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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: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:07PM (2 children)
What a horrible PR disaster for Amateur Radio, which has been launching cubsats and similar microsat designs for at least a quarter century.
They even carefully kept the google-able term"cubesat" out of the article. Awful, just awful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat [wikipedia.org]
Something I find fascinating is the rising influence of amateur radio. As the legacy media dies, ham radio does not, making it proportionately more influential. Back in the old days like 1/3 of the 200 million person population watched the nightly news, which in addition to being 1/3 of the population it was 60 million people. Nobody knew about ham radio because there were only like half a million or one quarter of one percent of the population. Now as legacy media dies, only a million or so people watch dying channels like CNN at night, google found me a stat of 1.04 million nightly viewers, whereas ham radio has grown microscopically from 500K to 700K licenses over the last 40 years or so. So in the old days 33% of the population watched legacy nightly TV network news and 0.3% of the population were hams, now like 0.3% of the population watches legacy TV news and hams have dropped to merely 0.2% of the population. In 1980 ham radio was a niche for very few, today watching dying legacy news media is a niche for very few. Someday I think the rankings will swap and they'll be more people talking BS in the bad parts of 80M and 20M than watching old fashioned TV.
I remember a weird commentary on Star Trek Voyager a quarter century ago running along the idea that in the future, pro sports like baseball died out completely and nobody watched TV. Weirdly, that future is kinda here today. Median age of those activities is far beyond AARP membership and around standard retirement age and it goes up about a year or more per year, so that Trek scene/gag about "the last world series" is almost here...
(Score: 1) by xhedit on Friday August 10 2018, @01:42PM (1 child)
All of us new hams just FT8, OM appliance operator ragchews about health issues on 80m have exactly zero appeal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @04:05AM
Say what