Stretching the Friendship? (Was: How Small Is...)

>
> (Sorry about the earlier accidental post.)
>
> If it's not off topic for this list, and if my asking is not out of
> line, would Mr. Clements mind explaining his parenthetical statement
> for the education of all? (Which friendship?) (What do you mean by:
> 'trust me: i know'?)
>
> Chris.
>
> > A more sophisticated mission again would be to flyby
> > (impacting such an object may be stretching the friendship
> > - trust me: i know) a near Earth asteroid taking video
> > pictures during closest encounter.

I tried to package such an impactor mission; which didn't fly in part
because my concept for a not-for-profit AMSat-style concept (which was - &
is still - financially feasible) was SpaceDeved into a bit of commercial
nonsense which broke every rule of economic common sense. There is an idiocy
going around the space advocacy that there is some kind of market for our
space developmental toys; but the market that exists is so small that
funding on that basis simply can't be done cost-effectively - even when you
smother your craft with web-cams, each embedding a sponsor's logo on its
imaging....

(Hey - i tried...)

Hitting NEAs has a lot of problems (hitting anything in space has a lot of
problems); but the particular problem with NEAs is the short flight times,
which can leave you without time to correct for errors in your escape burn.
We minimised the escape velocity as much as possible; but i think the
Toutatis flight we we were looking at still gave us four weeks from ignition
to arrival - plenty of time for a JPL or Darmstadt to correct & refine a
trajectory; but not for an operation put together on the fly.

That said, there is a window for a AMSat-style group to build a non-profit
microsat compatible with the Ariane 5 ASAP (or similar) GTO secondary launch
capability, probably targetting the Moon with a simple impactor; & this
window -when finally filled - will probably do more for real space
development than all the space tourism hype put together. The key thing we
need to change to make space development possible is the reduction of our
technology costs (launch costs, despite the hype, can be double-scissored
around; which is why all of the fantasies about re-usable launchers failed
to find viable financing & the X Prize has degenerated into irrelevancy) by
a mixture of simplification, miniaturisation & alternative organisation. The
AMSat teams currently putting satellite relays into LEO could play a part
here - but w ill they?

Live in peace
Robert.Clements@...
endeavour2 project http://www.geocities.com/robtclements/endeavour2.html>