good as the satellite coverage is, you have to have people who can talk to each other on the ground. and president saakashvili just said the satellites were point there had, but it s not enough to get all the information you need. what about this point that he raises. what about the legitimate government? a lot of people are critical of the united states that seems to champion people toppling kbofts when they don t like the guy who was in power, and out of the other side of their mouth saying the united states supports democracy and democratically-elected governments. how does this play out in this particular case, where you had a government, a quote/unquote bad guy in the american point of view, who was drtoppled by crow, and now we re saying, this is a legitimate government. first of all, president yanukovych wasn t a bad guy just a couple of months ago. right. vice president biden called him, i think, a dozen times to try to de-escalate this
that monitors the eastern seaboard. seven year system mal fudged ahead of super storm sandy. it s one of aging satellites capable of failing. it s part of a committee that monitors the current state of earth satellites and she warns the government needs to act fast. we re definitely encountering a basically near perfect storm here. we have rising costs. we have had two recent launch vehicle failures for earth science missions. there is no way to launch these at the rate it would take to replace the ones that are being lost. and two vital polar orbiting is likely to be launched in 2017. noaa continues to develop mitigation plans for satellite coverage these plans will be reassess
the second time in a year. most recently in may. the geo station there monitoring the eastern seaboard. the 7-year-old system also malfunctioned for a brief time ahead of superstorm sandy. engineers is part of a committee that monitors the current state of earth sat lithes and warns the government needs to act fast. we re definitely encountering basically a near perfect storm here. we have shrinking budgets, rising launch vehicle costs. two recent failures for earth science missions and putting it all together there s just no way to launch things at anything like the rate it would take to replace the observation that is are being lost. reporter: building a satellite takes years and that s why they say they need funding now and a long-term plan and a statement noaa says, quote, noaa continues to develop mitigation plans for any potential gap in satellite coverage. the plans will be re-assessed on a biannual basis to account for
something he really shouldn t have been discussing in a public forum. but the problem that seeing with sort of the mixed messages as you put it, is a lack of clarity, a lack of human intelligence. not to say that we don t have signals intelligence, you know, satellite coverage. we ve got other sources of intelligence. what we don t have is again, we re lacking the humint that can provide more clarity on this matter so we can make sounder decisions where to go with this. martha: given that, what do you do? well, i mean i think the first thing we have to do is realize that, i don t want to oversimplify this but when we re talking about does north korea have the capability to put a nuclear weapon on a long-range missile as opposed to a short-range missile, we have to understand that it s kind of a moot point because we ve been kicking the can down the road to this point of this discussion if we continue to behave in the same fashion, if we continue with the same policies, then eventuall
stand, reports of explosions near a compound where he may be hiding. and i m carol costello. a new poll predicting a tight race in 2012, whether obama versus romney, bachmann, perry or paul on this american morning. good morning to you. it is tuesday, august 23rd. this is american morning. we have a lot going on today here. this weather in the united states. that s right. politics and, of course the developments in libya. start with breaking news in the battle for libya this morning. the arabic news network al arabiya reporting explosions near the compound where moammar gadhafi is believed to be hiding, this coming as the regime is teetering on the bring of collapse. nobody has seen gadhafi since the opposition rolled into tripoli over the weekend. his son, saif al islam, made a surprise appearance after the libyan opposition claimed they captured him. he showed up at a western hotel with journalists and spoke to matthew chance and said his father is alive and