Damn how are space probes built so reliably

[Nine Tailed Fox]

Even after spending 40 years in the harshness of space the Voyager probes still able to send data back

 

In a further testament to the robustness of Voyager 1, the Voyager team completed a successful test of the spacecraft's trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters in late 2017 (the first time these thrusters were fired since 1980), a project enabling the mission to be extended by two to three years.^[9]

 

[amdorintel]

$1,000,000,000+

thats how

 

the module that landed on the moon was just tin foil

the memory it took to do the entire operation, is about 1/1000 of what your flip phone is from the 1990's, even bag phones which I remember fondly.

russians where the first in space, they won!

 

1 hour ago, Nine Tailed Fox said:

Even after spending 40 years in the harshness of space the Voyager probes still able to send data back

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tamesh16]

24 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Just ask

Why is James Webb Taking so long to launch, and after all that development if it explodes on launch that would be a waste, so is additional research going into preventing that ?

[Bacon soup]

Bob Lazar knows

[mr moose]

Because they only have to build a few of them with an enormous budget.  Everything else you touch has been built en masse with the smallest budget the company could manage.   1 mistake with the probe is the end of a very expensive space program, while a consumer product mistake is only really a headache for you the end consumer.

 

 

[Kisai]

29 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Because they only have to build a few of them with an enormous budget.  Everything else you touch has been built en masse with the smallest budget the company could manage.   1 mistake with the probe is the end of a very expensive space program, while a consumer product mistake is only really a headache for you the end consumer.

 

 

 

Yep. When building stuff for space, it's over-engineered to kill as few people as possible. That's why we have like 6 people on the ISS, and not 60.

 

Nothing on earth is built that way, not even nuclear reactors. (And had Nuclear reactors been built that way, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all would have been designed not to fail, and yet all of them did.) That is why people don't want Nuclear power, it's incredibly unpopular, and there will be more accidents to come since most of the worlds Nuclear plants are pushing 50 years since they were mostly built in the 70's, and were only designed to operate for 30 years.

 

With that said, not all accidents are equal. I would not trust a space station operated commercially. Such a thing is guaranteed to be the next "titanic" level disaster. If we can't build an unsinkable ship, we can not build a spacecraft to keep a large amount of people alive.

 

[mr moose]

11 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

Yep. When building stuff for space, it's over-engineered to kill as few people as possible. That's why we have like 6 people on the ISS, and not 60.

 

Nothing on earth is built that way, not even nuclear reactors. (And had Nuclear reactors been built that way, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all would have been designed not to fail, and yet all of them did.) That is why people don't want Nuclear power, it's incredibly unpopular, and there will be more accidents to come since most of the worlds Nuclear plants are pushing 50 years since they were mostly built in the 70's, and were only designed to operate for 30 years.

 

With that said, not all accidents are equal. I would not trust a space station operated commercially. Such a thing is guaranteed to be the next "titanic" level disaster. If we can't build an unsinkable ship, we can not build a spacecraft to keep a large amount of people alive.

 

That's pretty good, 50 years of nuclear plants all over the globe and only 3 major events that didn't even cause 1/100th of the deaths coal has. 

 

EDIT: I should add this: 

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

 

[GoldenLag]

1 hour ago, Schnoz said:

Actually, many early space probes were more hit-and-miss. For example, during one of the US's first spacecraft launch attempts, the launch vehicle exploded around a foot of the launchpad. Embarassing...

and actually, untill recently, many crafts have had their reaction wheels fail due machanical failure in the construction material. allegedly due to solar flares affecting the metallic housing. new move to ceramics is supposed to help. 

 

then there is the Juno Spacecraft that just recently had issus with it main trust engine. and had to perform a very, very, very long emergency burn using its reaction control trusters. 

 

then there is the flaw with Oppertunity that lead to the death of the rover. where they couldnt turn of the heating, without turning off the entire system. and vice versa. meaning really long, cold nights. 

 

 

space probes and rovers are 1 batch products. and like allways, they are likely to have flaws built into them, or unforseen things occur, or just the QC just wasnt good enough. 

[GoldenLag]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's pretty good, 50 years of nuclear plants all over the globe and only 3 major events that didn't even cause 1/100th of the deaths coal has. 

nuclear is also one of the few ways you can power anything in space with lots of leftover power. 

 

a single Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG) keeps crafts powered for a very long time, far longer than their service life. 

 

the sun is really unreliable as you get almost no power around Jupiter, and you get less and less as you go further away. and you increase the dry weight of your spacecraft, meaning less equipent can be taken with it. 

 

also, the deaths that have occured with nuclear plants, are of a very old design (relativly speaking)

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, GoldenLag said:

nuclear is also one of the few ways you can power anything in space with lots of leftover power. 

 

a single Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG) keeps crafts powered for a very long time, far longer than their service life. 

 

the sun is really unreliable as you get almost no power around Jupiter, and you get less and less as you go further away. and you increase the dry weight of your spacecraft, meaning less equipent can be taken with it. 

 

also, the deaths that have occured with nuclear plants, are of a very old design (relativly speaking)

 

I just like the fact that every human only needs 1 golf ball sized chunk of uranium for all their electrical power needs for their lifetime and the end product is a coke cans worth of waste that is only dangerous for 300 years.    And this is assuming they can't refine the power process even further or optimize one of the other forms of nuclear energy. 

