I asked myself this same question when New Horizon sent pictures of Pluto back. I was surprised to learn that NH will never overtake Voyager because of the number of gravity assists Voyager 1 achieved. The planners had to race to achieve the 4 gravity assists in the 70's, the next time the 4 giants line up in such a way isn't until 2145. Perhaps some form of ion engine, one day, will help us overtake Voyager. Or more sci-fi fusion/nuclear rockets. Who knows, but it's interesting to ponder.
TIL about a 2,000 lb "manhole cover" (big armored plate they welded on the end of a pipe to contain (HA!) the explosion) that got launched into the atmosphere in 1957 by a nuclear explosion test, leaving ground at 150,000 mph (220,000 fps). Spoiler: it probably vaporized.
Launch velocity was estimated at 66km/s. 11 of that would be burned climbing out of Earth's gravity well leaving us with a velocity of 55 km/s relative to Earth. It will take another 42 km/s to escape the solar system, so that would be a velocity of 13 km/s at escape. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s, so would either be ahead of it or will catch it eventually.
But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/s. So depending on the launch orientation to orbit, the manhole cover could either still be in orbit around the sun, or have a velocity of up to 43 km/s at escape. So it's possible, if it didn't get vaporized, that is.
The Wikipedia page has the date, time, and location for the Pascal-B test:
August 27, 1957 22:35:00.0, 37.04903°N 116.0347°W
So that would have been 10:35PM local daylight savings time from southern Nevada, so 9:30PM solar time.
Turns out the potential adder from earth's rotation is a negligible ~0.37 km/s at that latitude. With earth tilted by 23.5 degrees, we have it launched 37-23.5 = 13.5 degrees away from the orbital plane. That seems smallish, so let's ignore that. Seems like the best time would have been around 6AM to add to the orbital velocity and 6PM to be about the worst, subtracting off the orbital velocity. At 9:30PM, our 55 km/s launch vector is 127.5 degrees (8.5/24*360) away from the 30 km/s orbit vector. For a combined velocity of around 43.8 km/s. Check my math.
I'm missing something from the initial calculation which is that the solar escape velocity from the current position of Voyager 1 is about 3km/s, so Voyager's velocity at escape would be 14km/s, not 17, which is very close to the 13km/s of plumbob without any earth assist. So basically anything in the direction of orbit beats voyager, and anything the other way loses.
Looking down on the north pole, the earth rotates and orbits counter clockwise. This means that anything from midnight to noon will be aligned with the orbital vector and anything noon to midnight will be offset. 930PM will be about halfway between sunset and midnight, so losing 11 km/s from orbital velocity sounds about right.
It's almost certainly the farthest one, period. Voyager utilized multiple "gravity slingshots" to accelerate to a vastly faster velocity than we could achieve with rockets alone.
Yea but we don’t know how many failed attempts there were that got stuck at zero. We only know our one existence. Could be trillions of dead universes before ours.
Yes really. These improbabilities are guesswork, and their size is unknown. We know a spacefaring civilization has happened once, so the probability is far greater than you allow, and time obviously sufficient.
It is clearly possible to have a space-faring civilization, we’ve seen one. But the density could be extremely low. Fine, in infinite space we’ll get an infinite number of spacefaring civilizations whatever the odds. They exist, we just might never interact if the density is low enough.
But, I’m not sure, maybe it is a philosophical question or maybe it is a physics one (I only had an engineering education so at the extremes these get hard to distinguish sometimes). Does the universe outside of our light cone “exist” in some sense? If not, then I guess the universe is not quite so big.
Further, you might suppose that the planet needs to be in some reasonable band, in terms of power being absorbed from the star, to be amenable to life. And that, in order to hit spaceflight, you’ll need to have accumulated a certain amount of energy (for rocket fuel). This could bound the beginning of space-flight-viable planets to those which have already had a good amount of life for a couple hundred million years.
So this would seem, to me at least, to limit our universe of possible planets to those that are more than a couple hundred million years old, at least, in our frame of reference, right? (and this is assuming most of the Precambrian was a waste of time that could be skipped through lucky evolution).
Thank you. Didn't want to tap a CNN link for anything involving science
P.s. I also wouldn't go to Fox, before you think this is left/right bias. My bias is against regular media reporting on anything scientific. It's either rendered alarmist, so simplified it's wrong, or some combination of the two
First, I think you got it right already. The "person" pulling the strings is the same "person" pulling the strings at every other quasi-monopolist multinational. Just another Senior VP, likely Ivy League MBA doing whatever they can to ensure they hit this quarter's financial goals.
Second, I just stop engaging when someone says a company/org is run by a right-wing nut/left-wing Communist
There was another incident recently with garbled data[1]. The issue then was Voyager was trying to use a processor that was supposed to have been turned off. It either turned the malfunctioning unit or thought that the disabled unit was turned on when it wasn't. But the flaw is similar to the current problem which a malfunction in managing its internal state.
Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
I guess it is nitpicking, but I hate the word choice they’ve selected there. The “additionally” makes it look like the 22.5 and 45 hour problems are two different things, instead of the natural result of a round trip.
I don't think you should use the phrase "viscerally hyperbolic", I think it overstates the degree to which their comment communicates an excess of emotion. Instead, consider saying "I don't hate it, but I don't love it" to express agreement with the sentiment, but disagreement with the degree.
Everyone's experience is subjective. Maybe they really hated it.
I also hate the wording, it threw me off for a few seconds and made me lose min train of thought until I realized the author simply doesn't know what the word "additionally" means.
Perhaps the phrase "I don't hate it, but I don't love it" doesn’t fully encapsulate the nuanced spectrum of emotional response. Might I suggest employing "I harbor a moderate degree of equivocation regarding this matter"? It articulates a position of neither fervent advocacy nor staunch opposition, akin to balancing on the fulcrum of a metaphorical teeter-totter, oscillating gently between the poles of approval and disapproval.
The NASA press release is written: "In addition, commands from mission controllers on Earth take 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, ... That means the engineering team has to wait 45 hours to get a response"
The CNN writing looks uncannily similar but without the same meaning. I'm not saying it's machine generated, but I won't say it isn't.
The transmitter on Earth can be massive with an enormous power budget. Sending from Voyager might be much more constrained: less compute to compress the payload, less power to send it.
The speed of light is obviously the same either way but it’s not obvious to me that the speed of a byte (error corrected, etc) must be.
>The speed of light is obviously the same either way
It's not obvious that it is :) We don't have any way to prove that it is the same, because every experiment to measure the speed of light going from A to B requires some light to go from B to A which cancels out any difference. We just assume that it is the same because we don't have any reason to believe it's not.
I wonder if it was messed with in editing or something, like maybe they have a style guide rule against long sentences.
Anything to merge the ideas together would make it clear that it is just one phenomenon, for example.
> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft, and so the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
This is an absolutely terrible headline. Voyager is communicating with Earth, full stop. The data from it's scientific instruments is coming back in a fixed, repeating pattern, meaning we aren't getting anything meaningful from it, but it is absolutely still communicating with Earth.
exchange actually does too much heavy lifting here. This almost passed, but no; communication is the transfer/movement of information.
One-way communication can convey (even if requiring a previously agreed upon compression mechanism) information - even a single bit or even the existence of a signal at all can be used - think about using the time between signals as a medium, etc.
Heartbeat signals (inverted dead-man switches) exchange information; it doesn't have to be the same type. The beat source explicitly proclaims it's existence in space-time and the receiving end can infer it's existence at a certain time.
