Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Goober5000 on September 26, 2014, 11:30:21 pm
-
The current expedition to the International Space Station really went to town with the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme:
http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-092414a-expedition42-hitchhikers-guide-galaxy.html
Following a trend that began during the now-retired shuttle program, the Expedition 42 crew — Cristoforetti, together with commander Butch Wilmore and flight engineers Terry Virts, Alexander Samokutyayev, Elena Serova and Anton Shkaplerov — selected a movie poster to parody for their official crew poster.
"I am incredibly excited to share with you the Expedition 42 poster!" Cristoforetti wrote Tuesday (Sept. 23) with the online reveal of the poster. "If you like it half as much as I do, it will still be your favorite expedition poster ever." ...
Closely mimicking one of the movie posters for the 2005 "Hitchhiker's Guide" film, the Expedition 42 poster "stars" Cristoforetti as Trillian, Wilmore as Arthur Dent, Serova as Ford Prefect, Samokutyayev as Humma Kavula and Virts and Shkaplerov as the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox. The space station's Robonaut 2 guest stars as Marvin the Paranoid Android.
(http://www.collectspace.com/images/news-092414e.jpg) (http://www.collectspace.com/images/news-092414e-lg.jpg)
-
This is why they're heroes to many
-
all the extra pr budget is doing wonders. i wouldnt want to spend it on space missions or anything.
-
cool bit of fun there
-
all the extra pr budget is doing wonders. i wouldnt want to spend it on space missions or anything.
The few million that NASAs enhanced PR campaigning has probably cost over the past few years is peanuts in the budgets of serious space science missions, let adjoined manned missions. But if, by increasing their public visibility they manage to put themselves into a stronger position when it comes to negotiating budget allocations at a US federal level, then that's money very well spent.
-
Yeah, NASA is really doing well on PR front these days. They're no longer just "those guys that landed on the moon and flew the Space Shuttle". :) I wish Roskosmos started doing similar things, you barely hear about them these days, they've got some good ideas, but are still "those guys with Gagarin and MIR".
-
Meanwhile, in India...
-
Since nobody's said anything since then, and since my post wasn't very informative, double-post!
So I saw a headline about India putting an orbiter around Mars for only(?) $75 million, "on the first try" (a stupid thing to say IMO; they're engineers, not Orks.)
I can imagine NASA learning a thing or two from India, finding ways to do things cheaper, and then the president/legislature/whoever getting flak for cutting their budget. Because of how a "cut" and a "savings" look the same on paper.
That said, NASA is probably still spending a lot on R&D, and India probably used a lot of stuff we developed. So... huh.
-
That said, NASA is probably still spending a lot on R&D, and India probably used a lot of stuff we developed. So... huh.
This. India even said that they owed a lot to the USA and USSR which had done trailblazing missions in the past.
Plus, there's an agreement for India to use NASA's Deep Space Network in exchange for NASA getting access to MOM's scientific data. That is another expense India doesn't have to bear.
-
The timing of MOM is rather unfortunate for NASA. People see two missions going to Mars at the same time, and naturally compare the two price tags. They see the two price tags - and the order of magnitude difference - and, understandably, wonder about it. Add on things like India being the first country to teach Mars on their first go, and it's very easy to paint a picture of the Indian space program as being somehow badly cheaper our note efficient than NASA.
Bit the truth is, apart from the fact that they're both going to Mars to study it's atmosphere, the two missions see only barely comparable.
The MAVEN payload is more than four times heavier than the payload on MOM, it carries significantly more scientific instruments, and it was custom built to advance a scientific frontier. MOM, by contrast, was first and foremost a demonstration mission - proof that India can cheaply insert a small payload into Martian orbit using largely off the shelf components. And, over and above all that, those headline figures also represent the vast differences in labour costs between the two countries, and the different way in which India allocated it's costs.
Basically, if MAVEN is a Ferrari - custom engineered for absolute peak performance by one of the most advanced manufacturers on the planet, then MOM is a Toyota Corolla - still an incredible piece of engineering, in its own way, but very much built down to a budget, and only possible due to the advances made on the cutting edge in preceding decades.
This shouldn't be taken as anything against what the Indians achieved with MOM - they wanted to get to Mars, and they did exactly that - it's just important to keep it in context.
-
Very good points.