Luck had nothing to do with it. The probe entering the atmosphere of a moon is a once in a lifetime opportunity for unique observation, much like the comet impact on Jupiter. Everybody that has the control to point a 'listening asset' would point it in that direction during that timeframe. It was a unique opportunity to get unique data. Everything else the radio telescopes listen to, will still be there the next day, the probe descent would not happen again.
There was no luck involved, just a lot of scientists eager to gather every scrap of raw data availble during the probe descent. In this case, the primary reciever (cassini) didnt' get one of the data sets, secondary recievers on earth were able to salvage a bunch of it. It would be a 'lucky thing' if those radio telescopes just happened to be pointed in the right direction, quite by accident. It was no accident, they were purposely aimed in that direction, specifically so they could record this data. I'd call this more in the category of 'good planning' rather than 'luck'.
And if you think they used a shuttle for the moon program, that invalidates your opinion, and crushes your credibility. As far as brainwashing the entire planet, well, i see they have done a pretty good job on the home population in america, but, the rest of us wont fall for it quite so easily.
In reality, it's all academic. The america of 40 years ago had the vision, and guts, to actually mount a mission to the moon. The america of today is so busy trying to find a terrorist in every shadow, they dont have the time or money to do anything else. they cant even mount a manned mission to low orbit these days, so it's no wonder they crack out the 35 year old pictures of apollo, to reminisce about the 'good old days' when america was actually a world leader.
Actually, our forefathers, 2 generations past, could send astronauts to the moon. _We_ cant even send them to low orbit. Some would call it 'progress'.
Invading canada would get rather messy for you guys. We have more guns per capita than the usa, and another big difference, most of us actually know how to use them. A lot of the folks I know have taken to putting 3 inch us flags onto range targets these days, shoulder patches. It's an excellent way to measure a 3 inch grouping at 300 yards, and it's getting us all practised up.
Paying interest on the debt is what happens, when society overspends for a couple of generations. It's only getting worse now too. The generation coming along now is going to have to do without Hubble, but, they will be straddled with paying for it. I hope they wake up to the reality of it all, and get the house in order over the next 20 years, so they dont hand an even worse mess off to thier kids. Maybe then, that generation will once again have enough excess to be able to do things like having cool space telescopes. For now, we'll have to settle for paying interest, and buying lots and lots of ammunition for the military.
there's more to it than that. it's actually about die size. When you get the tighter dies you see on modern processors, an impact from a gamma particle is guaranteed to cause a short between 2 traces on chip. The older die sizes have wider spacings on die, so a gama particle actually fits between the traces, meaning it will NOT bridge 2 of them, even if it hits one right on the edge. The same holds true across much of the spectrum of ic's, modern stuff just uses to tight of a silicon matrix for it to be useful in the hard radiation environment.
Many many years ago, i was working with a company that owned a few foundries. One of the projects was quite exciting, it was going to be the first chip they produced using 0.8 micron stuff, a big deal in those days. During my tenure there, I met a venture vulture, and he was quite proud of the fact he had just purchased an old foundry in an eastern bloc country. it was very old, and the best they could do there was to produce 5 micron stuff. i told him he was crazy, and he laffed, said 'come back in 6 months, I'll show you how to be crazy like a fox.' Sure enough, 6 months later, he was the proud owner of a number of military contracts to provide small volume production of very old chip designs, at absolutely exhorbitant prices.
This is/. and you can explain this with hard numbers forever, but they still will not 'get it'. It's closer, so it's gonna use less gas to drive there, it's the only thing they understand.
Except for one little detail, nobody here seems to understand. I'll try explain in terms even the/. crowd can understand.
