Anyone for an astronomy thread?

[San Bernardhinault]

Two things: NASA has failed many times. Not just with people, either. To suggest they’re not allowed to misunderstands how it works. Everybody knows it’s high risk.

Also, failures from SpaceX when they lose a half billion dollar satellite that took 5 years to build is just as debilitating as failures for NASA. They arent “allowed” to fail. It’s immensely costly in both actual money and in reputation.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Snake does have a point though about NASA having a culture of avoiding failure that is very different to Space-X, in large part because NASA's funding is so uncertain, and constantly under attack. It's also relatively small for what they have to do, so what happens is that they wind up putting their eggs into a small number of baskets, and they only get one shot at it. (compare this to spaceX being able to attempt a landing every couple of weeks essentially for free, until they got it right) Every project has a head, and under them there are various teams, with a lot of the cost simply involving having people monitoring and operating the project. (There are quite a few people still operating the mars Rovers) If the project goes well, everyone has a job, and science is progressed. If a Mars Rover ploughs into the surface of mars, rather than gently landing on the surface, you've written off the billion dollar rover, and you've wasted the $1 billion dollars you spent getting it to the moon, and you've lost 10 years of pottering around on mars, in terms of Science output, and justifying its existence.

So NASA desperately needs the incredibly difficult stuff it is doing to work out, then they make as much hay as possible out of the success of these missions, firstly to promote the science that they are doing, and to increase the awareness of science, and other positive externalities, but also to store up as much credit as possible for a rainy day, when they are getting hammered, because something goes wrong on the other side of the solar system.

The Problem for NASA is basically this. The Head of the Senate Appropriations Committee is Richard Shelby from Alabama, and he is a stone cold cunt. He is the guy who has the most control over the US budget outside of the white house, and his ideas about space primarily involve the US govt spending as much money as possible in the Boeing and Lockheed Martin factories in Huntsville in Alabama. pretty much at the expense of everything else. He effectively thinks that every penny that NASA spends that isn't spent in Huntsville is wasted money. For instance the SLS is so fucking expensive, that they don't have anything to put on top of it. They have literally given all the money to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and rocketdyne to build the thing. Which is essentially the point of it. And it's here where SpaceX's failures seem to matter an awful lot.

One of the big moments in the history of spaceX is the bit where they sue the Department of Defence, to allow them to bid for military launches. Back about five years ago, The DOD announced an eight year block buy of a load of Atlas V's and Delta IV's, at enormous expense, keeping the factories open and busy for many years. It was a great deal for ULA (boeing and lockheed Martin) but SpaceX weren't allowed bid, even though their bids would have been between half and a third as expensive. The Case went to court, the block bid remained in place, but Space-X were now allowed to compete for new contracts. They've won nearly all the contracts that the Falcon 9 is able to carry out, and the Falcon Heavy is there primarily to allow them bid on the rest.

But this is where Senator Shelby comes back into it. If he sees NASA money not spent in Huntsville as a pointless waste and an insult to freedom, he sees SpaceX as a massive threat to the sweet deal he has going. And he has a point. ULA have already sacked a third of their workforce in huntsville and once they've finished the last Delta IV's for the DOD, they're shutting down that factory. They've really dragged their heels on a replacement, to build there on an ongoing basis to keep at least some people employed there. but that should be ready by 2020. The thing is that it is doomed from the start. It will be competing for commercial launches with two resusable rockets, that are far cheaper than it is. It's difficult to see what the point of this rocket is going to be, or what it is going to be used for. That factory has a very limited future and there is nothing that can be done about it.

But one of the major recurring themes, coming from Govt hearings on aspects of space is that Shelby will make many points about ULA's record of 100% reliability, (which is an interesting exercise in setting the boundaries of your comparison. because all failures of these rockets happened before the foundation of ULA and the rockets had flown many times, and not entirely successfully either) while pointing out everything that has gone wrong with spaceX over the history of their company. He keeps hammering spaceX over failure, and lack of concern for Safety and reliability compared to ULA, and that perhaps Govt money would be more wisely spent on fewer, more expensive launches on the more reliable rockets that happen to be made in his state.

You could see it as recently as a month ago, when that Zuma satellite launch didn't work out. SpaceX launched the satellite into orbit, and then nothing happened. It seems that the problem ultimately was at Northrup Grumman's end, in that their machine to detach the satellite from the second stage didn't work. SpaceX quickly came out and said that everything went fine on there end, and the Airforce ultimately backed them up in as far as they talk about top secret missions. but in the gap in between Shelby was hammering spaceX for losing a $1 billion dollar satellite and wasting Taxpayers money. And even though the DOD said that it wasn't spaceX, he said it again in a committee hearing about commercial crew. It didn't matter at all to him that it was a matter of public record that what he was saying wasn't true. The problem is that he is in charge of the money.

The thing is that that wasn't even SpaceX's failure, and it was pinned on them. So it's a complicated issue, to do with the incredibly fucked up and primitive nature of American politics, and their childish system of clientelism. This is the problem with the Nation state driven model of space development that RC is keening over. Ultimately the key shapers of US space policy and the industry were Richard Shelby (Who was 8 when the v2 was first tested) and until recently Jeff Sessions. The thing that SpaceX have going for them is that they have completely swallowed the global commercial launch market, and have an order book of $12 billion. At this point in time there is very little that Richard Shelby can do to them financially, however he can really fuck them up over safety considerations etc.

[Various Artist]

Superb post TAB. You've elucidated on this thread before about how absurd and self-interest-driven the 'system' is there, but the above really drives home how fucked up it is.

