Pat Flannery wrote:
kevin willoughby wrote:

I'll stand by my statement. The test plan for a moderately complex
program will specify several hundred test cases, minimum. Launching
several hundred satellites -- until the cheap-access-to-space miracle
occurs -- we're talking a significant chunk of a gigabuck
Ah, but there is something slick we can do here...we don't need to use
satellites that are _going_ to be launched; we can backtrack and use
ones that were _already_ launched.

That would certainly be useful. But it wouldn't come close to filling in
all the required test cases for a universal-orbit-calculator program.
You'd need custom launches into extreme and/or weird orbits to complete
the test plan. Perhaps the trickiest would be placing a satellite in
(not orbiting) each of the Lagrange points. As far as I know, no one has
ever done a sun-synchronous polar orbit around the moon. Buzz Aldrin
hypothesized a cyclic traveler orbit between Earth and Mars. So I still
say: we're talking a significant chunk of a gigabuck.


Unfortunately, we probably can't get our hands on all the detailed data
for all that thousand or so Soviet optical and Signit recon satellites
that were launched,

It wouldn't surprise me if that information was available. Perhaps the
former USSR would be willing to sell that data. Or may NORAD could be
convinced to declassify the data.

But again, that doesn't eliminate the need to lots of launches to
validate the software. The Soviet launches were all from high latitudes,
and flew into a limited number of orbital planes.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

It doesn't take many trips in Air Force One
to spoil you. -- Ronald Reagan