technology, that's great for the Starship. But, we're going to see more spacecraft reentering from orbits, and the sheer number of the anticipatedspacecraft means that more parts will survive intact to Earth. Usually, parts of the fuel system. So, we do have an
spacecraft reentering from orbits, and the sheer number of the anticipatedspacecraft means that more parts will survive intact to Earth. Usually, parts of the fuel system. So, we do have anincreased risk that people or property or environmental harm might happen.
Fundamentally, the point about a cosmonaut is that he wasn't going to fly his spaceship, he was going to sit in an automated spacecraft at huge personal risk and fly in it around the world without actually touching anything.Because they didn't want them to touch anything.
Free-flyers for SPHERES got started, like I said, in the late '90s, originally with this first project called the PSA, an adjustable autonomy spacecraft free-flying robot. So as you can tell, it looks very sleek, very capable, and it was a great project.They did a lot of work in this field.
before Christmas Eve, veteran astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Landers climbed into their Apollo spacecraft at the top of the 363 foot tower that was the Saturn 5 and prepared for a 7:51 AMliftoff for the moon.
And what that does is instead of custom designing spacecraft , you actually can save cost by having a multimission design spacecraft that you then tailor the science to.And then the other thing was NASA engineers love to design stuff from scratch.
Some people love to launch powered on. Spacecraft is awake and alive when it's launched.And then some people like us wanted to launch powered off so that when the spacecraft separates from the launch vehicle, it wakes up.
The overriding thing in our discussion-- our end user was Grandma. spacecraft or more assets.
powered by decay and half-life of isotopes. And they run really well and the first one was launched in 1961 on a naval navigational satellite. And this is a poster for the Voyager spacecraft , which, as we know, is now approaching the outer limits of our solar system.And it's isotope-powered and it's been isotope-powered since it launched 33 years ago. And I just mention the isotope batteries because, actually right now in the US, we have a crisis of isotope
They're narrativized by the best of the best, "The Wind from the Sun," all about solar-powered spacecraft . At the same time, the utopian impulse embedded in the civil, the impulseto civil space exploration anticipated the problem of space junk and anticipated strategies for pulling space junk out of orbit at the same time.
right working in secrecy is it can be very very alienating this imagine having spacecraft and on this patch the orbital inclinations of these spacecraft were
We'd, you know, explore the woods, we'd build go-karts, we'd, you know, salvage old pieces of electronics and build you what we thought were our spacecraft control panels for the, you know, fake spaceships we were building as play. And we'd have an enormous amount of freedom.
We have to interface with such a wide variety of people and make sure that-- there might be a time where I swab and I say, wow, your spacecraft , this component is a little bit dirtier. You need to stop, clean it, and then we need to resample.
The contractor, however, did it in-- because normally you do it in newtons or newton meters if you're doing torque. of spacecraft . And people working on the SRI were trying to keep their overheads in terms of energy use down.
And the Russians succeeded in exploring the surface of Venus by essentially building-- I mean, it's an exaggeration, but they were basically clockwork spacecraft . I mean, they were mechanical spacecraft because you can build mechanical components that can work at very high temperatures. Electronics, especially in the 1970s, were not ready to operate at those kinds of conditions.
And the stories are woven together, the science, the politics, the how you build this, how you fly an interplanetary mission across the solar system, some of the technologies we invented, like spacecraft hibernation, the navigation requirements that were super stringent, hit a 40- by 60-kilometer window from three billion miles away. And by way, do that while arriving within nine minutes of the time you aimed for when you launched nine years before.
If you look closely, it'll show you spacecraft orbiting our Sun. Kepler spacecraft is actually orbiting our Sun, not orbiting our Earth. And if you could zoom into part of Earth, and here it will click on the West Coast of North America and showing you what our spring night sky looks like.
That's one of the US instruments from Alan Stern and SWRI. The spacecraft is flying its trajectory.
The spacecraft has these booms.
This spacecraft here literally wrote the book and invented the term "heliophysics," which is the physics of the Sun in the modern sense
The spacecraft wasn't exactly where it was supposed to be.
What that did as a side benefit was have a very simple safe mode. With spacecraft , you have your normal operating mode, but you always have something called safe mode. So if the spacecraft has a problem, it'll drop back into a control routine that is very robust.
