this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
220 points (100.0% liked)
SpaceflightMemes
902 readers
2 users here now
A Lemmy analogue to r/SpaceXMasterRace.
Related communities for serious posts and discussion.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People shit on NASA all the time, as if "private space exploration" is the future, but I did the math on their JUNO mission and their margin of error was 1%.
NASA is goated.
What kind of calculation?
Delta-V Budget assuming standard parts
Getting anywhere in space requires ∆V, think of it like "gas needed" to go somewhere in a car, in an extremely simplified form.
The long form is a dimensionless change in velocity. You can point to any object in the night sky and calculate the ∆V required, like Jupiter.
In this case, NASA needed to go say, 384 miles to get to Jupiter and made it with less than 4 miles of fuel remaining using the car analogy. That's a shocking degree of accuracy.
They then purposefully coasted into the gravitational terminus of Jupiter terminating the mission using the final 1% of fuel, while studying the planet over a number of years.
In space, informally, and also because I'm personally somewhat awful at space, a 20% margin of error in ∆V would be considered "good" for us mere mortals, because we need to have wiggle room for errors, mistakes, and course corrections.
(Flipping a lander or rover over on the Moon is considered to be average performance, see: IM-2)
I'll have you know I managed to land Jeb on mun with exactly zero fuel remaining, so suck it NASA.
20% is kinda a lot ngl, we could probably do better.