On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft — which carried The Golden Record, Carl Sagan's love letter to Annie Druyan — turned its revolutionary camera around and took the iconic "Pale Blue Dot"photograph that later inspired the famous Sagan monologue of the same title. The image, composed of 640,000 individual pixels, depicts Earth, a mere 12% of a single pixel, at the center of a scattered ray of light resulting from taking an image this close to the Sun. It endures, even in an age when the future of space exploration hangs in precarious balance, as a timeless Valentine to the cosmos...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/02/14/happy-birthday-pale-blue-dot/
(Section 6)
ReplyDeleteWhat is truly interesting within this article is when it references the time when NASA would do a mission just because it would be "cool." These pictures were taken just roughly 4 years after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Our space program was still within its infancy, and truly was just doing missions because they were "cool." Between the Challenger disaster and the Columbia disaster, NASA really stopped doing missions because they would be "cool" and instead focused on pure exploration. Everything that NASA undertook, had to be carefully planned and run through multiple times to ensure that something would not go wrong. This is where Elon Musk and SpaceX have made vast improvements. Elon has taken the early NASA philosophy of keep trying until you get it right. His methods of implementing changes allows him to make rapid and vast improvements between rocket iterations. Elon would almost rather the rockets explode ("Rapid unplanned disassembly") during test flights so that he does not have to store the rocket after the test. It also allows investigations into what went wrong so that improvements can be made for the next iteration. With Falcon 9, Elon was launching new variations quite frequently until he got a rocket that did not have any issues and could be reused multiple times. Elon Musk's new rocket, Starship, has taken longer to evolve mainly because the FAA and Army Corps of Engineers have delayed providing the Boca Chica location with orbital launch certification. But Elon has brought back the old philosophy of NASA's in which he does stuff just because it will be "cool," take a look at the roadster that he launched into space just because.
https://www.whereisroadster.com/