In 1992 nasa's then boss, Daniel Goldin, said the agency's objective was to do things "faster, better, cheaper". The past few weeks have seen the logical outcome of this approach: a mission whose launch costs are zero and whose ground controllers are a group of amateurs who are doing it, essentially, for nothing. The iaee-3 Reboot Project, as these enthusiasts call themselves, exists to revive an old spacecraft. A very old one. It was launched in 1978, and has thus spent almost two-thirds of the entire space age, which began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, in orbit around the sun. But in 1997 nasa decided isee-3 had done its job as a solar observatory and comet-chaser, and shut it down. Just in case somebody in the future wanted to try to revive it, the shutdown left the craft in standby mode. And that, as their name suggests, is what the Re-booters are trying to do.
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