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NASA Names New Spacecraft 'Altair'
simonbp writes "NASA's new spacecraft, designed to travel to the Moon and International Space Station, has been christened 'Altair' - 'named after a variable double star in the constellation Aquila.' The crew launch vehicle will be called 'Ares I'; the larger cargo vehicle, 'Ares V'; and the lunar landers will be named after Artemis, the Greek goddess of the Moon and twin sister of Apollo."
It's really named after that planet from that Stargate episode.
I am afraid that you made a BIG mistake. I am a greek , and I can tell you for sure that artemis is the goddess of hunt. Artemis is the Latin god Diana. The goddess of moon in greek is Selini.
My highschool buddy owns a sci-fi publishing house "Altair" and computer game company "Altair Interactive". Looks like - he will be able to make some money out of it, finally. (Lawyers are good people, down deep.)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
...now we just need to create a moon base from scratch, create an inter planetary spaceship that can haul enough food and water to keep a few astronauts alive for a few months, build a ship that will keep the crew alive if a solar storm hits them on the way, get the ship to stop, drop the astronauts into a hostile gravity well, do some science, get back up out of the hostile gravity well, get back into the ship, turn it around, and survive the voyage home. Oh yeah, one more thing I forgot. They need to fund this, the subcontractors, the workers, and the deal with a cost of a few thousand dollars per kilogram sent up.
But hey, at least they got the hard part out of the way; figuring out names.
This post is a perfect example. It took my a hell of a lot less time to spit out a dozen or so challenges they still face then it did to think up a good title. Way to go NASA! You are almost there.
That, or NASA is illiterate in the classics. Which I doubt.
But why a variable star? Is that because they expect the program to expand and contract according to the budget, stories on slow news days etc.?
The whole thing about the inflation of names relating to space is more than a little childish. Calling people who barely got out of the Earth's atmosphere "Astronauts" and "Cosmonauts" is a bit like calling a dinghy sailor "Admiral".
Pining for the fjords
wasnt that a geek toy kit ... sound ?
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Does it run BASIC?
Yeah! Just like the MITS Altair 8800!
Artemis is also a small lunar impact crater located in the Mare Imbrium region of the moon.
NEVER ever name a spacecraft after something resulting after a crash...
NASA's new spacecraft, designed to travel to the Moon and International Space Station, has been christened 'Altair'
Well, this article just confirms it for me. The United States is lagging in science and technology!
I knew the time was approaching where I could finally get some money when I sell the Altair computer in my parent's basement. Ebay, here I come!
As in, JESUS, the parent poster is an idiot!
Who gives a flying fark about the name?
How about the specification of the vehicle, instead?
Just confirms it.. they arnt going to do anything new are they? Despite what they say.
A few flags up, a few rocks down some media air time and lost interest...
I dont want to be a synic on this, but their (NASA/US) track record on almost everything follows this. Except maybe for oil, oil keeps them interested for a while... mmm oil...
Actually, there are at least two sets of gods involved. The original sun god was Helios, who was supplanted by Appolo - who had his start north of Greece - as a mouse god, IIRC. Artemis/Diana is also an import, but from the Middle East instead. Selene is I believe the older and contemporary of Helios. None of them are likely to be the real original moon and sun deities of the Greeks though. Throughout the Indoeuropean speaking lands north of the Alps and west to Ireland and Iberia, the sun was represented by a goddess and the moon by a god. This preserved in both Irish and Norse myth, with other traces caught by Roman historians. The opposite convention was apparently adopted by the Greeks and Latins from indigenous people as they moved in.
The title bar of my web browser says:
NASA Names New Spacecraft - Mozilla Firefox
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Its named after that star system they were visiting in Star Trek.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
The planet where the action took place was Altair IV -- the one where your worst nightmares come true and your species suffers complete annihilation.
Good choice.
http://www.altair.org/natradio.html
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Altair obviously is not named after some star in Aquila. It is named after the MITS Altair 8800 which was an instant, overwhelming success and its bus became the de facto standard.. and the 8800 was in turn named after a star in Star Trek and not in Aquila. See the emulator. Though these guys think the 8800 was named after the movie Forbidden Planet, but it could also have been Altair sf magazine, which probably was named after a star in Aquila. Of course Altair also means "the flyer" in Arabic which is better than considering it an ill-starred lover. Though any of the above would provide for great mission logos too. Anyway it is difficult to work out who named what since the 8800 was named after the star Altair that the Starship Enterprise was heading for, but the Space Shuttle Enterprise was obviously named after the Star Trek Starship, or maybe after a balloon, or a seafaring ship, and probably not Branson's suborbital.
...will see this as the preparation for NASA's buyout by Ares Macrotechnologies. The megacorp that is your friend and your country's friend.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Please tell me there not bringing Harlan, I cant stand that guy!
