Jim Lux wrote: >It's been challenging to find out information like Center of Mass position, >where the other GPS receivers are, etc. (complicated in part because half >of station is measured in inches/feet, and the other half in meters)
This reminds me of a story I heard about while building the packet module power supply for the Russian module of the ISS. Apparently when the Russians copied the type-N connector blueprints from the west, they used an incorrect english to metric conversion factor, such that Russian-made type-N connectors will not mate correctly with US type-N connectors (unless you use force). I have not personally verified this story, just passing it along for your consideration. On the subject of cell phones in space, since the cost of placing anything in orbit is approximately equal to the value of an equivalent mass of pure gold, efforts to do extreme cost reduction at the expense of reliability seem misplaced. A $100K Cubesat costs about the same amount to place into orbit. Getting the cost of the satellite down to a thousand dollars makes little sense when it still costs $100K to put that satellite into orbit. If the satellite dies early from radiation exposure you wasted the money that you spent to launch it. And it is unnecessary to adapt terrestrial consumer products for satellites when there are other good options to obtain components engineered for the space environment at reasonable cost. AMSAT has decades of experience in this area. Cell phones are consumer devices, exquisitely engineered for mass production with reasonably high reliability (when used on Earth as intended) at minimum per unit cost. Consumer electronics is a highly specialized area of engineering, but so is space flight hardware. Using consumer electronic devices in a space flight environment is a misapplication of engineering principles and is destined to be a technological dead-end. Dan Schultz N8FGV _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.