4 ms·

>It was always expected that water could gradually build up and contaminate Euclid’s vision, as it is very difficult to build and launch a spacecraft from Earth

by 1970-01-01 3y ago

>It was always expected that water could gradually build up and contaminate Euclid’s vision, as it is very difficult to build and launch a spacecraft from Earth without some of the water in our planet’s atmosphere creeping into it. If they expect moisture, perhaps final assembly could be done in the Atacama?

SiempreViernes 3y ago
Still need to launch from either Guyana or Florida though, so that doesn't solve anything unless you do the integration with the final stage in the Atacama and ship the entire assembled rocket somewhere.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I wonder if this is actually a good application for orbital manufacturing. Kidding. Kinda…
- perihelions 3y ago
  You could do a Starship* hop from Chile to Guyana, and there transfer it to the ESA's launch vehicle. *(Meaning the upper stage by itself, once it has lunar lander legs).
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    Are you saying ESA should have waited for this to be technically possible? Or that it is technically possible now and ESA should have looked in to this option?
    - perihelions 3y ago
      It's a speculative, blue-sky idea—as is the context discussion that's proposing to assemble space satellites in a remote desert for optimization reasons. It's not technically implausible. Starship (upper-stage only) in principle has a very long hop range—it's almost an SSTO by itself [0]. In principle it could also support landing on non-spaceport facilities like deserts—after all it's explicitly designed for landing on the moon, in accordance with the NASA Artemis contract. Would SpaceX be thinking about trying long-range hops on Earth, as a testing mechanism? I'm not sure it'd be completely crazy to consider that. Musk has extensively talked about the concept of Starship (full stack) as city-to-city passenger transport [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-transport-earth-travel https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex...
bee_rider 3y ago
I read the quote and wondered, well, that’s sort of a weird thing to mess up; if it was always expected then why didn’t they take care of it? It in case anyone else is wondering—it sounds like it is a very thin layer of water > A few layers of water ice – the width of a strand of DNA Sounds like they made it about as dry as possible.

SiempreViernes 3y ago

Still need to launch from either Guyana or Florida though, so that doesn't solve anything unless you do the integration with the final stage in the Atacama and ship the entire assembled rocket somewhere.

bee_rider 3y ago
I wonder if this is actually a good application for orbital manufacturing. Kidding. Kinda…
perihelions 3y ago
You could do a Starship* hop from Chile to Guyana, and there transfer it to the ESA's launch vehicle. *(Meaning the upper stage by itself, once it has lunar lander legs).
- throwway120385 3y ago
  Are you saying ESA should have waited for this to be technically possible? Or that it is technically possible now and ESA should have looked in to this option?
  - perihelions 3y ago
    It's a speculative, blue-sky idea—as is the context discussion that's proposing to assemble space satellites in a remote desert for optimization reasons. It's not technically implausible. Starship (upper-stage only) in principle has a very long hop range—it's almost an SSTO by itself [0]. In principle it could also support landing on non-spaceport facilities like deserts—after all it's explicitly designed for landing on the moon, in accordance with the NASA Artemis contract. Would SpaceX be thinking about trying long-range hops on Earth, as a testing mechanism? I'm not sure it'd be completely crazy to consider that. Musk has extensively talked about the concept of Starship (full stack) as city-to-city passenger transport [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit#Starship [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-transport-earth-travel https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex...

bee_rider 3y ago

I read the quote and wondered, well, that’s sort of a weird thing to mess up; if it was always expected then why didn’t they take care of it? It in case anyone else is wondering—it sounds like it is a very thin layer of water > A few layers of water ice – the width of a strand of DNA Sounds like they made it about as dry as possible.