Conservatism and innovation in spacecraft design |
Conservatism and innovation in spacecraft design |
May 6 2014, 01:26 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 102 Joined: 8-August 12 Member No.: 6511 |
Would it be fair to say that we're in the middle of a fairly conservative period with regard to spacecraft design? By this I mean that we haven't seen major innovations in propulsion, communications, power sources, shielding or avionics in the last decade, and we're not expecting to see major innovations in these areas in the next ten years. We are seeing a lot of ongoing advances in mission design, in payload, and in instrumentation. But the spacecraft themselves are changing much more slowly, and their design is increasingly dominated by heritage technologies.
Would this be a broadly true statement, or is there actually a lot of significant innovation in these areas that's going underreported? I'm sincerely curious. Doug M. |
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May 6 2014, 02:57 PM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 933 Joined: 4-September 06 From: Boston Member No.: 1102 |
Obviously 1957-1968 was the time when rockets propulsion got refined to a very high level in a short period of time. However, the backup computer for the moon missions was an HP65 hand held programmable calculator. So all things computer have continued to evolve rapidly, but for reasons of reliability and radiation hardening, at a much more cautious pace than consumer electronics.
Examples of change--see DAWN mission (ion engine) and the recent launch of SpaceX (takeoff and land at same spot) -------------------- |
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