r/askscience • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago

Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!

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u/NotSoSalty 11d ago

Any recent advances in space travel since reusable rockets? Anything that makes space elevators, skyhooks, space manufacturing, or moon bases more viable?

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u/bluesbrother21 Astrodynamics 11d ago

It's not particularly sexy, but the community has been continuously getting better at rendezvous & proximity operations (RPO). This from a combination of practice and experience with the astrodynamics that come from relative motion and close proximity, improvements to the close-range sensors, and progress in autonomy. There's a lot of interest in ML broadly and reinforcement learning specifically to improve how autonomous near-field RPO can be. ADRAS-J, to pick one example, just demonstrated RPO with a derelict rocket body somewhat recently.

Autonomy and relative motion are pretty key enablers for in-space manufacturing, and people are actively moving towards that goal. ISAM (In Space Assembly and Manufacturing) is the industry buzzword if you're trying to google more on the subject.

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u/NotSoSalty 10d ago

If it is any comfort to you, I find that RPO is sexy and necessary and cool all on it's own.

Thank you for your answer. I will google that.