Like natives' smoke patterns of Morse code of radio waves, using periodicity to convey bit value
Not in this context. They are sending commands. The spacecraft is not responding to them. This is exactly a breakdown of the communication, which is exactly what's mentioned in the first paragraph of the article.
Sorry but you're still wrong. You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the commands. You don't know that. Nobody really does. All that is necessary for this to be "communication" is for the transmitter to send and the receiver to receive, and the receiver may well be working but the transmitter on the spacecraft may not be working, making that scenario one-way communication. It takes far less power to receive than it does to transmit, so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were still receiving commands but unable to send responses.
If the spacecraft is known to not be receiving, I think the term "broadcasting" would apply.
> You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the commands.
I didn't say that. The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response.
The article title and intro are correct. For all intents and purposes, the spacecraft has stopped communicating. Broke down, used in the intro, is better than stopped. Discussing this is pedantic and pointless, which is why the guidelines state not to make comments like the original one. As we can all see. It has led nowhere interesting.
And you and everyone keep bouncing around all these side definitions. The definition of communication between earth and a spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 is implied and assumed to be standard two-way communication.
> It takes far less power to receive than it does to transmit, so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were still receiving commands but unable to send responses.
I don't follow. The spacecraft is known to still be transmitting a signal.
So just to end this, what would you and the others like the title to be given the article is perfectly clear and with a title that is substantively different? So we don't have to non-discuss this anymore.
You're entitled to be as obstinate as you want to be, and as wrong as you want to be - I don't really care what you do. The fact is, sending information to a receiver that is receiving is in fact the definition of one-way communication, whether you want to refute it or not. You're dying on this hill.
I'm not dying on any hill or refuting anything. The point is the title is fine, could be mildly improved, though isn't outright incorrect, and that this entire conversation has been a waste of all of our time. Haha.
If I'm talking to a person, and then they just start repeating a nonsense sound no matter what I say to them, is it really inaccurate to say communication has stopped, especially when it's immediately followed up with by saying communication has broken down and explained further? No, not really. Certainly isn't wrong enough to have this long, fruitless discussion that I feel embarassed I participated in.
>Communication means an exchange of information. Receiving a signal does not.
You were wrong. Communication does not explicitly require response.
The definition of "communication":
>"means of sending or receiving information, such as phone lines or computers."
It says "Sending or receiving information". It does not say "sending and receiving".
The spacecraft can be receiving perfectly fine, and that is communication from earth to the spacecraft. We may not be getting a valid response, but that does not mean we haven't communicated information to the spacecraft.
This is the obtuse hill you chose to keep dying on.
Communication does not have to be bidirectional, but is has to carry information (meaning). Cosmic background radiation is not communication; your local FM station is.
How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
MITM attack?
Well they won't get away with this! Some humans are super-intelligent - they already discovered that the Earth is flat, and sitting on the bank of a giant turtle (yes it's turtles all the way down)
Voyager 1 has a large 12-foot diameter directional radio antenna that it keeps pointed at Earth. If you look at photos of Voyager, the antenna (the big dish) basically is most of what you see: it's bigger than everything else on craft.
There are radio antennas across the Earth listening to its very weak signal.
Signal processing algorithms can pull out a signal from well below the noise floor these days. Even the small and nondirectional antennas on your phone are good enough to receive GPS signals even all the way down at -125 dBm, which is WAY less than your phone receives in interference from random radio stations and faulty LED bulbs nearby.
The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really different, just more sensitive and sophisticated (and expensive).
I think that would fall under the "must accept interference" portion of FCC Part 15, my phone communicating back to the tower might raise some alarms if I tried amplifying it at all though!
Because their power supply is shitty and it's easy to transform the chopper that is used in the switching power supply to behave as an oscillator instead, which will start to emit harmonics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply)
Electromagnetic radiation power roughly equivalent to the amount of light they output. I wished I was kidding, some of them are so bad they should qualify as jammers.
A ridiculously huge and powerful array of antennas spread across the planet.
NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and you can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with. The Voyagers are usually active any time I look.
According to the article, they can send commands to Voyager 1, and it executes them, and it is still sending data back - the problem is the data coming back is gibberish (repeated patterns of 0s and 1s). They are still hoping they can work out a sequence of commands to reset its computers and resolve the problem. So it makes sense the DSN is currently talking to it.
For me, it looks like it computer damaged by interstellar radiation, which is much more energetic than solar radiation, so it's unlikely that reset will help.
According to NASA's blog [0] they believe the problem is between the FDS computer and the TMU (the outbound radio modulator). The other two onboard computer systems, CCS and AACS, they believe are still working. All three systems are dual redundant pairs of computers. So, even if one FDS was damaged, in theory they should be able to switch to the other. The blog post is vague on what exactly they tried - "the team tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in before the issue began, but the spacecraft still isn’t returning useable data" - so I don't think we can rule out there are other things they can still try.
It would be cool if we eventually develop the technology to send out a probe to go out there and fetch the Voyager probes, so that we can put them in a museum.
(Presumably with one of the siblings of the fetching probe going further and faster than the Voyager probes ever managed)
That would be rather defeating their purpose. We put golden records on the Voyager probes, which included instructions for reading them, so that should another intelligent civilization be in their flight path they can learn of our existence and some of our culture.
If aliens are sending a battle fleet to destroy Earth because there's life here, they were on the way long before we emitted and radio waves. Earth has been broadcasting the existence of life for a billion years.
That was hardly their primary purpose, and presumably long before we were in a position to retrieve the Voyagers we would have sent faster probes that would have already overtaken them.
Reminds me of ... I think it was All Your Bridges Rusting? (Niven) Mostly about teleportation, but it's basically the whole "if you bring a 747 back to 1912, can you do anything at all for the Titanic" thought experiment.
(So this could be surprisingly difficult even with major propulsion leaps...)
It wasn't a good documentary anyway- at least compared to the sequel, which explores the implications of large scale weapons (planet-scale), ship battles in hostile environment, genetic engineering, reincarnation, and brain-controlling mindworms.
That movie was so good but was entirely overshadowed by the release of The Matrix, which released just 2 months earlier - I think people assumed that The 13th Floor was just a Matrix knock-off, which it wasn't. Both were great, of course, but 13th Floor just got a bum deal with it's release date I think.
Tangentially related, just watched Star Trek the Motion Picture (director's cut) for first time as an adult. One of the best tie-ins between NASA and scifi I can think of.
I was just a tad young to care when the voyager spacecraft were first launched, but I have followed the adventures of these spacecraft since the mid 80s. I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo and didn’t have time to colorize it :-D
But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly keeping these two machines operational across so much time and distance in such a hostile environment.
Thank you Voyager team present and past; you’ve helped inspire so many young people to STEM careers, and you’ve done so with a project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive side of humanity.
I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
So true. NASA's achievements are the highest of human accomplishments, imo. Sometimes I picture being on the team that built these triumphs, I think I would be overtaken with pride forever.
There's a nice 2017 documentary about Voyager called The Farthest [1]. It includes interviews with many of the now very old team members, and they do exude (deserved) pride, and a still fresh sense of wonder that they pulled it off.
FANTASTIC documentary! Beautifully made, engaging, entertaining for those well familiar and very accessible to the layperson. I caught it by accident, right at the beginning, while flipping through public-access TV and spent the next hour+ positively glued in front of the TV. Didn't even move to the couch - just transfixed in front of the TV where I was standing when I caught it. Later bought it on BluRay.