[GoldenLag]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

I just like the fact that every human only needs 1 golf ball sized chunk of uranium for all their electrical power needs for their lifetime and the end product is a coke cans worth of waste that is only dangerous for 300 years.    And this is assuming they can't refine the power process even further or optimize one of the other forms of nuclear energy. 

its also assuming they dont find a way to dilute the material. integrating a gram of waste into a couple tons of steel, in a naval vessel wouldnt be a terrible idea, assumign they manage to keep the structural integrety. 

[mr moose]

6 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

its also assuming they dont find a way to dilute the material. integrating a gram of waste into a couple tons of steel, in a naval vessel wouldnt be a terrible idea, assumign they manage to keep the structural integrety. 

Or they'll just re process the waste and extract another 30% of the energy from it leaving a significantly smaller problem.

 

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel.aspx

 

 

 

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

Or they'll just re process the waste and extract another 30% of the energy from it leaving a significantly smaller problem.

 

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel.aspx

kinda crazy how much of a "spent" fuelrod is actually not spent to its potential. 

[RejZoR]

4 hours ago, Caroline said:

Some say American spacecrafts are better because they landed on the moon.

 

Others say Russian engineering is more reliable because they launched Yuri Gagarin inside a hollow metal ball.

 

But deep down we all know that this is a status update.

American technology, Russian technology, all made in Taiwan!

[Kisai]

 

52 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's pretty good, 50 years of nuclear plants all over the globe and only 3 major events that didn't even cause 1/100th of the deaths coal has. 

 

EDIT: I should add this: 

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

 

Not a single mention of Hydro-electric, Geothermal, Wind, or Solar. It's only compared to Coal and Oil. We aren't launching spacecraft running on Coal because there is no oxygen to burn in space.

 

There are actually more than 3 major events, but the three I mentioned are the ones that set back the Nuclear Industry. Anyway it's missing my point about design. Nobody wants to launch a nuclear reactor into space, even though that might be the most reasonable way to fuel a space craft meant to transport people beyond the moon. 

 

Speaking of Nuclear space craft... one powered by nuclear bombs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

 

Now, if you ship an unfueled reactor into space, you can always bring launch the unprocessed fuel and then process it in space (thus reducing the amount of potential contamination due to a launch accident.) Any waste left over from processing/reprocessing it could then be stored securely in space where there is nothing to irradiate and no chance of sending it back into earth's orbit. 

[harryk]

If you're curious at how much care goes into building a spacecraft check of some of the lengthy specifications just for soldering:

 

https://nepp.nasa.gov/docuploads/06AA01BA-FC7E-4094-AE829CE371A7B05D/NASA-STD-8739.3.pdf

https://workmanship.nasa.gov/lib/insp/2 books/frameset.html

 

Of course all that doesn't necessarily stop pieces falling off JWST during shake testing, which is why NASA does extensive testing before launch.

[Inversion]

There are times I really wish that space agencies like NASA, ESA, Roscosmos and all the rest got a lot more funding. The technology available to us now is massively more advanced than the likes of the instruments on the Voyagers. It's amazing that almost 50 years on we're still getting interesting discoveries from them but imagine what we could do if we followed up some of their discoveries with modern crafts.

 

Now I realise that it would be very difficult to catch up to the Voyager probes since they got their Planetary Grand Tour gravity boosts, but it would be nice to see.

[dalekphalm]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

Not a single mention of Hydro-electric, Geothermal, Wind, or Solar. It's only compared to Coal and Oil. We aren't launching spacecraft running on Coal because there is no oxygen to burn in space.

 

There are actually more than 3 major events, but the three I mentioned are the ones that set back the Nuclear Industry. Anyway it's missing my point about design. Nobody wants to launch a nuclear reactor into space, even though that might be the most reasonable way to fuel a space craft meant to transport people beyond the moon. 

 

Speaking of Nuclear space craft... one powered by nuclear bombs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

 

Now, if you ship an unfueled reactor into space, you can always bring launch the unprocessed fuel and then process it in space (thus reducing the amount of potential contamination due to a launch accident.) Any waste left over from processing/reprocessing it could then be stored securely in space where there is nothing to irradiate and no chance of sending it back into earth's orbit. 

To be clear, we launch RTG reactors into space all the time - Curiosity Rover uses one, as do a bunch of the newer probes, like New Horizons and Cassini and Galileo (newer on the Space technology scale).

 

RTG's have very little risk to the environment, as they typically don't carry a lot of radioactive materials. Most use 1-5 kg of fuel (typically plutonium). The biggest was the Russian US-As satellite, which carried 30 kg of Uranium-235, and had a 3000W electric output (100,000W heat output). The next most powerful RTG was the American SNAP-10A satellite, which had a 600W (electric)/30,000W (heat) RTG fueled by enriched uranium (unknown quantity - I'd guess 5-10 kg).

[harryk]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

To be clear, we launch RTG reactors into space all the time - Curiosity Rover uses one, as do a bunch of the newer probes, like New Horizons and Cassini and Galileo (newer on the Space technology scale).

I don't know if I'd call it "all the time". Less than 100 have been launched ever, mostly in the early space age and only 3 in the 21st century so far. Due to their potential for higher severity of damage from failure NASA has strict mission requirements for choosing an RTG over other power sources and rarely does so these days. I believe it also has to be approved by Congress or the Whitehouse due to the potential international relations nightmare it could create if there was a failure.

[amdorintel]

16 hours ago, Tamesh16 said:

additional research going into preventing that ?

yes, but the research the research in order to research, spend more money to minimize the risks

they dont want another nasa rocket seal failure to happen again which was due to a bad culture within nasa