Who does this
Musk-ovites that want to take NASA’s budget and out it in Elon Musk’s pocket.
This used to be the case, but now the tables have turned. There was a time when SpaceX launches were streamed in 4k and NASA launches were only 720p. Now NASA streams launches in 4k and SpaceX streams moved to Xitter.
Which only allows 1080p streams. That means the highest pixel quality streams of SpaceX launches are from third parties like everyday astronaut.
Should all of NASA’s budget go to SpaceX? Obviously not. But should they outsource their rocket development and launches to SpaceX, at least until the next competitive bid? Without question.
The Falcon 9 has already revolutionized earth observation and science projects with how cheap it has become to get science satellites into orbit, and Starship is an even crazier reduction in cost and expansion of capabilities. It will be able to lift 100 to 150 tons for $30M per launch, and will be able to launch 30+ times a year. SLS, NASA’s traditionally designed and built rocket, will be able to lift 95 tons to orbit for $2200M per launch, and can only ever launch twice per year.
Do you know how crazy of a difference that is for NASA’s science programs? For their exact same budget, they can either launch 100 tons of experiments once per year, or they can launch 100 tons of experiments every 5 days.
This is the correct answer.
NASA
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400 km?
The ISS orbits at an altitude between 360-440 km
The generally accepted “border” between space and earth is the Karman line which is only about 100km up
People are complaining about pics from the ISS? I thought they must be talking about Mars or something. ISS pics are usually amazing.
Even the Mars pics are great these days. There are some awesome photos over at !perseverancerover@lemmy.world.
Ooo not that far, I might take a bike trip
Get some grippy tires.
jump good
But that’s shorter than Texas! How hard can it be!
Valid, but I hate your texas analogy.
Texas is nearly 4,000 miles tall. We just hang out on the surface.
ISS orbit is 408km.
No, it currently is at an altitude of 426km (was at 423km when I started writing), the orbit isn’t at a fixed altitude though, it varies, and the residual atmosphere causes drag which means every once in a while the orbit has to be adjusted.
My favorite fact about the ISS is that it actually has an engine to do its own orbital boosts. Astronauts have taken videos where they slowly drift from one side of the cabin to the other during a burn
Yeah, but as far as I know at least in the past they usually used Soyuz or Progress spacecraft for orbit boosts. Videos of it are very cool.
That is well within the range I posted, yes.
400km is nothing, if you have/had satellite TV the signal comes from a geostationary orbit (35 786 km) and it has to get there first and if you’re not exactly below the satellite it’s even farther away. Streams from the ISS having low quality (do they actually have low quality?) is due to either bad cameras or cameras aging faster in space due to high energy particles hitting it.
The ISS also moves relative to the receiver, whereas geostationary satellites don’t.
I feel like “moves relative” also understates just how fast it moves: ~19,000mph
It’s a trade-off, either you have to do tracking and compensate for doppler shift or you have to deal with really bad SNR.
While going 17000km/h.
Well, depends on your reference point.
Well, yeah. The earth is a better reference frame, but the orbital velocity of the moon (3679.2 km/h) is no less impressive.
That’s very earth centric of you
One might say geocentric…Aristotle was right y’all.
There was an unfortunate overwriting incident:
The Apollo 11 missing tapes were those that were recorded from Apollo 11’s slow-scan television (SSTV) telecast in its raw format on telemetry data tape at the time of the first Moon landing in 1969 and subsequently lost.
Meanwhile the perseverance rover sending back incredible quality footage of its landing
I was going to say, forget 400km, try 8.5 light minutes lol
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NASA TV was actually one few things I recall being on the Mbone.
Is 400 km a lot? 🤷♀️ I’m american…
Edit: thank yall, I was being cheeky
It’s 200 km from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. The moon is 400.000 km away
Your fancy decimal/comma swapping sure does make this seem like nothing with extra significant digits.
The moon is 4 •105 km away
I truly don’t mean this as an insult, but the second half of your post could apply to almost anything after a question mark it could be a new form of “that’s what she said”
You could be a trailblazer🤷♂️ But then I’m Irish…