I'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more inward and education is getting worse and worse with the peak somewhere in the 1950's. If we have a bright future in space travel none of the countries with launch capability today look like they will be the ones driving it.
There are many, many unmanned missions happening now making amazing discoveries. Cassini was nothing short of mind blowing.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.
I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate.
Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've done will long term only be a little bit of radiation, some of it structured but so far below the noise floor it will be unrecoverable.
There's every possibility that neither Voyager will ever arrive anywhere ever again. If they do, it's going to be after our galaxy collides with another, and the place they arrive at may not even exist yet.
While the Milky Way galaxy is on course to collide with Andromeda galaxy in 4.5 billion years, that will not make Voyager's arrival anywhere more likely, since the stars are far enough apart that they will not be affected.
My understanding is that it just makes it less predictable once that happens. We don't know exactly where all those stars are, and it gets chaotic once they start interacting.
It probably is a _bit_ more likely as well, you suddenly have ~2x the stars near you and some of them are moving much faster relative to you, it's just not a sure thing by any means.
Well so would be picking up radio signals like the ones we emit.
And while the probability that someone will be able to pick these signals up is low, it is still almost infinitely greater than that of someone finding one of the Voyagers out there.
IMO, throwing out more Voyager like probes is not really the next step in humanities evolution towards space. It was a good step in the 70s, but now we're working to the lay the foundation and hope that one day space travel can be nearly routine as air travel is today. Higher volume of launches, bringing down the costs, etc... will allow hundreds and thousands of Voyagers to be sent out aimed at specific, distant locations.
You may dislike Musk, but SpaceX is pushing getting to space forward.
Launching more Voyagers is like tossing heavy metal disks into a random deep-sea part of the ocean and hoping one of them lands next to a benthic creature that can miraculously appreciate its significance. Not only is God more plausible, so is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It's so blatant that things are only improving, the US is running so many high profile missions, SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
The only people saying that the countries with launch capability right now will not be the ones driving space travel are those who have (ironically) paid zero attention to the developments in progress.
What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy' rather than the future.
> SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be able to sustain any long term efforts and India may well be the future, though it would have to deal with a lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen. South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by their own power.
You can label all of this as progress and in terms of volume launched into space it is impressive, but it doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress towards anything much larger. It's like the software people with 30 times one year of experience, we're getting really good at redoing the years between 1939 and 1969. But we haven't progressed to 1990 even once. 1977: peak humanity.
No, indeed, I'm not a believer. When I see someone that lies with abandon and who regularly behaves in absolutely horrible ways towards others and that person happens to want to establish a colony on another planet my first thought is 'nutcase' not 'savior of humanity'.
I marked Musk very early (long before his name became a household item) as someone with a ton of potential and he has definitely realized some of it. But along the way he's become a horrible human being who will now potentially undo any good that he's done and then some. If you are a believer than I'm perfectly ok with that and I hope that you will be strengthened in your belief and that you are right.
In the meantime I'll just take what I see and extrapolate from there and it doesn't look good.
It actually does move the needle because the key feature of many upcoming vehicles is significant private investment, focus on higher cadences, lower costs and in some cases, partial or full reusability. All of which are factors indicative of increasing expansion into space as it starts increasingly becoming commercialized. That isn't just "getting really good at redoing 1939 to 1969", that's taking the latest in materials science, electronics and so on to push the line in what we are capable of doing in space. These capabilities were simply not realistic even in the 90s. Both American lunar landers under development are near scifi in terms of their capabilities, a far cry from the Apollo era's closet sized tin can.
Saying we're only redoing things is like saying that the latest x86 CPUs are just redoing what the original 8086 did.
Ah sorry for being out of the loop on that one, thanks for the correction. But: it's nothing that hasn't been done many times before, it isn't a space program so much as it is an arms race between NK and SK.
I'm fine with SK getting some satellites into orbit to keep an eye on their neighbor but at the same time I don't see it as a breakthrough of sorts. Starship, if and when it works and if and when it is used to get stuff out of the Earth-Moon system would be a step. For now I don't see that happening any time soon, if at all. But I'm prepared to be amazed, and Gwynne Shotwell has a history of delivering the goods.
We never had the launch rate in the 1960s that we do today. It really doesn’t matter if you believe Musk or not, NASA is contracting with SpaceX to use Starship (and others) for lunar surface missions of far greater capability than Apollo. Our missions to Mars also far exceed what we did in the 60s and 70s, both the US and China are funding and planning sample return missions, in addition to lunar surface bases. And Starship is so capable, it’s launching more for a single Artemis mission than all Apollo combined or all the mass needed for NASA’s Crewed Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0. And Starship is just one of half a dozen RLVs being developed as we speak (with metal bent, engines test firing). We will soon leave the high water mark of Apollo far behind.
You don't have to go that narrow to refute this nonsense. Pretty much nothing was better back then. Many countries experienced regular famines. Much higher infant mortality. Much lower literacy rates. Wanna get surgery in the 70s or now? Medicine might as well be from another planet today. Even just looking at the US many of these statistics are worse and the "a single income could get you a house for a family of four"-BS is also not covered by fact, but by thinking the 70s were accurately depicted by tv shows. Much smaller houses and lower home ownership rates and families statistically had one car, not two as today. On top of that we have people fuming now because we are giving a few billion USD worth of equipment to Ukraine instead of paying for the expensive disposal off that hardware. Back then we paid enormous amounts on preparing for a war to end all wars against the Soviet Union. Things are so much better, it's insane!
> What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy' rather than the future.
You're in a pit, friend. Yes, there is some backsliding in a few spots, but overall education levels are higher than ever and amazing science is happening right freakin' now (JWST, asteroid sample return missions, a real shot at putting humans on the moon again, MRNA vaccines, CRISPR...). Nothing is ever perfect and it's good to recognize that fact, but don't focus only on the bad things or you'll miss all the good things that are happening all around you.
> I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do.
I'm sceptical Musk will actually succeed in establishing a genuine "Mars Colony" in his lifetime.
However, I think it is very likely SpaceX will succeed in landing an uncrewed Starship on Mars-likely within the next 10 years. Even if that's all they achieve, that would represent a massive increase in our robotic exploration abilities, simply in terms of the significantly greater mass - we could land dozens of Mars rovers in a single mission.
And I think a crewed Mars mission eventually happening is likely too. It is likely to take a lot longer than Musk thinks, but he's only 52; he probably will still be around in another 30 years, and it is not impossible he'll still be around in another 40, so I think the odds he'll live to see a crewed mission to Mars are decent.
But there is a big gap between "small-scale crewed scientific research station" and "interplanetary colonisation", and I'm sceptical Musk will live to see that gap traversed. Although he'll probably handwave away the distinction, and claim the first as the start of the second.
I tend to generally ignore Russia in the context of development nowadays in spaceflight because I don't see them having the spare resources or talent to do any meaningful new development. They're good at reusing and iterating what they inherited from the USSR, but they've promised so much new stuff over the years and have delivered on basically nothing. The countries I mentioned have all at least managed to bring online modern "from scratch" designs in reasonable timeframes.
This is only true in the western world. Globally, education has been trending upwards, at least until the pandemic.
What is happening is a noticeable decline in the levels of trust in education and science. Generally, in the rich world, education used to be assumed to be a necessarily good allocation of resources, and whether you accessed it or not was largely a function of your wealth. Now, in some pockets of the world, this is no longer true.