An earth moon voyage has a cost, both in financial terms, and in terms of energy expended to arrive at destination. Assuming for the moment that finances are unlimited, the real problem is energy and materials, ie packing enough energy into a structure so that it can launch and sustain itself thru a soft landing. The first expenditure is to impart _just_ enough deltaV onto the vehicle that it departs the orbit of the earth, and enters the sphere of influence of the moon. Basically that's a trajectory that ascends to L1 and has _just_ enough velocity left when it gets there, to 'fall' over to the moon side, at which point it begins falling 'down' to the moon. When it gets close, the vehicle will have quite a velocity, and need to be decelerated again to soft land, so we burn rockets again, to put another DeltaV onto the machine, and bring it's motion to zero (or close to it) at touchdown. If you call phase 1 of the journey X and phase 2 Y, the total DeltaV you need to apply to the vehicle is X+Y. From there it's simple arithmetic to calculate what the fuel requirements etc are for a given payload at landing.
The mars equation is a little different. During the launch phase, we need to apply enough DeltaV onto the vehicle to put it into a holmann transfer trajectory, that intersects with the martian orbit. We use careful timing of the launch to make sure that mars is actually at this point of intersection when the vehicle arrives. Assume the same payload as in the above scenario, we'll call this value Z. Upon arrival at mars, we now need to decelerate. BUT, here's where it gets different. To decelerate at mars, we dont burn rocket fuel, we open up a parachute, and let atmospheric drag apply the forces to get the DeltaV we need. The total fuel burn is still only Z, no extra fuel required for the soft landing on mars.
The amount of DeltaV we can put on a vehicle is a function of the ratio of fuel to total mass, along with the engine efficiency. There are hard limits based in engineering as to what amount of DeltaV a given rocket can produce for a given payload. The surprising part to most folks is, with atmospheric braking on the other end, the DeltaV required for a one way to mars is LESS than that for a one way to the moon, simply because we have to carry braking fuel to the moon, we dont to mars.
The mars trip brings lots of other problems, mostly because it takes to long. You need to carry a tremendous amount of consumables if you want to support humans for that timeframe, whereas the consumables for a 6 day moon round trip can be minimal. It's possible with todays technology to build a rocket that can support the mass required to keep a few humans alive for a week trip to/from the moon, and lift that all into a lunar trajectory. It's not possible to do the same for a martian trajectory, you just need to much in the way of consumables on board. But, on a pound for pound basis, for stuff 'delivered', it's actually cheaper to send it to mars, than it is to send it to the moon, thanks to aerobraking on the other end.
Space flight as we know it today works, only because we've refined rockets to the point they can just _barely_ carry themselves, and a very marginal payload, into a useful orbit. Aerobraking for the return trip makes it workable. It's the equivalent of the horse drawn wagon in the 'old west', not very efficient, but, it worked. When we get an improvement in propulsion technology equivalent to the step from the horse drawn buggy, up to todays modern jet engines, then, and only then will space travel become 'the norm'. Prior to that, it's cheaper to go to mars than the moon for scientific probes that dont need to eat/breathe on the way out there. The landing deceleration at the moon, makes that trajectory more expensive than the transfer trajectory to mars, on a pound per pound basis.
you are working at a place where the firewall wont let you got the cingular site, but will let you post on/. --- I'll take a wild guess that you must be somewhere in the support department at cingular...
yes, and as americans, you are busy building up the list of things to atone for again. your children will the ones that ultimately have to pay retributions for what's happening now.
Not to worry, this came from the spies, and is about spies. It's just as accurate as the reports of imminent attack from iraq, with all the stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons they have.
People have a much much longer memory for *bad* decisions, and often specifically vote against such people.
I guess you missed the election results in the USA last november. basically proves your theory wrong. the best politicians are the ones that can dupe enough people into voting for them. Good and Bad have nothing to do with it, it's all about how gullible the population is.
If only it were so simple, but, there's a few minor problems with your plan.
a) Soyuz is not large enough to carry the needed parts, they wont fit thru the hatches. this is actually a big problem for iss operations right now, they have a few spares that are sitting in florida instead of on board the iss, because they wont fit in a progress or soyuz, and shuttles haven't been flying. If iss has 2 more gyro failures before the shuttle gets up there with a spare, it will be lost, because they wont be able to stablize it for a shuttle docking. Sometimes I wonder if that isnt' what Nasa is hoping for.
b) The launch system used for the soyuz is not capable of achieving the orbit of the Hubble. It can make the altitude, and it can translate onto the inclination, just cant do both on the same trip.
c) Without an iss or mir to dock with, a soyuz capsule does not carry enough consumables to support a crew thru a repair mission.
