anyway,beside the headshake at the twat who forgot that the sun is hot (sunlight is actually something nerds read about on their LCD screen,i s’pose) i figured that someone,somewhere ,should start a space recovery business,launching a cheap space-craft (from somewhere in turgidistan or sumfink’,they seem to have reliability on a small budget down pat 'round there)
and literally “harvesting” fuck-ups from the “we’re ok to throw 780 billions $ for a pic of the moon” nations.
then sell them back to their careless/clueless former owners…
i’m about to enter the bill gates status…i can feel it
Except that the device itself is worth sweet f’all of the total project cost, because hiring hundreds of engineers and managers and purchasing rockets and the fuel required to get into space and using other devices to carefully co-ordinate the landing and setting up telemetry systems for communication.
Once the device is ACTUALLY manufactured, tested and commissioned, you could probably make another one for less than $15.4 million which is 10% of the project cost, yet your proposal, to create a ‘robot’ that retrieves that $15.4 million dollar probe would require the rehiring of 100’s of engineers and project managers, telemetry systems and rockets. (also remembering that designing a device that can come back is probably gonna triple or quintupple the cost of the project at the very least, which is why such probes are designed to just ‘die’ and not require them to come back)
thanks for the eye opener,so the whole project is in the range of several hundreds time the 154 mil$ mentioned as cost of the spaceship alone
now the twat who made the probe expose it’s batteries to sun rays must be sleeping easier
[quote=“Tyc00n”] because hiring hundreds of engineers and managers and purchasing rockets and the fuel required to get into space and using other devices to carefully co-ordinate the landing and setting up telemetry systems for communication.
[/quote]
which begs the question:why do they keep going ahead with manufacturing/employing the way they always did…
any business that has to watch their cost would have relocated and outsourced staff… and if you tell me that’s not viable,you gonna have to provide back up for ur claims
i think the answer is that the white house keeps signing the bill,no matter how outrageous,and whomever might be raising their voices over the farcical ratio of achievements Vs cost will be soothed with a dose of “but don’t that makes you hugely proud to be American?”
in the case of the recovery shuttle (damn that sounds cool,the yanks make the discovery,the soviets make the recovery ) there is no need to get back,it could drag the stricken costly piece of crap to a station like MIR where “proper” scientist would replace the faulty bits.
I don’t have anything to back up my claim other than that I am an engineer and the final product can usually be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of the total budget for the project.
Also, NASA isn’t a business and they don’t operate to make a profit. Space ventures have never been profitable until perhaps very recently with the first space tourists. Even Russian space technology is not profitable although they do have a history of smart cost saving as compared to the US.
(The best example I can think of is the millions the US spent on and anti-gravity pen VS the Russians using a graphite pencil).
I seriously doubt anyone can make a low cost recovery device. Perhaps for low orbit devices, you could design them to be self recovering, but for probes that go to orbit other planets, its just impossible.
[quote=“Tyc00n”](The best example I can think of is the millions the US spent on and anti-gravity pen VS the Russians using a graphite pencil).[/quote] Was it that much? You can buy those pens from gadget shops/catalogues. I guess NASA’s trying to recoup some of its costs!
i was honestly hoping to get schooled on that one,or at least learn something new
being right about the uselessness of NASA doesn’t make me feel good one bit.
[quote=“Tyc00n”] the final product can usually be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of the total budget for the project.
[/quote]
business peoples know that,that’s why it disturbing that despite the expectedly acquired know-how they are still leaching the same budgets,or should i say,even increasing the costs of making explorations
i haven’t dug any infos on profitability of the Russians,but actually i’m not looking for profit,just wise and useful spending.
i’m all for research,cancer research isn’t profitable either but still pretty damn useful (with the exception of rogue individuals profiteering from it)
one sure bet is that on the Russian side,the twat who fucked up is sure to eat roots in a Siberian gulag until he becomes fertilizer for the roots of the next detainee whereas the fat wanker at NASA got slapped on the wrist and swiftly moved to next costly project,along with some more public funded mental counsellings
that’s a well documented farce,but exactly why did NASA come to this kind of non-sense?
was there a real need for such a pen?
are nasa scientist so thick that they can’t even think simple?
of course not,it was all down to “here’s a gazillion $ ,if you use only half,next year we just give you half,so try and find any stupid ideas to waist it on”
and the American tax payer just merrily goes along with it,because the mere mention of the four lettered agency make them jolt with pride
similar stupidity comes out of Hollywood,
with a smug grin,art directors tells us that a frame of CGI FX did cost 12 million or such crap.
Hitchcock was a master yet with low budget
the exorcist left it’s permanent mark with a cost lower than a single stunt in last MI:3
nowadays the public let themselves getting impressed by “this movie cost more than titanic and the 3 LOR put together”
they don’t even bother looking at the director’s name.
although Hollywood don’t actually use tax money,just grossly overpriced theater tickets,so they’re not as bad.
Assuming you get all the technical stuff and funding sorted out I think time is your enemy - if the probe get’s lost somewhere close to Mars it takes months if not years to get there, find it and bring it back. If you have only one rescue craft it won’t be profitable. (I mean you want to make zillions, not just billions …)
So what you need is a fleet of recovery space-crafts that are parked around the solar system. In fact the recovery crafts only need to “kick” the probes towards earth, so they can stay in the area for further use. And somewhere in earth’s orbit you have another craft that catches the probe and brings it back to earth.
For that advise I take 15% of your profit, thanks.
Nope. That sux…because you’ll spend perhaps a billion designing, testing and commissioning these craft that sit up there waiting for a probe to go wonky. Meanwhile all such probes will require a pre-design (re-entry parashute for example) that without some kind of financial incentive the engineering team won’t want to put it on (cost vs risk of failure).