I also think that space travel will only see a revival in public interest if it provides viable economic value or becomes a renewed front for competing nationalism, neither of which appear to be extremely likely in the short term. Up to that point, I think it'll continue to be a playground for billionaires.
Where are you setting the bar for something to be commonly accessible?
Only about 60% of the world’s population has reliable access to clean drinking water. 18% of people own a car.
Compared to those numbers, 20% of people flying seems downright common - especially considering many people likely never fly simply because they have nowhere worth going (relative to cost).
There remains a fairly good chance that Voyager will be the last surviving thing in the universe made by humans. It may not be our pinnacle, but it might be our legacy.
I think you’re both right. They’re cornering a market with little competition because of the high cost barrier, with the hopes of personally owning/controlling space travel and any future colonization of other planets. I believe their primary motivation is monopolization and money, even if the science community experiences a benefit.
I disagree, I think it's the opposite. Men have lofty dreams, they're also realists. How can you realistically get a man on Mars? Use all their talents to work with a government? Or use it to create enough capital to do it yourself (And piss off some people at the same time for fun)?
It's just the whims of the rich and powerful, sometimes we are lucky and their mood aligns with needs of society as a whole.
Sometimes the only way to for a billionaire to differentiate themselves from your run-of-the-mill middle-eastern oil billionaire is a vanity project to Mars.
Why do you even want to put a human on mars? What would you have them do that you can’t do with a probe or robot?. Its extremely risky to put people in space with our present technology. Even if nothing goes “wrong” they are dealing with microgravity and radiation. We aren’t adapted for it at all.
There are a few reasons. You could say that putting humans on Mars has intrinsic value. In other words, "because it's cool". The other main argument for putting humans on Mars is that the grand projects of humanity push our technology forward. Putting humans on Mars requires solving a larger class of problems than sending probes does. The first space race accelerated the development of rocketry, integrated circuits, computers, satellite communications, and materials science. There's reason to believe that sending humans to Mars will cause similar advances in our capabilities, possibly in novel ways that we can't anticipate. A third argument is existential risk. If something catastrophic happens on Earth, there is some probability that having independent colonies on other planets would prevent extinction of the species. This is definitely true in the long term if we truly master the technology of surviving and thriving in space, but it's less realistic in the near term.
That said, I don't think Musk and others working on this problem are taking the challenges of creating a colony on Mars seriously. We know very little about the long-term effects on the human body, reproductive cycle, and psychology. If they're serious about this, one of their top priorities should be funding research to create isolated self-sustaining human colonies closer to Earth as a proof of concept. If we can't survive for decades at the bottom of the ocean or on the moon, we probably can't survive for decades on Mars. We would also need high confidence that generations of humans born on Mars wouldn't accumulate severe genetic damage and birth defects. This is a whole research program in itself that we're nowhere close to solving.
If you really believe that’s what they are doing, well, I really wish I could live with the same ability of ignoring reality.
Elon Musk is not a force of good. He is a sociopathic lunatic that was lucky enough to live at a fruitful intersection between his Messiah complex and a specific deranged state of capitalism.
Musk has stated that his goals for space colonization are for his children’s children and his friend’s grandchildren to be the ones doing all the colonizing, and that earth is just a resource (people included) to burn up in pursuit of that goal. Any scientific advancements in his eyes are for the sole purpose of getting the ultra wealthy into space, with zero concern for the impact that has on the rest of us.
I appreciate the Star Trek reference (V'ger incase somebody doesn't know what I'm talking about - Star Trek, The Motion Picture). That movie awed me as a kid.
Indeed. A group of people went through 15 years of financial hardship and horrific war and it made them so strong willed and determined to do something with surviving that. I’m grateful to not have to have gone through all that but also accept that they formed a certain wisdom we can’t appreciate fully.
That era should be looked on like we do the renaissance, etc. Just a remarkable era that we still are building on today. The springboard.
I don't know if the 1981 issue is covered, but you can read some very fun examples of bugfixing and OTA updates on the Voyager spacecraft in this article:
Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in prod!
"A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to automatically restart some of the critical functions in the event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked as designed."
NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was designed to? Is it a political thing: they set their success criteria low just in case something goes wrong, but actually intend a much longer lifespan?
Sorry if this seems an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world. I actually love all this stuff - I'm just curious if there is a pattern here and what the reason is if so.
I guess the problem is lead time. You want overspecced because you get one shot every 10-20 years between design, launch windows and the all too present political angle.
There is certainly a political element, when they tried doing cheaper missions they had two failures in a row which was really embarassing, even though probably if they had stuck with it it would have still worked out cheaper than using the low risk approach.
Mainly though if you design a spacecraft to have a 99% chance of lasting five years it ends up with a pretty high chance of lasting 30 years.
If you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5 years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to design it in a way that it didn't.
Overengineering is building in buffers that you didn't actually need. But it may be much later when anyone can prove it.
See also the roman aqueducts. Today we would have used about half as much stone, and they'd be falling apart in our lifetimes. Instead, lucky chunks of them have lasted 20 times as long as anyone ever could have expected to need them.
Designing things such that they don't require/ use steel reinforcement goes a long way towards having a (potentially) indefinite lifespan.
Reinforced concrete and masonry design are underappreciated disciplines of modern engineering, but their Achilles heel is that reinforcement rusts, rust expands, and expansion ruptures. All at relatively accelerated speeds.
Things like the aqueducts weren't necessarily overengineered, they were just designed (mostly) without quickly deteriorating elements, like steel.
Which is to say, 2000 yrs ago, the design of an aqueduct with a 10yr lifespan didn't differ much compared to a hypothetical one with a 100yr or even 1000yr lifespan. At least compared to how things would be done today.
Much of space design seems to be similar, where the minimum requirements aren't that far off from what seems like excessive engineering. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything was "overengineered".
That's actually part of the thinking behind the "faster, better, cheaper" (FBC) policy of NASA in the late 1990s / early 2000s:
The intent of FBC was to decrease the amount of time and cost for each mission and to increase the number of missions and overall scientific results obtained on each mission
That was something of a mixed bag: numerous missions did succeed and returned phenomenal science, but there were also some spectacular and humiliating failures:
In 1999, after the failure of four missions that used the FBC approach for project
management, you commissioned several independent reviews to examine FBC and
mission failures, search for root causes, and recommend changes.
(Both quotes from the transmittal letter for NASA's 2001 report on the policy, as subsequent sentences.)
It turns out that space is an unbelievably unforgiving environment, and attempting to perform repairs, maintenance, tune-ups, and/or mitigations at distances of hundreds of millions or billions of kilometers, often at the end of hours-long round-trip speed-of-light lags, is challenging at best.
At the same time, FBC mitigated risks, and some of the problem may well have been a failure to manage expectations: with FBC, some missions would succeed, whilst others would not. But even in that context, gambling losses on $150 million bets remain painful. (It's worth considering that there have since been numerous failures by other nations attempting various space missions, this isn't a failing of the US alone.)
It's also worth considering that earlier missions, notably Apollo & Skylab, suffered numerous critical incidents, one fatally catastrophic (and that on the ground), but any one of which could have resulted in total mission losses, including lighting strikes on launch, computer failures on Lunar landing (Apollo 11), wiring-induced oxygen tank explosion (Apollo 13, resulting in abort of the planned landing), and failure to deploy Skylab's solar panel and sunsheild. People tend to remember the major incidents of Apollos 1 and 13, but not the numerous other close calls. The US Space Shuttle programme similarly had two catastrophic failures but each occurred within the context of numerous other close calls. The envelope for both error and deviance is vanishingly thin.
