Very cool that they were developing the one-gyro control mode all the way back in 2004, and had in-flight tested it by 2008. Seems like they were well prepared for this eventuality.
That's because this isn't the first time Hubble has been down to two working gyros. It happened before in 1999 (replaced a few months later), and they were worried it would happen again after 2003 when the Shuttles were grounded (actually got down to three/six working before replacement in 2009).
NASA has such a tiny budget in comparison to other stuff....so they really have to stretch that money as far as they can, and especially considering spacecraft....its a very unforgiving production environment.
Am I making a joke about deploying in production? Yes, yes I am. But I also know NASA really does the best they can and I am amazed at the insane work and effort that they do to make sure spacecraft they send actually work.
Except you look at what they are spending on the entire SLS infrastructure vs what they are getting (vs other science options and/or space exploration options) and basically your mind is blown at how wasteful NASA is.
SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.
I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing.
I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position).
L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).
I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.
I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!
NASA's manned mission division does seem to have the bigger problem with bloated contracting budgets and inefficiency, relative to the rest of the organization. I'd guess that's due to direct political influence (the Richard Shelby - Bill Nelson effect in that case). From 2010:
Imagine the leaps the humanity would see if the US spent a tenth on NASA as it does on "defense" (it'd likely still outspend the next 10 countries, combined, even then on the war-dept.).
Used to do radio astronomy before switching to software, and we would joke that you could fund all of US science grants for a decade by driving to the local airforce base and stealing couple of jets and their loadouts. It wasn't that far off from accurate, sadly.
That’s an average for the year 2024, but as income taxpayers we only pay around half of that, or around $36.40 per American (using the $24.9B 2024 budget and 342M for the 2024 population), or maybe about one week’s morning Starbucks habit for some of us. :P The rest is paid by businesses and other sources. Of course, compared to the amount the military costs & spends, NASA’s really small.
NASA looks efficient because you’re comparing it to the rest of government.
I love the work they do. I wish they did more with what they have. And then I wish they had more to work with.
When they are constrained, like they are with spacecraft already in flight, their ability to problem solve with the tools and systems they have available is absolutely impressive.
> NASA looks efficient because you’re comparing it to the rest of government.
NASA also looks quite efficient when you compare it to many tech companies. NASA has 18k employees and $25bn budget in 2023, let's compare it with some companies:
Spotify and Stripe are each equal to half of NASA both in terms of employees and budget.
Snapchat and Airbnb are both approx 1/3rd of NASA in both employees and budget.
Yahoo has 1/2 the employees and 1/3 the budget of NASA.
ByteDance is 6x larger than NASA on both metrics.
Meta is 6x larger in budget and 4x larger in head count.
These are just companies making social media apps and selling ads.
I'm sure at NASA as at all government agencies there are teams who work very efficiently and do more with less, and other teams whose mission does not have that characteristic and constraint.
There's a billionaire who has offered to do a repair mission. NASA considers this too risky to let some random guy go up there and fix it. If they worked together on a plan I feel like they could get this done in a way that reduces the risk, but it seems like they just don't want to.
It's worth adding that the proposal was mainly for reboosting the telescope, which can still be done later if needed.
Trying to EVA and work on Hubble would be very risky right now with Dragon since you have to vent the entire capsule first, and this creates all sorts of optics contamination risks.
They're also balancing this against upcoming technologies, possible cost reductions and the much improved capabilities of ground based telescopes due to advanced adaptive optics.
> The Voyager 2 scan platform, on which are mounted the spacecraft cameras and several science instruments, is rotated in elevation and azimuth by actuators. Near the end of the Voyager 2 Saturn encounter, the scan platform azimuth actuator exhibited an anomaly. This anomaly was evidenced by the azimuth actuator seizing, causing a scan platform pointing error that resulted in a loss of some data. Through a series of ground commands, the problem was alleviated to the extent that the scan platform could perform its function. ...
