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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...
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Or did anyone else have the vision of a giant slingshot for the launch?
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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'.
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.
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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?
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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
Yeah just make sure these satellites are engineered to last 6 months only.
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+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Earth has a magnetic field, and if you place another magnet in the field, oriented differently, a torque results. The torque is very low, so it takes a while to have a noticeable effect, but if all you're doing is pointing at the earth, it's sufficient.
Generally, you'll see the magnets either on the ends of long booms (for satellites intended to stay oriented in one direction) or as electromagnets (for more pointable spacecraft).
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
FASTSAT Affordable, Science and Technology SATellite (FASTSAT)
There, fixed it.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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.
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
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Or even "a metre". Try converting 39.5 inches into metres and you'll see where the number came from. Then ask why it wasn't written "1 metre" in the first place...
I vote for geostationary orbit over Natalie Portman's house.
End transmission.
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.
Like /.'ers know the size of an exercise ball?
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Out of curiousity, what do you think is a "sky high" salary and why do you think someone in NASA is being paid that much?
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....
It would make perfect sense if you would just spend a few parsecs thinking about it.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Yeah, but what about a cannon and a slingshot working together? A multi-stage approach: the slingshot fires the cannon into the sky, and when the cannon reaches maximum height it fires and sends the payload hurtling into space. I hear that NASA may be signing an exclusive partnership with ACME to develop this...
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
...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.
"Better, faster, cheaper" was tried. They also tried the "take more risks, do more science". The problem with the first was that cheaper was the immutable part of that closed equation. The problem with the second was that risk taking was valued but failure was punished.
Neither produced any forward motion.
This, too, will fail. Simple reason: space research and exploration is a custom, one-of-a-kind endeavor at this stage. You can't make a "standard" bus because as soon as you do, somebody will need more [power,data,real estate,angular momentum,precision,jitter compensation] that the standard bus can provide. And then you're back into the business of custom modifications for each scientific payload. It has been tried so many times, it's funny (sad, not ha ha). There have been minor successes, but in the end, the savings are relatively marginal, considering there is a raft of designs out there which can be used as starting points for custom hardware.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?