NASA Launches Dart Spacecraft to Demonstrate Automated Rendezvous

Jake McGuire wrote:

The reported comments of the DART program manager also seem to indicate
a pretty clear case of Not Getting It. The combination of "The mission
team for NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous technology hopes
to finish validating its hardware through ground testing and analysis"
and "The same guidance box that flew was tested on the ground. We knew
all that worked, we just wanted to prove it in the environment of
space" don't seem to mesh well with the observed results.

The whole mission seems to have been very poorly designed -- downright
awful, actually. Read the Spaceflight Now news archive articles on DART
and XSS-11 back to back, and you'll see what I mean.

Mike

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Michael Kent Apple II Forever!!
St. Peters, MO