Venezuela's Flagship Communications Satellite Out of Service and Tumbling (spacenews.com) 81
Venezuela's first and only state-owned communications satellite has been out of service since March 13 when a series of maneuvers left it tumbling in an unusable orbit. SpaceNews reports: The VeneSat-1 satellite, built by China Great Wall Industry Corp. and launched in late 2008 on a 15-year mission to provide television and broadband services to Venezuela, has been stuck for 10 days in an elliptical orbit above the geostationary arc, according to telescopic observations from two U.S. companies that track satellites. VeneSat-1's operator, the Venezuelan space agency ABAE, had issued no status reports on the satellite as of March 23 and could not be reached for comment March 22 or March 23. In January, ABAE said Venezuela and China planned to develop a replacement satellite, VeneSat-2, that would continue service after VeneSat-1 retired.
California-based ExoAnalytic Solutions, which operates a network of satellite- and debris-tracking telescopes, spotted a "significant orbit change" for VeneSat-1 on March 13 at 3:15 a.m. Eastern, when the satellite left its position at 78 degrees West longitude over Venezuela, Bill Therien, ExoAnalytic's vice president of engineering, told SpaceNews. Approximately three hours later, the satellite conducted another maneuver that sent it tumbling westward, he said. Telescope observations from ExoAnalytic and Pennsylvania-based AGI show VeneSat-1 tumbling in an elliptical orbit that at its lowest point is 50 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc where most large communications satellites reside. Venesat-1's highest point, or apogee, is roughly 36,300 kilometers -- or about 525 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc, according to the companies. Bob Hall, AGI technical director for space situational awareness, said VeneSat-1 has drifted 30 degrees from its original orbital slot since March 13. If the satellite drifts another 40 degrees, it will be beyond line of sight from Venezuela, complicating any efforts to restore control of the spacecraft unless Venezuela relies on ground stations in other countries. VeneSat-1 will likely be maneuvered into a so-called graveyard orbit around 300 to 500 kilometers above the geosynchronous belt, where inactive or dead satellites are expected to orbit for thousands of years without colliding with active satellites.
California-based ExoAnalytic Solutions, which operates a network of satellite- and debris-tracking telescopes, spotted a "significant orbit change" for VeneSat-1 on March 13 at 3:15 a.m. Eastern, when the satellite left its position at 78 degrees West longitude over Venezuela, Bill Therien, ExoAnalytic's vice president of engineering, told SpaceNews. Approximately three hours later, the satellite conducted another maneuver that sent it tumbling westward, he said. Telescope observations from ExoAnalytic and Pennsylvania-based AGI show VeneSat-1 tumbling in an elliptical orbit that at its lowest point is 50 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc where most large communications satellites reside. Venesat-1's highest point, or apogee, is roughly 36,300 kilometers -- or about 525 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc, according to the companies. Bob Hall, AGI technical director for space situational awareness, said VeneSat-1 has drifted 30 degrees from its original orbital slot since March 13. If the satellite drifts another 40 degrees, it will be beyond line of sight from Venezuela, complicating any efforts to restore control of the spacecraft unless Venezuela relies on ground stations in other countries. VeneSat-1 will likely be maneuvered into a so-called graveyard orbit around 300 to 500 kilometers above the geosynchronous belt, where inactive or dead satellites are expected to orbit for thousands of years without colliding with active satellites.
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Neither do any of the land-based machines we've had such success with for centuries. Even the man-operated examples.
Hey, even humans are so reliable.
Socialist Utopia fails again. (Score:2, Insightful)
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The kind of socialism/communism that exists or existed in some countries is more akin to a religion than a political ideology and hence rationality, evidence and logic just bounce harmlessly off the reality distortion fields its proponents wear.
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I am sure Germany needs a lesson on the dangers and problems that comes with Communism.
I am sure generations of Cold War American Propaganda is far more informative then have the country living under Communism.
Perhaps Germany may have smart enough to create a balance to try to benefit from the advantages of both systems.
The difference between Successful Socialism and the Fall into Totalerism is a strong democracy. The government needs to work for the people, not the people needs to work for the government.
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Germany could start by closing its borders and banning abortion.
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Capitalism is not necessarily a political ideology, it's an economic ideology. I think you're confusing democracy with capitalism, an easy mistake with today's media promoting this idea, but you can have a democracy without capitalism, just not sure what the economic driver would be for that, but I'm sure we can find something.
