[HN Gopher] Space things happening in 2021
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Space things happening in 2021
Author : feross
Score : 118 points
Date : 2021-01-05 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The orbital debris problem mentioned at the end is really scary
| in the medium-long term. We're used to mistakes being relatively
| self correcting down here. A bridge falls over, and it's
| terrible, but when it hits the ground, it's "stable" again. Then
| you can learn from your mistakes and try again. With orbital
| debris, on the other hand, if there was some day a chain
| reaction, could take ages to sufficiently deorbit, like a
| building that keeps falling for years or decades (or even
| generations! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| We will need a cosmic vacuum cleaner one day.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Won't work because cosmos is mostly vacuum already :) But
| there are some neat tricks with lasers that can help
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom
|
| When really scares me is how easy it would be for a malicious
| actor to kickstart the process. Imagine a cylinder filled
| with ball bearings painted black and an explosive device in
| the middle. Launch that to a mega-constellation altitude and
| at the very least that orbital altitude is no longer
| inhabitable.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > Won't work because cosmos is mostly vacuum already
|
| How else to clean a vacuum but with a vacuum cleaner? :-)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Could perhaps ferromagnetic pieces be collected using a
| giant magnet?
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Yup, magnetic drag is a definitely a thing, see https://a
| gupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202... .
| To have a real effect the magnet would need to be
| ginormous, specifically effectiveness would be
| proportional to a ratio of distance between magnet poles
| and the target object. The distance between poles is
| important because if both poles are equidistant to an
| object the net effect would be 0.
|
| So with that constraint in mind I doubt anything we can
| do at our current Kardashev scale can top Earths magnetic
| field. (Note the above is for a permanent magnet, it is
| possible that electromagnet would fare better. However
| given that magnetic force strength decays proportionally
| to distance squared, a magnet powerful enough to be
| effective would mess up real satellites too.
| [deleted]
| erwinh wrote:
| Looking to create my own dent in the awareness of this with
| https://space-search.io
| ianai wrote:
| I wonder how the Starlink satellites affect this? Are they
| appropriately mitigating their EOL?
| scrumbledober wrote:
| starlink sats are in a particularly low orbit, so they will
| reenter within a couple of years.
| ianai wrote:
| That just makes this distinction more important as the
| potential scale of fall out is greater.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| As a tangent, that's something that I found interesting and
| understated about the movie "Gravity". You get drawn into the
| story of the main character, but in the background you're
| seeing the end of human access to space (at least for the
| foreseeable future).
| robin_reala wrote:
| The JWT launch and deployment is going to be _terrifying_.
| Peeking between my fingers for that one.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I am looking so much forward to this. Hubble has been launched
| in 1990 and look what insane amount of great science and
| pictures it brought. JWT should be a huge step upwards from
| this, especially as it looks into different wavelengths. This
| could deliver an amazing amount of science.
|
| I also hope, that if the Starship becomes operational, it could
| deliver much larger telescopes to space and start a new era of
| astronomy.
| black6 wrote:
| At least the Ariane 5 is a proven launch vehicle. Artemis 1 is
| going to be the _real_ knuckle-biter, if NASA defies all odds
| and meets schedule.
| nickserv wrote:
| Yes! Deployment in particular, as it's never been done before.
| Launch is on an Ariane 5, and those have become very reliable.
| [deleted]
| hashmymustache wrote:
| Picking Halloween is an interesting launch date. That said it's
| hard to believe any timeline or budget at this point.
| nickff wrote:
| I am quite skeptical that it will take place this year. The
| project is already 14 years late and ~20x over the original
| budget. I expect them to announce a _shocking_ delay later this
| year, blaming COVID.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...
|
| https://xkcd.com/2014/
| koheripbal wrote:
| 14 years "late" is not exactly accurate as the initial time
| projections were based upon full funding from the initial
| moments of the project - which was never a realistic goal.
|
| Similarly, the 20x budget overrun number makes two errors -
| 1. that the initial numbers were in today's inflation
| adjusted dollars (which they were not), and that project
| scope remained exactly the same - which it has not. Numerous
| aspects of the telescope have been enhanced/improved to
| accommodate additional science.
| nickff wrote:
| The project was supposed to take 10 years and is already at
| 24! That's simply atrocious, and saying that they didn't
| get everything they wanted to is a poor excuse.
