The fellow in this photo was buying coffee at a coffee shop I go to. The object dangling from his hand is a prototype of a satellite he built.
The actual satellite will be carried to the space station and launched by hand from the station into orbit. I guess that means throwing it backwards.
The orbit is expected to degrade in slightly more than a year and the satellite will burn up.
The dangling objects from the box are solar panels. In space, with no gravity they will be extended from the satellite body.
I asked the fellow how the satellite would remain stable. It has to remain fairly stable because it is going to be taking photographs and relaying them back to earth.
His answer was that each of the four parallel edges had a magnet inside. Those magnets would align with the earth’s magnetic field. I asked him if the expected reversal in the Earth's magnetic field in the next few months would effect his satellite. He said no it would just be facing the opposite direction.
I have to admit I am stunned and impressed.
This is the age when an ordinary person can launch a satellite. An age where commerce is taking us into space.
Do we really need NASA? NASA does plenty of military work, but that should be military. The rest of the time NASA funds people like Jim Hansen to travel the world, getting speaker’s fees for himself and promoting the anti-scientific human caused global warming ideology.
Any kid who can read a simple graph will quickly find out that global warming is nonsense and the scientists who support it are ideological pawns. Very bad for science.
NASA has been harming science not helping it by trumpeting ideology and ignoring data. NASA ignores its own satellite data that shows global warming is a sham. The earth is 57F degrees and has hardly changed since the first satellite sent up to measure it 35 years ago.
The one good thing NASA did for science was putting Richard Feynman on an investigative panel about the failure of the Challenger. He demonstrated the cause of the failure with a cube of ice from the water glass on the table in front of him.
The next panel convened for the Columbia shuttle disaster avoided an honest man like Feynman so we got the unscientific explanation that NASA had prepared before the panel started its work.