Word: spacecrafts
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...economics: the new craft are cheap--dirt cheap, by space standards. Engineers at last appear to have learned how to build a spaceship on a budget, and as the costs come down, the ships are going back up. The attitude among space engineers has always been that bigger spacecraft are better, and much bigger ones are better still. But bigger is much more expensive. In 1992 Goldin was recruited from private industry in the hope that he would bring a hardheaded bookkeeper's approach to the hardware-driven NASA. Goldin accepted the challenge, vowing to build an agency that...
...millions of miles from home, a probe only 6 ft. long can cost $1 billion--more than half the sticker price of a space shuttle. The problem is that even expensive ships can go south on you, which is just what happened in 1993, when the Mars Observer--a spacecraft that was NASA's only attempted Mars mission since 1976--apparently blew an aneurysm in a fuel line and spiraled off into space. Goldin decided that such Cadillac probes should be replaced with more-modest ones: stripped-down ships made of components already on the shelf. When skeptical NASA engineers...
Last week in the Pioneer control room at NASA's Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California, project manager Fred Wirth watched Pioneer's data, in the form of multicolored blocks of numbers flashing across a computer screen. To make the best use of the spacecraft's dwindling power, he has shut down all but three of its 11 scientific instruments, and by early next year only one--Van Allen's cosmic ray detector--will be able to function. Citing operational costs and the diminishing scientific return, NASA has ordered Wirth to halt all communications with Pioneer next year...
...even a silent Pioneer 10 may someday effect a kind of communication with extraterrestrials. Attached to one of the spacecraft's antenna support struts is a plaque, designed by Drake and astronomer Carl Sagan, that is inscribed with symbols, binary numbers and drawings conveying what they hope is a universally understandable message. It locates the solar system, shows that Pioneer was launched from Earth and portrays a terrestrial man and woman...
...plaque is one day recovered by advanced extraterrestrials, however, it is unlikely that any of us will be around to receive their reply. At Pioneer's current cruising speed, even if the spacecraft were headed directly toward the closest star, Proxima Centauri, and any possible nearby residents, it would not arrive for some 100,000 years...