The thread for space cadets!

hobbsyoyo said:
SpaceX is reporting a 50% reduction in the brightness of their communications satellites. They are experimenting with different coatings to reduce the glare from the satellites that can disrupt astronomical observations. The astronomers need a 10-20 fold decrease though, so 50% is good but not good enough.

The astronomers need to put together a database of all the professional and semi-professional observatories on Earth. This can be tied into an algorithm that causes the satellites to tilt their arrays away from the sun while passing over these zones. That would likely get them the rest of the reduction they need and they can likely survive the power hit just fine though there may be some problematic areas where they have to sun-seek regardless. They can work out an algorithm to stagger sun-seeking over those areas problem areas to help minimize the disruptions too.

This won't be easy but it's probably easier than further hardware revisions.
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There is no point in such database. There are observatories all over the place and you might as well designate all land areas as possible spots for observatories.

SpaceX should really put more time into more hardware revisions. If they recklessly pollute the night sky without consent of the countries they fly over, some will soon raise the question, whether they should be allowed to do that. And if a sufficient amount of people start answering 'No', the days of launching satellites without asking 50 countries for permission might be over. This could endanger the entire current space industry.
 
uppi said:
And if a sufficient amount of people start answering 'No', the days of launching satellites without asking 50 countries for permission might be over. This could endanger the entire current space industry.
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This is exceedingly unlikely in my opinion.
 
uppi said:
There is no point in such database. There are observatories all over the place and you might as well designate all land areas as possible spots for observatories.

SpaceX should really put more time into more hardware revisions. If they recklessly pollute the night sky without consent of the countries they fly over, some will soon raise the question, whether they should be allowed to do that. And if a sufficient amount of people start answering 'No', the days of launching satellites without asking 50 countries for permission might be over. This could endanger the entire current space industry.
Click to expand...
I also found a map that shows observatories are not all over the Earth, and that's leaving aside the oceans.

http://calgary.rasc.ca/world_observatory_map/world_observatories_verylarge.htm
 
hobbsyoyo said:
I also found a map that shows observatories are not all over the Earth, and that's leaving aside the oceans.

http://calgary.rasc.ca/world_observatory_map/world_observatories_verylarge.htm
Click to expand...

I don't know what size cutoff they use for this map, but it is only showing about 1 in 10 of the observatories in my area. If you add all of the smaller ones, the map would look quite different.

And the only land area really devoid of observatories is central Africa. Of course you can tell them that they did not manage to put up observatories in time and now they can't, but that would not be very nice.
 
Fair enough, but given that the Earth is 70% ocean, I still think the easiest way to handle this is still to break sunpointing when flying over observatories. Coating satellites to change their reflectivity is not simple due to the thermal problems it creates and it won't do anything to stop the glint off the panels.
 
or you know you could put out all the satellite people out of business .
 
r16 said:
or you know you could put out all the satellite people out of business .
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OneWeb is going to declare bankruptcy so that's already baked in to an extent.

Bigelow Aerospace also furloughed everyone but honestly Bigelow is the kind of abusive capitalist that would fire everyone to save a buck regardless of how the business fundamentals are doing so it's hard to say they are really in distress. (which is a sad statement on capitalism)

I've pointed out how awful Musk is when it comes to how employees are treated but Bigelow is next-level.
 
I saw a headline somewhere recently that people were saying the movie Gravity discourages women from going into STEM fields. :rolleyes:
 
Japan is considering a triple-core variant of their upcoming H3 rocket to support lunar missions.


SpaceX won a contract to resupply the Lunar Gateway with something they are calling 'Dragon XL'.


It does look like NASA is going to de-prioritize having the Lunar Gateway ready by the first landing in 2024.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
Japan is considering a triple-core variant of their upcoming H3 rocket to support lunar missions.


SpaceX won a contract to resupply the Lunar Gateway with something they are calling 'Dragon XL'.


It does look like NASA is going to de-prioritize having the Lunar Gateway ready by the first landing in 2024.
Click to expand...

To be honest I've come to be lukewarm about the Gateway. It feels more and more needless. We can and have directly landed on the Moon. The Europeans and Russians keep mulling about a Lunar surface base. Why have a gateway? Especially when there's no direct replacement for the ISS, far closer to home - and why not go with DARPA's GEO station, which D/v wise already does much of the same work?

I dunno. I feel like the Gateway is on course to being scrapped; while the USA launches a Skylab 2/monolithic/semi-monolithic station up to replace the ISS either in LEO or GEO.
 
Imaus said:
To be honest I've come to be lukewarm about the Gateway. It feels more and more needless. We can and have directly landed on the Moon. The Europeans and Russians keep mulling about a Lunar surface base. Why have a gateway? Especially when there's no direct replacement for the ISS, far closer to home - and why not go with DARPA's GEO station, which D/v wise already does much of the same work?

I dunno. I feel like the Gateway is on course to being scrapped; while the USA launches a Skylab 2/monolithic/semi-monolithic station up to replace the ISS either in LEO or GEO.
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The gateway is good for staging multiple long-term missions to the lunar surface because you can assemble all the elements there ahead of landings. But it's not necessary for what is planned for the very first excursion, which will basically be a super-Apollo landing but probably without a moon buggy.

The biggest reason is that they don't think they can manage to launch a single-stack lander like they did with Apollo since we don't have a Saturn V. So they'd launch the lander in two or three different pieces and assemble them at the gateway. Then ship supplies, then ship the people, then drop to the surface and come back up and go back to the gateway. Then from the gateway, they head home. The gateway also allows you to re-use a lot the individual elements instead of discarding all of them with every mission.

The Russians and EU are keen to get involved with the Gateway because they can re-use a lot of their current hardware and it lets them get boots on the moon without an enormously huge R&D effort on their part.
 
only to keep up the post count , who says they are going again ?
 
evil capitalists self destroying to get me ? Gah , ı have 10 years of predicting doom in the net , stuff happenz anyhow .
 
Boeing is going to re-fly their unmanned test flight of the Starliner crew capsule.
https://spacenews.com/boeing-to-fly-second-starliner-uncrewed-test-flight/

Another year passes and another damning report of ISS research mismanagement is published. I'm sure they'll turn it around this time. :rolleyes:
https://spacenews.com/report-criticizes-management-of-iss-national-laboratory/

Trump is moving forward with plans to give legal cover to US entities which want to mine outer space resources.
https://spacenews.com/white-house-looks-for-international-support-for-space-resource-rights/
 
Samson said:
It is Trump, so there has to be something wrong with it. Would you comment on what that is?
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The executive order doesn't really say much other than to implement policies according to a law passed in 2017 which was intended to enable US companies to claim and extract resources in space. There's nothing in it that I saw that was controversial but to your point, Trump has plenty of opportunity to screw things up going forward and I expect he will.

The executive order does push the government to work on agreements with other countries to cement the US position vis a vis allowing commercial resource extraction, which is a good thing. This is the sort of thing we should all agree on before it's needed.

red_elk said:
This violates international treaties IIRC.
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None that the US, Russia or any other space-faring nation have signed on to. It is opposed to the Moon Treaty which has only been signed by 18 non-space countries (and not the US or Russia, et al). The Outer Space Treaty (which the US, Russia and others have signed on to) is silent on private property ownership and extraction of outer space resources. It states no nation can claim parts of outer space but has nothing on commercial activity.

tl;dr - No, this does not violate treaties that the US or other space fairing nations have signed.
 
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