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NASA Schedules Robotic Spacecraft Launch
Nathan writes "NASA has finally set the launch date for their first robotic spacecraft, intended to "rendezvous in orbit with other satellites without any human intervention", to the 15th of April. The spacecraft, called "DART" as an acronym for "Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous", cost $110 million dollars and weighs 800 pounds."
At the moment, as far as I know, both the European ESA, with their ATV and the Russians, with their Progress do this same thing, i.e. autonomously meeting and docking with ships in orbit (the ISS mainly). Apart from that, I can't imagine that the technology is all that spectacular that NASA wasn't able to do this in the past. Or is this a case of NASA wasting money in trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak?
Is there some aspect to this that really is new?
The Soyuz space capsules have three seats, one for a tourist and two for the crew. So no. You're thinking of Progress, which is unmanned, but still controlled by humans from the ground.
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
Yeah, I was confused by this. Reading the fine article however:
"Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology"
Yeah. So. There.
They may well be. But NASA's mission has nothing to do with that. NASA is a civil agency. Military space work is done through the Air Force and the Navy (primarily the Air Force). The Air Force has its own programs for demonstrating the kind if mission that NASA is doing with DART: look up XSS-11, and Orbital Express.
But the docking maneuver with Mir was done automatically. That was one of the funny things about the capsule crashing into Mir, it was under manual control for some reason. I guess the pilot didn't trust the automation :)
apparently they need a special antenna to do this docking, costing a small amount of money to be paid to Ukraine, and at that time they didn't have the money to purchase this.
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