Communism are the economic ideals necessary for the political ideals of socialism, it has historically been proven to be really hard to have communism with democracy, because those in
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There are these things called 'dictionaries' that give the actual meanings to words. Some of them are even online, and free! You might want to check one out before making absurd statements next time.
Or are you the one who told me, "The dictionaries are wrong!" the other day? That kept me amused most of the morning.
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And certain groups in the United States that I used to belong to.
Ok, Distributism is very much a religion as well.
As is libertarian capitalism, which has nothing to do with crony capitalism
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"libertarian capitalism" is as rare as real communism. Humans are naturally 'crony'. It is as natural as gravity.
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Tell that to the sovereign citizen movement, which has taken to social media to protest the constitutionality of USC 42 Sections 1, 1a, and 2, which were passed by the same continental congress that gave us the constitution!
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To have a movement of more than one person you gotta have cronies to help out.
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Or you just have to have a really bad idea that a lot of loners glom onto, like "Open Space Law" in USC 42.8.3 (which was repealed in 1923, but try telling that to the people who use the 1919 edition of Black's Law to insist that you don't need a driver's license to drive).
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Loners are easy to pick off. When they cooperate, they are "cronies". 10,000 of them make a division.
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Which Germany? Old East? Old West?
Sounds like our conservatism. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say your "more akin to a religion than a political ideology and hence rationality," would describe some aspects of our country's conservatives.
For instance, the rest of the first world is completely boggled by our lack of socialized medicine. For our private medical system we pay twice as much per capita (including both public and private expenditures) for roughly the same first world coverage everyone else in the first world gets and people still go bankrupt over medical fees in our country. We pay vastly more and get vastly less. This is stupid.
Meanwhile a solid portion of our country firmly believes socialized medicine is evil because the great red elephant tells them so. It won't matter that it's massively cheaper and serves everyone equally, government is bad because the red elephant tells them so.
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Venezuela was never a socialist utopia. They were doing well when Oil was expensive. However having an economy built on one product isn't a good long term model.
We see towns (and some states) in the Capitalist US who have failed because their economy was centered around a single business sector, or company. If that company reduces its size or move out, or the entire sector becomes less desirable then the economy collapses, and in some areas never recovers.
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You've never read the Communist Manifesto, have you. You should if you're going to criticize it, it's not long and criticizing from ignorance makes you look like a gullible dittohead. Here's a free copy;
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook... [gutenberg.org]
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Perhaps you should read it.
- It calls the "bourgeoisie" nothing more than useless rot
- It calls for violent overthrow of the "bourgeoisie" by the "proletariat"
- It calls for an overthrow of the entire system of trade and production
- It calls for the destruction of private property and capital since the proletariat doesn't have any anyway (that is exactly what it claims, even though it was written during the largest individual wealth growth in human history) and calls for collectivizing of private property
-
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Sauce is rather bland on your copy-pasta.
BTW, what does this have to do with Venezuela anyway? They're not communist, and none of its leadership ever intended to convert the government to communism. Or is everyone who isn't a frothing-at-the-mouth Libertardian now considered a 'communist'?
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https://youtu.be/8lEPNaezpS0 [youtu.be]
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Well, I live in one. New Mexico. In 2019 the state received a record $3.1B in oil revenue. That might not sound like a lot in this era of Jeff Bezos' personal net worth of $114B. Well, $3.1B is (was) 39% of our general revenue.
Everybody is (rightly) so concerned about Coronavirus that we've forgotten about the other total collapse right now, oil prices. We are so, so screwed.
State government has tried for decades to diversify the economy, but th
Phoenix & Vegas had water brought in (Score:2)
As for water, by then both states were draining water from the Colorado. It's going to be "interesting times" soon because that's running dry and nobody wants to spend money on desalinization plants in Califo
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And the retirees (snowbirds, we call them here) leave right about...now. Coming back around October.
This year they may shelter in place, an unexpected windfall for us in Arizona, so the restaurants, golf courses, fitness centers, all get a bonus.
Oh, wait, those are pretty much shut down. And when they open, the snowbirds will flee back home.
Anyways, these seasonal jobs are great - think of a huge cruise ship that sails form October to March, goes nowhere, but has thousands of square miles fo deck and limitl
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I live in Upstate NY where there are a lot of old Factory Towns, that have closed down generations ago and they haven't been to successful in diversifying as well.
This is also the problem that can occur when a government bends over backwards to get a big company headquarters into their town.
During its good time, the town expands and becomes very popular, then after that single point of failure leaves, the town has a large infrastructure it cannot maintain anymore, thus it gets into disrepair and the area is
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Foreigners are not allowed to own property in Mexico, which makes having a retirement home there slightly problematic for many.