Since the early 2000s, NASA have modulated their approach to FBC. Some missions, such as the JWST, are absolute monoliths and relied on extensive and expensive testing and development, which has paid off with absolutely flawless execution of launch and deployment and truly universe-expanding insights. Others, such as the Mars rover programs, have iterated on concepts starting with small, cheap, and simple rovers of limited range to incorporating a "technology demonstrator" in the form of the Ingenuity heliocopter which accompanies the SUV-sized Perseverance rover. The Huygans lander (part of the Saturn-based Cassini mission, landing on the moon Titan), and Galileo probe (part of the Galileo orbiter mission) both rode along with and extended orbiter-probe missions to provide actual contact with planetary or lunar atmosphere and/or surfaces.
More on FBC:
"'Faster, better, and cheaper' at NASA: Lessons learned in managing and accepting risk"
But a large part of the cost is not just construction but testing and verification. Not only that it does what it needs to do, but that it survives launch without destroying itself, survives being in a vacuum etc.
Most of that testing is specific to how each individual item was manufactured, so there's little cost saving if any to be had there.
Then there's the price of the launch, and the time on the radio dishes to follow them.
And even if you design everything so it has a 75% chance of working for 5 years, some of the things won't last 5 years, but you'll still only hear about and remember the ones that work for much longer.
On a real note, it is hard to do accidentally, but very much possible to do on purpose - so much so that it is currrently a driving factor of our evonomies.
Based on some JPL documentary videos, I recall the engineers involved intentionally over-specced the components on the hopes that the mission would be later extended to go further out into the solar system. Check out the JPL channel on YouTube. There is a video series about the different missions throughout NASA history. Its really worthwhile watching.
In addition to what other people mentioned (if you design something to have a 99.99% chance of lasting x years, it'll probably last some multiple of x), a lot of failures follow what's called a bathtub curve (visual depiction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve#/media/File%3A...).
Once you can make something work for 1 day, you're past the most dangerous phase.
NASA definitely does overengineer things at the beginning, but it's worth noting that an incredible amount of work goes into keeping these things alive past their end date. For example regularly updating the software to be more efficient so probes can keep functioning and communicating despite having less and less power and being further and further away.
There's also lessons learned once a mission is in progress, like "if we move in this weird pattern we can shake some dust off the solar panels."
Finally, a lot of these missions that continue long past the predicted end date do so with some limitations - maybe going forward a particular sensor is unavailable or certain maneuvers can't be done anymore - but there's still enough to justify keeping the mission going.
Organizations always react to incentives and all of the above and more are probably at play.
The funding incentives are probably such that failure means leadership is hauled before political theatre and accused of wasting people's taxes Vs say SpaceX where it's let's blow up one more rocket.
The political situation also probably makes it infeasible to ask for or rely on long term program commitments (which is tied to scientist & engineer employment) but once the hardware is already in place, getting extensions is probably quite cheap and non controversial
All these probably incentivize a risk averse and over engineering culture. Of course that benefits science fans, so I'd say more power to them :-)
Trick I learned from an old wrench: overestimate time and cost, then when you deliver something in half the time and half the cost they'll think you're twice the mechanic.
I'm not sure that's what NASA does, but it certainly doesn't hurt their PR.
I think it’s political. It’s untenable to tell the public that it will work for “15 years with a 95% confidence interval” and have it fail after 14 years. There would be congressional hearings.
But you must give a number, so sandbagging makes sense.
It’s the same thing with telling your wife when you’ll be home…if you say 7pm and it’s 7:05, you’re late and dinner is cold. But if you say 8:30 and it’s 7:05, you’re a hero.
I think it's not so much a question of deliberate overspeccing, but more that each of these missions is its own prototype. You're asked to design something to do a small part of the task, but you won't get a chance to try again if it goes wrong. You really really don't want your part to be the reason the mission fails. And you don't get to test your part in the real deployment environment and find out everything you need to know before your design the production part. So you have to design for every eventuality you can foresee, and then add some margin for the events you cannot foresee. So even if the spec is exactly right, to ensure you satisfy the spec first time with the uncertainties of the production environment, you end up producing a part that has as much margin for error as you can get away with in the mass and financial budget. Everyone involved does the same thing, because no-one really knows what the production environment will be like, and no-one wants to be the reason the mission fails. And so you end up with a spacecraft that is as overengineered as possible given the budget, even if it isn't specced that way.
The game is, if you get funding for X years, but you can remain on mission for X+N years, you have an opportunity to get easy funding after your initial funding runs out.
That's a major incentive to over build things. Engineers also love making things better, so, your workforce is defacto onboard with that mission.
And then, there's the issue that, basically every long term mission to space requires bespoke spacecraft. That makes things very, very expensive, but also, presents a requirement to engineer your way around unknown mission requirements. They know what they want to do, but, they don't really know how it'll work in reality. They can test some things, sure, but it's impossible to know every variable.
For instance, you're building a bridge with a 100ft span that's 50ft above the ground at the highest, in an area with a maximum wind speed of 50mph, and a maximum load capacity of 2000 tons of traffic moving 65mph. Now, that's basically enough information to build that bridge.
Now imagine that, you're asked to build that same bridge, but, you don't know how fast the traffic is moving, that's more difficult. Now, in addition to that, you don't know how much wind loading you have to deal with, more difficult still. Now imagine that, your load capacity isn't certain either.
Could you still build the bridge?
Of course you could, but, you'll have to build it with what you think are reasonable requirements. You might do some research into those requirements, but you also might not be able to. Where you end up is, the bridge you build is going to be over built, likely by a significant margin, if you desire to build a successful bridge.
This is the issue with designing spacecraft, you have more questions about requirements than you have answers, and sure, we have more answers than we used to, and the available pool of knowledge has only increased, but many points of uncertainty still remain. Not an unusual engineering problem, we'll get there eventually. It was about 100 years of thinking for us to learn to fly at all, another 100 years to learn how to do it well, and there's still plenty of room for improvement. Space flight will be much the same, and eventually we'll have the space equivalent of the honda civic
Some missions blow up on the launch pad, or fail to reach orbit, or are lost mid-flight, or crash on landing. I wonder if the average actual mission length exceeds the average expected mission length.
I find it interesting how they use “aging spacecraft” and “exceptionally long lifespans” of these devices. In terms of the age of the universe, or the time that light from a star has travelled to us, it’s minute. Aging in relation to human life maybe.
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I suspect you're using some plugin that's blocking cookies (whether they correctly detect that as EasyList or not). Due to that, it's possible that CNN can't store your response to their privacy popup and so they have decided to limit their liability by preventing access.
If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to increase your privacy because you're running a piece of blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.
The opt-in is only required if they collect your information. If they take the default as opt-out then they don't have to show you any prompt and have no liability.
> While the spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands transmitted from the mission team, a problem with that telecommunications unit means no science or engineering data from Voyager 1 is being returned to Earth.