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)
Will seafaring ships don't they chrisen it when it is in the water? with that whole smashing the bottle of wine thing. I would think they should work on "building it". I love the fact thay they are designing it but how many NASA projects get built after the design let alone put into use.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
Also, due to recent budget constraints, the craft will be controlled by an Altair.
Altair is NOT double.
http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/altair.html
http://www.solstation.com/stars/altair.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair
Shouldn't they use names from cultures that will make the majority of the parts? How about Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Hanuman? Or Mao, Zhao, and Jiang. :)
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Let me guess. It's serial number will be "8080"...
Does somebody @ NASA have a sense of humor? I heard 'Artemis' & the first thing I thought of was Superman II.
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Far & Away, Terrence Stamp's Finest Performance!
Here are a couple of references -
http://collectspace.com/ubb/Forum35/HTML/000234.h
http://www.funtrivia.com/en/Movies/Superman-II-10
(I had to check myself to make sure I wasn't crazy) You'll have to scroll down a bit in each link.
It's going to run Vista
Altair is supposed to be big enough so nobody will suggest launching it on a commercial rocket (those were Not Invented Here, you know!), and it's supposed to use hydrogen engines instead of methane so long-term propellant storage in space and propellant manufacture on Mars will be out of the question.
I liked the name "Apollo on Steroids", personally. It reflected the fact that NASA is just doing the same thing again a little bigger, and that they're losing their balls.
We get a bonus reference to 2001: A Space Odessey as well.
The Ares 1B was the egg-like shuttle that Heywood Floyd took from the Space Station to the Moon.
Aso, the Ares vehicles are called Ares I and Ares V, presumably after the naming conventions of Saturn I and V. However, the Saturn I was actually called Saturn 1B, so there's the logical linkage to the Ares 1B.
From that, we can clearly see that Werner Von Braun is related to Kevin Bacon!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
>Who gives a flying fark about the name?
Right. Tell us the important stuff. Does it have chrome exhausts? Holographic paint? Threatening protuberances? In other words, is it cool?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Since HAL sang "Daisy," will Patsy sing "Walking After Midnight?"
I mean, what if they had decided to call it "Pube"?
Some people have been speculating that the choice of name is a nod to Robert Zubrin, whose Mars Direct plan has some parallels with NASA's new mission designs. From the blog of Chair Force Engineer:
The irony of it is that Ares was also the name of the booster in Robert Zubrin's proposed Mars mission, "Mars Direct." Further, Zubrin's Ares (publically unveiled in 1990) is almost the same as NASA's Ares-5, launched in 2005.
The differences between the Zubrin and NASA boosters are very subtle. Both are built from the Shuttle fuel tank and boosters, with an upper stage mounted axially on the vehicle.
The biggest difference is the propulsion arrangement. Zubrin used four stock shuttle engines (SSME's) mounted in a pod where the shuttle orbiter's tail would normally be. Theoretically, Zubrin's propulsion pod could re-enter the atmosphere and be recovered. Ares 5 goes to the more expensive step of designing a "low-cost, expendible SSME." The five engines are mounted axially underneath the hydrogen tank. While this is a more efficient arrangement, it requires more extensive modifications to the shuttle's launch pad.
There are other differences as well. Zubrin originally proposed using the now-moribund Advanced Solid Rocket Motors, while NASA goes with 5-segment SRB's. NASA stretches the shuttle's tank, while Zubrin uses the same volume of propellants on the first stage tank as the shuttle does. NASA has an 8.4 meter diameter upper stage (to match the first stage,) while Zubrin went to 10 meters for his (matching the Saturn V's diameter.)
An open question is the definition of "J-2X," the engine that will be used for the second stage of Ares I (The Stick) and Ares 5. While the engine is a modern replacement for the J-2 on the Saturn V's second and third stages, it's a mystery to me whether it will have any commonality with the old J-2 or J-2S. One wonders if the European Vulcain engine, fitted with a nozzle extension to compensate for upper atmospheric & vacuum conditions, would fit that bill. Of course, I smell the odor of "not invented here" creeping up on this idea.
While many groups of space enthusiasts have been disappointed with Project Constellation, Zubrin's Mars Society should not be one of them. Michael Griffin's NASA has joined Zubrin and his Zubrinistas, worshipping at the Church of Heavy-Lift.
"Athena" would have been a much better name than "Ares" for the NASA launch vehicle.
From Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, scene in jail in the Philippines, this quote starts p. 801 - see full quote starting from p.799, or better yet, buy the book.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
A now DEFUNCT computer that never went anywhere, You know, probably like the space craft!
The 4th planet of this solar system is called Mars. Mars is the roman name of a greek god known as Ares.
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