Rescue Mission Is Called Off For NASA's Aging Swift Space Telescope (apnews.com) 33
NASA has called off a $30 million mission to rescue its aging Swift space telescope after Katalyst Space's Link spacecraft developed persistent control and positioning problems. The Associated Press reports: Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecraft. NASA said this means the telescope will plunge through the atmosphere after more than 20 years of tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. Its demise is not expected before October.
NASA paid $30 million to Katalyst in an attempt to raise the telescope to a safer, longer-lasting orbit. Intense solar activity caused it to lose altitude faster than expected. The rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin a few weeks after its liftoff in early July. While flight controllers managed to slow Link's tumble, issues continued to plague its pointing and positioning in orbit.
"This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. As a consolation prize, Katalyst will continue to operate Link in proximity with the telescope to demonstrate capabilities for future rescue operations. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said it was an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline that was thrown together in under a year. "We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way," Lee said in a statement. "We have already learned a tremendous amount."
NASA paid $30 million to Katalyst in an attempt to raise the telescope to a safer, longer-lasting orbit. Intense solar activity caused it to lose altitude faster than expected. The rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin a few weeks after its liftoff in early July. While flight controllers managed to slow Link's tumble, issues continued to plague its pointing and positioning in orbit.
"This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. As a consolation prize, Katalyst will continue to operate Link in proximity with the telescope to demonstrate capabilities for future rescue operations. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said it was an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline that was thrown together in under a year. "We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way," Lee said in a statement. "We have already learned a tremendous amount."
A Contributor to Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a glass of port to Swift: its discoveries so sweet, results so intoxicating. You shall be missed but not forgotten.
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Damn, and I had tickets for her concert in November.
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Re: A Contributor to Science (Score:2)
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Do we, the US taxpayers get a $30M refund from this company that could not complete their end of the contract?
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My question is....
Do we, the US taxpayers get a $30M refund from this company that could not complete their end of the contract?
No, but our aerospace industry learned a lot of useful things about how to operate in space. We can't be risk free if we want to make progress. In order to learn you have to fail sometimes; If we, the taxpayers, insisted on a refund that would likely put this company out of business and a lot of the learning would be lost.
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So..what exactly are we learning for $30M?
How to fuck up a launch/deployment of a low orbing space craft?
Haven't we been in space long enough to learn those lessons?
Yes I'm a bit sarca
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Never heard of it (Score:1)
Space telescopes will soon be much cheaper (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Space telescopes will soon be much cheaper (Score:5, Informative)
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It's race between cheaper and stingier. Like the Bungle of Hormuz, too early pick a winner
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But if it only costs $50 million to launch a 100-ton space telescope made of cast iron and powered by lead-acid car batteries, even Poor Europe (TM) might be able to afford something with impressive observing power.
Re: Space telescopes will soon be much cheaper (Score:5, Funny)
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That would be bad; with the caveat that I didn't check the AI's math;
"At low Earth orbit (LEO) velocity of roughly 7.8 km/s (17,450 mph), a standard 2.5-gram US penny has a kinetic energy of about 76,050 joules. This is equal to the explosive energy of roughly 18 grams of TNT (about the energy of a heavy firecracker or a small grenade)."
Or about five times the energy of a 50 BMG round.
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Re:Space telescopes will soon be much cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
That meant that the Shuttle system could not be tested without killing people, so it hardly changed over decades ( and was more dangerous as a result ).
Starship is iterating fast, with major internal changes taking on the order of two years to test and debug.
Also, Starship is built to be quick and easy to make.
A Starship, as of now, could be used to cheaply bring ~100 tons to LEO *even if it is not reused*.
Once the tiles are debugged and Starship is caught - big problems that look likely to be solved in months not years - Starship will be capable of bringing cargo to orbit super cheaply, every month and soon after that every week and soon after that every day.
I just hope Musk will allow the launch of a few scientific missions between his Starlink and AI cargos.
They will be amazing.
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Starship avoided the one big problem with Shuttle ( that is rarely mentioned ): It was manned.
It's not like it had to be manned - it was perfectly possible to make it automatic and put the crew when needed, but AFAIR astronauts protested.
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"
Unlike Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, the Space Shuttle had no escape tower to pull a crew capsule away from a failing rocket. Because the vehicle itself was the escape vehicle, NASA engineers poured all their energy into making the Shuttle "human-rated" from day one. They reasoned that if the vehicle wasn't safe enough to fly humans on test flight one, it wasn't safe enough to fly at all.
"
And requiring humans led to l
reentry casualty (Score:2)
Other required optimizations... The rescue mission would have put off concerns about the probability of surviving debris hitting anyone on the ground. Space telescopes often have large, temperature-stable components that tend to survive reentry. X-ray telescope mirrors are particularly interesting.
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That's just Musk hype, i.e. hopelessly optimistic drug-induced rambling.
I'm sure when they finally get it to work, Starship will be cheaper than other options. It won't be as cheap as he claims though, not by a long shot. There will probably be cheaper options too - Musk often claims he is going to make the cheapest product, but fails and others do even better than he was hoping to. Cars, solar, batteries, tunnels, robots.
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Whatever, it will still be about 5x cheaper than the current cheapest. That is, yes, Falcon 9.
Say about $500/kg.
And it can lift massively more mass and volume.
$500/kg means a 100-ton space telescope ( Hubble is 12 tons ) would cost $50,000,000 to launch. That is not worth worrying about, given the costs of making and running a space telescope.
I hope many big new space telescopes are already being planned - if they are, we are going to see some a
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Building/crafting a new telescope takes ages.
And usually they are planned ahead with a different purpose / different instruments / capabilities.
It is not so that the current Swift can be replaced swiftly from garage garbage parts.
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You are wrong.
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You've checked that every single space-flight qualified part of that design is still available for purchase? Otherwise you may need to do a loop of design changes and part and board re-qualifications.
I cost less (Score:2)
"We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way," [Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee] said in a statement. "We have already learned a tremendous amount."
I'd be delighted to learn a tremendous amount from NASA, and I'd be prepared to offer them my willingness to learn for maybe 10% of the $30 million they paid Katalyst.
A deal like that...how can NASA say no? I will wait with relaxed confidence by my desktop communications centre for their response to my gene
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As somebody once said, "If I won $30 million, I'd spend half of it on hookers and coke. The rest, I'd just waste".
try it (Score:2)
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You'd probably need to analyse the risk of making Swift re-enter in such a way as to not fully burn up before reaching the ground as well.
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if Swift and Link are both goners anyway, why not try the operation and maybe get lucky ?
"... flight controllers managed to slow Link's tumble ..." - seems like it is still tumbling, just slower - no way to dock.
I wish such an important spacecraft rescue was awarded to a more experienced company, e.g. Rocket Lab, especially that seems like Katalyst Space Technologies hasn't shown anything yet - not even a demo/test mission.