So, sounds good to just grab a soyuz, but without the needed parts, and not enough consumables to stick around, maybe they can wipe the mirror, and take a few pictures, but they wont be able to fix it.
I'm curious about one thing, since you do actually have uses for hubble data yourself. What timeframes do those observations take ? The talk is it will extend the life of the Hubble by 5 years if it's serviced. That works out to 1 bil/5/365 = $574,945 per day of raw data collected, just for the cost of the servicing, never mind the ground based infrastructure required. Is that data worth a half million of your own money for a day of observation time? If it's not worth your own money, why should it be worth that of the taxpayer?
I fully understand the unique nature of the data that can be gathered from an orbiting platform, but, I dont see the cost/benefit. You guys can find plenty of 'new raw data' using ground based equipment, for a tiny fraction of the price. The extra little bit of clarity from the orbital platform just doesn't justify straddling the children of today with another billion dollars of debt that needs to be serviced when they reach the ages where they become taxpayers.
With the debt so out of control, i just dont understand the mentality of americans and thier willingness to sell the future of thier children down the river for a few toys today. Wouldn't your time and effort be MUCH better spent devising ways to actually gather the relavent data from ground based equipment? Astronomy is a field with plenty of questions, and very few answers. Why do you guys focus on the ones that need space based equipment to answer, instead of focussing on the ones that can be answered with ground based equipment ?
I'm one of those mythical 'taxpayers' that ends up footing the bill for reasearch grants. I think you'd find a lot more support from folks like me, if your whole profession took the attitude of trying to find innovative ways to do things cost effectively, instead of always talking about spending billions to gather data which is for the most part ireelavent to joe average. The Seti at home project caught on in a BIG way because they did just that, a low cost method of data aquisition, and a low cost way to process the data. Think about it rationally, joe average on the street would rather spend 50 bucks on Seti@home than on the Hubble, for the simple reason, it's a cost effective way of doing real science. If more of you guys thought about being 'cost effective', I think you'd be surprised, in that the actual amount of funding availble would increase dramatically. As it is now, to most average citizens, grants for raw reasearch in astronomy have all the appearance of money 'pissed away'. 50 bucks from every 'joe average' on the street would fund 10 Hubbles, and if 'joe average' actually thought it was being spent in a cost effective manner, you'd get that money in a heartbeat, even without trolling the government departments for handouts. In the current scenario, you do have to beg at the government departments, because 'joe average' doesn't see it being spent cost effectively, and just sees millions being squandered debacles like launching a telescope with a mirror that doesn't even work. Hubble is a product of pork barrel politics, and that's wasted money. If it was really a scientific endeavor, it never would have launched with a flawed mirror.
If you guys really want serious money from the public to do good science, you need to get out of the business of pork barrel politics, and into the business of 'good science'. That'll never happen with Hubble, and it'll likely never happen with anything launched/administered thru nasa.
Folks are debating the cost of putting a small satellite into earth orbit, and there's no visible source of funding for that. Now you want to do a moon base, with a moon satellite instead.
The general population (thru the administration) has already 'decided' its not worth a billion dollars to fix hubble, dont think your plan has any hope of finding funds that would be at least 2 orders of magnitude larger.
If it's really _that_ important for these grad students to have 'live data', then let them pay for the observing time.
Somehow I think that if all the folks clamoring for the observing time on the Hubble had to actually pay the costs of aquisition of thier data, there would be little/no demand anymore, and the problems would cure themselves. I've never understood why a few researchers that already live off handouts (they call them grants in the academic world) think the taxpayers somehow owe them another billion dollars for toys.
Has FULLY funded NASA's plan to send a manned mission to the Moon and ultimately to Mars.
