MethaneSAT 'likely not recoverable' after losing contact with Earth The Bezos-backed MethaneSAT satellite has been declared "likely not recoverable" after losing contact with controllers just over a week ago. The satellite was launched in March 2024 and was tasked with collecting data regarding methane emissions, a gas associated with global warming. The theory was that by tracking emissions, …
Come back here tomorrow for a refund.
Last time I did that, and I reordered, the original items turned up. Contacted Amazon to tell them so, citing heaviness of items as reason for not returning them, and they told me to keep them. Anyone want some free fence spikes in West London and can collect, let me know...
Yeah, it has been in the local news a bunch the past week or so down here in NZ. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/565815/taxpayer-funded-satellite-had-deep-seated-problems-from-launch
Space is hard and missions fail all the time. The comms however have been pretty terrible around the whole thing.
It's a shame if this satellite only collected data over land, since both undersea pipelines and natural methane hydrate deposits can release quite a bit of methane.
And it's doubly unfortunate because while the carbon isotope ratios in atmospheric CO2 show what proportion of that carbon was recently released from buried deposits, they don't show how it was released of by what. Having global tracking of all methane emissions would be very useful.
Mr. Methane is happy that he can now return to a peaceful life without having a satellite tracking his every move.
"Besos has been desperate to suck up to Trump, and Trump has been determined to stop all measurements of climate change, so is this another quid pro quo?"
Tragically with what's been happening in Trumpisstan to any resources that contradict even the most deranged of MAGA dogma with the consequent chilling effect on resources otherwise free of direct government influence, I am not overly confident that your suggestion is entirely a baseless conspiracy theory.
At a measly USD 88 million, Bezos could demonstrate his bona fides by funding its replacement. FlatuSAT ?
Never happen. These billionaires have their pockets tailored into their trouser cuffs; unless they were built like an orangutan they could never reach down to their wad and would, in any case, be a tight fit.
I'm not one to start the kind of conspiracy theories that go viral, but..
Given the number of conspiracy theories relating to 'Global Warming', one more is unlikely to do any harm..
Besos has been desperate to suck up to Trump, and Trump has been determined to stop all measurements of climate change, so is this another quid pro quo?
Far be it to 'fact check' you, but it's Bezos. Who's just created humongous amounts of CO2e, general pollution and spent quite a few quid having his wedding. Especially with all the celebs jetting in to Venice for the piss-up. There's also 50,000 or so who'll be jetting off to Brazil to attend the massive UN COP jolly in November. So many activists due to descend on Belem that they've had to expand their airport and cut down a lot of forest to make a bigger road-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference
Several attendees have publicly complained about extremely high accommodation pricing for COP30, with one listing on Airbnb priced at US$9,320 per day, up from its normal $11 rate, and a one-person flat on Booking.com going for $15,266 per night.
Ah, the great Green grift continues. But it'll be fine given the attendees will be on expenses paid by taxpayers or 'charities'. But I digress..
So one cannot stop science and there's stuff like this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Carbon_Column_Observing_Network#
TCCON, or affectionately known as just "Total CON". Which is really down to the way some climate 'scientists' interpret the results from that project. But given most of the world's GHGs, including methane come from nature, and Trump stating he wants to 'drain the swamp', methane observations would help pinpoint which swamps to drain. Florida's property developers have been working on this for decades now. Meanwhile, over in EUro land, our useful idiots are doing things like 'restoring wetlands' to create more swamps and increase natural CO2 & methane emissions. Plus for the projects around London, helping to recreate the conditions for the ague that used to err.. plague the East End of London until public health officials realised that actually draining the swamps was a GoodThing(tm).
But that's just one of the many ways that climate activists are trying to kill people.
Having done a stint as a Democratic party organizer, followed by several years working on efficiency-focused R&D projects, I'm going to concede that @Jellied Eel has a point about the lack of doog-fooding at the top.
It's extremely frustrating to see people like Musk and Bezos investing in flying cars and helicopter delivery (respectively) given that those vehicles have an energy consumption rate several times higher than the terrestrial systems they'd replace, which would more than offset the benefits of electrification.
