SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded human-rated version of Dragon started flying in 2019, SpaceX moved splashdowns to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company's refurbishment and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida included a faster handover of astronauts and time-sensitive cargo back to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.

The old version of Dragon, known as Dragon 1, separated its trunk after the deorbit burn, allowing the trunk to fall into the Pacific. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the trunk before the deorbit burn. This meant that the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and lacks a propulsion system, usually takes a few weeks or a few months to fall back into the atmosphere and doesn't have control of where or when it reenters. //

In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that departed the International Space Station fell on the property of a "glamping" resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.

These events followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-pound piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC. //

This means SpaceX can no longer splash down off the coast of Florida because the trajectory would bring debris from the trunk down over populated areas in the United States or Mexico.

When recoveries shift to the West Coast, the Dragon capsule will fire its Draco thrusters to slow down, and then once on course for reentry, release the trunk to burn up in the atmosphere on a similar trajectory. Any debris from the trunk that doesn't burn up will impact the Pacific Ocean while the capsule deploys parachutes for a slow-speed splashdown. //

“One benefit of the move to the West Coast is much better weather," Walker said. "We have a number of sites in Florida, that we feel like we’re sometimes threading hurricanes a lot. When we look at the flight rules for wind, rain, wave height, all of the criteria that determine our flight rules for return, we actually saw that the West Coast sites that we’re looking at have much better weather, which allows us to have much better return availability.”

We're standing by for news on NASA's decision on what to do about Orion's heat shield. //

The central piece of NASA's second Space Launch System rocket arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. Agency officials intend to start stacking the towering launcher in the next couple of months for a mission late next year carrying a team of four astronauts around the Moon.

The Artemis II mission, officially scheduled for September 2025, will be the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the Moon since the last Apollo lunar landing mission in 1972. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen will ride the SLS rocket away from Earth, then fly around the far side of the Moon and return home inside NASA's Orion spacecraft. //

NASA's inspector general reported in 2022 that NASA's first four Artemis missions will each cost $4.1 billion. Subsequent documents, including a Government Accountability Office report last year, suggest the expendable SLS core stage is responsible for at least a quarter of the cost for each Artemis flight.

The core stage for Artemis II is powered by four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Two of the reusable engines for Artemis II have flown on the space shuttle, and the other two RS-25s were built in the shuttle era but never flew. Each SLS launch will put the core stage and its engines in the Atlantic Ocean. //

Artemis III's launch date is highly uncertain. It primarily hinges on SpaceX's progress in developing a human-rated lunar lander and Axiom Space's work on new spacesuits for astronauts to wear while walking on the Moon.

NASA spent $11.8 billion developing the SLS rocket, and its debut was delayed five years from an original target date in 2017. But for Artemis II, the readiness of the Orion spacecraft is driving the schedule, not the rocket.

Boeing won't start flying operational crew missions with Starliner until a year from now. //

The astronauts who rode Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last month still don't know when they will return to Earth.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been in space for 51 days, six weeks longer than originally planned, as engineers on the groundwork through problems with Starliner's propulsion system.

The problems are twofold. The spacecraft's reaction control thrusters overheated, and some of them shut off as Starliner approached the space station June 6. A separate, although perhaps related, problem involves helium leaks in the craft's propulsion system. //

MHStrawn Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
1,142
Subscriptor
Emon said:
The competent engineers and managers were driven out long ago, or they bailed because they were sick of the nonsense.

They're probably working at a variety of competitors or other companies in and around aerospace.

Brain drain is real and Boeing's useless manchild execs either don't understand, don't care, or more likely, both.
So much this.

Boeing going from a company run by engineers whose purpose was to build safe, reliable aircraft to a company run by MBAs whose purpose is to maximize shareholder value was one of the worst developments of the last 50 years in the aerospace industry.

The space agency did consider alternatives to splashing the station. //

NASA has awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to develop a "US Deorbit Vehicle." This spacecraft will dock to the International Space Station in 2029 and then ensure the large facility makes a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before splashing into the ocean in 2030.. //

"This decision also supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth."

NASA has a couple of reasons for bringing the space station's life to a close in 2030. Foremost among these is that the station is aging. Parts of it are now a quarter of a century old. There are cracks on the Russian segment of the space station that are spreading. Although the station could likely be maintained beyond 2030, it would require increasing amounts of crew time to keep flying the station safely.