[Lang Spoon]

There's literally nothing less randian than a mars colony. the only way it will be able to survive is the sort of ultra high productivity communism that they have in star trek. People operating in the pursuit of individual freedom on mars will die very quickly.

https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/elon-...r-3-years.html

I knew it, he’s a fanny. It’s fucking Atlas Shrugged with fancier trains. I really wouldn’t want to be a peon in his Mars utopia. And his ex wife’s interview in Vanity Fair?/Marie Claire?, he’s a fucktoad. Who just maybe could advance, even save humanity, but judging by his anti union bullshit at Tesla, probably won’t.



“If there is a party or event with Amber, I’d be interested in meeting her just out of curiosity,” Musk wrote. “Allegedly, she is a fan of George Orwell and Ayn Rand … most unusual.”

[Lang Spoon]

It’ll be the off world colonies in Blade Runner, your wealth or Alphaness will determine getting off the rock or not.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Someone in another place posted up a picture of the far side of the moon traversing the Earth. Awesome photo. But one question. The far side appears to have far less craters than the near side. How does that happen? Surely most objects coming at us would naturally hit the far side, it acting as a shield? Or is there some effect where a lot of near-earth objects are slung round by our gravity and hit the moon on the rebound?2

[hobbes]

There are as many craters, just no Mare. The nearside crust is thinner than the far side and cooled more slowly so impacts could puncture the surface creating lava flows. The Earth and Moon were really close together at the start so once the Moon tidally locked, the heat from the molten Earth kept it liquid or very thin on the near side.

[hobbes]

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/elon-...r-3-years.html

I knew it, he’s a fanny. It’s fucking Atlas Shrugged with fancier trains. I really wouldn’t want to be a peon in his Mars utopia. And his ex wife’s interview in Vanity Fair?/Marie Claire?, he’s a fucktoad. Who just maybe could advance, even save humanity, but judging by his anti union bullshit at Tesla, probably won’t.



“If there is a party or event with Amber, I’d be interested in meeting her just out of curiosity,” Musk wrote. “Allegedly, she is a fan of George Orwell and Ayn Rand … most unusual.”

I too would be curious to meet someone who was both a fan of George Orwell and Ayn Rand. You've got to be a really good looking person to be allowed get away with something that crazy.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

There's nothing wrong with wanting nice things. It's just that as you well know, when you take time to look at how the sausage is made.... then you are dealing with the Larry Goodman's of this world.

LS, I'm sure that Musk is a weirdo. I was listening to a rather fascinating interview with Tom Mueller, who is the guy who was SpaceX employee no.1 and is the guy who designs the Magic Engines. He described Musk as very strange to work for, and that He's not sure that he would want him as a father. Which is a pretty risky thing to say given how many kids he has. I'll put it to you this way, the man is pretty much singlehandedly driving a revolution in spaceflight, while simultaneously forcing every car manufacturer to abandon the Internal combustion engine. I'm prepared to allow him a certain latitude.

The one thing that he isn't is a libertarian. He ultimately frames everything he is doing in terms of trying to combat threats to humanity. Be it fighting global warming by making electric cars and solar power cheaper than the alternatives, or building a self sustaining colony on mars, so humanity doesn't get snuffed out by a comet, or a plague, or a particularly vigorous solar event. Or that the unregulated development of AI could kill us all. These are not libertarian pre-occupations. The one thing that libertarians simply cannot understand is the economic concept of Externalities. This is quite a lot of what he talks about. The thing is, that A martian colony is by necessity going to be about as libertarian as an ant farm.

[wiblflibl]

Latest from Jupiter

Jupiter's north pole -

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

is that the nine circles of hell?

[Guy Profumo]

No pictures of Sunday's aurora for this, or the photography thread, people?

[Gerontophile]

2:30m before take off of the latest Falcon, off to the ISS with 3 tons of stuff. (Science channel, if you have it.)

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

No landing for the cameras. They're throwing these reused ones away and trying to work out ways of landing that require less fuel. They don't seem to have the hang of it yet, given how the middle bit of the falcon heavy nearly wiped out the landing tug.

Fecking clouds prevented me from seeing the chinese space station ploughing back into the atmosphere.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I appreciate it's not exactly astronomy related, but does Scott manley have the best speaking voice in the world?

[Gawpus]

View from a comet:

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/988711358358261762

[Sits]

WOW. That's doing my head in. How far away is that, and what are we seeing exactly? Incredible.

[Various Artist]

Fantastic. Thanks for sharing that Gawpus.

[Gawpus]

WOW. That's doing my head in. How far away is that, and what are we seeing exactly? Incredible.

It's pictures taken from the Rosetta after it had landed on the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet at the end of its mission (further good pictures on the wiki links). I'm not sure exactly how far it is at the time the above was taken, comets' orbits being what they are, but as a very rough guide:

On 10 February 2015, it went through solar conjunction when it was 5 degrees from the Sun and was 3.3 AU (490 million km) from Earth.

[Sits]

Yeah, I thought about 3.3-3.4m AU, give or take. Didn't want to hijack the post though, y'know.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

What most americans want the US to spend its Space money on. It's long on Climate change, and asteroid cataloguing, and short on moon bases. Indeed the US govt seems intent on ending the first, and spends almost no money on the second.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The EU seems to be making a move on ESA in some form

tbh this mightn't be the worst idea in the world though it is going to be interesting to see how much money each country is prepared to contribute, if they're not getting most of that money spent in their country, supporting firms in their economy.

also, these time elapse photos of Rocket launches are really beautiful.

Click for photo

[Gerontophile]

Was there life on Mars? It's a possibility.

[elguapo4]

The chances of anything coming from Mars is a million to.....ok 50,000 to 1