Horsepucky. He's provided a new direction from the executive offices, giving nasa new direction. This really just involves shifting where the research and planning is headed to. The actual issue of funding an actual mission, he's pushing off on some future administration, nasa will not be ready to start spending that money before he leaves office.
It's a slick political gimmick. Grab the vote of space visionaries by talking about going to the moon and mars, but, dont actually do anything. If anything does come of it all, it'll be a future administration that gets to cancel the plans, for budget reasons. Nasa wont get that far during his tenure.
If competition for the hubble time is so fierce, then it really becomes simple. Auction the observing time, and if the proceeds cover a repair cost, it's a no brainer.
oh wait, you mean everybody that wants to use it is already living on grants and handouts from the taxpayers, and now they want taxpayers to fork out another billion, so they can apply for more grants....
The cameras are replacable, and they are relatively cheap, certainly cheaper than an entire new satellite.
Actually, as silly as it sounds, this is likely not the case in real dollars. A replacement just uses an expendable launcher to arrive on station. A repair mission uses a shuttle trip. The difference in price to 'on station' is on the order of half a billion dollars in launch costs, assuming 100 mill for an expendable, and 600 mil for a shuttle trip (they used to quote them as costing 500 mil, prior to all the new safety rules). Especially if you are making more than one, and they are not designed for upgrading, i think for half a billion dollars, the satellite portion can be designed and built, in particular if the design costs are amortized across 3 or 4 units.
p.
But there's another big item everybody seems to have forgotten. The billion dollar servicing cost has for a large part already been spent. The replacement equipment is already built, tested, and in storage at the KSC. That money has already been spent, even tho it's costed as part of the 'hubble servicing mission'. The reality is, the real cost at this point is just the shuttle trip, and the rest has for the most part already been spent.
you cannot use the words 'gentle' and 're-entry' in the same sentence, except in a diametrically opposed context. There is NOTHING gentle about a re-entry from orbit into the atmosphere. It's simple physics, the vehicle descends, comes in contact with the atmosphere, producing drag. Drag slows it, causing it to descend farther, causing an increase in drag, and this becomes a 'self feeding' situation, the resultant forces from which are huge.
Doesn't matter how you twist it, re-entry is going to be exposed to a minimum force level of 4 to 6 g. doesn't matter if its a Soyuz or a Shuttle. An apollo capsule would be up around 9 (similar to a soyuz operating in failsafe mode on a pure ballistic trajectory). If payload surviveability is your point of measurement, what difference does a soft landing make, all that really matters is that landing impact is less than the maximum aerodynamic forces during the descent. That is basically the parameter on which they designed the parachute sizes for a Soyuz.
Then, when we do the reality check, if you haven't kept up with the news, Columbia burned up on re-entry. One of the recommendations after that, was to reduce orbiter mass for re-entry. There wont be any more big payloads coming back from space aboard the shuttle.
Lets see. Travel is restricted, they aren't allowed to drive today, airports are closed. There is a strictly enforced curfew. The election has been carefully orchestrated to ensure the most popular factions in the country are not represented on the ballot. Half the population is scared to go out, for fear of being killed in extremist actions. The other half is scared to go out, for fear they will be killed by the occupying army.
I'm really curious. Just what is so great about this kind of enforced 'freedom'? Is that what you folks are striving toward in america too, cuz at the current rate of progress, you'll have it in a few years.
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There was no luck involved, just a lot of scientists eager to gather every scrap of raw data availble during the probe descent. In this case, the primary reciever (cassini) didnt' get one of the data sets, secondary recievers on earth were able to salvage a bunch of it. It would be a 'lucky thing' if those radio telescopes just happened to be pointed in the right direction, quite by accident. It was no accident, they were purposely aimed in that direction, specifically so they could record this data. I'd call this more in the category of 'good planning' rather than 'luck'.
I've spent many a nite pushing those things thru the sky, does that make me an astronaut ?