Additionally, NASA is seeking to foster a commercial economy in low-Earth orbit. To that end, it is working with several private companies to develop commercial space stations that would be able to house NASA astronauts, as well as those from other countries and private citizens, by or before 2030. By setting an end date for the station's lifetime and sticking with it, NASA can help those private companies raise money from investors. //

The station, the largest object humans have ever constructed in space, is too large to allow it to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. It has a mass of 450 metric tons and is about the size of an American football field. The threat to human life and property is too great. Hence the need for a deorbit vehicle. //

volcano.authors Smack-Fu Master, in training
6y
73

flerchin said:
The idea that SpaceX wouldn't even bid unless it was fixed price, and then came in well under the estimates for cost-plus is wild.

It's almost as though the cost-plus era has some political baggage that challengers like to point out.

RTWAP Smack-Fu Master, in training
1y
12

afidel said:
I assume SpaceX prefers the firm fixed price contract because it reduces the army of paper pushers needed and the amount of time that engineers and technicians need to waste documenting their work on the contract? I guess if you can actually execute correctly it's more profitable to just submit a bill and get paid than to do the old cost plus change order malarkey.

My speculation is that it enforces a certain discipline in the requirements. SpaceX isn't going to just happily go down every rabbit hole of dithering on requirements and possible changes because unless it's a costed and signed change order they'd be losing money on it. And anyone at NASA looking to change things knows it requires a highly visible contract change ($$$), not just a larger bill from the contractor. //

Tridus Ars Tribunus Militum
17y
2,189
Subscriptor

afidel said:
I assume SpaceX prefers the firm fixed price contract because it reduces the army of paper pushers needed and the amount of time ....

Yeah, exactly. They're not paying people handle the paperwork end of cost-plus.

Also if they think they can do it for significantly under that, the potential profit margin is higher since they'll get paid that no matter what it actually costs them to do it. It takes a high degree of confidence to want to go this way, but if any space company has the experience with this type of contract to make it work, it's SpaceX.

It REALLY showcases the differing mindset and abilities between them and a company that won't bid on fixed price contracts like Boeing, though.

It is about 3,000 light-years from Earth, but it can be witnessed with the naked eye. //

NASA predicts a nova will occur sometime this summer, about 3,000 light-years from Earth, but it can be witnessed with the naked eye.

The nova reoccurs once every 80 years. //

The nova should happen in a dark spot among the seven stars of Corona Borealis, known as the Northern Crown.

The dark spot contains “two stars that are bound to and in orbit around each other,” known as T Coronae Borealis or T CrB. NASA nicknamed it the Blaze Star:

Anders - who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission - took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.

Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.

Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.

The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.

Speaking of the moment, Anders said: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth."

NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly 10 years ago. //

Now, with the shuttle's retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair. //

So what happened? How did Boeing, the gold standard in human spaceflight for decades, fall so far behind on crew? This story, based largely on interviews with unnamed current and former employees of Boeing and contractors who worked on Starliner, attempts to provide some answers. //

The problem is that while a company might do something that unlocks a payment, the underlying work may not actually be complete. It's a bit like students copying homework assignments throughout the semester. They get good grades but haven't done all of the learning necessary to understand the material. This is only discovered during a final exam in class. Essentially, then, Boeing kept carrying technical debt forward so that additional work was lumped onto the final milestones.

Ultimately, the flight software team faced a reckoning during the initial test flight of Starliner in December 2019. //

The bottom line is that Boeing technically earned the flight software milestones in its commercial crew contract. But by not putting in the work for an end-to-end test of its software, the company failed its final exam. As a result, Boeing had to take the disastrously expensive step of flying a second uncrewed flight test, which it did in May 2022. //

All of Boeing's struggles with Starliner played out against a much larger backdrop of the company's misfortunes with its aviation business. Most notably, in October 2018 and March 2019, two crashes of the company's relatively new jet, the 737 MAX 8, killed 346 people. The jets were grounded for many months.

The institutional failures that led to these twin tragedies are well explained in a book by Peter Robison, Flying Blind. Robison covered Boeing as a reporter during its merger with McDonnell Douglas a quarter of a century ago and described how countless trends since then—stock buybacks, a focus on profits over research and development, importing leadership from McDonnell Douglas, moving away from engineers in key positions to MBAs, and much more led to Boeing's downfall.

It's estimated that, in addition to paying customers and the families of victims, the grounding of the 737 Max for nearly two years cost Boeing $20 billion since 2019. This critical loss of cash came just as Boeing's space division faced crunch time to complete work on Starliner.

There were so many other challenging issues, as well. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 occurred when Boeing was dealing with the fallout from all the software issues on Starliner's debut flight. Additionally, the pandemic accelerated the retirement of experienced engineers who had brought spaceflight experience from the shuttle program. Boeing's best people were focused on the aircraft crisis, and the experienced space hands were leaving.

