Why is it necessarily adapted, and not just a sonobouy? Why placed by frogmen? When there are joint naval exercises in the Pacific (like the US does with South Korea annually, for example) hundreds of them get dumped into the ocean by helicopters and planes and are left to drift and sink. It’s not unreasonable to…
“function is not right”
Yep, they US Navy considers them expendable, and does not recover them. Literally hundreds could be dropped during multi-national fleet exercises.
More likely dropped from a plane or helicopter. That’s how sonobouys are typically deployed.
Typically side-scan sonars have “wings” to stabilize in the water, and towing hardware. My money’s on being a sonobouy. Size and shape are right on the mark.
If by “Many years” you mean something like several years, but not several decades, I wholly agree.
Not necessarily. There are fiber optics used on some aircraft, they aren’t connected to anything external, they are used for communication between components.
1 - It doesn’t need to be long range to communicate between the circuit boards inside. Clearly the fiber wouldn’t be used to communicate to something externally, or they could have just followed the fiber and see where it was plugged in.
It likely has zero range. It looks the right size and shape for a sonobouy. They’re dropped in the water to form ad-hoc sonar networks and they just drift and or sink after they are used. They are not self propelled.
7 Is the maximum crew capacity for the vehicles, but planned missions will not have that many seats in place.
“Meanwhile, other launches out of Wallops have been ongoing, just not the Antares/Cygnus ISS cargo runs.”
And that’s why they love funding SLS and not Commercial Crew. Commercial Crew has fixed price contracts that only pay out when performance based milestones are met. SLS is cost-plus. If it goes slower than planned or over budget, the contractors get paid more so they can make their contractually guaranteed profit…
The problem with that is it was so much more expensive to run than initially planned, it ate through budgetary hopes of funding the development of a replacement.
There’s too much congressional pork in the ISS, like there was in the shuttle. Congress wants jobs in their districts, and donations from the multitude of contractors involved. They’ll keep funding the ISS until it’s falling apart, like they did with the shuttles. That’s the same reason they want to put more money in…
It’s not just an issue of how big their overall budget it. Congress wants money to go to different things than NASA wants to spend it on.
Under the early Commercial Crew rounds NASA funded a few million into a study on man-rating Delta IV, and the report ruled that it wasn’t feasible. Too much of it would have to be re-designed to make it advisable over starting with a clean-sheet design.
That’s what the Commercial Crew program is all about.
It works on St. Patrick’s day in Chicago!
More importantly, it’s unrealistic to point fingers and say “The EPA knew there was a risk this would happen,” as if it’s a bad thing.
“So am I correct in reading this and seeing that the EPA sub-contracted the cleanup to a private company?”