A probe going further in space than any other that suddenly starts sending back incomprehensible science data is a pretty killer start to a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
There's a nice recent documentary about the team that keeps these spacecraft working and developing software updates, "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022):
I mean, even if they can't recover it at this point, it's still been far more reliable and useful than any program I've ever written or hobby electronics project I've built. Along with Apollo it's really a testament to the phenomenal productivity of American science in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
648 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadVoyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s
...which do a swing by the sun to get up to 22 AU/year.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/voyager-1-solar-syst...
that we know about and actively track
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/s. So depending on the launch orientation to orbit, the manhole cover could either still be in orbit around the sun, or have a velocity of up to 43 km/s at escape. So it's possible, if it didn't get vaporized, that is.
The Wikipedia page has the date, time, and location for the Pascal-B test:
August 27, 1957 22:35:00.0, 37.04903°N 116.0347°W
So that would have been 10:35PM local daylight savings time from southern Nevada, so 9:30PM solar time.
Turns out the potential adder from earth's rotation is a negligible ~0.37 km/s at that latitude. With earth tilted by 23.5 degrees, we have it launched 37-23.5 = 13.5 degrees away from the orbital plane. That seems smallish, so let's ignore that. Seems like the best time would have been around 6AM to add to the orbital velocity and 6PM to be about the worst, subtracting off the orbital velocity. At 9:30PM, our 55 km/s launch vector is 127.5 degrees (8.5/24*360) away from the 30 km/s orbit vector. For a combined velocity of around 43.8 km/s. Check my math.
Looking down on the north pole, the earth rotates and orbits counter clockwise. This means that anything from midnight to noon will be aligned with the orbital vector and anything noon to midnight will be offset. 930PM will be about halfway between sunset and midnight, so losing 11 km/s from orbital velocity sounds about right.
https://www.heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx
There may be alien civilizations, but they might be on worlds without the adequate resources or the right type of gravity to reach escape velocity.
And there simply hasn’t been enough time in the universe for many space faring civilizations to have arisen yet. We might be really early.
Going from zero to one of something tends to be a lot less likely than going from one to two or more.
It is clearly possible to have a space-faring civilization, we’ve seen one. But the density could be extremely low. Fine, in infinite space we’ll get an infinite number of spacefaring civilizations whatever the odds. They exist, we just might never interact if the density is low enough.
But, I’m not sure, maybe it is a philosophical question or maybe it is a physics one (I only had an engineering education so at the extremes these get hard to distinguish sometimes). Does the universe outside of our light cone “exist” in some sense? If not, then I guess the universe is not quite so big.
Further, you might suppose that the planet needs to be in some reasonable band, in terms of power being absorbed from the star, to be amenable to life. And that, in order to hit spaceflight, you’ll need to have accumulated a certain amount of energy (for rocket fuel). This could bound the beginning of space-flight-viable planets to those which have already had a good amount of life for a couple hundred million years.
So this would seem, to me at least, to limit our universe of possible planets to those that are more than a couple hundred million years old, at least, in our frame of reference, right? (and this is assuming most of the Precambrian was a waste of time that could be skipped through lucky evolution).
NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
P.s. I also wouldn't go to Fox, before you think this is left/right bias. My bias is against regular media reporting on anything scientific. It's either rendered alarmist, so simplified it's wrong, or some combination of the two
Who's that in a "Warner Bros. Discovery" world? Glancing at the wikipedia page I see no clear single owner anymore.
Edit: not intending to come to CNN's defense in any way here, just genuine curious who's pulling the strings now in the new ownership structure.
Second, I just stop engaging when someone says a company/org is run by a right-wing nut/left-wing Communist
Popsci can be kinda clickbaity too, but CNN's title is just shameless.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-2/engi...
> Editor’s note: A previous version of this post identified the TMU as the telecommunications unit. It is the telemetry modulation unit.
since clickbait title was made due to nasa's error that has been fixed ...can the clickbait title also be fixed, please?
I also hate the wording, it threw me off for a few seconds and made me lose min train of thought until I realized the author simply doesn't know what the word "additionally" means.
(I think ChatGPT has you all beat)
The CNN writing looks uncannily similar but without the same meaning. I'm not saying it's machine generated, but I won't say it isn't.
The transmitter on Earth can be massive with an enormous power budget. Sending from Voyager might be much more constrained: less compute to compress the payload, less power to send it.
The speed of light is obviously the same either way but it’s not obvious to me that the speed of a byte (error corrected, etc) must be.
It's not obvious that it is :) We don't have any way to prove that it is the same, because every experiment to measure the speed of light going from A to B requires some light to go from B to A which cancels out any difference. We just assume that it is the same because we don't have any reason to believe it's not.
Veritasium video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
Anything to merge the ideas together would make it clear that it is just one phenomenon, for example.
> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft, and so the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
well, actually... https://thenewstack.io/nasa-programmer-remembers-debugging-l...
I imagine something more like a video game. Simulating the systems but keeping it engaging.
It’s sending nothing useful.
if it had hit the wall and gone totally silent, that would be a different thing entire.
where by dead we mean that the entropy of her current utterances is failing to move extant priors
It also tells us that ca. 1970s kit can survive past the termination shock, i.e. in interstellar space.
there's lots of things much further away broadcasting information to us. just go outside at night and look up. you'll see a bunch of 'em
The sun is not communicating with us, and we know its "radio" is still working.
It's a pedantic, and incorrect, argument against the headline. The guidelines actually say not to do this, even when you're right.
exchange actually does too much heavy lifting here. This almost passed, but no; communication is the transfer/movement of information.
One-way communication can convey (even if requiring a previously agreed upon compression mechanism) information - even a single bit or even the existence of a signal at all can be used - think about using the time between signals as a medium, etc.
Heartbeat signals (inverted dead-man switches) exchange information; it doesn't have to be the same type. The beat source explicitly proclaims it's existence in space-time and the receiving end can infer it's existence at a certain time.
Like natives' smoke patterns of Morse code of radio waves, using periodicity to convey bit value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication#:~:tex....
One-way communication is a valid type of "communication".
If the spacecraft is known to not be receiving, I think the term "broadcasting" would apply.
I didn't say that. The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response.
The article title and intro are correct. For all intents and purposes, the spacecraft has stopped communicating. Broke down, used in the intro, is better than stopped. Discussing this is pedantic and pointless, which is why the guidelines state not to make comments like the original one. As we can all see. It has led nowhere interesting.
And you and everyone keep bouncing around all these side definitions. The definition of communication between earth and a spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 is implied and assumed to be standard two-way communication.
> It takes far less power to receive than it does to transmit, so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were still receiving commands but unable to send responses.
I don't follow. The spacecraft is known to still be transmitting a signal.
That is by definition "one way communication".
You're saying it's not communication, but it absolutely is. I'm not sure why you can't accept that.
So just to end this, what would you and the others like the title to be given the article is perfectly clear and with a title that is substantively different? So we don't have to non-discuss this anymore.
Voyager 1 is sending repeated data back to Earth.
I think I saw an article on tech dirt saying the spacecraft was sending stuck in "groundhog's day" that I thought was clever
If I'm talking to a person, and then they just start repeating a nonsense sound no matter what I say to them, is it really inaccurate to say communication has stopped, especially when it's immediately followed up with by saying communication has broken down and explained further? No, not really. Certainly isn't wrong enough to have this long, fruitless discussion that I feel embarassed I participated in.
>Communication means an exchange of information. Receiving a signal does not.
You were wrong. Communication does not explicitly require response.
The definition of "communication":
>"means of sending or receiving information, such as phone lines or computers."
It says "Sending or receiving information". It does not say "sending and receiving".
