Dan, Yes, we shall continue to explore and give ourselves (AMSAT) every opportunity to do these things. Garage and home built with love from our community. Thanks for your thoughts. A bystander, Dee, NB2F
Let's consider what we got from the Russians: they gave us a FREE 26 kilogram launch to low Earth orbit, with 20 times the mass and 75 times the volume of a 1U Cubesat, which is currently the only type of satellite that Amsat can hope to pay full market price for launching. NASA donated the six solar arrays and gave us a ton of help with export paperwork which would have been a bear if we had to export the satellite to Russia by ourselves. For this fact alone, we should be grateful to both agencies, because nobody else has offered us a 26 kilogram launch in the past decade.
In spite of this, we still need to conduct an Anomaly Review Board to examine the reasons why the satellite was launched in a state of less than 100 percent readiness. This is not to assign blame but to see how we and our launch partners can improve the procedure for the next launch.
The fundamental difference between educational satellites and amateur satellites is that educational satellites can be considered successful if they deliver a working satellite to the launch pad, it does not need to work on orbit and the students who built it have probably graduated by the time it gets launched. Amateur satellites are supposed to perform a useful communications function for some amount of years in a hostile environment. The best thing that Amsat can contribute to the student built satellites is to teach them to think about designing for reliability and long life, not to consider the mission successful if they collect a few weeks of telemetry from their beep-sat once it is in orbit.
I agree with Phil Karn on most of his points, but the hams who are out there collecting countries and grid squares are also testing our communications infrastructure under real life conditions, without them we would only be doing a laboratory experiment. Hopefully some hams are bringing the kids along on their grid square expeditions to show them how we communicate under adverse conditions. I have often compared Amateur Radio to fishing: if you just want to eat fish it is certainly more cost effective to buy your fish at the market instead of wasting all that time trying to catch your own fish. Yet many people still enjoy fishing just for the challenge of testing their abilities under sometimes adverse conditions. In my case I still plant little tomato seedlings in the ground in spring time, waste lots of time watering and weeding them, waste lots of money on fertilizer and bug spray, and hope I can get a few tomatoes before the deer and rabbits get them, it certainly would be cheaper and easier to buy tomatoes at the supermarket. That is why we do Amateur Radio, we want to communicate in the least cost-effective way possible because we seek the challenge of doing it ourselves instead of using equipment that any dummy with a credit card can buy at the mall.
As for why Amsat did not receive credit for building the satellite by either NASA or the Russians, journalists are a lazy bunch who like to copy from press releases and from each other. Universities and Government agencies have full time public affairs offices with people who know how to get their stories into print and on the air in a way that best serves the interests of their organizations. We at Amsat don't know how to play this game and don't have the connections to do so. Students building little satellites in school is a cute story that practically writes itself, but journalists don't know how to explain amateurs building satellites in their garages and using them to collect QSL cards and grid squares.
In the aerospace industry, "Educational Satellites" are good, they are training students who the industry can hire cheap (while getting rid of the older engineers who earn too much money), but "Amateur Satellites" are bad, because if a bunch of amateurs can build long lived, useful satellites in a garage, then why is industry charging 100's of millions of bucks for a satellite? Jan King gave a talk at a professional meeting years ago and reported that certain business officials and military officers walked out of the room because they did not want to hear any more of his talk about our "garage satellites". It is too much of a threat to their established way of doing business.
Anyone who has tried to find an engineering job recently knows that there is no shortage of engineers, but lazy journalists keep reporting about a crisis in STEM education and how we need to inspire the next generation to study science and engineering. The universities who need a steady stream of incoming freshmen, the industry which needs a steady stream of fresh inexpensive young blood, and government agencies who need to justify their existence love to play the STEM education card, even though most of it is not true. It seems that every university in the world is building satellites but I doubt that even five percent of those students will find jobs in that field, and those that do will find that they have much less design authority and freedom when they are working for the big boys.
However I am willing to let Amsat play along with that game, if we can get our satellites launched along the way. I will leave it for others to debate the ethics of that action. We live in a hostile world where most organizations do not have our interests at heart. As in any business deal, we need to use them to get what we want in exchange for giving them some of what they want. Use the educational aspects to get our payloads into space, but recognize that our goals are sometimes different from theirs.
So let's celebrate what has been accomplished, learn the lessons from the mistakes that were made in final assembly, preflight inspection and deployment, and start planning ARISSat-2. If the Russians want to claim credit for building it all by themselves, so long as they put it into orbit first, I'm OK with that.
Dan Schultz N8FGV
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