> The oldest segments are from 1998

You wish. That's just the launch date. Zvezda dates back to late 1980s and Zarya to early 1990s, because they were considered as modules for Mir and later Mir-2 project, to finally get included in the ISS.

> Some parts? 🤣

Yes. Large part of the ISS was not launched on the Shuttle. Zarya, Zvezda, Pirs, Poisk, Nauka, Prichal were not. And Mir and recently Tiangong proved you don't need a Shuttle to construct a modular space station.

> the need for a general-purpose LEO utility vehicle

No such need ever existed, and history showed how stupid idea this was. It was bad as a launcher because you needed a crew, which made it extremely expensive and dangerous. It was also bad as a manned craft, because you had a huge vehicle with a tiny manned part. The only scenarios where it was useful was Hubble refurbishing and SpaceLab missions. Everything else, including ISS construction, could have been done much cheaper by regular rockets.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make. The article discusses de-orbiting the ISS, which requires pushing a 500t object to a transfer orbit with 150km lower perigee than what it is right now. The space shuttle had nowhere near the delta-v to do that. Yes it was used few times to reboost ISS orbit, but only a tiny bit.

Yes, Shuttle was used to construct some parts of the ISS, but in 36 flights in total. Are you suggesting an idea to de-assemble ISS and take it back to the ground piece by piece? It's a completely crazy idea and even if the Shuttle was still operational it would never be considered.

Yes, but for very small reboosts, nowhere near what would be required here.

> recycle the parts/materials

That's completely pointless. It's not a solid block of aluminium or something else which can easily be recycled. Consider that ever on Earth we don't "recycle" things like cars, because it's just not practical - it would be more expensive than making a new thing from scratch.

1. There are safety risks because modules are old and degraded
2. Costs are pretty high, it takes a couple of billions to keep it flying each year. Why would private sector do it? Cost is high and return prospects not great.

Shuttle would be rather useless for such purpose, it had very little delta-v and could not do such thing.

A "wet-workshop" idea is not new - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_workshop

> Why can’t they just use a Cygnus to do it?

To small. You'd need something like fully loaded ESA ATV to deliver enough delta-v. Single biggest push ISS ever got was from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler_ATV and with 4.5t of fuel (total theoretical payload capacity was 7.5t, but part of that was fuel for ISS, water and dry cargo allocation) it delivered less than 30m/s delta-v, raising orbit form 350 to 400km. Here you need about 50% more. So theoretically fully loaded with fuel it could make it. But that was the biggest resupply craft flying to the ISS.

This is because atmosphere does most of the job, you just need to drop the perigee low enough.

Consider that the Space Shuttle had around 300 m/s of delta-v available for their orbital operations. Deorbit burn of visiting spacecraft to the ISS are around 130-150 m/s.

> My basic understanding of orbital mechanics would suggest that this should be possible right?

No, because it would require the velocity to exceed the speed of light when you're approaching the periapsis. This is where the "classic" calculations fail. In "regular" orbital mechanics problem the closer to periapsis you are, the faster you're moving, and this way you "climb up" from the gravity well. However in reality there is a limit of how fast you can move, and in your example you'd have to exceed the speed of light in order to climb up from the gravity well after crossing the event horizon, and this is not possible.

> I’d think if it was satellite removal there’d be enough gold and valuable materials to make a profit

What? No! Not even remotely close. There is no "gold" other then maybe tiny amount in eletronics. I'm not sure what you think satellites are made of, but it's essentially like trying to recover "materials" from your old car, old refrigerator, old PC or old mobile phone. Completely unprofitable even when you have those things readily available on the ground.

What do you mean exactly by "work at NASA"? Because the range of jobs there is most likely pretty large. What exactly you want to do actually do there? Focusing on a particular place is a bit weird, you should focus on a job instead. Otherwise what happens if you realise you actually don't like the place?

If you want to do some engineering or astro-science then it might be hard without math and physics. But there are lots of other jobs - you could be a janitor there, or drive the crawler which moves rockets into the launch pad, or be a technician or a lawyer or a firefighter...

For the same reason you don't see such "trails" of the cars on the road next to you. The light coming from the time when object was in different location already reached you in the past.

The "trails" you refer to are essentially what you perceive as "object moving".

> If it expanded faster, the light would never catch up. I doesn't seem like we should be able to see anything at all.

The mistake here is that you dismiss the fact that speed of the expansion is related to distance. What happens is: "space expands". Imagine that 1m of space at some point becomes 2m. This also means that 100m become 200m in the same timespan. Notice that this means that object which was 1m away is now 2m away (so moved away by 1m) but object which was 100m away is now 200m away (so moved away by 100m).

So while expansion makes everything further away from everything else, the distance change is greater the further the object is. So objects which are closer are getting away slower, and objects which are further are getting away faster (and even faster than the speed of light!).

