On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:58:30PM -0500, Rocky Jones wrote:
That is not a flaw in my argument, it was a fact. As best I understand it, and it has been sometime since I looked at it in any depth, the flaw in the AO-40 rocket motor was that a procedure was missed in preping the motor for flight.
This is a deviation from your previous posting where you linked the demise of AO40 to it being a "super sat which was going to do things that were simply out of reach of all but a very few hams (40ghz? or whatever it was)".
Clearly the kind of mistake that caused the catastrophic failure could have happened on any spacecraft assembled by any organization.
The folks building /E have figured it out and returned to a rather robust "simple" satellite...More then one homebuilder of airplanes (garage planes) has found in someway that their modifications were mistakes (the lucky ones when the DER's shut them down).
You can call it "simple" if you like but a) it remains firmly affixed to earth and b) it is being sold to the German government as an adjunct to a mission to Mars. If you want to call an interplanetary mission "simple" that's your call, but P3E was scheduled to be launched years ago to support the P5 mission that was supposed to launch in 2009 and I'll buy the first beer whenever either of those fly...
I dont know this for a fact but would suspect that one reason launches are hard to come by for anything with rocket propulsion in it (ie a hamsat with a rocket engine in it) is what happen with AO-40. If I owned the rocket that failure would scare me
For the last time (from me, I promise) we have been told in no uncertain terms that the cost for a launch to GTO that would carry a craft of the size required to provide a happy medium of solar panels and antennas will cost no less than $6 million US and maybe as much as $8 million.
Years ago (has it been almost a decade now?) when we first started talking about 'Eagle' it took AMSAT-NA two years to raise $90,000 US. At that rate, it would require a century for us to raise enough money to get back to GTO.
Facts on the ground have already determined the outcome of this debate. Whether or not AMSAT members (and officers for that matter) are willing to accept reality is an entirely different matter.
Many actually prefer the blue pill...