SuitSat Not Looking Good So Far

Hulboy writes "According to the SuitSat website, things aren't going well for the makeshift satellite in it's first few hours. 'Reports of nothing heard from Israel, Turkey, South Africa, and two negative reports from Japan as well as the weak report below. JH3XCU reports signal only heard in SSB mode, TX cycle and doppler detectable, but no modulation... this is not looking good.'

Re:Another piece of junk

[DoctorStarks]

Every time we do something trivial like this, it means cleaning it all up later is going to be that much more difficult.

The ISS is in a low enough orbit (~400km) that this thing will not be there for very long. The odds of it causing a problem before it re-enters are very very small. At most, it will "only" take a few years to re-enter.

It's the stuff that gets left higher up that poses real risk, hence the change in attitude about blowing things up when you are done with them, and the desire to save fuel on spacecraft with propulsion to facilitate a controlled re-entry if possible (although that is also for safety reasons with big stuff that might hit somebody).

Re:Two things...

[Plunky]

This wasn't an "experiment" this was "throwing a radio out an airlock as a PR stunt". The fact that they failed at even something that simple is rather sad.

Incredibly, you are wrong!

1. If this was an experiment to see what would happen, then thats ok - they found that out!

2. If this was a publicity stunt, thats ok too.. This is the publicity!

Re:Two things...

[grumling]

Sort of like the experiment conducted by Cramerica Corporation in the mid 90's to test the viability of a beach ball oil containment system by tossing a ball of motoroil out the 5th story window of a Mahattan highrise. The test was unsuccessful (I believe the head researcher was quoted as saying "Well, that didn't work."), and there were minor injuries, but at least we all know for sure that a beach ball is not a good backup containment system for oil tankers.