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Came here to say this - I frequently wonder when (not if) these grandiose NASA et al missions to e.g the moon etc will be overtaken by someone taking a joyride
by mattlondon 4y ago
Came here to say this - I frequently wonder when (not if) these grandiose NASA et al missions to e.g the moon etc will be overtaken by someone taking a joyride in a commercial space launch.
E.g. NASA finally land their 300 squillion dollar 20-years-in-the-making moon probe, only to find a social media influencer had already had a space picnic at their landing site.
- GolfPopper 4y agoWhen mass is extremely limited, and launches are rare due to cost, it makes sense to build super-expensive probes, because you're putting all your eggs in one basket, and you want that basket to do everything it possibly can when you get there. IF Elon gets anything close to the launch rate he wants for starship, all the game theory that goes into the last fifty years of robotic exploration spacecraft design becomes obsolete over the course of a year or two. Need more mass, for fuel or ship? Tank or link-up in orbit. Worries about reliability change, because it's suddenly easier and cheaper to send a half-dozen spacecraft built for one-tenth the cost (or less) than it used to be to send a single super-expensive one. You still need to pay for the team running the instruments, navigating the spacecraft, and pointing the instruments, but with more craft that are likely more "generic", that will hopefully become a little easier (and thus cheaper), too. One overall need will (I'm guessing, this is out of my field - I'm a space exploration fan) be to upgrade the Deep Space Network to handle more traffic.