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Asked by Hera to Julian, Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane on 14 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by JacobH.
Question: how long does it take to design and prepare the space crafts?
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Julian Onions answered on 14 Nov 2014:
It takes some years. Spacecraft are expensive to make, costly to launch and they have to work first time (as you can’t usually go and fix them).
So usually it is a number of years to design and prepare them.The James Webb Space Telescope for instance, which is probably an extreme example, was planned and started in 1996, and will probably launch in 2018. So 24 years. Most others are somewhat quicker, but not by a huge margin.
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Heather Campbell answered on 16 Nov 2014:
Space crafts are really complicated and often need special things to be developed for the satellites so take a long time.
For example the Gaia satellite (which I work on the science of) was first suggested in the early 1990s. It launched in december last year, so it took over 20years to design and make. It took about 10years for the design and about 10years to make. Much of it was made here in the UK, the huge camera, 1billion pixels, the size of a table top, the largest ever sent into space was made by a company called e2V in the UK.
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Helen Johnson answered on 17 Nov 2014:
Basically a really long time. The Rosetta mission, which just landed a probe on the surface of comet 67P, originated from an idea in the late 1980s inspired by the 1986 close approach of Halley’s comet. There were two proposed missions – ‘Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF)’ to be controlled by NASA, and the follow-on ‘Comet Nucleus Sample Return (CNSR)’ mission to be controlled by ESA. It was a joint effort to learn more about comets, since the two missions would share the Mariner Mark II spacecraft design (to save money). The CRAF plans were eventually scrapped by NASA, and in 1992/3 ESA started to redesign the whole idea. 11/12 years later and Rosetta was launched! 🙂
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