I’m no shuttle engineer, but…
While watching Nasa TV this morning, I’m wondering, when we put telecommunications satellites into orbit, right next to the shuttle, why are we still hearing 4k, 8bit audio radio transmissions from the shuttle? I mean, the time they lose being unintelligible and simply dropping out must cost pretty close to what I’m guessing it would cost in additional gear for a servo guided laser transmitter, right? Trajectories are constant enough to compensate automatically, yes? Even to bounce off those nearby satellites. Also, the time lost to having mission control go back and forth trying to get the astronauts to find and read out some displays seems like would go a lot faster if they’d deploy some small pan/tilt/zoom cameras with a laser pointer coupled to let mission control be able to look and point directly at what they want to get readings on… the camera doesn’t have to be high res, if they can at least find it and point to it, that’d speed things up.
What is the cost-per-minute to be in space now? How many concurrent mission objectives are going on in a shuttle mission now? Why can’t they use the commodity hardware like pan/tilt/zoom webcams and laser pointers?
well, I’m completely clueless, surely… there’s gotta be some magical things that happen to servos and batteries in space that would prevent my ideas from working.