So when you're flying by on a close approach to the earth and you're moving very fast, the antennas can track you well. So spacecraft provides the main pointing of their instruments.
Because that allows this to not just be a spatial map, but also a map in time. Our spacecraft flies from south pole to north pole on the day side. And so these are other things about what the spacecraft is doing, what its roll angle is, other things.
a spacecraft , you're going in any direction, doesn't make any difference. We actually flew towards the Moon backwards, which didn't affect our location. But we went in backwards because
the spacecraft and larger infrastructures of the vast Apollo enterprise. And in fact as I said this turned out not to be the case. The spacesuit that was successfully launched
Soviet spacecraft unlike American spacecrafts , could not land in the oceans controlled by American Navies but instead had to land in the vast plains of Kazakhstan in Siberia.
be dangerous to launch spacecraft through this debris-filled environment.
They do this for spacecraft re-entry, trying to figure out how quickly the debris is going to slow down, where it's going to land.
The amount of contaminants that can make its way onto the spacecraft is huge, and the number one source is from humans, the people that put the spacecraft together. We have-- humans have more microbes in and on our body than we have human cells.
It's worst birthday cake ever because it would be burnt to a crisp. But we bake the spacecraft components out so that it's clean. We assemble it in a cleanroom.
There's a ground-penetrating radar on the back of the rover that came from Norway. not close to the spacecraft because there are some issues with that, but close enough where the engineers can see what you're doing.
Then they sent a spacecraft to crash-land into the moon and succeeded in doing that.
that they even placed bombs on their spacecraft with dogs inside them, so that if anything went wrong and the spacecraft happened to enter the Earth's atmosphere at the wrong point so it would actually end up maybe in America by mistake, or in a western capitalist nation by mistake, these bombs were triggered to explode, taking the dogs with them.
And my thoughts on spacecraft are changing little by little as I age.
The docking of the spacecraft is like a jumping on the Seoul-Busan Expressway while you are on the car in the express lane in the highway.
And when it was launched in, oh, goodness, over a decade ago and sent to Mars, there was a famous understanding that there were-- the general understanding that there was a spacecraft from NASA which crashed into a planet because of a unit's conversion error. And that's the kind of headline a lot of people-- hands up, who's aware there was a spacecraft that crashed because of a unit?
The contractor, however, did it in-- because normally you do it in newtons or newton meters if you're doing torque. It's just spacecraft , which still-- now I know a friend of mine-- I didn't realize this until later on.
The contractor, however, did it in-- because normally you do it in newtons or newton meters if you're doing torque. They literally make spacecraft in the old potting sheds.
to put on this spacecraft .
And the spacecraft is going to go to a moon of Saturn called in Enceladus.
And the Cassini spacecraft measured organic molecules coming out in that gas.
In that process, did you come out with a favorite? So all the spacecraft kind of hunker down and go into a fairly low activity mode during conjunction.
There's a chapter-- it's one of my couple of favorites in the whole book-- called Battle Plan Pluto, where we tell the story of how you actually plan a flyby like this where the spacecraft is operating completely by remote control. All the software and all the support files have to be completely tested in every way you can think of,
And by the way, the hibernation mode that Alan mentioned was itself a really innovative part of this mission that was a brilliant solution to how do you have a spacecraft traveling for nine and 1/2 years and not be worn out when you get there, and also have the human resources to do all that planning and simulating that Alan was talking about with a really small team.
an unclean spacecraft . And of course, I'm sure you know that spacecraft get cleaned within an inch of their life, whether they're
Now our spacecraft could catch those microbes or the chemistry associated to them and maybe find evidence for life.
There was no spacecraft in the early solar system.
Everyone had known that the Apollo was a jalopy, but the clock was ticking, and the Russians were lurking, and there was nothing NASA could do but throw together the best spacecraft they could and hope it was flight worthy. Instead, that great moon ship ended up with three deaths on its rap sheet before it ever got off the ground.
liftoff for the moon. The redesigned Apollo spacecraft had been certified fit for flight, as had the Saturn 5 rocket. Werner Von Braun, the German genius and ex-pat who had designed the V2 missiles that reigned terror on London during World War II and was now involved