MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by mikepurvis on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @08:36PM (#28464799)

Arguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar missions and grab Soviet spy satellites right out of the air.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by mauvehaus on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @09:56PM (#28465337)

Point of order: if the space shuttle were grabbing satellites out of the air, something has gone terribly wrong with both launching the satellite and the shuttle.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by mikepurvis on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @10:12PM (#28465442)

I think the idea was that early spy satellites would use film rather than digital transmission, so it would be at the very least necessary to potentially grab one's own satellites.

In any case, this exact question was asked here, and the top-rated response indicates that it's unlikely that the design requirement was ever meant to refer to grabbing an uncooperative payload:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-spac...

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by neltnerb on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:31PM (#28465884)

I think the joke was that the satellite isn't supposed to be in the "air".

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by influx on Thursday September 09, 2021 @02:14AM (#28466852)

Parent was being overly pedantic in that satellites were likely to be grabbed out of space and not air.

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