Slashdot Mirror
NASA Goes Bargain Basement With New Satellite
coondoggie writes to tell us that NASA has announced a new low-cost satellite that could be ideal for those who wish to get into space quickly and (relatively) inexpensively. "The Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology SATellite (FASTSAT) is 39.5 inches in diameter — not much larger than an exercise ball. It is hexagonally shaped and clocks in at a little less than 200 Lbs. It can carry a payload up to 110 Lbs. [...] NASA said FASTSAT is just the right size for earth observing missions, space science missions, and technology demonstrations. 'We think we can do whole missions for less than $10 million instead of the traditional $100s of millions, and that includes the launch vehicle, the satellite, and the widget you want to test,' said Marshall Space Flight Center's Edward 'Sandy' Montgomery in a release."
The Russians aren't too happy about this new side to NASA... they're trying to distance themselves from the whole idea...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Or did anyone else have the vision of a giant slingshot for the launch?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
It'll be interesting to see if this drives a trend towards smaller, COTS parts for these satellites. Personally, I'm excited about this. This could be the first step towards an all-in-one probe (a la Star Trek) like device.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Didn't the faster cheaper thing prove out to be extremely risky? That model resulted in numerous failures on Mars, ultimately to be abandoned and real space agency calibre test and development resume as a result.
Dominant Meme
$10M may seem cheap but it's still out of the price range for most businesses. Maybe Google or CNN can afford to buy a beowolf cluster of these babies to help it map the Earth, and maybe even Rand McNally can afford one or two, but I doubt Joe's Map Company or the local independent radio station can.
Let me know when I can buy them for only 3 easy payments of $29.95.
Disclaimer for those with mod points: This post is NOT intended as a flame or flamebait.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When I was a kid, I did not know that playing with estes model rockets was actually making me a rocket scientist!!
On the lighter side, this is just one more step toward open source styled science. I'm glad to see it. It will slowly break the stranglehold that big military business has on such ventures, and hopefully spread the wealth around a little bit better.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
i'll take two...
Everyone lauded them for their ability to do it on the cheap. Result? Epic fail.
Data costs tend to be almost as much as the actual hardware since there are only a few locations that are prime for beaming data down - and they're in Alaska or the far North.
Now for a decent sized marketing budget, I can look in a telescope and see "Eat at Joe's" plastered up in the heavens?
-
Elon Musk intends his Falcon rockets to put ~500 lbs in LEO for ~$8 million. Two failures to date and another attempt coming up early next year (SpaceX dates being rather fluid.) Of course this is only the cost of the launch, not the experiment/science etc. Anyhow, the NASA numbers seem reasonable.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Perhaps if every slashdot reader contributed $10, we could get one. The highest rated comment ideas would be placed into a slashdot poll to decide what to do with it.
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
rediculous.
from the article ....
Magnets provide its attitude control instead of jets, so there are no propellants onboard to explode.
How do they manage this?
]{
Nobody can!
So, I guess that since we're pulling back from exploring space, we've decided to do the equivalent of taking our ball and leaving. Since we apparently can't afford to send more ships up, we'll leave it so polluted with obnoxious small pieces of debris that no other nation will be able to safely navigate our man-made minefield.
That should be enough for a headcrab and a garden gnome.
No one gives a shit. Get over it.
You know, what's your new account? That way I can mod all your worthless posts as such.
Get over yourself, you had a seven digit uid anyway, wtf is the harm in creating a new one?
FASTSAT Affordable, Science and Technology SATellite (FASTSAT)
There, fixed it.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Certainly they could have come up with a better comparison for the Slashdot crowd than an exercise ball. How about an 18lb turkey or a 128oz belly buster bag of Doritos?
WARNING: WE HAVE NOT CONDUCTED A FELONY-CONVICTION SEARCH OR FBI SEARCH ON THIS INDIVIDUAL.
There's a sentence in the article that doesn't make sense and I wanted to clarify it for those reading.
These dimensions place FASTSAT squarely in the microsatellite category where it will compete with such as SpaceX's Falcon 1 and Kistler's K-1, NASA said.
Except that SpaceX and Kistler both make ROCKETS not satellites. The competitors for FASTSAT would be companies like Surrey and Orbital Sciences.
