The world at night:
The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) has said the chances of the agency meeting the goal of landing humans on the Moon by 2024 are looking ever slimmer.
“We believe the Agency will be hard-pressed to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024,” said the OIG in a report (PDF) filed yesterday on the management and performance challenges faced by NASA.
Technical hurdles aside, even getting close to that goal “will require strong, consistent, sustained leadership from the President, Congress, and NASA, as well as stable and timely funding.”
“The added value is unclear, and I’d question why Spanish authorities need this capability,” says Malcolm Macdonald, a professor of satellite engineering at Strathclyde University and host of the podcast, Nibbles in Space.
“The multispectral capability seems very similar to the two Sentinel-2 spacecraft, and so many others. But if the images are well calibrated and characterized, then it could well be possible to combine the [SEOSAT] images with Sentinel-2 images and gain some added value, for example, in better temporal resolution — although, it’s kind of in the wrong orbit for that, so any added value could be intermittent.”
It seems to industry insiders that the value of this satellite is a coin-toss. Personally, I love all aspects of space capable engineering and exploration. I would gut corporate-welfare programs and pump that money directly into this kind of research and development.
Can you read Russian? Can you translate technical texts from that language?
So, dear space comrade, be aware that ROSCOSMOS is making secret documents from the Soviet era available online. These documents about the Russian space program are gradually being declassified.
Tired:
Wired:
Teletubbies in spaaaaace?
So do I. But First of all, I must find a backyard for me.