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Other economies built on oil have survive the fluctuations in price. The real issue for Venezuela was US sanctions and interference.
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The last couple of years, since Guaido the Gusano declared himself president with backing from DC, the US has taken to grabbing funds from Venezuelan oil sales that passes through the US banking system and handing them to its pet dictator-wannabe, which also doesn't help. The worst drought in a century and a half has made things immeasurably worse for everyone too, since almost all of its electrical generation is water powered.
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requires a work force paying taxes.
Baloney, the US funds its military 100% on debt, just graph the US deficit alongside the Pentagram budget and most years they will be almost identical. If the largest and most expensive military in the history of the planet, which contributes almost nothing back to the economy, doesn't actually need to be paid for by tax revenue then the rest of your claim is equally dubious.
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Yeah, I heard that things were so bad in Venezuela that they're rationing toilet paper.
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Oh, horsepuckey. They had one of the most unequal economies in the world, 90% of income went to less than 10% of the population. The economy of Haiti was distributed more evenly. Massive shanty towns with no potable water, sewer, electricity or garbage pickup where no one is allowed to own the house they've painstakingly built over the years is hardly a "vibrant economy".
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Oh, horsepuckey. They had one of the most unequal economies in the world, 90% of income went to less than 10% of the population. The economy of Haiti was distributed more evenly. Massive shanty towns with no potable water, sewer, electricity or garbage pickup where no one is allowed to own the house they've painstakingly built over the years is hardly a "vibrant economy".
I knew middle income hard working folks in Venezuela when this all got started. The *problem* as they saw it was that the welfare programs soaked up *all* the government's resources and they couldn't collect enough in taxes from those left to fund the programs. Eventually the number of voters who depended on the government out numbered the tax payers. It was down hill from there. All politicians had to do was to offer the prospect of government programs to help the poor and you could get elected. They
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EVERYTIME (sic) this justification is used and the socialist system takes over the end result is the same
Your "every time" is laughably incorrect. Look at the average standards of living in the following before and after:
Cuba
Vietnam
China
Russia
Agreed, they are (were in the case of the USSR) communist rather than socialist, but in all four cases the vast majority of people live longer, healthier, lives with higher standards of living than before. To be truthful I don't give a flying fuck that the top 5-10% were worse off afterwards, since they got their wealth by deliberately fucking over everyone below them.
Communists invented Satellites (Score:2)
Capitalists learnt how to make money from them streaming porn.
Probably a Time Conversion Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You now may have several questions, like why a company with several $100 million pieces of hardware in space could potentially lose one or more of them to an error that no one past their freshman year in CS should make. And indeed that would be an excellent question. Turns out the early history of the company reads kind of like a monty python sketch -- the first satellite burned down. The second one burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp. The third one got to orbit but they lost contact with it. They decided they needed to update the version of windows on it (I kid you not,) pointed an antenna where they thought the satellite would be, and then sent the wrong version of windows to the satellite, which would have bricked it if it received the data. They never heard from it again either.
So yeah, space shit is hard even when everyone in your organization is nominally competent. And even multi-billion-dollar companies make trivial programming mistakes like not making sure their times all get converted to a single reference time correctly. The Boeing test a few months back had a problem on re-entry that sounded like the exact same problem. They're easy to spot, if you know what to look for.
Oh yes, and Scott Manley has a pretty nifty Graveyard Orbits Video. [youtube.com] Worth checking out, if you like space stories.
Re:Probably a Time Conversion Problem (Score:5, Informative)
There are actually several satellites that run Windows Embedded or Windows Core. It's an inexpensive and stable OS that's easy to program to and which supports an absurd amount of hardware.
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Thanks for the comment and the link.
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Yeah, okay, wait, as in Microsoft Windows? Running on a satellite? I have so many questions I don't know where to start.
Which version of Windows?
Regardless of Windows, didn't the satellite have enough smarts to keep its solar collectors in sunlight?
You mentioned "root" - so the earth-based login was *nix, but satellite runs Windows?
Doesn't the satellite have its own clock? (kept sane by sun orientation?)
What OSes have been used on other satellites?
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2. Apparently not. They'd just send it up a bunch of rotations to make, and it'd just make them at the appointed times.
3. Yah, ground systems was on Linux. At least some of their early satellites ran Windows, I'm not sure what the more recent ones did.
