What do you hate that space agencies are not doing, which is possible?

[PB666]

2 minutes ago, Darguel said:

What about public funding? For example, some astronomers are kickstarting this project to study the KIC 8462852 star.

They have a goal of 100,000$, it's not a lot of money but space agencies are not backing it up. Do you guys think they will reach their goal?

I wouldn't put a nickle into it, I don't like funding lead science.

[radonek]

4 hours ago, fredinno said:

What mission was that?

It is mentioned in Chertok's memoirs several times. Not much details are given, but it involved Voskhod rotating on cable. Maybe using last stage as counterweight? Anyway, it was canceled during manufacturing phase and existing hulls were reused in Zenits.
 

[Kryten]

Voskhod cancellation was almost certainly a good thing, no matter what the remaining missions were intended to do. The thing almost completely lacked abort options, it was only a matter of time before it killed someone.

[Matuchkin]

NASA cancelling dyna soar.

[autumnalequinox]

Hopefully soon some of those high delta-v iCubeSats will allow small groups to launch interplanetary exploration missions on their own in the future.  I would love to be able to start a "club" with a $1000 buy-in where a few dozen people can run their own little mission control with their own tiny probe.  Distributed exploration, hopefully un-tethered from political nonsense.

 

[PB666]

5 minutes ago, autumnalequinox said:

Hopefully soon some of those high delta-v iCubeSats will allow small groups to launch interplanetary exploration missions on their own in the future.  I would love to be able to start a "club" with a $1000 buy-in where a few dozen people can run their own little mission control with their own tiny probe.  Distributed exploration, hopefully un-tethered from political nonsense.

 

How will they communicate with earth?

[autumnalequinox]

On 6/1/2016 at 10:47 PM, PB666 said:

How will they communicate with earth?

I'm not exactly sure myself.  I can't find the old article I read months ago about iCubeSats.  I think so far they are just working on the thruster system (which had some impressive delta-v using carbon dioxide I think).  I believe they are intended to be used in small "fleets" so I suppose one could be a dedicated relay to the Deep Space Network.  I know the upcoming InSight Mars mission is using cubesats as relays but obviously they aren't communicating directly to Earth.

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, Matuchkin said:

NASA cancelling dyna soar.

That was the air force. 

[Matuchkin]

2 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

That was the air force. 

Oh okay. I forgot those guys had an influence.

[fredinno]

6 hours ago, tater said:

NASA can't do what it wants. It does what Congress wants.

It's come up before, but I have no idea why Europe doesn't spend more when they mostly don't even pay their fair share of NATO. The funny thing is that there is a lot of overlap with contractors, so space spending tends to keep defense industries more robust (and space programs are more technical jobs programs than anything else).

I know that, but NASA does propose to congress, and influence its future, but NASA hasn't even done that. I think  it's safe to say they aren't too interested...

 

Yeah, I have no idea with the EU too. Also, China's budget should be roughly equal to NASA (along with ESA), since they all have roughly the same size of GDP.

6 hours ago, Darguel said:

What about public funding? For example, some astronomers are kickstarting this project to study the KIC 8462852 star.

They have a goal of 100,000$, it's not a lot of money but space agencies are not backing it up. Do you guys think they will reach their goal?

 

They seem to be doing well, and probably don't need the extra money to be funded. Also, it's probably already being studied by obsevatories.

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, Matuchkin said:

Oh okay. I forgot those guys had an influence.

Dyna Soar was entirely a USAF program.

[fredinno]

5 hours ago, Kryten said:

Voskhod cancellation was almost certainly a good thing, no matter what the remaining missions were intended to do. The thing almost completely lacked abort options, it was only a matter of time before it killed someone.

You could argue that is the case with every spacecraft. But it was a similar thing with Gemini and Blue Gemini, ejection seats generally suck im terms of actually saving people.

But vostokod was a dead end.

2 hours ago, Matuchkin said:

NASA cancelling dyna soar.

Dyna-Soar was pointless.

1 hour ago, autumnalequinox said:

Hopefully soon some of those high delta-v iCubeSats will allow small groups to launch interplanetary exploration missions on their own in the future.  I would love to be able to start a "club" with a $1000 buy-in where a few dozen people can run their own little mission control with their own tiny probe.  Distributed exploration, hopefully un-tethered from political nonsense.

 

Or you know, just piggybacks on actual planetary probes.

And that cubesat constellation would provide little data, and thus less science.