In reality, it's all academic. The america of 40 years ago had the vision, and guts, to actually mount a mission to the moon. The america of today is so busy trying to find a terrorist in every shadow, they dont have the time or money to do anything else. they cant even mount a manned mission to low orbit these days, so it's no wonder they crack out the 35 year old pictures of apollo, to reminisce about the 'good old days' when america was actually a world leader.
Wait a second, isn't shining lasers at stuff evil these days ?
Actually, our forefathers, 2 generations past, could send astronauts to the moon. _We_ cant even send them to low orbit. Some would call it 'progress'.
Invading canada would get rather messy for you guys. We have more guns per capita than the usa, and another big difference, most of us actually know how to use them. A lot of the folks I know have taken to putting 3 inch us flags onto range targets these days, shoulder patches. It's an excellent way to measure a 3 inch grouping at 300 yards, and it's getting us all practised up.
Paying interest on the debt is what happens, when society overspends for a couple of generations. It's only getting worse now too. The generation coming along now is going to have to do without Hubble, but, they will be straddled with paying for it. I hope they wake up to the reality of it all, and get the house in order over the next 20 years, so they dont hand an even worse mess off to thier kids. Maybe then, that generation will once again have enough excess to be able to do things like having cool space telescopes. For now, we'll have to settle for paying interest, and buying lots and lots of ammunition for the military.
Many many years ago, i was working with a company that owned a few foundries. One of the projects was quite exciting, it was going to be the first chip they produced using 0.8 micron stuff, a big deal in those days. During my tenure there, I met a venture vulture, and he was quite proud of the fact he had just purchased an old foundry in an eastern bloc country. it was very old, and the best they could do there was to produce 5 micron stuff. i told him he was crazy, and he laffed, said 'come back in 6 months, I'll show you how to be crazy like a fox.' Sure enough, 6 months later, he was the proud owner of a number of military contracts to provide small volume production of very old chip designs, at absolutely exhorbitant prices.
This is /. and you can explain this with hard numbers forever, but they still will not 'get it'. It's closer, so it's gonna use less gas to drive there, it's the only thing they understand.
An earth moon voyage has a cost, both in financial terms, and in terms of energy expended to arrive at destination. Assuming for the moment that finances are unlimited, the real problem is energy and materials, ie packing enough energy into a structure so that it can launch and sustain itself thru a soft landing. The first expenditure is to impart _just_ enough deltaV onto the vehicle that it departs the orbit of the earth, and enters the sphere of influence of the moon. Basically that's a trajectory that ascends to L1 and has _just_ enough velocity left when it gets there, to 'fall' over to the moon side, at which point it begins falling 'down' to the moon. When it gets close, the vehicle will have quite a velocity, and need to be decelerated again to soft land, so we burn rockets again, to put another DeltaV onto the machine, and bring it's motion to zero (or close to it) at touchdown. If you call phase 1 of the journey X and phase 2 Y, the total DeltaV you need to apply to the vehicle is X+Y. From there it's simple arithmetic to calculate what the fuel requirements etc are for a given payload at landing.
The mars equation is a little different. During the launch phase, we need to apply enough DeltaV onto the vehicle to put it into a holmann transfer trajectory, that intersects with the martian orbit. We use careful timing of the launch to make sure that mars is actually at this point of intersection when the vehicle arrives. Assume the same payload as in the above scenario, we'll call this value Z. Upon arrival at mars, we now need to decelerate. BUT, here's where it gets different. To decelerate at mars, we dont burn rocket fuel, we open up a parachute, and let atmospheric drag apply the forces to get the DeltaV we need. The total fuel burn is still only Z, no extra fuel required for the soft landing on mars.
The amount of DeltaV we can put on a vehicle is a function of the ratio of fuel to total mass, along with the engine efficiency. There are hard limits based in engineering as to what amount of DeltaV a given rocket can produce for a given payload. The surprising part to most folks is, with atmospheric braking on the other end, the DeltaV required for a one way to mars is LESS than that for a one way to the moon, simply because we have to carry braking fuel to the moon, we dont to mars.
