Satellite Orbits — Where the First Dollar Should Go

The question

If funding becomes available, what's the single highest-priority fix for Satellite Orbits, and why?

The answer, in plain terms

The riskiest point in the whole Satellite Orbits pipeline is the step where all the individual analysis centres' orbit calculations get combined into the one official product everyone uses. It's risky for two separate reasons at once — and both need fixing, not just one.

Reason 1 — there's no backup. Only one organisation does this combination step, using one piece of software written by three people. If that team or that software becomes unavailable, there's no second option. Nothing else in the pipeline has this problem this badly.

Reason 2 — even day to day, nobody would notice a problem quickly. Two things are missing:

• The step before it (data flowing in from the archives) has no automatic alert when something breaks — someone would have to notice manually.
• The combination step itself has no formal risk register, no tested backup plan, and no charter spelling out who's actually accountable for keeping it running.

Neither problem is a backstop for the other. Right now, if something goes wrong, there's no automatic warning system and no governance process ready to catch it either. That combination — irreplaceable, and unwatched from both directions — is what makes this the top priority, not just one weak number in isolation.

What actually needs funding

Two distinct fixes, not one:

1. Automatic monitoring and failover at the archiving step — so a problem gets flagged the moment it happens, instead of whenever someone happens to notice.
2. Basic governance capability at the combination step — a real risk register, a written and tested backup plan, and a formal charter naming who's accountable. All three are close to non-existent today.

Either fix alone would help. Both together is what actually closes the gap.

The honest caveat

This is the top priority within Satellite Orbits — it's currently ranked #1 out of the 25 tiers assessed across all five products so far. But only Satellite Orbits has been assessed to this level of detail. Before this becomes the answer to "where does the first dollar of a $100M investment go" across the whole supply chain, ITRF, EOP, ICRF, and Gravity need the same treatment — it's possible one of them turns out worse once looked at with the same rigor.

Where this comes from

Everything above is the plain-language version of numbers already documented in satellite_orbits_workflow_description.md (the annex) and satellite_orbits_principles_walkthrough_DRAFT.md (the working document): Tier 3's combined risk score (18.25 out of 25 — the highest of all 25 tiers), its criticality rating (5 out of 5 — no substitute exists), and the specific capability scores behind it (Network Operations' technology score, and Risk Management, Performance Management, and Disaster Recovery all sitting near the bottom of the 1–5 scale). Full detail and sourcing is in those two documents; this page is the "why it matters" summary on its own.