> Finally, engineering improvements made in order to enhance scientific findings at the Uranus encounter are reviewed in detail. The two most important were the increased gyro drift turn rate capability to accommodate image motion compensation for the close fly-by of Miranda and the reduction in spacecraft rates to accommodate increased imaging exposure times without incurring excessive image smear.
Luckily the processing for this sort of control loop is usually very simple mathematically. It's gonna be a few multiplies and a bunch of adding and subtracting most likely. The challenge is designing that mathematical formula, and making sure to take the readings from the sensors and output them to the actuators on time.
It's not just designing the formula, getting the parameters right is going to be a right pain. You might have meant that as part of "designing" but it's a significant challenge in its own right, over and above having a formula that's the right shape.
Not to mention numerical accuracy in the implementation, but I'd assume that's mostly known patterns at this point.
I had a hard time getting Doom to run on my 486. I only had something like 4MB of RAM if I recall correctly so I had to restart my computer, edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT to remove options that I would use to load Windows, and then boot back into DOS to launch DOOM each time I wanted to play it to get that last bit of memory I needed. Then, when I wanted to run Windows, I had to edit the HIMEM.SYS stuff to get it running again. (I was a teenager with no Internet access. I have no idea how I figured out this stuff or where I got information from.)
Quake was the first game to make heavy usage of the FPU and thus require a Pentium. You could run it on a 486 DX, but the performance would be atrocious.
Is it though? All you'd need to control some gyros is a microcontroller. I can't imagine it'd be more than a couple hundred lines of code implementing a PID controller or something. In fact, you could probably do it with standalone controllers, some sensors and relays.
>What a shame there has been only one pointing outwards all these years.
Let's not forget that initially it was considered a massive failure. There simply was no way for NASA to build another in the 90s. What's truly remarkable is how the ROI went from unknown, to negative, and then was a massive long-term success.
Let's not forget that NRO donated multiple Hubble level satellites. NASA had no budget to utilize them, so they were not used. Of course there were other logistics involved that made the "gifts" not so practical. However, the thing that gets me is that if the NRO was willing to donate these satellites tells me that they have better than Hubble quality imaging looking inwards and absolutely have multiple of them.
It's a sad state of affairs that we as a society have only been able to prioritize sending up one single Hubble, while the US alone has sent up several dozen equivalent KH-9 and superior KH-11 satellites to look at Earth for classified military purposes.
I know there are other space-based telescopes (James Webb being larger and superior, others being much smaller and more specialized than Hubble) and lots of ground-based telescopes. I don't dispute that keeping an eye on Soviet missile development and other spy satellite tasks was and is an important mission that has significant, immediate consequences for our species than the informative and gorgeous photos of space that the Hubble mission produces. I'm just disappointed that the combination of human nature and politics makes this a reasonable outcome.
Hey SpaceX, here's an idea: put a few of your 'Atlas' robots on one of the upcoming Starship test vehicles - maybe the one where you plan to test in-orbit refuelling since it probably takes a bit of extra fuel to get to Hubble's orbit - and get the thing to meet up with Hubble. Have the robots replace the failed gyros, replace the batteries and whatever other consumables that old relic contains. Have them take back the old parts in Starship so they can be studied. The result would be revived Hubble as well as one of the biggest PR coups imaginable. Or, maybe, one of the biggest hits against human space flight if it turns out robots can do the job well enough not to have to send up their meat-based masters, take your pick.
Jared Isaacman and SpaceX already made a proposal to NASA to do a Hubble servicing mission. NASA recently responded with "no thanks". NASA feels the risk of potentially damaging Hubble in some way (eg, gas from thruster getting on a mirror) outweighs the benefits. Basically a high probability of worse performance is chosen to be more favorable than a lower probability of better performance.
Or a bigger challenge - safely deorbit Hubble so it could be fixed/refurbished on the ground. Or maybe put in a museum if they didn't feel it was worth it the cost of sending it back up again
What even is the point of looking at space if we give up the pretext of sending people there? It just turns into an expensive way to mint PhDs on the taxpayer's dime, studying things which cannot have economic relevance on Earth (which is why they can't be studied on Earth.)
