And communications satellites have come a very long way since Telstar; the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand simultaneous phone calls plus three channels of cable television. There is enormous room for technical improvement in comsat technologies; they have a well-established market, much pent-up demand, and are likely to improve drastically in the future. (The satellite launch business is no longer a superpower monopoly; comsats are being launched by Chinese and Europeans. Newly independent Kazakhstan, home of the Soviet launching facilities at Baikonur, is anxious to enter the business.)
Weather satellites have proven vital to public safety and commercial prosperity. NASA or no NASA, money will be found to keep weather satellites in orbit and improve them technically -- not for reasons of national prestige or flag-waving status, but because it makes a lot of common sense and it really pays.
But a look at the budget decisions for 1992 shows that the Apollo Paradigm still rules at NASA. NASA is still utterly determined to put human beings in space, and actual space science gravely suffers for this decision. Planetary exploration, life science missions, and astronomical surveys (all unmanned) have been cancelled, or curtailed, or delayed in the1992 budget. All this, in the hope of continuing the big-ticket manned 50-billion-dollar Space Shuttle, and of building the manned 30-billion-dollar Space Station Freedom.
The dire list of NASA's sacrifices for 1992 includes an asteroid probe; an advanced x-ray astronomy facility; a space infrared telescope; and an orbital unmanned solar laboratory. We would have learned a very great deal from these projects (assuming that they would have actually worked). The Shuttle and the Station, in stark contrast, will show us very little that we haven't already seen.