Originally published at: Perseverance rover's Ingenuity helicopter readies for takeoff | Boing Boing
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I cannot believe how geeked out I am for that to happen. I’ve always paid attention to space stuff, but for some reason the drone thing has got me really excited. It just seems like next-level amazing.
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85M$ !? What the actual fuck? How does that work?
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Because it costs a lot of money to ensure somethings works on an entire different planet?
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Well…. The blades have to spin 5x faster than a helicopter on Earth and only weigh 5 pounds…
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I know, my Dear Wife and I are very excited, the images will be awesomeness. Go Science!
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The Martian permits alone were astronomical!
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Perseverance and Ingenuity are hereby dubbed the RightStuff Brothers.
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Remember the days of the Viking probes? Good times.
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Do I ever, hid in the basement every time they came to town.
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Seriously, I’d be interested to hear audio of the drone, too.
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That’s only the cost of 6160 Beeple jpgs.
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Wonderful events like this have helped keep me from complete despair over the prospects for humanity over the past years. Keep 'em coming, NASA!
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I don’t get it. They spent a gazillion dollars to touch down safely on the surface, and now they can’t wait to get up off the surface? Crazy earthlings.
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If only they had the foresight to add a couple of googly eyes then maybe it would have a shot at competing with the reigning king of rovers: Sojourner.
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It’s like Jerry Seinfeld’s old bit about bringing a car to the moon. “You’re on the moon already! Isn’t that far enough?”
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I imagine that includes research, development and testing (oh, so much testing!) for a unique helicopter design flying under completely novel conditions (e.g. 1% of Earth’s atmosphere, equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet, which no existing helicopter is capable of). Plus, it’s made out of highly specialized parts (that don’t get the price decrease of being mass-produced), with few off-the-shelf bits - that really increases the costs of things. Especially if you’re using, as NASA does, very high quality elements, like the super-high-efficiency solar panels where a few percent more power comes at the cost of much higher prices.
All that, and the fact they’ve been working on it for more than 6 years (they published a design for it in 2014), and It adds up. Labor costs alone eat up a lot of that - the operating costs for this are another $5 million, and the specifications are only for five flights (though no doubt it’ll manage many more than that, if it works according to plan).
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The Beeple NFT involved only one jpg (even if it was made out of multiple images), though technically it’s a link to the jpg, not even the jpg itself. So it’s only like one-and-a-quarter Beeples. If you want to talk about individual images, those NFTs have still sold for millions, so it’s like a dozen Beeple jpgs at most.
Gods, does that put things in a depressing context.
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Between the Martian atmosphere and gravity, it’d be hard to really test the flight software. Soon it’ll be brown-trousers time for the code.
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