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A Novel Way To Track The Space Station

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 26, 2015
Filed under
A Novel Way To Track The Space Station

Point the Way to the International Space Station with This DIY Orbit Tracker, Make
“Given the International Space Station’s host of superlatives (i.e. most expensive man made structure, largest artificial body in Earth’s orbit, longest functioning habitable satellite, greatest engineering accomplishment of all time, coolest flying space laboratory, etc.), you’d think that it would be on our minds constantly. Yet many of us go hours, even days, without thinking about it once. There’s a growing movement of people who believe that our space agencies are underfunded because humanity is just not paying enough attention to our present accomplishments and future plans in space exploration. Well, I know one way to direct attention to something. Point at it.”
Barn door tracker, Wikipedia
Keith Cowing at Maker Faire: Hacking NASA

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “A Novel Way To Track The Space Station”

  1. Littrow says:
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    I don’t know about the value of this pointing apparatus, but I find the narrative of the article fascinating. I think it illustrates the poor job NASA and the ISS Program has done of telling people in succinct terms what ISS is, what it does,and what its value may be. We hear a lot of hype but the message has not been clear or consistent. I think the current NASA ISS mission statement is something like “off the earth, for the earth”-how nondescript and forgettable is that? I find it interesting that in the same paragraph where the author talks about the most expensive man-made apparatus of all time, that he also talks about the under funding of the program; is this a non-sequitor? Maybe NASA needs to put messaging and marketing in the hands of trained marketers and take it from the hands of engineers, who seem to have missed their mark.

    • Rich_Palermo says:
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      “Maybe NASA needs to put messaging and marketing in the hands of trained marketers and take it from the hands of engineers, who seem to have missed their mark.”

      NASA has put PR ahead of engineering more than once. People died. The problem with the ISS is not and has never been who is doing the marketing. There is no substance there to market.

      This country needs to get over its addiction to hype.

  2. James Lundblad says:
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    Love it, very cool.

  3. GregB says:
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    This tracking device kind of reminds me of the tracking device in the old science fiction movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

  4. Brian_M2525 says:
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    NASA’s human spaceflight program has not been particularly effective at getting things done in space in decades. The loss of Columbia was a NASA engineering management failure. And don’t forget, we had a tremendous capability with Shuttle and thanks to NASA engineering management ineptitude, we threw it away. Shuttle might have been readily modified to a heavy lift capability, as had been the plan for decades, and yet we shut down all of the facilities and laid off the workers before the effort was made to continue the Shuttle legacy through SLS; more NASA HSF waste and ineptitude.

    ISS is a prime example management ineptitude. There was no technical challenge to ISS; it had all been done before. And yet, it did take far more money and far more time than was warranted. Then, once it was up in orbit and assembled, we found that the management had forgotten to plan for its utilization. So not only had they spent more $$billions than should have been required, they wasted $$ billions not using the resource once they had it.

    (Did you ever stop to think that maybe the NASA “leadership’s” real goal was to snooker the US taxpayer into paying as much as possible for as long as possible to put money into their own and their contractor’s pockets? I think this is called corruption.)

    So you are wondering why the same leaders cannot figure out how to communicate what they are doing to the public?

    I do not believe the NASA HSF “leadership” even knows what they are trying to do engineering-wise. Why would anyone think they would have a clue of what to do in such foreign areas as PR or communications?

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      I don’t think NASA’s leadership is actually trying to ‘snooker’ the US taxpayer. I don’t give them that much credit for understanding what they are doing to the long term exploration of space. I do, however, think the contractors are strategically planning how to take as much as they can from the US taxpayer, and the NASA managers are not sophisticated enough to protect against them.

  5. Michael Spencer says:
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    Fascinating. It’s far too easy to visualize objects in orbit as simply going around and around, when in fact things are much more complex, particularly when viewed from a stationary point on Earth.

  6. Antilope7724 says:
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    This is something Radio Shack should sell. Oh wait…..they don’t exist anymore.

  7. chuckc192000 says:
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    I wanted to do this years ago using a Lego Mindstorm robot but I didn’t know if its computer could handle the trig calculations fast enough for real-time tracking.