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An opportunity to create a global network of disaster monitoring satellites
at a bargain basement price is slipping away. Lightweight sensors could be
piggybacked on a fleet of 180 telecoms satellites due for launch. They would
give complete coverage of Earth for the first time so floods, landslides and
other disasters could be predicted and monitored. But the idea, proposed by
Richard Holdaway of the Space Science and Technology Department of the
Rutherford Appleton Labs, was greeted by deafening silence from the United
Nations, the World Bank and Britain’s Office of Science and Technology.