ESA loses Mars lander - drunk driving eurotrash

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/europe/mars-schiaparelli-lander-esa-lost/index.html

(CNN)The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed the Schiaparelli spacecraft, which was expected to land on Mars on Wednesday, has been lost.

During a press conference on Thursday, scientists said that Schiaparelli stopped transmitting around 50 seconds before the expected landing.
The agency suspects something went wrong when the parachute was jettisoned: "The ejection itself appears to have occurred earlier than expected, but analysis is not yet complete," it said in a statement.
ESA's Director General, Jan Wörner, said Schiaparelli's primary role was to test whether they could successfully land a probe on Mars.
"Recording the data during the descent was part of that, and it is important we can learn what happened, in order to prepare for the future," Wörner said.

David Parker, ESA's Director of Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration said it's what they wanted from a test.
"We have data coming back that allows us to fully understand the steps that did occur, and why the soft landing did not occur," he said.
The probe was equipped with nine thrusters that were due to be activated for the last 30 seconds to help cushion the landing. But while they were confirmed to have been briefly activated, the agency believes they switched off sooner than expected.
The anxious wait
Scientists with ESA were anxiously waiting for news from Schiaparelli yesterday.
After a high-speed, fiery descent through the Martian atmosphere, scientists at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, did not get a signal back from the 1,272 pound (577 kilogram) probe.

 

[AnOminous]

Idk I have mixed feelings about going and shitting up other planets

It's not like there's anything going on there we'd be fucking up.

 

[DuskEngine]

It's not like there's anything going on there we'd be fucking up.

We don't know that and if we do fuck it up we also fuck up our chances of ever finding out.

 

[Marvin]

We don't know that and if we do fuck it up we also fuck up our chances of ever finding out.

Heh, we definitely do. There's nothing going on on Mars.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

yet we can't even get to Mars

Even returning to the Moon is too hard. Even replacing the Space Shuttle program is too difficult.

 

[Piss Clam]

Even returning to the Moon is too hard. Even replacing the Space Shuttle program is too difficult.

No, it's not too hard. You'd have fusion power by now but humans just can't seem to work together.

I had high hopes for the NIF, but if we all pulled together we wouldn't have been spending decades to fire muh lazer at a pellet of deuterium and tritium.

And of course we would have been on Mars by now.

Our entire history is full of magical moments and momentous fuck ups.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

but humans just can't seem to work together

Hence why it's too hard. Politics and lack of funding and public interest get in the way.

I think we may need another space race like the one in the 1960s.

 

[AnOminous]

I had high hopes for the NIF, but if we all pulled together we wouldn't have been spending decades to fire muh lazer at a pellet of deuterium and tritium.

No shit. Fusion is really just "take this little thing and squish it real hard." Yeah, there's some pretty heavy infrastructure to do it but we should already be there.

 

[millais]

American satellite in Mars orbit humiliates Europe by taking photo of the crashed ESA lander.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37731671
The black dot is the crash site, the white dot is the lander's jettisoned parachute

 

[Randy Lahey]

Boy, how much do you think that cost?

$23.56

 

[Ravenor]

I think we may need another space race like the one in the 1960s.

To be honest we do but I don't see it being a state run affair this time, I can see it being privately funded but with governmental oversite at least until orbital flights are as commonplace as simple atmospheric flights.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

privately funded

The private sector doesn't seem to be making that much progress though.

 

[dunbrine47]

So how much can Poland be blamed for this one?

 

[glass_houses]

So how much can Poland be blamed for this one?

Come off it. This is is all the fault of the vodka niggers and you know it. Haven't you seen the Bond film?

 

[Ravenor]

The private sector doesn't seem to be making that much progress though.

I agree an disagree with that, at the moment we have a few of the old players and a few new upstarts in the field but we wont get a surge like aircraft manufacture etc until the costs of getting into orbit drop drastically, we already have citizen space in the form of cheep projects like cubesat's that fly either cheaply or for free if they are put forth via certain body's OR get assessed as genuine science.

But you can still get a 1u cubesat into orbit privately if you don't meet any of the criteria above for the low price of £20,000 that's cheep and you can fit a lot into a 10x10x10cm box if your clever enough, but the problem is that's still too high for most amateur scientists with interesting if unproven ideas, just so you have a idea that's the median salary of a 25 year old in the UK before tax.

Most people can't afford that, so we are a little far off from space becoming truly accessable to the massess but there are companies that are working to bring those cost's down through a variety of interesting ways, some of them are trying to recycle old military hardware (legally and politically tricky), non conventional launch systems, and the outright stupid.

After getting there cheaply, the next big challenge is getting earth return down to the same level of reliability as it is now for a fraction of the RnD costs, the current winners are exotic ceramics that still leave a lot to be desired and come at a serious weight cost (orbital mass lifting cost's are as I said above are massive even cube sats still have weight requirements) but if you could work that out with cheap lift cost's the solar system will become ours for the taking (also crack either of those nut's your in for a massive payday), once that happens it'll be like the wild west up there and whole new industries will open up and later generations will ask themselfs what took us so long.

 

[AnOminous]

But you can still get a 1u cubesat into orbit privately if you don't meet any of the criteria above for the low price of £20,000 that's cheep and you can fit a lot into a 10x10x10cm box if your clever enough, but the problem is that's still too high for most amateur scientists with interesting if unproven ideas, just so you have a idea that's the median salary of a 25 year old in the UK before tax.

If you have something of interest to even a couple dozen people, that cost comes down rapidly.

I'm not sure I'm that thrilled about the idea of hundreds more pieces of space junk being added to the orbital junkyard we already have going, though, so there should really be a protocol for de-orbiting shit like that at the end of its lifespan, and/or registering its location and orbit.

 

[Marvin]

If you have something of interest to even a couple dozen people, that cost comes down rapidly.

That's the idea behind massdrop. Nerds with various interests pool their money together to buy stuff in bulk from the manufacturer. I got a really great weed grinder from it. It's pretty cool

I'm not sure I'm that thrilled about the idea of hundreds more pieces of space junk being added to the orbital junkyard we already have going, though, so there should really be a protocol for de-orbiting shit like that at the end of its lifespan, and/or registering its location and orbit.

It blew my mind to find out that there are amateur satellites out there. I guess in retrospect it makes sense, because no one owns space, so there's no inherent rules against it. (Not that international agreements couldn't be established later, of course.)

 

[AnOminous]

That's the idea behind massdrop. Nerds with various interests pool their money together to buy stuff in bulk from the manufacturer. I got a really great weed grinder from it. It's pretty cool

It blew my mind to find out that there are amateur satellites out there. I guess in retrospect it makes sense, because no one owns space, so there's no inherent rules against it. (Not that international agreements couldn't be established later, of course.)

I don't mean that specifically in terms of buying satellites in bulk, but of getting a couple dozen (or more) people together to put something up and then share whatever data it generates (or just share it outright with the world).

 

[Goofy Logic]

To be honest we do but I don't see it being a state run affair this time, I can see it being privately funded but with governmental oversite at least until orbital flights are as commonplace as simple atmospheric flights.

You have to remember the space race coincided with the cold war, and space ship technology can be conveniently repurposed into ICBMs. When it started, the space race was more to demonstrate how good either side can make rockets.

 

[polonium]

The private sector doesn't seem to be making that much progress though.

The private sector can't compete against the government. If space travel was a truly free market we'd be mining the oort cloud and holidaying on the moon by now

 

[ToroidalBoat]

If space travel was a truly free[...]

I had thought all the private sector was doing was launching satellites and that one SpaceshipOne thing, but it turns out they've done more than that. Still a long way off from space travel being truly free though.