The mars trip brings lots of other problems, mostly because it takes to long. You need to carry a tremendous amount of consumables if you want to support humans for that timeframe, whereas the consumables for a 6 day moon round trip can be minimal. It's possible with todays technology to build a rocket that can support the mass required to keep a few humans alive for a week trip to/from the moon, and lift that all into a lunar trajectory. It's not possible to do the same for a martian trajectory, you just need to much in the way of consumables on board. But, on a pound for pound basis, for stuff 'delivered', it's actually cheaper to send it to mars, than it is to send it to the moon, thanks to aerobraking on the other end.
Space flight as we know it today works, only because we've refined rockets to the point they can just _barely_ carry themselves, and a very marginal payload, into a useful orbit. Aerobraking for the return trip makes it workable. It's the equivalent of the horse drawn wagon in the 'old west', not very efficient, but, it worked. When we get an improvement in propulsion technology equivalent to the step from the horse drawn buggy, up to todays modern jet engines, then, and only then will space travel become 'the norm'. Prior to that, it's cheaper to go to mars than the moon for scientific probes that dont need to eat/breathe on the way out there. The landing deceleration at the moon, makes that trajectory more expensive than the transfer trajectory to mars, on a pound per pound basis.
you are working at a place where the firewall wont let you got the cingular site, but will let you post on /. --- I'll take a wild guess that you must be somewhere in the support department at cingular...
Win 95, Win 98, WinNT, Win2K, WinXp. Looks like a hell of a lot of incompatible forking to me....
yes, and as americans, you are busy building up the list of things to atone for again. your children will the ones that ultimately have to pay retributions for what's happening now.
Not to worry, this came from the spies, and is about spies. It's just as accurate as the reports of imminent attack from iraq, with all the stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons they have.
I guess you missed the election results in the USA last november. basically proves your theory wrong. the best politicians are the ones that can dupe enough people into voting for them. Good and Bad have nothing to do with it, it's all about how gullible the population is.
a) Soyuz is not large enough to carry the needed parts, they wont fit thru the hatches. this is actually a big problem for iss operations right now, they have a few spares that are sitting in florida instead of on board the iss, because they wont fit in a progress or soyuz, and shuttles haven't been flying. If iss has 2 more gyro failures before the shuttle gets up there with a spare, it will be lost, because they wont be able to stablize it for a shuttle docking. Sometimes I wonder if that isnt' what Nasa is hoping for.
b) The launch system used for the soyuz is not capable of achieving the orbit of the Hubble. It can make the altitude, and it can translate onto the inclination, just cant do both on the same trip.
c) Without an iss or mir to dock with, a soyuz capsule does not carry enough consumables to support a crew thru a repair mission.
So, sounds good to just grab a soyuz, but without the needed parts, and not enough consumables to stick around, maybe they can wipe the mirror, and take a few pictures, but they wont be able to fix it.
I fully understand the unique nature of the data that can be gathered from an orbiting platform, but, I dont see the cost/benefit. You guys can find plenty of 'new raw data' using ground based equipment, for a tiny fraction of the price. The extra little bit of clarity from the orbital platform just doesn't justify straddling the children of today with another billion dollars of debt that needs to be serviced when they reach the ages where they become taxpayers.
With the debt so out of control, i just dont understand the mentality of americans and thier willingness to sell the future of thier children down the river for a few toys today. Wouldn't your time and effort be MUCH better spent devising ways to actually gather the relavent data from ground based equipment? Astronomy is a field with plenty of questions, and very few answers. Why do you guys focus on the ones that need space based equipment to answer, instead of focussing on the ones that can be answered with ground based equipment ?