|
| I ran the numbers for inflation adjustment, and 500MM in
| 1997 is equivalent to ~811MM today. That means the project
| is between 12x-20x over budget... not much of an
| improvement in my mind.
| bumby wrote:
| This part makes my nether-regions pucker: 307 single point
| failure components. I do not envy the reliability or systems
| engineers on that project.
|
| http://spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=51617
| koheripbal wrote:
| This data point is not useful without knowing the failure
| rate for each of them.
|
| For example, the Sun is a single point of failure for us each
| day. ...but the odds of the Sun being destroyed per day are
| so infinitesimally small, that it's not meaningful to say I
| have a single point of failure each day for the next 20,000
| days.
| bumby wrote:
| This is fair. Single point of failures denote a severity
| (loss of mission) but risk is defined as severity x
| probability. To extend your example to the extreme,
| everything on the JWST has a failure probability > 0, even
| the systems with redundancies.
|
| What ends up happening is each failure is plotted on a
| severity x probability matrix with a resulting score.
| Depending on the requirements, the exact probability
| category thresholds may be defined quantitatively (e.g.
| 1/10,000 chance) or they may be more qualitative (e.g.,
| 'likely' vs. 'may happen' vs. 'improbable'). The resulting
| risk has to accepted by someone (usually a program or
| project manager). To your point, they have obviously found
| each to be an acceptable (but perhaps uncomfortable) risk.
| Some projects will define the acceptable level of risk at
| the requirements stage to drive design (e.g., no single
| points of failure that can result in loss of crew). With
| all that said, it is still an abnormally high number of
| single point failures in a complex system and reliability
| is generally not linearly related to complexity (just think
| about what happens to cyclomatic complexity as you add more
| variables and the resulting number of test cases you need
| for full coverage)
|
| In my opinion, the real dangerous part of this process is
| that humans are notoriously poor at thinking in
| probabilistic terms. Challenger, Columbia, EVA 23 etc. are
| all attributable, in part, to bad assessments of
| probability. Human biases are all but guaranteed to affect
| these probabilities and thus affect our understanding of
| the associated risk.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's a logical albeit unhelpful argument. My observation
| of how engineering is done and the economic pressures
| involved make me think that such cost cutting is
| inevitable. So the short term "we'll just make this single
| point of failure component more reliable" is not an
| effective strategy as "design in depth" that assumes any
| single component will fail. It can be more expensive but in
| some ways (maintenance, up-front cost) but can also be
| cheaper since the individual components don't need as much
| testing/validation/reliability.
|
| That being said, engineering is all about trade offs so the
| takeaway I have from something like this is blind
| faith/hope that the domain experts make these decisions
| better than an outsider (me) and that when mistakes are
| made they're corrected in the longer-term. I don't know a
| better way than that.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I really feel space tech is gonna be the next big thing going
| forward, but I have zero clue about how to get involved. It seems
| like one of those things where you really need to either be some
| government agency or have a PhD in it or something.
| mulcahey wrote:
| Well it depends what you mean by "involved" but there are
| plenty of "new space" companies hiring software engineers -
| from real time Linux to web dev
| bumby wrote:
| It totally depends on what you want to get into.
|
| Want to get into the applied side and build/test aerospace
| equipment? You don't even necessarily need an advanced degree.
| Don't discount how many contractors do this work for the
| government either. Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, Jacobs, etc.
| all need engineers to do the applied science. Don't overlook
| tangential roles like quality either because the industry is
| littered with them.
|
| If you want to do research, you'll probably need an advanced
| degree and possibly time in academic research.
| simonh wrote:
| Bear in mind space tech isn't all about the rockets, it's also
| about what they take up there. If Starship pans out, the market
| for satellite hardware, orbital habitats, space probes and
| associated software and services is going to explode.
|
| In a lot of threads about this people seem to think Boeing,
| Lockheed, etc are finished because they can't compete with
| SpaceX. On the contrary, the demand for their skills at
| building payload hardware is about to expand massively.
| Somebody's going to need to build all the infrastructure and
| systems for these Moon and Mars cities.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Basically all space companies (oldspace, newspace) hire
| software folks. Some specific jobs might require PhDs, but most
| don't. Flight software sometimes has requirements for certain
| experience (e.g. Embedded). However, flight software is a
| surprisingly small sliver of all the space related software
| that gets written. Even though it's _outer space_ they still
| need GUIs for ground systems, CRUD apps for handling downlinked
| data, WebGL people to build fancy visualizations, etc
| Klathmon wrote:
| Even the space fairing vehicles need UIs, and at least at
| SpaceX they are being written using web technologies [1]!