It's true that light from things very far away won't ever reach us, because space expands faster than the light can travel, but there are lots of objects closer than that, and light from those objects will eventually reach us.

> If we push the stick 10 cm, does it mean the stick is 10 cm shorter before the push reaches the other end?

Consider that this "stick" is not really a rigid body, but rather a large "spring", and it can compress (at atomic scale). So yes, the stick would be, from certain point of view, shorter while the push is being propagated.

> additional force to transiently deform it

Again, since it's a spring, there is no additional force needed, because the energy is conserved (aka: the spring will uncompress, releasing this "deform" energy) back.

It's a common misconception that space is "cold". This is due to the definition of "cold" -> the kinetic energy of particles in certain volume is low. But while on Earth is means you have lots of particles, each with low energy, in space it's very different - you have very few particles, often with very high energy.

In order to cool something down, you need to transfer the energy. On Earth particles with low energy will steal some of the energy of your hot thing, cooling it down. The more particles, the better. In space this effect doesn't exist, there are no particles to steal the energy. You need to radiate the heat as infra-red.

> Don't we have nuclear powered boats floating around aka the carriers and subs with nuclear engines?

The issue with nuclear reactors in space is waste heat. Boats you're referring to have literally whole ocean around them to use as coolant. In space you don't have such luxury and you need massive radiators to dump the heat.

> The fastest spacecraft is the Parker Solar Probe at 430,000 mph

This is simply wrong. The value you provided is instantaneous velocity this spacecraft had when passing perihelion, and is mostly due to how close to the Sun it was. It has very little to do with actual velocity at which it would travel outside the solar system.

Highly elliptical or hyperbolic orbits look a bit like pendulum or a ball thrown upwards -> you have high velocity when it's deep in gravity well (eg. ball is the fastest right before hitting the ground) but the velocity drops when you're moving away (eg. the ball will essentially reach a point where it has velocity=0 before it starts falling back down). So while parker solar probe had high velocity when passing close to the Sun, it would be moving orders of magnitude slower when moving away, eg. in the direction of this nearby black hole.

> ambitious plans

It's always nice to have another telescope, but I'm not exactly sure about the "ambitious" part here. First 6m telescope was built in 1976, that's 46 years ago, and first 10m telescope in 1993, almost 30 years ago. And just for comparison, currently largest telescope under construction is going to be 40m. 6m sounds like a project a large university could pull-off on their own - so if that's the case (as in: the Peking University is doing this on their own) then it's definitely ambitious idea.

Two ways you can approach that:

• each observatory has their own archive interface (you can just search for "jwst archive", "hubble archive", "eso archive" etc.)
• some observatories implement so-called Virtual Observatory protocols, which in principal allows to query all of them using the same code or the same tools (there are some tools like Aladin Sky which support those)

Depending on your goal either of those might be more useful. First option provides much more in-depth tools and is useful if you're looking for specific type of data - eg. you want data from particular instrument. Second option is useful if you're interested in data about some specific target, and you want to get all available observations of such target.

There is also one more thing to consider -> archives provide two types of data:

• raw data
• science data

Raw data means essentially a direct read-out of the instrument which requires complex multi-stage processing and combining with other data (aka: calibrations) before you get something useful. This is useful if you are developing some special processing steps, or if you know something particular about the target and you can configure parameters for the processing better than the default ones.

Second option is more useful if your intention is just to search and analyse science data.

It was not "lost" in terms of unknown location, but in terms of loss of communication due to a comm system failure. It came back online many years later, thanks to hard-reset caused by deep discharge of batteries when it when in Earth's shadow long enough. At this point no-one was trying to communicate with it any more, and amateur astronomer accidentally picked up the signal.

> Why do we have to "write the imaging processor"?

You don't. It was OP himself who said processing is 90% of the work and skill, but in reality majority of processing is done automatically.

> because you don't actually know how to create an image like this,

I actually do. I happened to write astronomical data processing software, although for telescopes orders of magnitude bigger than what OP is using here. Anyway, OP said himself that 90% of it is image processing this is why I asked if he actually is the author of this "image processing" he's referring to. Because it's not a manual process, just as making hundreds of photos for stacking or taking calibrations is also not a manual process either - you literally buy a special robot to track the target on the sky for you.

Of course it involves spending time and having the skills to setup all of this, and clearly OP got some really nice results, I'm not denying that! But let's be clear on which parts of the process require skill and which require money.

A completely failed analogy, since I'm not saying someone has to build the camera with their bare hands.

Imagine you bough a flute and also a robot which is playing this flute. And you're essentially choosing the music sheets, tuning the instrument and picking the right place to play the music. This is pretty much what is happening here.