Originally Posted by
FlightDream111
We had real-time telemetry of the moon landing and 47 years ago, right upto the moment of (soft) impact with the lunar surface.
And we sit here looking at text from the news channels to try to find out what hapenned more than 5 hours ago.
The technology is there, has been discussed to death. It's not a problem with volume of data either, as has been discussed and agreed on this forum.
I do not normally comment at such an early stage because it is speculative and ghoolish but what possible benefit would realtime telemetry bring in this situation? The motivation is clearly morbid curiosity rather than safety because in this as in almost all cases the data recorders will be recovered and any lessons that can be learned will be. However even morbid curiosity woudl almost certainly not be satisfied as in all probability the telemetry broadcast would simply have halted when whatever occured occurred.
The reality is that realtime telemetry would need to be backed up by data recorders to ensure data communications problems did not result in lost data. The safety value is only in those cases where the recorders cannot be recovered which is rare. Rather than safety it is the cost of searching for and recovering data recorders that needs to be balanced against the cost of implementing such a system. If it existed the data should not in any case be released until after an accident investigation.