The spacecraft can be receiving perfectly fine, and that is communication from earth to the spacecraft. We may not be getting a valid response, but that does not mean we haven't communicated information to the spacecraft.
This is the obtuse hill you chose to keep dying on.
There are radio antennas across the Earth listening to its very weak signal.
More details: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really different, just more sensitive and sophisticated (and expensive).
And on the receiving end, we have decent arrays of antennas to pick up the signals.
Here's a nifty document detailing the coms of Voyager: https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--14...
Fig 3-4 on page 46 (page 10 in the document) shows the signal flow.
NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and you can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with. The Voyagers are usually active any time I look.
[0] https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
https://www.space.com/22787-voyager-1-signal-interstellar-sp...
(Presumably with one of the siblings of the fetching probe going further and faster than the Voyager probes ever managed)
(So this could be surprisingly difficult even with major propulsion leaps...)
https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/54983/154333
Plus Ricardo Montalban!
EDIT: Maybe Aliens picked it up last night and they are on their way here now because we forgot to include a golden record player.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_P...
But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly keeping these two machines operational across so much time and distance in such a hostile environment.
Thank you Voyager team present and past; you’ve helped inspire so many young people to STEM careers, and you’ve done so with a project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive side of humanity.
I remember waiting for the next month's National Geographic to include the next planet Voyager visited. Joys of the pre Internet era.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu3kuUB1sOQ
I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.
Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've done will long term only be a little bit of radiation, some of it structured but so far below the noise floor it will be unrecoverable.
https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-dist...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_...
It probably is a _bit_ more likely as well, you suddenly have ~2x the stars near you and some of them are moving much faster relative to you, it's just not a sure thing by any means.
And while the probability that someone will be able to pick these signals up is low, it is still almost infinitely greater than that of someone finding one of the Voyagers out there.
You may dislike Musk, but SpaceX is pushing getting to space forward.
It's so blatant that things are only improving, the US is running so many high profile missions, SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
The only people saying that the countries with launch capability right now will not be the ones driving space travel are those who have (ironically) paid zero attention to the developments in progress.
> SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be able to sustain any long term efforts and India may well be the future, though it would have to deal with a lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen. South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by their own power.
You can label all of this as progress and in terms of volume launched into space it is impressive, but it doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress towards anything much larger. It's like the software people with 30 times one year of experience, we're getting really good at redoing the years between 1939 and 1969. But we haven't progressed to 1990 even once. 1977: peak humanity.
I marked Musk very early (long before his name became a household item) as someone with a ton of potential and he has definitely realized some of it. But along the way he's become a horrible human being who will now potentially undo any good that he's done and then some. If you are a believer than I'm perfectly ok with that and I hope that you will be strengthened in your belief and that you are right.
In the meantime I'll just take what I see and extrapolate from there and it doesn't look good.
What of spacex’s performance are you extrapolating from?
South Korea achieved orbit by their own power, on their own rocket: https://www.voanews.com/a/south-korea-tests-space-rocket-/66...
It actually does move the needle because the key feature of many upcoming vehicles is significant private investment, focus on higher cadences, lower costs and in some cases, partial or full reusability. All of which are factors indicative of increasing expansion into space as it starts increasingly becoming commercialized. That isn't just "getting really good at redoing 1939 to 1969", that's taking the latest in materials science, electronics and so on to push the line in what we are capable of doing in space. These capabilities were simply not realistic even in the 90s. Both American lunar landers under development are near scifi in terms of their capabilities, a far cry from the Apollo era's closet sized tin can.
Saying we're only redoing things is like saying that the latest x86 CPUs are just redoing what the original 8086 did.
I'm fine with SK getting some satellites into orbit to keep an eye on their neighbor but at the same time I don't see it as a breakthrough of sorts. Starship, if and when it works and if and when it is used to get stuff out of the Earth-Moon system would be a step. For now I don't see that happening any time soon, if at all. But I'm prepared to be amazed, and Gwynne Shotwell has a history of delivering the goods.
I think the LGBTQ and minority communities would like to have a word. Don't get sucked into the golden age fallacy.
You're in a pit, friend. Yes, there is some backsliding in a few spots, but overall education levels are higher than ever and amazing science is happening right freakin' now (JWST, asteroid sample return missions, a real shot at putting humans on the moon again, MRNA vaccines, CRISPR...). Nothing is ever perfect and it's good to recognize that fact, but don't focus only on the bad things or you'll miss all the good things that are happening all around you.
I'm sceptical Musk will actually succeed in establishing a genuine "Mars Colony" in his lifetime.
However, I think it is very likely SpaceX will succeed in landing an uncrewed Starship on Mars-likely within the next 10 years. Even if that's all they achieve, that would represent a massive increase in our robotic exploration abilities, simply in terms of the significantly greater mass - we could land dozens of Mars rovers in a single mission.
And I think a crewed Mars mission eventually happening is likely too. It is likely to take a lot longer than Musk thinks, but he's only 52; he probably will still be around in another 30 years, and it is not impossible he'll still be around in another 40, so I think the odds he'll live to see a crewed mission to Mars are decent.
But there is a big gap between "small-scale crewed scientific research station" and "interplanetary colonisation", and I'm sceptical Musk will live to see that gap traversed. Although he'll probably handwave away the distinction, and claim the first as the start of the second.
I don't like them politically, but they are clearly a very capable spacefaring nation, with the capability to develop new space-related technologies.
What is happening is a noticeable decline in the levels of trust in education and science. Generally, in the rich world, education used to be assumed to be a necessarily good allocation of resources, and whether you accessed it or not was largely a function of your wealth. Now, in some pockets of the world, this is no longer true.
I also think that space travel will only see a revival in public interest if it provides viable economic value or becomes a renewed front for competing nationalism, neither of which appear to be extremely likely in the short term. Up to that point, I think it'll continue to be a playground for billionaires.
That seems like it’s a pretty heavily “gilded only” type of thing especially if you look at percentage distributions of flight frequency and by class.
Only about 60% of the world’s population has reliable access to clean drinking water. 18% of people own a car.
Compared to those numbers, 20% of people flying seems downright common - especially considering many people likely never fly simply because they have nowhere worth going (relative to cost).
So yes 100% of the population having clean water seems like the low bar
As to flying, it’s probably good there aren’t more flyers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_l...
Sometimes the only way to for a billionaire to differentiate themselves from your run-of-the-mill middle-eastern oil billionaire is a vanity project to Mars.
That said, I don't think Musk and others working on this problem are taking the challenges of creating a colony on Mars seriously. We know very little about the long-term effects on the human body, reproductive cycle, and psychology. If they're serious about this, one of their top priorities should be funding research to create isolated self-sustaining human colonies closer to Earth as a proof of concept. If we can't survive for decades at the bottom of the ocean or on the moon, we probably can't survive for decades on Mars. We would also need high confidence that generations of humans born on Mars wouldn't accumulate severe genetic damage and birth defects. This is a whole research program in itself that we're nowhere close to solving.
Not really trustworthy...
That era should be looked on like we do the renaissance, etc. Just a remarkable era that we still are building on today. The springboard.
I would love to read about specifically what went wrong in 1981.
The closest I could find was this old article from 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...
But there isn't nearly enough detail in it. Is there an analysis anywhere online of that event?
https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in prod!
"A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to automatically restart some of the critical functions in the event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked as designed."
NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was designed to? Is it a political thing: they set their success criteria low just in case something goes wrong, but actually intend a much longer lifespan?
