I'm really exited about Dragonfly, as Titan is a world not too different from ours: it gas lakes and rivers (made out of hydrocarbons, like methane), dunes and mountains
BepiColombo, another joint ESA-JAXA mission, will enter orbit around Mercury next month after a longer-than-expected journey. It will be the third spacecraft to visit Mercury.
JAXA does great work, they also publish the highest resolution open access global surface elevation model. Really impressive for a country with about 1/10th the GDP of the US.
4 ton launch mass, so 8x mass increase against Og Hayabusa probe(510kg). About 5.4x Satrlink V2 mini sats.
The OG Hayabusa was tiny as it was on the M-V 3-stage all-solid launcher with just 1.85t to LEO of max payload. This one was on H3-24L with up to 16t to LEO(91% of an F9 ASDS) so it's bigger accordingly.
My annual thing I can genuinely comment on in relation to hackernews. This is fucking so cool, I simply cannot tell you how rare it is we get primary material to do anything with.
It is important to get people excited about science, and inspire the next generation of scientists rather than choose the cheapest path to ‘good science’.
Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.
You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.
I'm not an expert, but in my mind if you actually want to make the human species interplanetary, flying small groups of people to the planet won't do anything for it. Send robots to build a base first, and yes that will take a long time. Otherwise you'll just be a species that visited other planets. (which would already be cool though obviously)
If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.
If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.
Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .
Venus and Europa could use some attention. Anything underway?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ice-war-on-europa-warforever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo
For Europa, Europa Clipper Mission (already on the way): https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/mission-time...
... and JUICE (already on the way): https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice
There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.
And to hell with the "planetary protection" treaty. We need "lebensraum"! Our females want to breed!
(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)
The OG Hayabusa was tiny as it was on the M-V 3-stage all-solid launcher with just 1.85t to LEO of max payload. This one was on H3-24L with up to 16t to LEO(91% of an F9 ASDS) so it's bigger accordingly.
Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.
Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.
The cost is about the same...
Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.
You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.
Unless you want to be interplanetary
If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.
If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.
Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .