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Group Wants To Recover 36-Year-Old Historic Spacecraft From Deep Space
An anonymous reader writes "A band of space hackers and engineers are trying to do something never done before — recover a 36 year old NASA spacecraft from the grips of deep space and time. With old NASA documents and Rockethub crowdfunding, a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing is attempting to steer ISEE-3, later rechristened ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, back into an Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Dennis says, 'ISEE-3 can become a great teaching tool for future engineers and scientists helping with design and travel to Mars'. Only 40 days remain before the spacecraft will be out of range for recovery. A radio telescope is available, propulsion designs are in hand and the team is hoping for public support to provide the small amount needed to accomplish a very unique milestone in space exploration."
http://www.xkcd.com/1337/
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
From TFA: "If successful ISEE-3 will spend its retirement as a platform for citizen science, with smartphone apps—and a twitter feed"
Perhaps it would be better to let it drift off into space and die with some dignity after all.
Liability insurance would be cheaper than sending you to a community college class about statistics and probability.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Let's bring this baby to life!
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
"a very unique milestone in space exploration"
WTF?
"unique" is not a relative adjective. There are no degrees of "unique". Something is either unique or it's not.
Aaargh!
That's why there are no such words as uniquer or uniquest
</rant>
V'GER.
Wrong probe anyway, VoyaGER is far beyond recovery with current technology and politics.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
*Beep* HELIUM DETECTED *Beep* COSMIC RAY *Beep* MORE HELIUM *Beep* AIR'S KINDA THIN UP HERE *Beep* FOR GOD'S SAKE GUYS LET ME DIE *Beep*
Catching Voyager is within our tech. The return trip is beyond our capability. The politics are irrelevant.
Learn to love Alaska
Hi, this is Dennis Wingo, co-project lead for this effort.
There is no need for insurance as the probability of collision is extremely small, far less than for satellites in any other orbit. At no time is this orbit coming even as close as geosynchronous orbit.
The Vulture has Landed!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1
clicking on a dynamically generated link to information but in space
Let's say you buy a computer, and you buy insurance in case that computer burns out. Is this a good decision?
How about if you buy 10,000 computers for a company, and you buy insurance in case those burn out. Is that a good decision?
In the first case, yes. You have one computer. You are exposed to either the marginal cost of a computer some percentage of the time OR slightly more than that percentage of the marginal cost of the computer 100% of the time. Let's say 1 in 100 computers burns out in a short life--1% risk probability--for a $1000 computer. You face a 1% chance of losing $1000; or you pay somewhere above but close to $10--let's call it $12.50--and face a 100% chance of losing exactly $12.50.
In the second case, you own 10,000 of these. You face a damn near 100% chance of losing 100 of them, at a marginal cost of $100,000. Of the replacements, you'll probably lose 1 more, adding $1000. Thus your costs are $101,000. For insurance, you're adding $12.50 per computer, providing a guaranteed loss of $125,000. This puts you $24,000 behind--you should forgo insurance.
Why is this?
In the first case, your total cost is low: you have one object and are exposed to a very low, but very severe margin of risk. It's unpredictable, and will be significantly costly. For some very small marginal cost, you can avert this risk.
In the second case, your total cost is high: you have many objects and are exposed to a very low margin of risk, but one that is now a fraction of your initial cost. Likewise, the risk is repeated across many things--failure is isolated and your system is robust.
In the first case, your experienced risk is many, many times higher the marginal cost of insurance: $1000 versus $12.50. In the second case, however, your experienced risk is almost guaranteed to be $10 per machine, and so you're going to pay an extra $2.50 for an extremely unlikely event--you're overpaying for risk mitigation. Your risk is spread wide and predictable, and the cost estimates of $101,000 versus $125,000 show that you're now paying more for protection than the failure event will probably cost you.
Ignoring that this project doesn't generate profit (and thus can't act as its own source of liability mitigation), what we're looking at is the risk of an extremely expensive one-off failure. If you have a 1 in 50,000 chance of hitting a $1M satellite, then you would be appropriately insured by a policy of about $20. Foregoing that insurance puts you at a $1M risk. On the other hand, if you were to do this substantially more than 50,000 times and each time profited you more than $20, it would be highly likely that you would incur a $1M liability occasionally BUT it would be more expensive to purchase insurance than to simply accept the occasional cost of liability.
This project is a prime candidate for liability insurance. Purchasing liability insurance is a good decision, even if nothing bad happens. Purchasing liability insurance with parameters as described above is a bad decision--even if you're unlucky, not purchasing it is usually a good decision (unless risk appetite is extremely low).
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