So it was all a pretty titanic struggle. //

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the strain of operating in a fixed-price environment was the fundamental cause of many of Boeing's struggles with Starliner and similar government procurement programs—so much so that the company's Defense, Space, & Security division is unlikely to participate in fixed-price competitions any longer. In 2023, the company's chief executive said Boeing would "never do them again."

A Boeing spokesperson pushed back on the idea that the company would no longer compete for fixed-price contracts. However, the company believes such contracts must be used correctly, for mature products.

"Challenges arise when the fixed price acquisition approach is applied to serious technology development requirements, or when the requirements are not firmly and specifically defined resulting in trades that continue back and forth before a final design baseline is established," the spokesperson said. "A fixed price contract offers little flexibility for solving hard problems that are common in new product and capability development.". //

The surprise is not that Boeing lost to a more nimble competitor in the commercial space race. The surprise is that this lumbering company made it at all. For that, we should celebrate Starliner’s impending launch and the thousands of engineers and technicians who made it happen. ///

Except it still hasn't succeeded

July 20, 2018
Website Notice

Note: This website (moonviews.com) has not been regularly updated since 2014. Now that the project’s data has been submitted to NASA, this website will no longer be updated but will be maintained as an online archive of the LOIRP’s prior activities. Thank you for your interest in – and support of – our project. //

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is a project to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967; it is funded by NASA, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals.[1]

The first image to be successfully recovered by the project was released in November 2008. It was the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon, taken in August 1966. On February 20, 2014, the project announced it had completed the primary tape capture portion of the project.[2] One medium resolution image, most of one high resolution image and parts of three others are missing, apparently due to lapses at the time they were being recorded.[3] The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered[2] and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System.

This image (click on image to enlarge) shows the sequence of images that were read out during what is termed “priority” readout vs the “final readout”. The priority readout was an opportunistic scanning of processed photos on the lunar orbiter before all of the images were taken. The photo process with the 70mm film began with an image being simultaneously taken by the 610 mm high resolution camera and by the 80 mm medium resolution camera. In a process remarkably similar to the old polaroid dry process instamatic cameras, the film was dry processed by a “bimat” dry processor. The bimat would separate from the film (most of the time) but would sometimes due to the timing would leave artifacts on the image, which are readily identified on the film.

The film would then be fed into the readout looper where it could be scanned and the images sent back to the Earth. During the mission when photographs were still being taken the film would run one direction through the looper. After all of the images were taken a command would be sent to cut the bimat and then the film could be read in the opposite direction.

Thus when we start with a low numbered tape, the first images that come off are from the priority readout in ascending order. However, the ascending order is not linear, jumping because images are still being taken and the film advancing while the spacecraft cannot transmit.

At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), mankind took its 'one giant leap' and 600 million people watched as Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.

Our Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, famously supported receiving the television signals on that momentous day. Although many people think the Parkes telescope was the only station receiving the signal, it was the 26-metre antenna at NASA's Honeysuckle Creek space tracking station near Canberra that was the prime station assigned with receiving the initial TV pictures from the Moon and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface. (The Tidbinbillla deep space tracking station, today known as the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, provided support to the command module in lunar orbit.)

Eight and a half minutes after those first historic images were broadcast around the world, the television signal being received by the larger 64-metre Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, was then selected by NASA to provide the images for the following two hours and 12 minutes of live broadcast as the Apollo 11 astronauts explored the Moon surface.

“I’ve spent the past week in Mountain View, California, hanging out with a group of Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) hackers who are working out of an abandoned McDonald’s on the NASA Ames base. For more than five years, LOIRP technologists (or techno-archeologists, as they prefer to be called) have been reverse-engineering analog tape drives and developing new software in an attempt to unearth some of the first images of the moon that were taken by unmanned lunar orbiters in advance of the manned Apollo missions of the late 1960s. Upon entering the building (affectionately called “McMoon’s” by those who work within it) for the first time, I was greeted by familiar architecture. The drive-thru windows, menu light boxes, stainless steel counters, fiber glass tables and the ghosts of corporate brand ephemera all remain. However now they coexist under a jolly roger with a literal mountain of vintage 2-inch tape reels that contain trapped data, refrigerator-sized Ampex tape drives, an army of Mac workstations and a seemingly endless supply of analog tape decks, monitors, cables and soldering supplies.”

NASA. You might think of NASA as the place for “rocket scientists.” A place where really smart people aren’t shackled by DEI hires and “every culture is equal” nonsense. NASA, where steely-eyed missile men went from a John Kennedy speech to building Titan rockets and sending men to the moon in less than a decade. Steely-eyed missile men are so last century. We need equity hires, diversity ambassadors, and indigenous science.