There's more important things in the universe than those which have economic relevance.
In fact studying things which have no apparent economic relevance is one of the best uses of government dime and has been so, to the great benefit of humanity as a whole, for centuries if not millennia
Readit News
Essentially using other sensors (star tracker and magnetometer) and kalman filtering for sensor fusion.
Am I making a joke about deploying in production? Yes, yes I am. But I also know NASA really does the best they can and I am amazed at the insane work and effort that they do to make sure spacecraft they send actually work.
SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.
I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).
I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.
I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!
https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html
That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only.
> The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!).
We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars.
What do you think this _should_ have cost?
JFK, come back.
I love the work they do. I wish they did more with what they have. And then I wish they had more to work with.
When they are constrained, like they are with spacecraft already in flight, their ability to problem solve with the tools and systems they have available is absolutely impressive.
NASA also looks quite efficient when you compare it to many tech companies. NASA has 18k employees and $25bn budget in 2023, let's compare it with some companies:
Spotify and Stripe are each equal to half of NASA both in terms of employees and budget.
Snapchat and Airbnb are both approx 1/3rd of NASA in both employees and budget.
Yahoo has 1/2 the employees and 1/3 the budget of NASA.
ByteDance is 6x larger than NASA on both metrics.
Meta is 6x larger in budget and 4x larger in head count.
These are just companies making social media apps and selling ads.
Trying to EVA and work on Hubble would be very risky right now with Dragon since you have to vent the entire capsule first, and this creates all sorts of optics contamination risks.
They're also balancing this against upcoming technologies, possible cost reductions and the much improved capabilities of ground based telescopes due to advanced adaptive optics.
https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/394
> The Voyager 2 scan platform, on which are mounted the spacecraft cameras and several science instruments, is rotated in elevation and azimuth by actuators. Near the end of the Voyager 2 Saturn encounter, the scan platform azimuth actuator exhibited an anomaly. This anomaly was evidenced by the azimuth actuator seizing, causing a scan platform pointing error that resulted in a loss of some data. Through a series of ground commands, the problem was alleviated to the extent that the scan platform could perform its function. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/27/us/camera-swivel-on-voyag...
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...
Voyager engineering improvements for Uranus encounter - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19860063178
> Finally, engineering improvements made in order to enhance scientific findings at the Uranus encounter are reviewed in detail. The two most important were the increased gyro drift turn rate capability to accommodate image motion compensation for the close fly-by of Miranda and the reduction in spacecraft rates to accommodate increased imaging exposure times without incurring excessive image smear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra2IpumLMfs
Not to mention numerical accuracy in the implementation, but I'd assume that's mostly known patterns at this point.
It was - is! - a great chip.
Let's not forget that initially it was considered a massive failure. There simply was no way for NASA to build another in the 90s. What's truly remarkable is how the ROI went from unknown, to negative, and then was a massive long-term success.
Why was that? Were fewer discoveries made than hoped?
Hubble is primarily optical wavelengths. The other Great [space-based] Observatories are in IR, X-rays, and gamma rays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Observatories_program
The notion of grouping them as "Great Observatories", AFAIK, came circa the mid-1980s, after Hubble was already getting underway in earnest.
I know there are other space-based telescopes (James Webb being larger and superior, others being much smaller and more specialized than Hubble) and lots of ground-based telescopes. I don't dispute that keeping an eye on Soviet missile development and other spy satellite tasks was and is an important mission that has significant, immediate consequences for our species than the informative and gorgeous photos of space that the Hubble mission produces. I'm just disappointed that the combination of human nature and politics makes this a reasonable outcome.
In fact studying things which have no apparent economic relevance is one of the best uses of government dime and has been so, to the great benefit of humanity as a whole, for centuries if not millennia