Cassini the probe

I was up early Friday morning hoping to see some live feeds ... no luck. Went back to bed.

Yes, I know it would at most be rows and columns of numbers which don't bother me.

Bob Wilson

 

fascinating!

 

spending is a subject for another thread. difficult to debate at 20 trillion in debt.

 

My career was a mix of NASA and Dept of Defense projects. So I have insights from 'inside the beast' to share:

• Space shuttle - the wings, what a mistake. Space-X is doing it right and a capsule can be refurbished if designed that way.
• Space stations - hard to justify the 'experiment'. Manned missions are terribly expensive but needed to show competence: Russians, USA, and China.

Every manned and resupply mission led to a network configuration freeze and I was a network engineer. The fatalities taught painful but valuable lessons.

Rocket launchers, there are at least three, significant new USA rocket systems: Space-X Falcon series, NASA SLS, Blue Origin. Yet the Atlas and Delta rockets date from the Soyuz era. We have a bad habit in the USA of 'reinventing the nail' ... yes a much nicer nail after getting through all of the testing (and failures!)

Robot science missions, I love them because we learn things that can not be found by any other means except by 'sampling' observations. Sampling is better than none but world-wide communications, weather and surface observations, the planets, and observatories ... these let us learn what we could not find out by other means. Perfect, no but perfectible.

In recent years, the NASA budget has been running about $20B/year. Adjusted for inflation, pretty much flatlined but unlike the Dept of Defense budgets, open and subject to review and challenge. The Dept of Defense flies the only 'winged' drone, X37 but we can't talk about it. Still, it doesn't carry humans (that we know) and that is a good thing!

Yes, there are spinoffs from the space industry. There are hard problems and once solved, the solutions look for similar problems. I can appreciate the unique ability of humans to do non-trivial things that are hard to automate. But gosh darn, they have a huge overhead dealing with breathing, water, food, and waste disposal in zero-G.

Bob Wilson

 

I was at work (night shift all this week and next) and found the NASA TV feed that came on at 7 am EDT (4 am MST) and watched the whole mission synopsis with interviews. Then, toward the end, watched the data feed flatline at 11:55:46 UTC. Even got a little misty-eyed. The fancy animation someone made of the end of mission didn't help. And, of course, I knew that the actual demise occurred about 87 minutes earlier. One-way lightspeed time. Mission accomplished, and then some.

 

I wish I still had it. You could take a 90 degree flat turn at 45 mph with that car. It was the TR4A with electrically-actuated overdrive and removable hard top. It was red, of course. Babe magnet.

 

I learned all my automotive skills on that car. Loved the way the "bonnet" opened full forward and you could sit on the front tires and tinker. I sold it to some guy that pulled up to the house in a white Bricklin with Rhode Island plates. I hope it is being driven cautiously somewhere on the east coast.

 

Modern kids will never know the joys of properly adjusted SU constant velocity carburetors. They will sit quietly in their push-button driverless cars checking their messages. End of an era is right.

 

We're rapidly running away from the topic. But, since you're the OP... Arduinos and Raspberry Pi are interesting.