I’m playing Kerbal Space Program and installing a mod that allows you to recreate Voyager and it really made me wax nostalgic for it (check out this beautiful video of the mod). So I thought this thread would be fun. List your top 3 favorite spacecraft/satellites - in order of loveitude. :)
Cassini - It’s discoveries about Enceladus, and the moons of Saturn have been stunning.
Voyager 2 - People often don’t realize just how much planetary science changed after Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter and Saturn and it’s moons. It was the start of realizing the moons of this solar system hold more potential than the planets themselves.
Saturn V - big and went to the moon with people.
—OK can’t stop at 3—
Hubble Space Telescope.
Curiosity - because it’s a small car and it’s crazy awesome landing.
Russian Venera lander - pictures of Venus while spacecraft is melting/imploding from high temp and pressure is awesome!
Opportunity, hands down. Built for a 90-sol mission, it just passed ten freakin’ years of function in an irradiated hellbath of drywall dust. That’s like driving your car into the ocean and putting 1,000,000 miles on the odometer.
I remember watching the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I watched it in my father’s office, a converted firehouse in Heidelberg, West Germany, where his MI detachment had their HQ. I saw it on a 12" B&W TV. It was…I don’t know if I can even describe it. I was a kid, but even then I knew I was watching something transcendent.
Every. Single. Thing. We’ve done since then in the space realm has been anticlimax.
The launching of a Saturn V was hell unleashed, and it had drama, because gravity and the Saturn V’s fury wrestled and fought for supremacy. It gathered speed slowly, ponderously, and you had to jump off the couch and scream at it, “Go, go, go!” just to urge it on its way, to give it strength. Then the fireball ascended into the sky, sound rippling, and then just when you thought the show was over, second stage! Glorious.
Yeeeeeha! Fuck you, gravity! Indeed!
My second favorite was the IRAS launch, because it was a Vandenberg AFB launch here on the west coast, and instead of going polar and away from me (most launches from there do), it went west out over the Pacific and it was the first launch I could really see go all the way up, with the flame expanding to the sides as the air pressure decreased.
But other than that, all the JPL satellites - I loved sitting in a guy’s office in a sub-basement of the 300 (?) building at the lab and watching the direct feed come in off of Topex/Poseidon. Don’t know if the lab ever took me up on my suggestion that the Jason satellite (Topex/Poseidon’s replacement) should have eyes painted on it to see the way. If they did, then that’s my favorite.
