51–60 of 134 posts
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You've misread your source article—what you've quoted is not a description of Webb.
Does that really change anything?
It doesn't change your specific, exact point (about previous cooling systems you were aware of), but it makes the conversation a lot less likely to confuse people IMO.
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Unfounded, IMHO: Musk is obviously a factor in space exploration. Trump founded the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force Also, as soon as China starts to put people on the Moon before Artemis can, I doubt POTUS would let that slide...
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Trump created the Space Force so he will presumably want some amount of funding for rockets and what not. If Space Force fails it would make him look bad after all.
Notwithstanding what you said, it is worth noting that the US Space Force has been a long time in the making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time coming.
Do these missions ever build back-up hardware? What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap, or there is a malfunction during the deploy (see Viasat VS3 antenna deploy failure). It is an added cost, but it cannot be that much compared to the overall R&D/tooling/launch/ect cost.
Into the 1970's, NASA did that. That was why there was Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, etc. Since then, however, NASA has stopped doing that. It became a balancing act- yes, 0 to 1 is much more expensive than 1 to 2, (1 to n is not quite as cheap as it is with software but it's still much cheaper than 0->1), but NASA Science is in the business of answering questions. The question is, will building…
> Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
I wasn't expecting a space shuttle tie in, but of course there would be. They sure had to promise a lot to get that thing off the ground.
To be honest, I was expecting Elon and DOGE to have completely gutted NASA by now, while at the same time allocating more contracts to SpaceX.
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ah, I misread the Orbital Parameters on the wiki. that day-night orbit is also a LEO which makes it even more possible to do a manned mission for upgrades. Oh, wait, we no longer have a shuttle for those types of missions.
Even a Dragon could bring enough hardware and a crew for a small upgrade or repair (to say nothing of the upcoming Starship).
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ah, I misread the Orbital Parameters on the wiki. that day-night orbit is also a LEO which makes it even more possible to do a manned mission for upgrades. Oh, wait, we no longer have a shuttle for those types of missions.
Even a Dragon could bring enough hardware and a crew for a small upgrade or repair (to say nothing of the upcoming Starship).
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Even a Dragon could bring enough hardware and a crew for a small upgrade or repair (to say nothing of the upcoming Starship).
Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva airlock.