On Monday, during the total eclipse of the sun, America also had a total eclipse by the dumb. //

I dug a little deeper to see what NASA is doing in its search to auger-in the next rocket launch. NASA, under Biden, has pushed hard for DEI, including awarding contracts to “underserved communities” and hiring a diversity ambassador, and is pushing employees to include pronouns in emails. So, it is no shock that NASA is in the fifth year of a 14-year partnership with the Navajo Nation. Why? NASA views the Navajo as particularly “sciency.” //

Cowboysurfpunk
23 minutes ago
... Blinded by the Light... ;)

The Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing when it was developed five decades ago. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to use volatile memory. Most of NASA's missions operate with redundancy, so each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers. But the backup FDS on Voyager 1 failed in 1982.

Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory.

The command worked, and Voyager.1 responded with a signal different from the code the spacecraft had been transmitting since November. After several weeks of meticulous examination of the new code, engineers pinpointed the locations of the bad memory.

"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working," NASA said in an update posted Thursday. "Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years." //

"Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again," NASA said.

NASA Moon @NASAMoon
·
Oops I did it again 🤭

#TotalSolarEclipse

2:36 PM · Apr 8, 2024

Sierra Space says it has demonstrated in a ground test that a full-scale inflatable habitat for a future space station can meet NASA's recommended safety standards, clearing a technical gate on the road toward building a commercial outpost in low-Earth orbit.

“Right now, we’re certified for five flights on Dragon, and we’re looking at extending that life out," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "I think the goal would be for SpaceX to say 15 flights of Dragon. We may not get there in every single system." //

This ship has spent 466 days in orbit, longer than any spacecraft designed to transport people to and from Earth. //

Space Shuttle Discovery launched more often, but time on station was much shorter. And those launches were vastly more expensive. Paying for a few extra Dragons is chump change compared to the billion dollars per Shuttle launch.

SpaceX has four human-rated Dragon spaceships, plus three Dragons designed for cargo missions. A fifth Crew Dragon is on track for completion later this year, and will probably make its first flight in early 2025, according to Stich. SpaceX officials have said this will be the final Crew Dragon spacecraft the company will build, and the fleet of five capsules will be enough to satisfy demand for Dragon missions until the next-generation Starship vehicle is ready to take over.

It will be at least several years, and possibly longer, until Starship is certified for human launches and landings. Until then, Dragons will continue launching on Falcon 9 rockets, even if some satellite missions shift to Starship.

SpaceX has flown some of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 19 times, nearly double the rocket's original life expectancy, and is looking at certifying Falcon 9s for as many as 40 launches and landings.

JohnDeL Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
8y
6,157
Subscriptor
The single bit requirement indicates that this was primarily an engineering mission and not a science one. The intent was to test out new technology and see how it might be improved for use on later science missions.

A great example of this is the Sojourner/Pathfinder mission. Sojourner's mission goals were to roll one meter and send back one image and last one sol on the surface. The nominal plan was for it to roll (IIRC) 10 meters, send back 100 images and APXS readings, and last 7 sols. What we got was 100 meters, more than a thousand readings and images, and a lifetime of 83 sols.

Thanks to Sojourner's work, we now have freakin' huge rovers on Mars that have lasted for a decade, rolled more than 30 km, and provided thousands of images and readings that have significantly improved our understanding of Mars.

We can expect the same sort of improvement from Odie's siblings when they finally make it to the Moon. Per aspera, ad astra!

Altemus said crises like this, and the loss of the range finders, happened over and over. "This mission kept throwing us alligators, and we would reduce these alligators to snapping turtles because they don't hurt as bad," he said.

If one assumes there is a 70 percent chance of recovering from any one of these crises but you have to address 11 different crises on the way to the Moon, the probability of mission success is less than 2 percent. //

In truth, NASA is thrilled with Intuitive Machines' performance. The aerospace industry at large understands what this company was up against and is celebrating its success. Most of the customers flying on Odysseus are getting the data they paid for.

The reality is that Intuitive Machines is a private company with about 250 people working on this lunar lander program. That's a small fraction of the resources that national space programs typically devote to these initiatives, and with all the data it has gathered, Intuitive Machines and its customers can be pretty confident that the company will stick the landing next time.

And there will be a next time, as the commercial lunar landers built by private companies in the United States cost about $100 million instead of the half-billion dollars the government would have spent on a specialized, one-time mission to the Moon.

