4/19/19, 4/26/19, 5/3/19, 5/10/10, leading up to plans for the summer

4/19: We discussed the first page of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733315001699#sec0130.

4/26: HA led discussion of the rest of section 1 of that paper. We also  discussed statistics techniques and concepts, let by MH. VB has done a preliminary analysis of the New Death Data file, getting a curve that appears at first glance to be roughly compatible with VK's analysis of SATCAT, although the noisiness in the two curves seem different.

5/3: MH's thesis proposal update: DB will send the updated proposal along with the Farmer & Lafond paper to the committee today. He will also send the time series analysis tutorial to us so we can discuss it next week.

5/10: Summer plans

• Summer schedule: we will communicate by email on an ad hoc basis, meet if there is a reason to, and otherwise start up our regular meetings in August.
• VB is working on his proposal now. VK is on his committee and has been assisting. Since VB's work will in part build on VK's thesis this helps significantly.
• MH thesis updated proposal: RS sent DB email approving it. EP has emailed approval. HA has approved by email as well. DB approves it, so now it's approved.
• DB plans to be working on a paper on death date curve conversion to launch date curve.
• MH plans to be working on his thesis based on the modified proposal document.
• RS plans to communicate when he is ready to start the minitab based paper.
• HA plans to provide weekly article discussions in the fall during our meetings.

Ongoing threads are also to be found at https://thehumanraceintospace.blogspot.com/p/ongoing-activities-and.html

4/5&12/19: AAS-19 and what's next

Congratulations to MH and the group on a successful presentation on Saturday 3/30/19! The next step is getting the submitted paper accepted, revised, and published.

Here are the threads underway.

1. Satellite data analysis. 

• VK suggested as a measure, for each year, launches*averageLifeSpan. 
• DB suggested lifespan/mass as a figure for each satellite, to be graphed as an average for each year, because cubesats may have lower mass, but lower lifespan, and still be an advance in technology. Thus lifespan alone might stop working pretty soon. Is mass data available for satellites? (It is for extraterrestrial spacecraft).
• New satellite data from planet4589. Merge with SATCAT and mine. VB is working on it.
• An analysis of lifespan trends on a per-country basis or per-organization basis would be interesting (MH suggested finding out to what extent the variation in satellite lifespan might be caused by new space programs). Same with lifespans and perigees.
• What if we analyze only SATCAT reentry status dates, and compare with the present analysis of all statuses except "in orbit." Probably would make little difference, but should compare to test this.
• Some potentially relevant background reading is at http://www.spaceworkscommercial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SpaceWorks_Spacecraft_Mass_Trends_2014.pdf.
• VK has applied for Affiliate Graduate Faculty Status so he could officially help advise VB.

2. Teaching track. DB used the google sheet to illustrate operator precedence in class. RS teaches engineering stat and may have some use for the trend and envelope analyses he's done on the data. These could be used for a future publication as well. 4/12/19: HA will be teaching python soon and could potentially use our data for class exercises and so on. We need to support that and work in that direction.

3. NEO/NEA analysis track: VK has some preliminary reports. What are the prospects?

4. Deep space exploration: we still need to do an analysis of missions/craft on a per-craft rather than per-year basis. Also, a per-year analysis is still needed for international missions since we just did NASA in our 2018 AAS paper. In addition:

• Comparison of different countries' space technology would be interesting. For example, comparing NASA vs. USSR in having similar lifespan doubling times, but different lifespan-over-time curves is interesting. Maybe other countries would also provide different curves. This might be good for an article in The Space Review, since short, focused articles seem good for that forum.
• It would be interesting to check lifespan/mass over time for deep space craft to see if it is an improvement over lifespan alone. (Doing this for satellites is mentioned above.)

5. Article discussion: we discussed 3 articles in room.eu.com. For next time we will discuss the first page of: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733315001699#sec0130.