Recent content by DanIAm

They're a government agency and their fundamental mission is determined (and funded) by the government, so they don't get to change their focus. They are Aeronautics & Space, so, not Mars specifically, if you want your tax spending changed, lobby the politicians. The Aeronautics department...

This line "the SpaceX satellites have been forced to move over 50,000 times to prevent collisions." This is making an inference akin to hitting the brakes when a deer jumps into the path of a car. That is not how it is, they know the paths of all tracked objects (operational and junk from 5cm...

I'm Australian, NASA isn't part of my tax bill. So, I guess, none of my business... I get that space was so expensive, so exploration and science were government funded, it needed the likes of NASA to do the moon missions etc. Stay in the policy space for the regulation of space activities...

If... Spacex get's NASA's astronauts to the moon in it's lunar variant of their Starship successfully, then this is such a needless mission. Spacex will have already privately landed thousands of tons of cargo and possibly hundreds of people already onto Mars by the time this mission launches...

I don't think it is so straightforward. The OP discussed repercussions on the environment, pollution isn't only about the launch fuel, it's in the whole chain of manufacturing rockets and satellites, the facilities, what happens to it after launch etc. Examples of factors at play. We just let...

You could ask NASA. https://science.nasa.gov/about-us/contact-us

Are they a foreign national that is a NASA employee and sent as part of their job? If so, then absolutely NASA is paying. As for the employees of other space agencies, speculation on my behalf here, a quick googling of NASA documents didn't reveal anything. But I would not think that NASA is...

The promise of what Starship can be is mind blowing for launching cargo and people. If they can't stick landings and end up only as expendable rockets, it will still be a large capacity and very cheap rocket that opens up myriads of possibilities. But if they can nail the landings and...

There are a lot of positives to the environment from the space industry. Yes it is polluting to make a satellite and put it into space, it needs mines, fuel, manufacturing, transport etc. But loads of our tangible measuring on the environment is done by satellites. A lot of the reporting on...

Kassini, you make a poignant observation in that SpaceX aren't exactly doing anything new, though they will have plenty of smaller innovations of their own. What seems to be the key to them that sets them apart, is getting it to work in production models at scaled cost, instead of the usual...

On your metric (failure to land), you've banned almost the entirety of the history of spaceflight. Apologies to everyone if I get the details wrong, I ain't a rocket scientist. The useful comparison is against the rockets in the same class, e.g. the Delta IV or SLS from the States, Long...

Here it is being moved from the pad 3 weeks after it successfully launched, it was a bit more successful than you think. View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlp4AFj9_no&t=25s

SpaceX has it's whole purpose as getting man to Mars, rocketry and satellites are the paving stones towards that. If he wanted to just get richer but do it in space, making factories, space stations and asteroid mining (with huge deposits of gold, platinum, rare earths etc) would be the prime...

3. Scientific Astronomy LOE is big, there is no traffic jam to get through it even with a million satellites. Is there space junk, yep, but that's a different discussion, but active satellites send tracking data (the commercial ones at least) and they have fuel for trajectory changes, they...

2. Amateur Astronomy. I do take the odd look through a tube, it is not that I don't care for astronomy. But satellites do not make much of a difference for amateur astronomy in general. If I'm tracking Mars for 20 minutes, the numbers of satellites going through that small, particular piece...