However, (what I think the author probably meant to write) is that SpaceX's Falcon 1 (and Kistler's K-1 if it hadn't just been cut by NASA) would be great rockets to launch a small payload like this. Falcon 1 tops out at a few thousand pounds, so you could cheaply load a few of these into a rocket. For $7million for the rocket and a few million more for each satellite you could send up several serious NASA missions.
NASA puts more people into the upper class than the upper atmosphere
what is needed is the ethically right stuff, not the morally wrong stuff
Jules Verne most likely first imagined it, and Gerard Bull designed it: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/babongun.htm
The Raven
Surrey Satellites/University of Surrey in the UK have been making micro sats for decades. (customers include Department of Defence, Banking consortia, ESA, etc etc)
Their second satellite UoSat-2 was build in less 11 months, and they're more than happy to take commercial orders for satellites costing way less than 4 million dollars and still they can make a profit on it, launch included!
Heck this micro satellite isn't even small by today's standards! Give it a couple of years and we'll see satellites that are the size of a large coffee cup. How do I know? My colleagues are building them!
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=1+meter+in+inches&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
It's amazing how Americans don't want to use the "M" word
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Well, I guess they could have just said it was "about 1 meter in diameter" but I suppose someone figured that would be pretty meaningless to most Americans since we generally don't use the metric system in this country.
FTA: 'We think we can do whole missions for less than $10 million...'
'less than $10 million' is NASA-Speak for 'at least $350 million'
so... how long you guys think it will be before Google has their own privately owned global satellite array that updates google maps in realtime? You'll be watching your girlfriends every move from the comfort of your computer chair 10 years from now. mark my words.
All of your satellite are belong to us
I vote for geostationary orbit over Natalie Portman's house.
End transmission.
i better go on a diet if i want to live in a satellite...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Noting that accurate pointing of on-board sensors is vital for most Earth and astronautical observations, I'd be interested to read about the precision and accuracy of the attitude control system. The A-train satellites are each the size of a Ford van and have multiple spinning wheels, torquers, star trackers and gyros to sense the spacecraft attitude and maintain the correct orientation. Using only mag rods, nulling any residual attitude errors will take quite a while and I'm not sure you'd ever have a 'stable' platform.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
If you loose your dog you may lose him. Lose is a verb, "loose" can be either an adjective (as you used it) or a verb. When Linux says "you may loose data" it is warning you that you will lose your data on purpose (although I'm sure it's really just a typo and whoever wrote that warning never thought of it like that).
Perhaps you should change it to "'Looser' is when you let your belt out a notch. 'Loser' is what you are when you misuse 'loose'
"If you lose you money, great god don't lose your mind. And if you lose your woman, please don't fool with mine". -lyrics to an old blues song
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Most Americans don't understand things in meters. I could very accurately describe to you how big a few thousandths of an inch is, but it would take me some thinking to show you what a millimeter looks like, because I do all my engineering work in inches. It has more to do with our established infrastructure than anything else (go ahead, find me a meterstick at a local store...good luck with that). Conversions don't really get hairy until you're doing a thermodynamics problem anyways.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
It is hexagonally shaped and clocks in at a little less than 200 Lbs.
When you're talking about weight, the proper phrase is "Weighs in", not "clocks in"...
Satellite engineers are comparatively poorly paid.
No one works in the space business for the money.
I made more money in my first job out of university (physics major, astrophysics minor) than I would now if I worked as a satellite engineer - even with three/four years extensive experience and a postgrad degree in Satellite Engineering!
When we will be seeing satellites at Walmart next to the dollar DVD bin?
Disclaimer for those with mod points: This post is NOT intended as a flame or flamebait.
If you want good karma, stop worrying about karma. And never use the word "troll" or "flamebait" because your post will be modded "troll" or "flamebait" (I think I just got modded... never mind). Try for insightful and you'll get "funny" (no mod points). Try for "funny" and likely as not you will be modded "interesting".
More on topic, yes, there a lot more Top Cat's than there are McDonalds Corporations, but there are enough Giant corporations that CAN afford this tech. Those that can't afford it don't matter; at least, in the context of this conversation.
Should they stop selling Ferrarris just because I can't afford one?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
And just what malady is "exercise balls" anyway?
Yes....yes they should.
Or the alternative, Ferarris for every one. woo!
PBS's Wired Science magazine had a great segment (warning: video)on all of the things that someone has to do to launch a satellite - their example was a telecommunications satellite. It's a good watch if you want to know exactly why $10 million is not exactly a bad price....
