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.
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SpaceX is set to launch five more times before the end of 2018, bringing the total for the year to 22 launches. This falls short of a goal of 30 launches that was set previously:
SpaceX's launch manifest for the remainder of 2018 is beginning to take shape. The company has five launches remaining on its schedule for the year. Executing all of them would take SpaceX's 2018 launch total to 22 – surpassing the launch provider's previous record of 18 launches in a single year.
The next mission on SpaceX's manifest is Es'hail 2. Scheduled for no earlier than November 14th, a Falcon 9 will launch the communications spacecraft from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center for the Qatar Satellite Company. [...] The launch will be the first from Pad 39A since Bangabandhu-1 on May 11th of this year. Since then, the launch complex has been undergoing renovations to support NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Notable changes include the addition of a crew access arm and raising of the Emergency Egress System (EES).
[...] Just five days later, a Falcon 9 will launch Spaceflight Industries' SSO-A mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launch will feature over 70 small payloads. Traditionally, small satellites have either launched on smaller launch vehicles or as rideshares with a larger payload. However, the SSO-A mission will combine numerous smaller payloads into one dedicated launch. Currently, the launch is targeting a liftoff time of 18:30 UTC on November 19th.
Interestingly, SpaceX's Vice President of Mission Assurance, Hans Koneigsmann, stated at the 2018 International Astronautical Congress that the SSO-A mission may feature a first stage booster being flown for the third time. Previously, SpaceX has only flown the same core twice. If SSO-A is the first to feature a milestone third flight of the same booster, then the launch would have to utilize either B1046 or B1048. Those are the only two Block 5 boosters in SpaceX's fleet which have already flown twice. B1048 would be the most likely candidate out of the pair, given that it has already been performing launches out of Vandenberg.
The SSO-A launch carrying 70 small payloads to orbit will be one to watch. The Iridium-8 launch scheduled for December 30 will be SpaceX's final launch for the Iridium NEXT constellation of satellites.
Related: A New Wave Of Satellites In Orbit: Cheap And Tiny, With Short Lifespans
SpaceX Attempts Historic West Coast Landing Tonight -- Successful! [Updated]
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 10 2018, @10:15AM (3 children)
that was in the news when I was in high school. I think it was Spielberg anyway. But he wouldn't tell anyone what he was going to orbit.
I was made a Student Shop foreman at Caltech so I could qualify for the key to the expensive and delicate tools cabinet and so stop pestering the guy who ran the place. That led a couple other students to always be pestering _me_.
It turned out that what those two were building was the experiment whose Shuttle transport Steven Spielberg paid for. I had no idea.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by datapharmer on Friday August 10 2018, @11:38AM
For anyone interested that was a Plant Gravireception and Liquid Dispersion experiment G-033 on STS-7
https://archive.org/stream/nasahistoricalda05vann/nasahistoricalda05vann_djvu.txt [archive.org]
https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/green/cargsumm.pdf [nasa.gov]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @10:31PM (1 child)
MDC, really... write a book about your life. I'd be interested, there seems to be a lot of interesting shit going on :D
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 11 2018, @04:11AM
But it's going to have to be a collection of essays. I'm an essayist, I was long ago forced to conclude, not a book writer.
That's me in the picture, just outside Fleming House at Caltech. My camera at the time had a shutter delay timer. The camera I've got now does not. Not much I can do about that other than to purchase a new camera.
I _am_, however, attempting to write a proper book. This one is intended for dead-trees, that I hope to earn a little coin, but I'll place a few sample chapters on my site.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:57AM
Dick niggers. And they're neither cheap nor tiny. Do you want to know more?
[_] YES
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