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It's one of the most recognizable images in aerospace: Highly specialized workers clad in gowns, hair nets and shoe coverings crawl over a one-of-a-kind satellite the size of a school bus. The months-long process is so delicate that even workers' metal rings must be covered with a translucent tape to prevent static transfer.
Contrast that with how things are done at Planet Labs Inc. in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. Satellites no bigger than a loaf of bread are propped on work benches, tended by technicians wearing simple rubber gloves and light lab coats. Largely using commercially available tech components, they can crank out and test 25 of these pint-sized satellites in a week.
Befitting its location, the Earth-imaging company's approach is more akin to that of a tech start-up than a traditional aerospace firm. Giant satellites might cost north of $1 billion and last for a decade or more. Planet churns out satellites that cost a tiny fraction of that—how much, it won't say—with a lifespan of just two to three years.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 10 2018, @09:24AM (9 children)
No matter how cheap the satellites are, you still have to launch them into space. And if they are short-lived and thus have to replaced frequently, I'd expect that cost to be quite significant.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 10 2018, @10:13AM
that pays for your replacement satellite.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:14PM (5 children)
Rockets are the new mass transit and when you ride share, instead of launching a concrete ballast block they get like $100K or so for a 1U sat. Obviously this varies WILDLY with how many ham radio operators the launcher company employs and so forth.
amsat.org has launched a lot simply off donations.
Generally speaking even with crap discipline and crap working conditions and crap pay, you're still gonna spend/donate maybe 20x the amount of money on satellite labor as you would on the launch. You can launch a sat for about one engineer-year cost but it takes maybe 10+ engineer-years to build even a small sat.
So for ham radio sats, the real expensive part of the budget is ten guys come in on their day off saturday afternoon, at contractor rates that "donation" to the ham radio community would be like $5K... every weekend. It might take a couple years to slowly build a sat that way.
Old time ham radio guys usually don't get "FOSS" and "Open Source" until you explain its kinda like amsat.org where volunteers build satellites for everyone to use. Then they get it, usually, mostly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @03:52PM (4 children)
You can tell how smart a person is by whether they got fooled into calling it "ride sharing" or not. Hint - if you pay for something, it isn't really sharing. Hint #2 - corporations usually don't share things, they sell or rent things.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @04:06PM (3 children)
sharing
verb
use, occupy, or enjoy (something) jointly with another or others.
Crack open a dictionary. They are sharing the same payload fairing, and the same ride.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @04:30PM
It is easy to fall for corporate psychological tricks. They can literally change your mind (the way you think) by choosing the words that they use to communicate with you. Normalize the use of words such as "sharing" and "like" to mean whatever they want them to mean. Eg. - What?! You don't "love" Apple? Where "love" means to buy their shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @06:14PM (1 child)
Does the dictionary say that sharing means you have to pay to use the something? Seems more like rent is the word you're looking for.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 10 2018, @08:01PM
Does the dictionary say you have not to pay when you share? What about sharing the cost?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @03:39PM (1 child)
BFR is going to drop launch costs dramatically. But before BFR flies (as well as after), ridesharing can already make space accessible [theverge.com] for cheap, small payloads:
We could be witnessing a bubble in the small sat industry, but not on the satellite side. There are a bunch of small launch services that want to offer dedicated rides for small payloads (e.g. Rocket Lab, Vector Space Systems, Firefly Aerospace, Rocket Crafters, Ventions, LLC, Mishaal Aerospace, Relativity Space, Space Services Inc., and probably more) (SpinLaunch [soylentnews.org] is at least trying something different and potentially very cheap). They are typically in the range of $1 million to $10 million per launch, with a huge $/kg disadvantage when compared to SpaceX or other big launchers. The small launch vehicles are typically not reusable due to the fact that they can't carry enough fuel to both lift a payload and land booster(s).
So if SpaceX can reuse Falcon 9 rockets in as little as a week or so, it can have aggressive scheduling of launches that eat away at the "dedicated" advantage that small launch providers offer. Later BFR can roll onto the scene, with a much more voluminous and often empty payload fairing since it will eventually be replacing all Falcon 9 and Heavy launches on cost grounds. Lots of room for ridesharing, greater payload mass to orbit. The future looks bright for small satellites.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @04:02PM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/rocket-report-tons-of-new-boosters-spacex-soars-new-glenn-may-be-late/ [arstechnica.com]
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