I'm one of those mythical 'taxpayers' that ends up footing the bill for reasearch grants. I think you'd find a lot more support from folks like me, if your whole profession took the attitude of trying to find innovative ways to do things cost effectively, instead of always talking about spending billions to gather data which is for the most part ireelavent to joe average. The Seti at home project caught on in a BIG way because they did just that, a low cost method of data aquisition, and a low cost way to process the data. Think about it rationally, joe average on the street would rather spend 50 bucks on Seti@home than on the Hubble, for the simple reason, it's a cost effective way of doing real science. If more of you guys thought about being 'cost effective', I think you'd be surprised, in that the actual amount of funding availble would increase dramatically. As it is now, to most average citizens, grants for raw reasearch in astronomy have all the appearance of money 'pissed away'. 50 bucks from every 'joe average' on the street would fund 10 Hubbles, and if 'joe average' actually thought it was being spent in a cost effective manner, you'd get that money in a heartbeat, even without trolling the government departments for handouts. In the current scenario, you do have to beg at the government departments, because 'joe average' doesn't see it being spent cost effectively, and just sees millions being squandered debacles like launching a telescope with a mirror that doesn't even work. Hubble is a product of pork barrel politics, and that's wasted money. If it was really a scientific endeavor, it never would have launched with a flawed mirror.
If you guys really want serious money from the public to do good science, you need to get out of the business of pork barrel politics, and into the business of 'good science'. That'll never happen with Hubble, and it'll likely never happen with anything launched/administered thru nasa.
The general population (thru the administration) has already 'decided' its not worth a billion dollars to fix hubble, dont think your plan has any hope of finding funds that would be at least 2 orders of magnitude larger.
Somehow I think that if all the folks clamoring for the observing time on the Hubble had to actually pay the costs of aquisition of thier data, there would be little/no demand anymore, and the problems would cure themselves. I've never understood why a few researchers that already live off handouts (they call them grants in the academic world) think the taxpayers somehow owe them another billion dollars for toys.
Has FULLY funded NASA's plan to send a manned mission to the Moon and ultimately to Mars.
Horsepucky. He's provided a new direction from the executive offices, giving nasa new direction. This really just involves shifting where the research and planning is headed to. The actual issue of funding an actual mission, he's pushing off on some future administration, nasa will not be ready to start spending that money before he leaves office.
It's a slick political gimmick. Grab the vote of space visionaries by talking about going to the moon and mars, but, dont actually do anything. If anything does come of it all, it'll be a future administration that gets to cancel the plans, for budget reasons. Nasa wont get that far during his tenure.
It's a solar sail, not a delorean time machine.
oh wait, you mean everybody that wants to use it is already living on grants and handouts from the taxpayers, and now they want taxpayers to fork out another billion, so they can apply for more grants....
Actually, as silly as it sounds, this is likely not the case in real dollars. A replacement just uses an expendable launcher to arrive on station. A repair mission uses a shuttle trip. The difference in price to 'on station' is on the order of half a billion dollars in launch costs, assuming 100 mill for an expendable, and 600 mil for a shuttle trip (they used to quote them as costing 500 mil, prior to all the new safety rules). Especially if you are making more than one, and they are not designed for upgrading, i think for half a billion dollars, the satellite portion can be designed and built, in particular if the design costs are amortized across 3 or 4 units. p. But there's another big item everybody seems to have forgotten. The billion dollar servicing cost has for a large part already been spent. The replacement equipment is already built, tested, and in storage at the KSC. That money has already been spent, even tho it's costed as part of the 'hubble servicing mission'. The reality is, the real cost at this point is just the shuttle trip, and the rest has for the most part already been spent.
Doesn't matter how you twist it, re-entry is going to be exposed to a minimum force level of 4 to 6 g. doesn't matter if its a Soyuz or a Shuttle. An apollo capsule would be up around 9 (similar to a soyuz operating in failsafe mode on a pure ballistic trajectory). If payload surviveability is your point of measurement, what difference does a soft landing make, all that really matters is that landing impact is less than the maximum aerodynamic forces during the descent. That is basically the parameter on which they designed the parachute sizes for a Soyuz.
Then, when we do the reality check, if you haven't kept up with the news, Columbia burned up on re-entry. One of the recommendations after that, was to reduce orbiter mass for re-entry. There wont be any more big payloads coming back from space aboard the shuttle.
I'm really curious. Just what is so great about this kind of enforced 'freedom'? Is that what you folks are striving toward in america too, cuz at the current rate of progress, you'll have it in a few years.