1 hour ago, autumnalequinox said:

I'm not exactly sure myself.  I can't find the old article I read months ago about iCubeSats.  I think so far they are just working on the thruster system (which had some impressive delta-v using carbon dioxide I think).  I believe they are intended to be used in small "fleets" so I suppose one could be a dedicated relay to the Deep Space Network.  I know the upcoming InSight Mars mission is using cubesats as relays but obviously they aren't communicating directly to Earth.

They can use a low gain antenna due to the very low amount of produced data. Plus, there should already be a relay orbiter available, in the form of a dedicated planetary probe at the planet.

[Matuchkin]

9 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Dyna Soar was entirely a USAF program.

Wait, how many of those spaceplane projects were by the USAF?

[Kryten]

12 minutes ago, Matuchkin said:

Wait, how many of those spaceplane projects were by the USAF?

Most of them, at least outside of SSTO concepts. Dynasoar, PRIME, ASSET, X-15B, et.c. X-37 is sort of the exception, having originally been a NASA programme, but it's now USAF as well.

9 hours ago, fredinno said:

You could argue that is the case with every spacecraft. But it was a similar thing with Gemini and Blue Gemini, ejection seats generally suck im terms of actually saving people.

Voskhod didn't even have ejection seats, that's how it was able to fit so much more into the basic Vostok hull.

[Nibb31]

9 minutes ago, Matuchkin said:

Wait, how many of those spaceplane projects were by the USAF?

Which ones?

In the US, there has always been two government space programs, NASA and DoD (USAF, NRO, DARPA, and little bit of US Navy). Most of the time, those programs were independent, with projects sometimes being transferred from one to the other (like DC-X or X37) or handled jointly (like  X-15, X-24, X-30, etc...)

[Matuchkin]

1 hour ago, Kryten said:

Voskhod didn't even have ejection seats, that's how it was able to fit so much more into the basic Vostok hull.

Voskhod just had a stronger parachute that Vostok, and a tendency to land in the wilderness, surrounded by wolves.

[Kryten]

1 hour ago, Matuchkin said:

Voskhod just had a stronger parachute that Vostok, and a tendency to land in the wilderness, surrounded by wolves.

It also had retrorockets in the parachute lines to cushion the landing; another thing that would inevitably have led to disaster with enough flights.

[fredinno]

5 hours ago, Kryten said:

Most of them, at least outside of SSTO concepts. Dynasoar, PRIME, ASSET, X-15B, et.c. X-37 is sort of the exception, having originally been a NASA programme, but it's now USAF as well.

Voskhod didn't even have ejection seats, that's how it was able to fit so much more into the basic Vostok hull.

I wonder why the DOD likes spaceplanes so much?

4 hours ago, Matuchkin said:

Voskhod just had a stronger parachute that Vostok, and a tendency to land in the wilderness, surrounded by wolves.

Didn't Soyuz and Vostok also face the same problem of landing in the middle of nowhere?

2 hours ago, Kryten said:

It also had retrorockets in the parachute lines to cushion the landing; another thing that would inevitably have led to disaster with enough flights.

why did it have it on the parachutes of all places?

[Kryten]

1 minute ago, fredinno said:

I wonder why the DOD likes spaceplanes so much?

X-15B was to work with what they already had to get someone in space as soon as possible. PRIME and ASSET were experiments to produce lifting body spysat re-entry capsules for increased cross-range, X-20 also focused on cross-range along using aerodynamic forces for cheaper plane changes, X-37B is anybody's guess.

 

3 minutes ago, fredinno said:

why did it have it on the parachutes of all places?

Couldn't put them on the capsule body because of re-entry, couldn't put inside capsule body with pop-off panels because too large a modification, could't put anywhere other than capsule or parachute line because there just wasn't anywhere else.

[Matuchkin]

2 hours ago, fredinno said:

Didn't Soyuz and Vostok also face the same problem of landing in the middle of nowhere?

Vostok just had landings that were approximate. I was talking about Voskhod, which missed its designated landing area by hundreds of kilometers on its second flight.

Soyuz, on the other hand, had parachutes that didn't work at all, cursing astronauts, and retrorockets that fired after landing, disintegrating the whole capsule.

[Boovie]

On 5/28/2016 at 10:08 AM, KerikBalm said:

 

* a Europa/Enceledus lander rather than this BS of manned lunar flights again

 

Actually the funding approved for the Europa Clipper mission includes a requirement that NASA add a lander to the mission.

I do absolutely want a lander sent to Europa, but as an attachment to the Clipper mission is not the way to do it. We need Clipper to go first so that we can figure out where to safely put a lander rather than hoping that we can just get one down.

