Spot the Space Station

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balrog said:
Will there come a day when nothing can launch due to all the crap up there?
Click to expand...
That's an interesting question, and I don't have the answer, but I'll play anyway.

For anything in low-earth orbit, gravity will eventually bring it down. Debris of any kind will certainly end up part of the earth or the moon in relatively short time. Relatively might mean thousands of years, not sure. But the good news is that the debris will fall.
 
Here's the Space Stations height. The atmospheric drag up there is enough that it needs frequent boosts from parked spacecraft.

These low altitude constellations are around the same height (about 500km for starlink) so have a limited lifespan.

Height of the ISS


OrbitHeightPlot.jpg
 
Pkrd said:
Here's the Space Stations height. The atmospheric drag up there is enough that it needs frequent boosts from parked spacecraft.

These low altitude constellations are around the same height (about 500km for starlink) so have a limited lifespan.

Height of the ISS


View attachment 841072
Click to expand...

Remember skylab? That was our first space station. After turning off control systems that kept it in orbit, I think it took about 5 years for it's orbit to decay and for it to come crashing back to earth. Landed in your neighborhood, western Australia. I remember worrying about it landing on my head haha.

There are satellites still in orbit since the 60's. They have active solar-powered systems to keep them there. Communications to them failed long ago, so they just keep orbiting forever?
 
day_trippr said:
How does that work?

Whenever something has been about to de-orbit it always seems like it ran out of some kind of propellant...

Cheers!
Click to expand...
Good question. Look up Vanguard 1 and let me know. It's been up there since 1958!

Skylab fell out of space much earlier than expected due to excessive and unexpected solar activity. Thus, you can conclude that "solar winds" can affect satellites. So, maybe the same way a sailboat can make it's way across the sea and back, a satellite can adjust its course. That might be a stretch LOL, no idea.
 
Ok, Vanguard 1 and its 3rd stage were put into a highly elliptical orbit (406 mi × 2,466 mi) and never had maneuvering abilities.

"After its scientific mission ended in 1964, Vanguard 1 became a derelict object – as did the upper stage of the launch rocket, after it finished the delta-v maneuver to place Vanguard 1 in orbit in 1958. Both objects remain in orbit. Vanguard 1 was projected to remain aloft for up to 2,000 years, but solar radiation pressure and atmospheric drag perturbations during periods of high solar activity affected its perigee, reducing its lifetime and expected burn up in the atmosphere to about 240 years, sometime in the late 22nd century, although a more realistic probability is that as space travel becomes routine, and especially when its re-entry date draws near, the satellite will be retrieved as a valued artifact of early space exploration."
 
Amazing that this effort was almost entirely privately developed and executed - Intuitive with SpaceX and who knows how many supplier companies. Not to mention Intuitive apparently developing their own world-wide data relay system to support their efforts as well as for anyone who will pay the rent :)
 
Speculation. And, having been in the tech business for 45 years, I could raise some hairs over the ridiculous amounts of money I saw burned in the private sector...
 
Pretty cool. I was busy today, but i'm gonna do a full ingestion of the event tomorrow.

However, I'll say that there is a HUGE difference between this and what we accomplished in '69. Putting a thing on the moon that does not have to return greatly reduces the effort. Putting a human on the moon and getting him back to the earth is SO MUCH more.

I do love that private industry is handling this now.
 
The prime example of burning massive amounts of money with which I'm intimately familiar:

Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) spent over a billion dollars in the mid-80s (when that was real money!) developing a water cooled "IBM-killer" computer called Aquarius, aka VAX 9000. They sold under 48 of them - lifetime - at roughly a million apiece, before killing the entire program. The biggest program failure of the company, ever.

As was the practice at DEC, there were usually three different engineering teams - one in Marlboro MA that was developing Aquarius, another in Littleton MA (can't remember what their doomed program was named) [edit: it was Argonaut], and my group in Maynard MA - competing to develop platforms for each market segment, in this case the High End Computing segment, which wanted to go head-to-head with IBM's mainframes.

I was the Project Engineer in Maynard developing a RISC architecture called Prism, with the first implementation called Crystal, and that included Microsoft's Dave Cutler in the architectural specs. It eventually got starved for funding along with the Littleton group's CISC platform, when Aquarius was picked...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000

Cheers!
 
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At 1:20 in this video by the Intuitive honcho he uses a model of the lander and the height v base proportions look daunting as far as erecting it upright through any possible means. But all of the onboard sensors appear to be static or nearly so, so aside from whatever mechanics point its antennae there's nothing that's going to budge the lander.

In any case, it was designed to last for around a week before going silent...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-landing-spacecraft-lunar-surface-today/
 
Isn't this the second thing that's landed most-un-cat-like on its side/face/front/top/anything-but-feet?

I mean, not that I might be able to do any better with my ancient treasure trove of Estes model rocket engines....
 
It's the autonomous nav systems that literally keep getting these machines tripped over by colliding with random boulders - while still moving laterally, I presume. Humans didn't make that mistake on the moon. Go humans! Go! :rock:

Cheers! ;)
 
day_trippr said:
It's the autonomous nav systems that literally keep getting these machines tripped over by colliding with random boulders - while still moving laterally, I presume. Humans didn't make that mistake on the moon. Go humans! Go! :rock:

Cheers! ;)
Click to expand...
And if AI does the landing, it will land on several feet/hands with too many fingers/toes/frogs
 

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