Re: Death Sentence for the Hubble?

From: Jorge R. Frank (jrfrank_at_ibm-pc.borg)
Date: 02/23/05 

Date: 23 Feb 2005 02:35:34 GMT

"Christopher M. Jones" <christopher.m.jones@gmail.com> wrote in
news:7_KdnSgj5LjGeIbfRVn-hA@comcast.com:

> Jorge R. Frank wrote:
>> Andrew Nowicki <andrew@nospam.com> wrote in
>> news:421B8D70.528E4838@nospam.com:
>>>If Dextre uses the same solar arrays, they
>>>will cost $1.08 million.
>>
>> And you think solar arrays are the only component of a spacecraft
>> electrical power system? You need transformers to convert the solar
>> array DC output voltage into the voltages needed by the equipment
>> above. You need inverters if the system contains any AC loads. And
>> assuming you're smart enough not to want a single short to be able to
>> kill the whole spacecraft, you're going to want to design some degree
>> of redundancy/fault-tolerance into the system.
> [snips]
>
> That's not even the issue. Software is assembled from
> characters stored on electronic media which cost next to
> nothing. The trick is assembling those components
> appropriately into useful source code and other
> materials. That does not cost money because the
> components are expensive (they are basically free), it
> costs money because it requires a substantial amount of
> staff-hours from highly educated and trained (read: not
> cheap) individuals to come up with workable designs and
> then construct those designs. Even a cheap and simple
> spacecraft developed highly efficiently (e.g. amsat,
> MOST) represents a greater cost in development work than
> Andrew's nominal solar array cost estimate.

Good point, and one I neglected in my original reply to Andrew (but which I
partially rectified in my other reply). 

-- 
JRF
Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

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