Here's why I think this is a truly notable success. Consider the trials and turmoil that a similarly sized company called SpaceX went through 18 years ago as it worked toward the first launch of its first rocket, the Falcon 1. Rockets are hard, but so are spacecraft that must make a soft landing on the Moon. I would argue that a lunar lander like Odysseus is as complicated, if not more so, than a relatively simple booster like the Falcon 1. //

Unlike the initial Falcon 1, Odysseus flew all the way to the Moon on its very first time out and made a soft landing. It has been phoning home ever since, sending a rich stream of data. That's a pretty big win.

Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and will launch the new station no earlier than 2028.

"SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship." //

Starlab will have a diameter of about 26 feet (8 meters). It is perhaps not a coincidence that Starship's payload bay can accommodate vehicles up to 26 feet across in its capacious fairing. However, in an interview, Marshall Smith, the chief technology officer of Voyager Space, said the company looked at a couple of launch options.

"We looked at multiple launches to get Starlab into orbit, and eventually gravitated toward single launch options," he said. "It saves a lot of the cost of development. It saves a lot of the cost of integration. We can get it all built and checked out on the ground, and tested and launch it with payloads and other systems. One of the many lessons we learned from the International Space Station is that building and integrating in space is very expensive." //

phat_tony Ars Centurion
17y
263
Subscriptor
This is exactly what most space companies should be doing now - assuming Starship is going to work, and start planning based on the sea change that's going to create. There are still so many companies trying to duke it out in small launch where clearly the overwhelming majority of them have no chance of making it. Pivot to take advantage of the fact that everything about space launch is about to change. Figure out what we could do with a 120 ton satellite the size of a space station that we can't do now and build that satellite. Figure out what we could do with swarms of micro satellites that isn't cost effective now if they were 1/10 the cost to get to orbit. Space tugs. Commercial refueling depots. Tourism. Space stations. Solar-system wide internet as a service... NASA has a huge bandwidth problem on the Deep Space Network... even if they aren't asking for proposals, it may be a case of "if you build it, they will come."
I don't know, but when there's a two order of magnitude change pending on the most fundamental constraint of a sizable industry, that's when new players make it and old players can't adapt and break. It's like the advent of microchips, or the internet. Trying to compete with the company that's inventing the two order of magnitude improvement is the last business bet you want to make. Capitalizing on the implications is exactly what you want to do. //

pavon Ars Tribunus Militum
16y
2,100
Subscriptor
Very excited about this, finally picking up where Skylab left off. It had 350m3 pressurized volume in a single Saturn V launch, compared to the 1000m3 of ISS with 15 pressurized modules taking over a decade to assemble.

If you ever get a chance to visit Space Center Houston, you can walk through mockups of both an ISS module and Skylab, and the difference was viscerally striking to me. One was a series of hallways, like the corridors of datacenter, while the other was this spacious open area. The ISS design might be more efficient for the experiments they actually do on the ISS, and for moving about in freefall, but I can't help but imagine there were lost opportunities due to being restricted to such narrow tubes.

So, how did the team do it? They ditched traditional, space-rated hardware. They just couldn't take the mass penalty. For example, the RAD750 computer that operates most modern spacecraft—including the Perseverance rover—weighs more than 1 pound. They couldn't blow that much mass on the computer, even if it was designed specifically for spaceflight and was resistant to radiation.

Instead, Tzanetos said Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce.

The RAD750, introduced in 2001, is based on 1990s technology. The modern Qualcomm processor was designed for performance and has the benefit of 20 years of advancement in microprocessor technology. In addition to being orders of magnitudes cheaper—the RAD750 costs about a quarter of a million dollars, while the Qualcomm processor goes into inexpensive mobile phones—the newer chip has bucketloads of more performance.

"The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

"This is a massive victory for engineers," Tzanetos said.

Indeed it is. While NASA's most critical missions, where failure is not an option, will likely still use space-rated hardware, Ingenuity's success opens a new pathway for most science missions. They can be cheaper, lighter, and higher-performing in every way. This is almost unimaginably liberating for mission planners. //

The concept of flying Ingenuity came along at just the right time, in the early 2010s, as NASA was finalizing the payloads that would fly on the Perseverance rover to Mars in 2020. When NASA had to make the call on whether or not to fly the technology demonstration mission, the right mix of technologies was coming online: high energy density batteries, high-performance processors for mobile devices, lightweight cameras, and MEMS accelerometers to measure acceleration.

These devices were pushed and perfected as part of the mobile phone revolution. If there had been no iPhone, there would have been no Ingenuity. It was the perfect confluence, and it resulted in the miracle on Mars. //

It's a perilous exercise to judge history while being in the middle of history, of course. But I would rate Ingenuity among the three most innovative and important things that NASA has done during the 21st century. The other two are the James Webb Space Telescope and the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program.