperson who said these changes will “modernize” and “enhance” the GeoXO program didn’t respond to Payload’s questions about how that would be the case.
Unbalanced: The new architecture would put a different suite of instruments on each satellite, with an imager accompanied by a lightning mapper on the GEO-West spacecraft, and an imager accompanied by the next-generation sounder on the GEO-East spacecraft.
Current and former NOAA officials tell Payload that this approach could threaten the constellation’s resilience; as designed, redundant spacecraft could replace each other in the case of failures, but now there will just be one lightning mapper and sounder on orbit until 2039.
Weather vs. Climate: Internal documents consistently cite refocusing on weather, with the implication that the canceled sensors are focused on climate change. However, both the atmospheric composition and ocean color sensors were sold to Congress to solve real problems, not make the case for global warming.
Of the two canceled sensors, the ocean imager is critical for fisheries management, and is forecast to save between $2.1B and $3.2B over its lifetime just from mitigating the impact of toxic algae on fish populations. The atmospheric composition sensor, meanwhile, can determine the toxicity of wildfire smoke and help tailor warnings during fire season.
“Closing our eyes to the threat of global warming doesn’t make it go away; it just means we won’t be adequately prepared to confront the rising risks that we face,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NOAA spending, told Payload.
Is it realistic? Officials Payload spoke to said that cutting instruments would obviously cut project costs. However, aerospace primes have had bad experiences with fixed-price contracts in recent years, and may not deliver as much savings as the administration hopes.
In particular, officials worry about plans to put both an advanced imager and an advanced sounder—each the size of a Mini Cooper—on the same space vehicle.
Lockheed is performing a study to see how it would solve the problem, but economies of scale could be lost if two different spacecraft designs are required instead of the planned one-size-fits-all approach.
And on the Hill: Though GeoXO is currently on schedule, lawmakers have been concerned about its spending. Appropriations bills passed in the House and Senate aren’t aligned on funding amounts for the program, and the Senate bill specifically calls for a reformulation of the program.