Sorry if this seems an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world. I actually love all this stuff - I'm just curious if there is a pattern here and what the reason is if so.
Mainly though if you design a spacecraft to have a 99% chance of lasting five years it ends up with a pretty high chance of lasting 30 years.
It looks really really bad for NASA when it's a mission failure in terms of what its was funded for, the politicians start talking about budget cuts.
See also the roman aqueducts. Today we would have used about half as much stone, and they'd be falling apart in our lifetimes. Instead, lucky chunks of them have lasted 20 times as long as anyone ever could have expected to need them.
Reinforced concrete and masonry design are underappreciated disciplines of modern engineering, but their Achilles heel is that reinforcement rusts, rust expands, and expansion ruptures. All at relatively accelerated speeds.
Things like the aqueducts weren't necessarily overengineered, they were just designed (mostly) without quickly deteriorating elements, like steel.
Which is to say, 2000 yrs ago, the design of an aqueduct with a 10yr lifespan didn't differ much compared to a hypothetical one with a 100yr or even 1000yr lifespan. At least compared to how things would be done today.
Much of space design seems to be similar, where the minimum requirements aren't that far off from what seems like excessive engineering. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything was "overengineered".
The intent of FBC was to decrease the amount of time and cost for each mission and to increase the number of missions and overall scientific results obtained on each mission
That was something of a mixed bag: numerous missions did succeed and returned phenomenal science, but there were also some spectacular and humiliating failures:
In 1999, after the failure of four missions that used the FBC approach for project management, you commissioned several independent reviews to examine FBC and mission failures, search for root causes, and recommend changes.
(Both quotes from the transmittal letter for NASA's 2001 report on the policy, as subsequent sentences.)
<https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY01/ig-01-009.pdf>
It turns out that space is an unbelievably unforgiving environment, and attempting to perform repairs, maintenance, tune-ups, and/or mitigations at distances of hundreds of millions or billions of kilometers, often at the end of hours-long round-trip speed-of-light lags, is challenging at best.
At the same time, FBC mitigated risks, and some of the problem may well have been a failure to manage expectations: with FBC, some missions would succeed, whilst others would not. But even in that context, gambling losses on $150 million bets remain painful. (It's worth considering that there have since been numerous failures by other nations attempting various space missions, this isn't a failing of the US alone.)
It's also worth considering that earlier missions, notably Apollo & Skylab, suffered numerous critical incidents, one fatally catastrophic (and that on the ground), but any one of which could have resulted in total mission losses, including lighting strikes on launch, computer failures on Lunar landing (Apollo 11), wiring-induced oxygen tank explosion (Apollo 13, resulting in abort of the planned landing), and failure to deploy Skylab's solar panel and sunsheild. People tend to remember the major incidents of Apollos 1 and 13, but not the numerous other close calls. The US Space Shuttle programme similarly had two catastrophic failures but each occurred within the context of numerous other close calls. The envelope for both error and deviance is vanishingly thin.
Since the early 2000s, NASA have modulated their approach to FBC. Some missions, such as the JWST, are absolute monoliths and relied on extensive and expensive testing and development, which has paid off with absolutely flawless execution of launch and deployment and truly universe-expanding insights. Others, such as the Mars rover programs, have iterated on concepts starting with small, cheap, and simple rovers of limited range to incorporating a "technology demonstrator" in the form of the Ingenuity heliocopter which accompanies the SUV-sized Perseverance rover. The Huygans lander (part of the Saturn-based Cassini mission, landing on the moon Titan), and Galileo probe (part of the Galileo orbiter mission) both rode along with and extended orbiter-probe missions to provide actual contact with planetary or lunar atmosphere and/or surfaces.
More on FBC:
"'Faster, better, and cheaper' at NASA: Lessons learned in managing and accepting risk"
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...>
"Faster, Better, Cheaper: A maligned era of NASA's history"
< magicalhippo ↗ Making them yes.
But a large part of the cost is not just construction but testing and verification. Not only that it does what it needs to do, but that it survives launch without destroying itself, survives being in a vacuum etc.
Most of that testing is specific to how each individual item was manufactured, so there's little cost saving if any to be had there.
Then there's the price of the launch, and the time on the radio dishes to follow them.
On a real note, it is hard to do accidentally, but very much possible to do on purpose - so much so that it is currrently a driving factor of our evonomies.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...
Once you can make something work for 1 day, you're past the most dangerous phase.
There's also lessons learned once a mission is in progress, like "if we move in this weird pattern we can shake some dust off the solar panels."
Finally, a lot of these missions that continue long past the predicted end date do so with some limitations - maybe going forward a particular sensor is unavailable or certain maneuvers can't be done anymore - but there's still enough to justify keeping the mission going.
The funding incentives are probably such that failure means leadership is hauled before political theatre and accused of wasting people's taxes Vs say SpaceX where it's let's blow up one more rocket.
The political situation also probably makes it infeasible to ask for or rely on long term program commitments (which is tied to scientist & engineer employment) but once the hardware is already in place, getting extensions is probably quite cheap and non controversial
All these probably incentivize a risk averse and over engineering culture. Of course that benefits science fans, so I'd say more power to them :-)
I'm not sure that's what NASA does, but it certainly doesn't hurt their PR.
But you must give a number, so sandbagging makes sense.
It’s the same thing with telling your wife when you’ll be home…if you say 7pm and it’s 7:05, you’re late and dinner is cold. But if you say 8:30 and it’s 7:05, you’re a hero.
Today, Voyager 1 leaves a hero.
When everyone isn't focused on salary but is motivated by an idea to solve the problem there are massive gains.
That's a major incentive to over build things. Engineers also love making things better, so, your workforce is defacto onboard with that mission.
And then, there's the issue that, basically every long term mission to space requires bespoke spacecraft. That makes things very, very expensive, but also, presents a requirement to engineer your way around unknown mission requirements. They know what they want to do, but, they don't really know how it'll work in reality. They can test some things, sure, but it's impossible to know every variable.
For instance, you're building a bridge with a 100ft span that's 50ft above the ground at the highest, in an area with a maximum wind speed of 50mph, and a maximum load capacity of 2000 tons of traffic moving 65mph. Now, that's basically enough information to build that bridge. Now imagine that, you're asked to build that same bridge, but, you don't know how fast the traffic is moving, that's more difficult. Now, in addition to that, you don't know how much wind loading you have to deal with, more difficult still. Now imagine that, your load capacity isn't certain either.
Could you still build the bridge? Of course you could, but, you'll have to build it with what you think are reasonable requirements. You might do some research into those requirements, but you also might not be able to. Where you end up is, the bridge you build is going to be over built, likely by a significant margin, if you desire to build a successful bridge.
This is the issue with designing spacecraft, you have more questions about requirements than you have answers, and sure, we have more answers than we used to, and the available pool of knowledge has only increased, but many points of uncertainty still remain. Not an unusual engineering problem, we'll get there eventually. It was about 100 years of thinking for us to learn to fly at all, another 100 years to learn how to do it well, and there's still plenty of room for improvement. Space flight will be much the same, and eventually we'll have the space equivalent of the honda civic
NASA tech from the 60s 70s
Ftfy
Go figure.
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Passing it through Google Translate works, though:
https://www-cnn-com.translate.goog/2023/12/13/world/voyager-...
If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to increase your privacy because you're running a piece of blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.
A probe going further in space than any other that suddenly starts sending back incomprehensible science data is a pretty killer start to a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/