(It's also hard to imagine a less efficient way of fighting gravity for no reson than an octo-copter with 24 tip-vortices sapping energy.)
I seem to recall too that "Inconvenient Truth" Gore, aka the Father of the Internet, was at the time of the documentary living in a 24000 sq ft home without a single high efficiency lightbulb.
Meanwhile, while I was looking for sustainable hardwood flooring in 2000 for my house, whatever fancy sustainable house design magazine I was using for inspiration was flogging things like $13 / sq ft mesquite flooring (USD).
One of the few people that seems to do what they preach and lives frugally is David Suzuki.
Still, it is getting hotter every year and I wonder how long morons like Jellied Brains will cling on to their beliefs that the earth is flat and the climate is not changing rapidly.
Still, it is getting hotter every year and I wonder how long morons like Jellied Brains will cling on to their beliefs that the earth is flat and the climate is not changing rapidly.
Most of the morons are the people who've been indoctrinated by the likes of Al Gore, who used his Inconvenient Truths to promote the VC fund he set up to profit from it. Those morons are both dishonest, and incredibly gullible. You think I think the Earth is flat rather than being an oblate spheroid orbiting an inconsistent Sun. But I've mentioned satellites, and shown that I understand something of those. How do you think I think satellites would work with a flat Earth?
I also know that climate change is real, and has happened many times in the past. I know that CO2 isn't responsible, and can't be because CO2 levels increase in response to warming. Morons, and climate 'scientists' believe that effect precedes cause, which is not how science or reality works. But if you rely on simulations rather than observations, the impossible becomes possible. I also believe that the climate can change rapidly. So as an example, the onset of the Little Ice Age was well documented and (in a geological sense) pretty rapid. Then it ended, and the Earth warmed.. Which conveniently happened around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which allowed climate 'scientists' to claim the rain follows the plow.. I mean CO2. It's a very simple and well understood molecule that's worth trillions to the Green Blob that exploits 'Global Warming'.
Thing is we don't really know why climate change has happened many times in the past, ie MWP, LIA, RWP etc, but we do know that CO2 can't have been responsible because we know it's a weak GHG. Luckily there are some honest climate scientist, like the astrophysicist who explains reality here-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV902JVOKKE
Which doesn't mention a potential man-made effect, ie the introduction of Clean Air Acts that reduced atmospheric pollution and increased insolation. But morons ignore the science and instead believe that measuring the temperature of airports is proof that CO2 sets temperature records, not tarmac and jet exhaust.
> climate change has happened many times in the past
But nowhere near the rate at which it is happening now. And while you may claim that CO2 is a weak driver that is not the general consensus.
Last, do you really think that, if there was a solid alternative explanation to our greenhousing the atmosphere, and yes, I include methane in that scope, scientists would be keeping it under wraps? No way! The fossil fuel industry would be bankrolling solid naysaying - i.e. most assuredly not yours - up the wazoo. An academic proving the consensus wrong would be a superstar, meaning there is a massive incentive to find the non-CO2 smoking gun.
I personally would be the first person happy to not worry about my own emissions, I have absolutely no interest in self-denial and hairshirting. And I positively dislike a good deal of the Green ideology, being mostly tech-positive myself.
Gore is what he is. But "Inconvenient Truth", as a title, resumes brilliantly exactly where we are at. It's an engineering/economic problem and your lot insists on making it into an ideological issue for political reasons.
But nowhere near the rate at which it is happening now.
Nobody can say this with any real certainty. The data we have today didn't exist in the past. The usual mantra is 'since records began', which usually only means a few decades at best, which is nothing compared to climate (30yr weather averages) or geological timescales. So we get idiocy like this-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/07/07/the-med-is-hottest-for-215-billion-years/
The Med Is Hottest For 215 Billion Years!
With a retweet from Roger Harrabin, previously the Bbc's chief climate propagandist. Who has collected a slew of honorary & academic titles. But is obviously an idiot. The original tweet from 'Met4Cast' obviously is as well because it's an extremely wild claim because a) nobody knows temps from 215bn years ago and b) the Med is 'only' 5-6m years old. And has undergone climate change in the past-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis
And while you may claim that CO2 is a weak driver that is not the general consensus.