Meanwhile you’ve invested all these dollars with no income stream and have to hope that you’ll hit gold with someone else’s f’up. But historically how often do these expensive failures happen?
[quote]i figured that someone,somewhere ,should start a space recovery business,launching a cheap space-craft and literally “harvesting” fuck-ups from the “we’re ok to throw 780 billions $ for a pic of the moon” nations.
then sell them back to their careless/clueless former owners… [/quote]
Rescuing/repairing satellites in low orbit has already been done. If it was possible to send controllable vehicles capable of returning with a payload to greater distances - such as other planets - then we would be sending them in place of the probes being sent now.
Why spend money to return something that doesn’t work if you can send something that does work for a lot less money? Answer: nobody yet has anything that works better.
The Russians are ‘talking about’ missions to Mars in decades, not the near future.
Maybe he can buy a 2nd hand shuttle from NASA - they probably can’t afford it anymore when they see the bill for the recovery service. Better even, you can make it their responsibility to retrieve the probe once the recovery craft has sent it into earth’s orbit.
Gotta ask dablindfrog. If there aren’t that many perhaps he can offer cleaning services for Hubble or a fly-in for space shuttles instead.
that’s why this is a genius idea,
at the rate NASA’s fuck-up goes,i’m sitting on a goldmine
i’m even banking on the mighty US of A to restart their star wars program and thus increasing dramatically the failure potential…
if the DoD has got tanks getting stranded for running in the sandy desert,what are the chances of something as technical as satellites going pear shape…high is the word you’re looking for
If your business plan is based on the assumption that you can do all this space wizardry more cheaply than everyone else, well… “the cheapest will often end up being the most expensive”
I’m not sure where your antipathy to NASA comes from, but you’re just plain wrong on so many points. For example,
[quote]nor should they feel compelled to engulf an enormous slice of budget that would bear nicer fruits on things like medical/education
govt orgs from any countries are known to use and abuse public funds,but NASA has really been taking the piss.[/quote]
As I have already told you, the NASA budget is far from an enormous slice of the budget – unless you consider 6/10 of 1% an enormous slice. The NASA budget has been extremely tight since the Apollo Program ended. Do you know why the Orbiters are referred to as the “Shuttles”? After NASA put a man on the moon, it planned to develop several orbiting space stations, with the first to be fully constructed by 1975. The vehicles that would be designed to build the space stations and to shuttle crews, equipment, and supplies back and forth between earth and the space stations were to be called “shuttles.” NASA made this proposal to the federal government in the 1960s, but LBJ was focused on his Great Society programs and the developing situation in Vietnam. When Nixon came to office, NASA once again asked for Apollo-like funding, but President Nixon’s response was to slash NASA’s budget, not increase it. The predicament in Vietnam was full blown by that time, with an average of 250 American GIs being killed a week. His final compromise with NASA was that they could build the shuttle vehicles, but not the space stations. I think of that “compromise” as equivalent to the Army Corp of Engineers asking to build a base on an island, and the government responds that no, you can’t build the base, but you can build the boat to go to the island. So if you’re going to blame someone for NASA’s lack of stellar accomplishments (pun intended), blame yourself! If you Frenchmen had done a better job of subduing Vietnam, the US would never have had to intervene and NASA’s budget could have been tripled. Just kidding mon ami, don’t take it personally.
Another thing you have repeated several times is your belief one person was “unaware” of the sun’s heat or is otherwise responsible. You are making it sound as if there was a person at Mission Control with a joystick controlling the MGS who carelessly turned the MGS towards the sun. That wasn’t the case. Mission Control did send a signal to the MGS to make a routine adjustment of its solar panels, but an orbiter antenna was positioned incorrectly and couldn’t communicate to its controllers. The MGS solar panels subsequently oriented themselves in the wrong position, and one of the batteries was exposed. Apparently the programmed safety responses did not react fast enough, did not work at all, or were not adequate to begin with to reorient the spacecraft to protect the batteries in time. Despite the one quote from the BBC about human error, actually an investigation team was formed and found that all the proper (human-controlled) procedures were followed, but yes the procedures were insufficient. The failure is at the system, rather than personal level.
The BBC article you linked fails to mention that the MGS operated four times longer than originally planned. The article did mention (but you failed to), that the MGS returned nearly a quarter of a million images of Mars back to Earth, far more than NASA originally believed it could. Overall, the MGS was a huge success.
I’m not sure where your antipathy to NASA comes from[/quote]
it’s not specifically against NASA,some things they do i find fascinating
i hate waste,that’s all.
waist of money
waist of food
waist of potential
waist of time
if everyone was very focused on waist,thus reducing it,the world would be a better place
i began this thread with a light-hearted idea,then vented some frustrations,but that’s what F.com is for,no?
oh geeez,here we go…
why is it that the great US of A is compelled to act as the world’s sheriff’s???
why can’t it be like Switzerland,minding it’s own business and getting incredibly fat wealthy???
actually,here’s a thought…
if you cumulate all the expenses wasted on wars the USA have engaged in since columbus,i’m sure there would have been enough funds to colonize mars and the moon,say…20 years ago already.
(and we frenchs and brits would be talking german ,i know,i know )
system huh…that makes it so much more excusable…
so we got billions of cars going around earth,trains…swathes of planes…yet they seem to do the job,except from the odd incident.
i say they should spend a significantly bigger slice of that tiny budget on checks,rechecks, watertight,failproof systems,so that,even if the missions are useless,they don’t look quite so amateurish
:s
) there is no need to get back,it could drag the stricken costly piece of crap to a station like MIR where “proper” scientist would replace the faulty bits.
Was it that much? You can buy those pens from gadget shops/catalogues. I guess NASA’s trying to recoup some of its costs!
:bravo: