U.S. Space & Rocket Center opens exhibit explaining weather tracking
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — The U.S. Space and Rocket Center opened an exhibit Monday, taking a look at the connection between space and weather and how that weather impacts people each day.
The exhibit, named 'How We Know the Weather,' explains the formation of weather systems and how experts use tools like radar to tell people what to expect in a forecast.
Judge finds Former Decatur Police Officer Mac Marquette did not act in self-defense, murder trial rescheduled
'Weather, you know, affects everybody, everywhere, and so a better understanding of the weather makes a better life for those all around the world,' Baron Weather Institute Founder Bob Baron said.
The exhibit includes 30 interactive and hands-on displays that start by exploring how the interaction between the Earth and Sun impacts weather across the planet. Baron said the exhibit is the result of years of collaboration between the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and the Baron Weather Institute.
'Our company, Baron Weather, was very fortunate in actually being formed just as computers and big data were coming together,' Baron said. 'It has been a wonderful experience over the last 30 years now to discover new things about the weather and our ability to explain it, to support safety, but to also enjoy it as a feature of everyday life.'
The exhibit takes a look at weather tracking technology through time and highlights the work done in the Tennessee Valley to track the weather.
'Huntsville and North Alabama sees a lot of severe weather,' News 19's Certified Chief Meteorologist, Danielle Dozier said. 'One of the big things that was missing, I think across our community, was some sort of science museum or weather exhibit. Now that we have it here at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, it's exciting. I'm excited to be in the exhibit, and you're going to learn a lot about dual polarization, radar and all of the radar technology that's come along the way over the last couple of decades to help improve how we track weather.'
Danielle is featured in the exhibit, explaining some of the technology used to keep people safe. Dual-polarization radar is something you will see News 19's Weather Authority Team use to track severe weather.
'We call it debris tracker, and it allows us to see where debris is being lofted into the air and being able to identify a tornado as it's in progress,' Danielle said.
The exhibit is open to the public, and admission is included with tickets to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Newsflash: Rocket Lab Makes Spy Satellites Now
Rocket Lab will buy spy satellite payload manufacturer Geost for up to $325 million in cash and stock. Rocket Lab already makes satellite buses for spy agencies and the military. Geost will allow it to make complete spy satellites. The purchase could help Rocket Lab bid for contracts under President Trump's Golden Dome plan. 10 stocks we like better than Rocket Lab › Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) stock has taken off like -- what else? -- a rocket. Over the past 52 weeks, shares of the maker of tiny satellites and the only slightly bigger rockets that launch them has soared 521%, gaining about 10% per week. At nearly $27 per share currently, Rocket Lab carries a market capitalization of more than $13.3 billion, and is valued at 31 times its annual sales. Whatever might Rocket Lab be able to do to justify such an optimistic valuation? That's the question I asked myself (and CEO Peter Beck) when I interviewed him about the company's plans to build a new Neutron rocket -- and about the company's plans beyond Neutron -- a couple years back. And I came away with the firm opinion that Rocket Lab's most likely course, to expand its revenue streams and help justify its steadily increasing market capitalization, would be to build (or buy) its own satellite constellation. Turns out, though, Rocket Lab has decided to take neither of these routes, or at least not for now. Instead, Rocket Lab's next act will be to begin making spy satellites, and become a prime contractor selling such satellites directly to American spy agencies and the military. Rocket Lab's path to this new business goes by way of Geost, LLC, a tiny privately owned manufacturer of electro-optical payloads for the spy satellite market. Last week, Rocket Lab announced it will pay $125 million cash, plus $150 million in Rocket lab stock, plus another $50 million cash "in potential additional cash earnout payments tied to revenue targets" to buy Geost from the private equity firm that currently owns it. The purchase is slated to take place sometime in the second half of 2025. Once it happens, Rocket Lab will be able to build its own spy satellite "payloads," to couple with the satellite "buses" that it already builds to carry other companies' payloads. "Geost delivers advanced EO/IR sensor systems for missile warning and tracking, tactical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, Earth observation, and space domain awareness," explains Rocket Lab, referring to electro-optical and infrared sensors (or in more common parlance, "cameras"). Rocket Lab notes that these are precisely the kinds of cameras that the U.S. Pentagon is currently deploying en masse as part of the Space Force's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) program, for which Rocket Lab won a $515 million contract in 2023. These same kinds of cameras would be needed in even greater numbers to construct President Donald Trump's Golden Dome. Geost has until now been building these sensor suites for sale to major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, both of which are also major players in PWSA, and both of which are hopefuls for the Golden Dome project. Now, Geost will bring these capabilities in-house and help Rocket Lab to build entire spy satellites directly, "cementing the Company's role as a disruptor in national security space," and allowing the company to provide even more "end-to-end space capabilities for the United States and its allies." Simply put, it gives Rocket Lab a huge leg up in competing for future awards under PWSA, under Golden Dome, and for other spy satellite work -- not just for the U.S., but internationally as well. And let's be honest here: Rocket Lab really needs a boost like this, if its enormous valuation is to be justified. Priced in excess of $12.3 billion, but with less than $500 million in annual revenue and no profit or free cash flow, and not expected to turn profitable for another couple of years at least, Rocket Lab stock sells for a sky-high valuation of 26 times sales. Even assuming analyst forecasts are correct, it will be 2030 before Rocket Lab's sales (projected to be $3.5 billion that year) reach a level that brings the stock down to an ordinary valuation for a space stock -- somewhere between 2 and 4 times sales. Granted, growth stocks like Rocket Lab often sport excessive valuations to present-day sales. But to justify its valuation, Rocket Lab needs a really big growth driver, capable of rapidly expanding its annual sales. Buying Geost, and putting itself in contention to win prime contracts under the $175 billion Golden Dome project, just might be a catalyst big enough to make that happen. Before you buy stock in Rocket Lab, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Rocket Lab wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $674,395!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $858,011!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 997% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025 Rich Smith has positions in Rocket Lab USA. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends L3Harris Technologies and Rocket Lab USA. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Newsflash: Rocket Lab Makes Spy Satellites Now was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hiltzik: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes. Casey Dreier, Planetary Society, on proposed NASA budget cuts The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, "NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration," says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on "practical, quantitative," even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. Read more: Hiltzik: Trump's assault on science will make Americans dumber and sicker The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: "America will always be the first in space," he said during his first term. "We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led." Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that "the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that." Among the "foreign class of servants," whom Vance acknowledged included "some German and Jewish scientists" who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. Read more: Hiltzik: Elon Musk's dumbest idea is to send human colonists to Mars The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. "Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles," Dreier observes. In this White House, however, "there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency." A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a "hoax." He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Read more: How the U.S. gave up on Nobel Prize research Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. Read more: Hiltzik: The Pentagon's former top UFO hunter talks about COVID-19, Haitian pet-eaters and pseudoscience generally The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its "misguided ... Global Climate Change programs," and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is "very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do" in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. "Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money," Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but "I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates," Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. "You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space," he told me. "It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes." Get the latest from Michael HiltzikCommentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, 'NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on 'practical, quantitative,' even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: 'America will always be the first in space,' he said during his first term. 'We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led.' Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that 'the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that.' Among the 'foreign class of servants,' whom Vance acknowledged included 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. 'Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles,' Dreier observes. In this White House, however, 'there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency.' A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a 'hoax.' He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its 'misguided ... Global Climate Change programs,' and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is 'very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do' in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. 'Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money,' Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but 'I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates,' Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. 'You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space,' he told me. 'It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes.'