[fredinno]

6 hours ago, Matuchkin said:

Vostok just had landings that were approximate. I was talking about Voskhod, which missed its designated landing area by hundreds of kilometers on its second flight.

Soyuz, on the other hand, had parachutes that didn't work at all, cursing astronauts, and retrorockets that fired after landing, disintegrating the whole capsule.

But Soyuz also had missions that missed their landing zones by hundreds of km, which is also a good reason why cosmonauts carried guns in the Soyuz.

 

3 hours ago, Boovie said:

Actually the funding approved for the Europa Clipper mission includes a requirement that NASA add a lander to the mission.

I do absolutely want a lander sent to Europa, but as an attachment to the Clipper mission is not the way to do it. We need Clipper to go first so that we can figure out where to safely put a lander rather than hoping that we can just get one down.

NASA is seriously considering adding the lander seperate to the Clipper mission for that reason. More expensive, but hopefully NASA might be able to get JAXA, ISRO, or Rocosmos involved to build the Orbiter (funding a SLS mission for a small lander would be pointless) (ESA probably still has a bitter taste in their mouths from JIMO and ExoMars).

 

However, another option (probably cheaper) is to send ESA's JUICE spacecraft (which is ahead of Clipper in development) first on a SLS in exchange for lander development. JUICE is intended to do 2 Europa flybys. Then, Clipper is sent out on SLS, finishes JIMO's Europa mapping, then sends out the lander probe.

Edited June 2, 2016 by fredinno

[Boovie]

2 minutes ago, fredinno said:

NASA is seriously considering adding the lander seperate to the Clipper mission for that reason. More expensive, but hopefully NASA might be able to get JAXA, ISRO, or Rocosmos involved to build the Orbiter (funding a SLS mission for a small lander would be pointless) (ESA probably still has a bitter taste in their mouths from JIMO and ExoMars).

I would argue that sending a separate probe to Europa would absolutely not be pointless. A lander could glean far more information from the surface and sub-surface ocean than the Clipper will gain from orbit. Congress ordered the two to be done together to save money, but what price can you put on data gleaned from other worlds and moons?

[Matuchkin]

22 minutes ago, fredinno said:

But Soyuz also had missions that missed their landing zones by hundreds of km, which is also a good reason why cosmonauts carried guns in the Soyuz.

1. Nearly all of the Russian spacecraft at the time had huge tendencies to miss their landing spots.

2. People didn't just carry guns in the Soyuz, like "this thing is unreliable, so I'm going to bring this gun with me for good measure". A TP-82 triple barrel pistol was put on nearly every ship. The upper two barrels fired 40 gauge ammunition, and were smoothbore, while the lower rifled barrel fired 5.45x 39 ammo. This armament came after Alexey Leonov landed in northern Siberia, and had a profound fear of the bears in the area. He made sure that the Soviet government provided astronauts with the TP-82- a half-shotgun-half-pistol, with not only shotgun ammo, but also pistol munitions of the same caliber as the AK-47. Essentially, it was an extremely powerful pistol, with surprisingly good quality.

[wumpus]

 

On 5/31/2016 at 6:51 PM, Kryten said:

Voskhod cancellation was almost certainly a good thing, no matter what the remaining missions were intended to do. The thing almost completely lacked abort options, it was only a matter of time before it killed someone.

 

On 6/1/2016 at 0:40 AM, fredinno said:

You could argue that is the case with every spacecraft. But it was a similar thing with Gemini and Blue Gemini, ejection seats generally suck im terms of actually saving people.

While the shuttle had plenty of abort options, my understanding was that they didn't have very good coverage and the ones they had the simulators nearly always ended with total crew death.

20 hours ago, fredinno said:

I wonder why the DOD likes spaceplanes so much?

Probably because it is vastly easier to become an Air Force general by piloting a plane than by being a missile jockey.  I wonder if the Navy was still had its turf, would we have Orion [the big boy]?  Possibly with an admiral or two with a distinct bias toward capital ships?

12 hours ago, fredinno said:

But Soyuz also had missions that missed their landing zones by hundreds of km, which is also a good reason why cosmonauts carried guns in the Soyuz.

While the shuttle obviously had to hit the runway, and the LEMs flew to their intended landing areas, is it possible to know how accurate US capsules were?  I mean, as long as you come within helicopter range of a ship capable of carrying a helicopter (wiki claims HUS-1 for mercury), you can get the collar on and recover.