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/we_are_th
| e_s...
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Indeed. See this great talk on the build system in use at
| SpaceX (and many other places):
|
| https://youtu.be/t_3bckhV_YI
| throwaway846283 wrote:
| It's not for the faint of heart. The consequences of failure
| are equivalent to setting off a bomb. You can't just tweak a
| line of code and recompile. You have to know how to manage the
| risk.
|
| Advanced degrees help. Operational experience helps. I have a
| master's and flight hours, for example.
|
| If you're serious about aerospace, you'll make your own way.
| Piece of advice though: don't tell an interviewer you're
| getting into this field just because it's the next big thing.
| d_silin wrote:
| As mentioned above and below, software development skills are
| always in demand. If you are really that interested, you can
| get involved with our company :)
| avmich wrote:
| It's both pretty easy and insanely hard.
|
| Insanely hard - from an engineer prospective - because there is
| a big gap between software disciplines and, ughm, "the real
| world". When you're pushing bits, today it's easy to forget
| about the times when computers were quite unreliable, from the
| hardware point of view. Bad contacts? Unreliable memory bits?
| Overheating parts? Magnetic tape which loses data and paper
| media which breaks? Today most of this is factored away and
| engineers largely operate with logic. Try to do hardware
| projects - even easy Arduino-based designs will give you a
| glimp of difficulties you're going to get with space
| technology, and if you're trying something modestly
| interesting...
|
| Pretty easy is because "rocket science isn't rocket science".
| It's technology invented more than a century ago - converging-
| diverging nozzle was invented about 150 years ago, about 120
| years ago Tsiolkovsky wrote about liquid hydrogen fuel and
| multistage rockets, more than 90 years ago Goddard flew his
| first rockets, almost 80 years ago von Braun was already
| working on V-2, and this year we're celebrating 60th
| anniversary of Spootnik. A great deal of efforts went into
| perfection of rocketry, and now we know a lot - that's a big
| part of the reason why SpaceX moves so fast - and can do a lot.
|
| Now you can have a nano-launcher startup for less than 100
| million dollars - may be way less - which just couple of
| decades ago is unheard of. More, there are competitions - X
| Prize for flight 100 km up, Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander
| Challenge, Google Lunar Prize, and now, say, NASA's
| https://breaktheicechallenge.com/ - where you can participate
| with much smaller barrier to entry. The webinar from this last
| challenge - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgdEDBTPJE -
| contains references on other competitions NASA is hosting.
|
| So, to conclude, if you're an engineering mind, especially
| capable of working outside of applied math of programming, the
| possibilities are certainly there to try in growing space
| industry.
| mhh__ wrote:
| There's still going to be a lot of room at the bottom, e.g. the
| people building the (say) Control algorithms for the rocket
| need to have testing infrastructure run for them.
|
| A PhD isn't as necessary as you might think, it really depends
| whether you're doing front-line engineering or a more abstract
| work - e.g. I would assume the people specifying SpaceX's self-
| landing system will have PhDs in control theory or similar but
| the people making it happen beneath are mere mortals.
|
| That being said, I am currently applying to do what I believe
| would be referred to as a paid-internship in the US, and it's
| quite difficult breaking into traditional engineering roles
| from my background as it's quite difficult to prove you'll be
| useful as a Theoreticsl Physics student (/ Compiler person)
| because I don't have any formal credit in a lot of the things I
| do have non-trivual knowledge about.
|
| Jim Keller doesn't have a PhD, and he "only" went to Penn State
| and he is now a god amongst men, so there's hope for us all
| (hopefully).
| aml183 wrote:
| Hi Everyone. I am the co-founder of Payload. We are a free weekly
| newsletter covering the business and policy of space. We cover
| topics like this all the time in our writing.
|
| If you are interested, sign up here:
| https://www.payloadresearch.com/
| kylebarron wrote:
| One notable omission is the launch of Landsat 9 [0]. Landsat 9 is
| expected to be launched by NASA in September 2021 and will
| hopefully continue the Landsat program's uninterrupted, nearly
| 50-year remote sensing history [1].
|
| [0]: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-9/landsat-9-overview
| [1]: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-1-3/landsat-1
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