Actually, it is. If you'd ever read any of the IPCC WG1 reports then you would know this, and why CO2 gets a GWP (Global Warming Potential) of 1. And then if you knew anything about the actual science, then you'd know the generally accepted consensus is CO2's potential is around 1.2C per doubling. And then to achieve Thermageddon, you need various 'forceings' and 'feedbacks' to somehow amplify the effects of CO2, and those cannot be observed outside of climate models.
Which in reality is good news and means there's no need to waste trillions on Net Zero, which even if we achieve it will make no measurable differences to temperatures. And the really good news is that CO2 is plant food, and has lead to the 'Greening of the Earth' along with improved crop yields and more food.
The fossil fuel industry would be bankrolling solid naysaying
See? You believe in conspiracy theories. This is an old meme spread by climate propagandists (hello, SkS) and like much climate 'science', unsupported by evidence. And it certainly pales into comparision with the billions being pumped into making money out of CO2.
... But I'm going to start spreading one anyway. Right? :-)
Wiki helps explain how climate 'science' works-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MethaneSAT
The MethaneSAT program was started by MethaneSAT, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), with the goal of providing global high resolution data regarding methane emissions from oil and gas facilities.
Normal science would be aware of things like confirmation bias and prejudice, an activist organisation doesn't have such considerations and probably wanted to use the 'evidence' to litigate against oil & gas. MethaneSAT managed just over a year's worth of observations, which doesn't really allow for any meaningful conclusions regarding Global Warming because climate change is about 30yr chunks of average weather. Had it survived long enough to produce more data, there could have been fun correlating trends and demographics wrt vegetarianism and veganism and presenting proof that they're actually responsible for Global Warming. It'd be a spurious correlation, but that's climate 'science' for you.
On the subject of conspiracy theories does anyone know if this satellite would pick up leaks from unexpected sources or was it just monitoring known suspects?
Would it, for example, spot if Russia (which sits on the world's biggest gas reserves that will likely never be needed) had decided to release some of these reserves in remote areas for malicious purposes?
Just asking, that's all.
On the subject of conspiracy theories does anyone know if this satellite would pick up leaks from unexpected sources or was it just monitoring known suspects?
Yep, it could do that. So some examples from their PR here-
https://www.methanesat.org/project-updates/new-data-reveal-previously-undetectable-methane-emissions
Which is kind of activism vs science in that it focuses on man-made rather than any natural methane sources, and natural methane emissions are far greater than human. Which gets fascinating, so I have a friend who got to play with explosives and blew up chunks of Antarctica. She was studying Mount Erebus, and that caused some FUN! because sampling around there showed it emitted far more CO2 than was previously thought. Which also lead to some interesting discoveries like this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus#Ice_fumaroles
They are dynamic systems that collapse and rebuild, but persist over decades. The air inside the caves has 80 to 100% humidity, and up to 3% carbon dioxide (CO2), and some carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2), but almost no methane (CH4) or hydrogen sulfide (H2S).
Life surviving and thriving (ish) in very high CO2 levels, when according to CO2 dogma, that should have raised the temperatures to a point where everything spontaneously combusts. Or not, because the relationship between CO2 and temperature is logarithmic, so we'll never get 'extreme warming' because at around 1.2C/doubling of CO2, there just isn't enough carbon.. But I digress (ish)..
Would it, for example, spot if Russia (which sits on the world's biggest gas reserves that will likely never be needed) had decided to release some of these reserves in remote areas for malicious purposes?
Nope, because it's kaput now. And also being a single satellite flying over an apparently flat Earth, it could only have seen things under its err.. orbit. So one of the biggest man-made methane emissions was the deliberate sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. MethanSat couldn't have observed that because it happened before it was launched. Other satellites did, however. But then Russia sits at the top edge of the flat Earth, so to observe and detect natural or intentional methane would need satellites to fly along the top somehow. Or back to reality, having satellites that can fly in polar orbits and observe the polar regions.. Which is being done.
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