4. Oh yes, the satellites apparently had an atomic clock, same as the GPS satelli
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A lot of the hardened stuff (military etc) is PowerPC based because the chips were simpler than others and IBM was able to adapt its US-based foundries to custom orders whereas others were already partially if not wholly out-of-country which the military was scared of.
These days you will find custom Linux, back in the day a more custom OS but a lot of the code was bootstrapped from Unix code. VxWorks for more modern boards, but you will often find a combination based on which system you're talking about. B
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"Simpler" was important, because the die size of newer chips mean a single cosmic ray can flip bits. IIRC until the end the Space Shuttle ran on old Intel 486 chips because they were reliable in that radiation swamp that is LEO.
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So yeah, space shit is hard even when everyone in your organization is nominally competent.
Not many anecdotes about nominally competent people in your post.
logged on to the maneuver system using his own personal account instead of the (probably root knowing that company) account they usually used for maneuvers
They decided they needed to update the version of windows on it (I kid you not,) pointed an antenna where they thought the satellite would be, and then sent the wrong version of windows to the satellite, which would have bricked it if it received the data. They never heard from it again either.
Now, we have no idea why the first two fell out of orbit, but these stories don't describe anything close to nominally competent - they describe bad incompetence and lack of procedures and responsibility.
Assuming, of course, they are real.
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I am in no big company and have very limited experience, as in only do bits and pieces of hardware and mission design for nanosatellites with scientific payload, and it is nothing like what you describe.
I'm surprised something like what you describe has a budget. But then, in your second post you don't talk about a satellite business so maybe I misread your original comment.
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I suspect he's talking about a large older company that relies on military contracts for its bread and butter since they totally hosed their civilian business recently.
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From what I've heard about Boeing from people who have worked there it seems quite believable.
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The Boeing test problem was supposedly that it never synced its clock with the MET clock (or simply read the wrong clock), so everything was relative to the uptime from 11 hours earlier when it had been first powered up on the pad. Then they had other parts of the code that compared the not-MET against a time constant to determine that it must be on orbit, and to use the RCS thrusters in fine-control mode instead of the main thrusters. This is the same sort of loose thinking that caused the MCAS problems.
I
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No. I am a Russian troll who is trying to get Trump re-elected.
What? (Score:2)
A cheap Chinese satellite operated by a small banana republic didn't last for its stated service life? Color me shocked.
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"Banana republics" are US-controlled puppet governments, which doesn't fit Venezuela at all.
Smells like human error (Score:2)
So some poor sap will rot in jail acused of high treason and such.
Slowly but defly the well trained people (trained in china) left the country, and satellite is no exception. So, the new recruits were trained by the remaining personel, and we all know and did the excersise of the rumour...
Is sad this happened, hope they are able to restore the satellite to its correct slot. Specially if they have to eat humble pie to do it.
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Unless he is already dead.
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Nah, is more ussefull if they make a public example out of him.
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I'm curious - what's your native language? Some of your word choices makes me think American English, but your spelling makes me think you're either semi-literate or a non-native speaker....
If my signature of "Suerte a todos y feliz dia" was not clue enough. My mother tongue is Spanish. I also speak Frech, used to be able to write in French, but lack of practice means nowadays I can only read and speak.
My written English is actually quite good (296/300 on my ToEFL) when I put my mind on it, but Slahsdot is not one of the places were I put my mind to it...
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Wow. I wouldn't have dignified that dick-ish question with a response, much less have been so nice about it. Kudos, sir.
Lo cortes no quita lo valiente.
Probably not actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Venezuela's kind of corrupt, as such things are. But hell, go look into the corruption that goes on in the American treasury some time. The only reason you don't notice it is we've had so much money floating around for so long.
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Venezuela isn't really that kind of dictatorship. He might get fired, but that's about it.
Oh dude, nope. That guy will spend a looooong time in jail.
First, the begining of his trial will get delayed, probably for years, then the trial itself will drag on and on, and then he will get sentenced (or not)... so....
BTW, I am Venezuelan, and I DO LIVE in Venezuela.
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My hope is that he leaves or get's ousted, but sadly my prognosis is that he stays.
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Considering that the alternatives are all considerably worse, and that the older people remember what life was like before 1998, Maduro will probably be around for quite a while if the US doesn't manage to assassinate him.
Jump, peon! (Score:2)
There is no end to China's love of Venezuela, a dictatorship with tons of oil.
China is porting its social good communist rating system to Venezuela, so Venezuela can deny loans and bus rides and apartments to people who get uppity, too.
The Boot Stepping On Human Face Forever app is free to download, but not downloading is costly.