A satellite well past its prime should get replaced this week. It is but one of many

ON EARTH it is a fact of public life that politicians love to trumpet new infrastructure but take much less interest in maintaining what already exists. The same rule, it appears, applies in outer space. Many satellites launched for important purposes such as monitoring solar weather (bad solar storms can damage electrical equipment on Earth), tracking the climate and just helping people navigate are limping along in need of replacement.

One that is about to be substituted is the Advanced Composition Explorer, a solar-weather satellite launched in 1997 with an intended lifetime of five years. After many postponements its replacement, the Deep Space Climate Observatory, should have got off the launch pad and into orbit on February 11th, as The Economist went to press. That still leaves a lot of other elderly satellites in similar need of retirement.