The Humanity Star, Giant Space Discoball

cruizer101

The company Rocket Lab who are a private rocket company based in New Zealand recently launched a new Satellite called The Humanity Star on their Electron rocket.
The satellite doesn't serve any commercial purpose instead it is geodesic sphere made from carbon fibre with 65 highly reflective panels, i.e. a big discoball designed to be visible from earth with the naked eye. Its only purpose is to be viewed by people and maybe inspire them, I think that is brilliant, gotta love some rich people.
Its will orbit for the next yearish and can be seen at dawn and dusk when it catches the suns light, they do have a tracking map on their website but not sure when will next be visible over Ireland, fingers crossed for a clear day.
http://www.thehumanitystar.com/

Call me a cynic, Fake star launched by CEO of Rocket company.
This is a text book example of something serving a commercial purpose :-)

cc

Pure space junk - basically a giant ad in orbit

Capt'n Midnight

cc wrote: »

Pure space junk - basically a giant ad in orbit

Speaking of giant ads in space

Look up the history of Echo II and how at one stage they were considering inflatable coke bottles 2Km long in LEO , the size of the moon :eek:


For the original Sputnik , Korolev had them polish the booster that got them to orbit because it was much bigger than the satellite.



First launches of new rockets tend to have low risk payloads, or people trying to cheap out. The Falcon Heavy will launch a old car. Ariane 5 had a lump of concrete (precisely dimensioned lump) ready to go for the maiden flight but they put the Cluster constellation of satellites on it instead, because they got a good price for being the guinea pigs.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)

... caused a data conversion from a 64-bit floating point number to a 16-bit signed integer value to overflow ...

For the scientists watching the launch it was years of work and a couple of hundred million gone.

Cluster II launched fours later.


BTW the Kiwi's launched 3 satellites, it wasn't just a disco ball :cool:

Mollyb60

Has anyone actually managed to see this? It's had 2 passes so far but I just cannot seem to see it.

mickmackey1

Mollyb60 wrote: »

Has anyone actually managed to see this? It's had 2 passes so far but I just cannot seem to see it.

Much ado about nothing. Only visible for a few seconds, and only a few times from any one location. No reports of any confirmed sightings.

pleas advice

should be visible in three hours, for about 4 mins, north-east direction

Rubecula

speaking of odd things put in space, there is a nice Tesla car up there now too.