What types of industries might be impacted by space weather and how?
The communications industry has lots of problems with solar events. Solar activity can garble radio transmissions, fry the electronics on satellites and in antennas. The power industry has problems with solar events as well, as their transformers can be overloaded. Almost any industry that uses electronics in space can be affected by extremely powerful bursts, but these are rare. GPS sales are projected to be $9 billion per year in 2000. GPS receivers are increasingly interwoven into the fabric of commerce and recreation. New investment in low and mid Earth orbiting spacecraft is expected to be $30 billion by 2001. Each constellation’s loss of revenue is estimated at $1 k per minute of outage per satellite; this does not consider the users’ losses Delay in assembly of International Space Station could have a domino effect on Shuttle flight manifests, at $500 M per flight. One credible electric power outage could result in a direct loss to US Gross Domestic Product of $3 – $6 billion; a