Soon we will be looking up in the night sky and seeing "SPlanets" (spam planets, of course) Terrific...
Poll: What to do with Slashdot's satellite
-Spy on... er Observe Natalie Portman
-Name it Shark and put a fricken' laser on it
-Play a kickass game of Asteroids against other satellites
-Put CowboyNeal in it
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
Look on the bright side, you have managed to get six -1's in a row. Very few other slashdotter's have managed to achieve such a perfect score.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Do it faster makes us stronger.
Couldnt resist.
Now back to work.
All you have to do is master the double bomb jump! :)
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
So what the hell is your point? Some things are expensive and some businesses don't have a lot of money? That the technology it's still un-affordable for some? Isn't that like pointing out that some businesses can't afford a skyscraper, or some people can't buy a house in Beverly Hills?
If I'm elected there will be a chicken in every pot, and some pot in every chicken.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
...a WHAT ball?
First of all, I wanted to question whether anybody knew if they had any customers for this satellite bus? The two photos looked more like non-flight testbeds than shiny, thermally controlled satellites we're used to seeing.
Second, does anyone know if a magnetic orientation system has been used on any satellites in the past? Obviously, the rotation rates that can can be achieved by such a system must be pretty low, especially if the satellite has no moving parts to extend booms, so I'm curious what sort of payloads this bus is useful for.
Third, one of my first thoughts is it sounds like they might be specifically targeting themselves at SpaceX. With the 1400 pound LEO capacity of the Falcon 1 for $8 million, it's the only rocket that could put one of these things (perhaps two) into space for the $10 million estimated in the article. Even the current low cost contender in the US, the Orbital Sciences Minotaur, which reuses SRB's from retired Peacekeeper missiles, costs over $12 million per rocket, not counting payload integration and launch, as I understand it.
Lastly, the article says this satellite would be a competitor with the Falcon 1, which is obviously false. The Falcon 1 is a launch vehicle. FASTSAT is a satellite. They go together, not compete.
...the Russians wouldn't be happy that NASA was stealing their idea.
But then, I guess immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
We think we can do whole missions for less than $10 million instead of the traditional $100s of millions, and that includes the launch vehicle, the satellite, and the widget you want to test.
Am I the only one who misread this as "and the midget you want to test" ?
I think that anyone digging for and actually reading this news understand a meter. Probably better than they understand what a yard is.
You can always write "39.5 inches (about 1 meter)". It would be actually helpful to some people, unlike the comparison to excercise balls.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Though it is true his deals can't be beat.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I offer my sympathy to Cowboy Neal's family in advance.
For $10 million You could use NASA or even Virgin Galactic (just roll down the window and throw it out).
But wouldn't it be sweet to stick a server up there?
Can you imagine Pirate Bay or the Russkis servers in geostationary orbit?
You'll have to blow it out of space to shut the damn thing down!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I think this is a good trend, because for space based research to be more useful it must be more affordable, but...
What about space junk? If a lot of smaller cheaper satellites are put in orbit, will this lead to more space junk? Will these be in a low enough orbit so that they will tend to fall out of the sky in a few years, or will they stay up permanently? Inquiring minds want to know!
Victory or awesome!
The PBS video clip is wild. $500 for a satellite.
Who knew there was only a few slots left in the Clark orbit?
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
NASA had to come up with something like this quickly.
They risk losing the entire low end satellite launch market to countries like China and India.
It should at least have frikin lasers attached. This could bring a whole new meaning to the 'slashdot effect'... "My garden is on fire!", "yeh, looks like you've been slashdotted good."
True, but lots of people have a satellite dish. Just point and download!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I vote instead of a satelite we just get a bunch of spy cams....
Coming to you live from another dimension.
The article's fine... but they say "including the launch vehicle", but don't mention just *how* it's supposed to be launched. The old "getaway special", you knew - it was via the Shuttle. They don't say here.
mark
Nope! Doesn't work. I'm slowly learning metric (living in a metric country) and previous experience hasn't helped out at all. Now, I don't know my current weight in pounds, and I'm slowly slowly learning Celsius. I still don't know to bring a jacket or not when they say 16 degrees or whatever, and all that C/F exposure I had my entire life didn't stick at all. The only thing it did was annoy me when I see some dumb journalist say "XX miles (XX km)" as if anyone cared.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!