Culture
NASA Launches Program To Confirm Its Own Satellites Are Real
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
NASA, the organisation that once strapped three men into a metal cone and aimed it at the moon using computers less powerful than a modern parking meter, announced this week that it has launched a formal initiative to verify that the satellite imagery it purchases from commercial vendors is, in fact, satellite imagery.
The program in question is the Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition program, known internally as CSDA, which contracts with private companies to provide Earth observation data to federal agencies. The new Calibration and Validation initiative, or Cal/Val, will assess whether the data being delivered matches reality. The reality being assessed is Earth. The same Earth that is visible from outside at no charge.
A webinar was scheduled for September 23rd to explain this development to anyone who could not intuit it on their own.
The CSDA program's stated goals include expanding access to commercial satellite data, reducing redundancy across federal agencies, and, now, confirming that light reflected off the planet's surface and captured by a sensor in low orbit is an accurate representation of the planet's surface. This is described in program documentation as a priority area.
Elon Musk, who has his own satellites and presumably trusts them, was not available for comment, which is notable only because he is available for comment on absolutely everything else.
The webinar, which ran approximately ninety minutes and was attended by an estimated forty-three federal employees who had the meeting appear on their calendar and saw no obvious way out of it, covered the program's history, current vendor relationships, and the philosophical question of whether commercial smallsat data can be trusted before someone at NASA has looked at it very carefully and filled out the appropriate form.
Sources familiar with the initiative note that the Cal/Val process will involve ground truth data, meaning NASA will compare satellite images to photographs taken from the ground to see if the ground looks the same in both. If it does, the satellite data is validated. If it does not, the satellite data is flagged, a subcommittee is convened, and the ground is asked to account for itself.
The program is funded through existing NASA budgets, which is itself a sentence that has meant progressively less each fiscal year.
A spokesperson for the CSDA program explained during the webinar that the Cal/Val initiative represents a significant step forward in ensuring data quality and interoperability across the federal remote sensing enterprise. She then advanced to the next slide, which was a timeline.
The timeline had seventeen items on it. Three of them had already passed. One of them was this webinar.
For those who missed the live event, a recording is expected to be made available on the NASA CSDA program website within two to three weeks, pending review, which is to say pending a human being watching it back to confirm it is a recording of the webinar and not something else entirely.
The Cal/Val initiative is expected to be fully operational by 2027, at which point NASA will know, with documented certainty, whether the commercial satellites it has been paying for since 2016 were, during that entire period, pointed at Earth.
The moon landing was fifty-seven years ago.
The webinar is on YouTube now.
The story we are making fun of: https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/webinar-9-23-nasa-csda-program-update-2026/