On 07/19/2014 03:32 PM, Jerry Buxton wrote:
But you arguing about something that has already happened. That makes no sense.
None of the Fox satellites have yet flown, so they haven't "already happened".
Why did the U.S. go back to the moon so many times? I don't know. But we did, and that is done. You could argue now that it had been done before, why did we do it over and over, it was the same old thing. That doesn't change the facts.
Good analogy, actually. They returned to the moon six times (succeeding on five) because they had excess hardware originally built in the expectation that the first attempts would fail.
And when they did return, they began to do some serious scientific exploration that made it worthwhile. Unfortunately, the public *did* see this as "the same old thing" and Congress quickly withdrew support. As everyone knows, NASA canceled the last three Apollo lunar missions and humans haven't left earth orbit since Apollo 17. (Strictly speaking, even Apollo never left earth orbit, since the moon orbits the earth.)
Yet NASA has always managed to find support for new and interesting things in space even without a human presence. The two keys to public interest have always been 1) exploration and 2) photography.
Apollo certainly did that in its time. More recently, stunning pictures from the surface of Mars and of the moons and backlit rings of Saturn have done much to keep NASA going even as it flails aimlessly in its human program. Sure, the ISS returns some pretty good pictures of earth but so do many robotic spacecraft. And the ISS certainly isn't exploring much of space from only 400 km up. That's why most people don't find it very exciting.
Both universities that I am working with are building amateur radio ground stations and interesting the students in becoming hams. We all benefit from that. And some other universities want to fly an ADAC system. We may benefit from that on Fox-2.
I'm hearing privately that many university groups really are after us for only our spectrum. Or our spectrum plus a ready-made telecommunications system they can use for their purposes without having to worry about the details. I actually don't oppose this categorically as some do, but I insist on *some* benefit back to the amateur service, such as an interesting new communications system to experiment with and to learn from. Some aren't even willing to go that far.
--Phil