Romalar
3390
Radio astronomers raised concerns ahead of time when SpaceX was filing with the FCC to build the constellation. Ideally, this is when it’s supposed to happen. The FCC had SpaceX reach an agreement many months ago about how to mitigate concerns about radio astronomy primarily (as I understand) by changing what frequencies they use, especially over major radio observation sites. We’ll see how well that works out.
Concerns about things like space debris went through a similar process. This is part of why they lowered the orbital altitude of most of the constellation, for example.
Did the rest of the astronomical community engage with this process? I’m not sure. Most of the ones I heard comments from online doubted whether the constellation would happen at all or anytime soon until the first launch happened. I think a lot of people thought the competitor OneWeb would launch more of their constellation first.
Fun fact: most of the Earth’s water is deep beneath the surface in the mantle.
Down there the water is IIRC pretty hot and toxic though.
Poking around the sky looking for more data on planets in other solar systems!
So any early risers out there can catch Boeing’s Starliner launching on its first flight tomorrow to the ISS. Launch is at 6:36AM EST. Same mission type Dragon did earlier this year. No crew, and will stay docked for about a week before coming back.
Boeing should have never put MCAS into the Starliner.
During a post-launch news conference, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that the mission elapsed timing system had an error in it, with the net effect that the spacecraft thought it was performing an orbital insertion burn, when in fact it was not. The on-board computer then expended a significant amount of propellant to maintain a precise attitude, thinking it had reached orbit.
Hmmmmmmmmm… sounds familiar.
Seems nuts to me they’d even consider doing a manned flight without a fully successful unmanned test.
jpinard
3400
Why does that sound familiar? (though this kind of thing happened to me all the time in Kerbal Space Program)
Oh, just another Boeing software/sensor snafu.
You won this thread. Time to start another.
That’s what this is, the unmanned test.
So Starliner is two years late and 50%+ more expensive than SpaceX why do we need it again?
Compared to what? SpaceX hasn’t gotten their manned Dragon module fully operational either, have they?
SpaceX has managed to successful dock the Dragon capsule with ISIS a couple of times, though.
Look on the bright side. At least this Boeing project was tested and failed but might be fixed.
Dragon capsule also had a test failure recently but that’s the whole point of testing unmanned fast and early.
The SLS on the other hand is about 14 billion $ down the drain over more than 7 years with zero launches yet.
