This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can't believe I'm saying this: Maybe we've gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
I was thinking more like Climate Change and Infrastructure and whatnot and suchlike.
That’s great, but that comes from funding those things, not shutting down a different industry. It’d be better to shut down non-productive industries like bombing brown kids in the Middle East.
Right. Elon hires people on the basis they'll be making Mars travel possible, but that Starship is really for dumping metal all over the night sky.
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
That's where you draw the line?
(Also, say hi to your chickens for me)
Well, at least we'll always have Sinatra.
theoretically
Billionaires don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we've all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
Doubtful.
This is just a way for SpaceX to try further integrate itself into the spheres of government and public funding, and thus, make it easier to justify government bailouts.
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they're certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn't mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren't environmental disasters anymore.
It's either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.
Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn't listen
To cool the iss they're exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
While this very well might fuck up land-based stuff looking at space, people are often overlooking what this would mean to stellar photography from space.
If they can truly launch these million data center sats profitably, that means starship works. That means payload to space is relatively cheap.
That means we could also send large quantities of large telescopes into space on the cheap, and avoid the crazy expensive cant fail telescopes because the cost to get them up there isnt prohibitive and a technical failure in the telescope isnt a disaster.
Things very well might change, but it will also open up possibilities in the same area.
Elon will not make it cheap. Falcon 9 prices keep rising. He's an exploiter and will enshitify his service once enough people are hooked on it.
It might be super cheap in the future to launch them but it will be into a field of fast moving garbage. The cost effectiveness of throwing more and more telescope up into space to try and get pictures before they get knocked out by the debris of the past will be a losing proposition.
Nah, everything at super low orbits like these constellations decay quite quickly. Even in cases of total loss of all satellites (eg Kessler Cascade), they would all reenter within a couple years.
You could relatively easily just put your space telescopes above that orbit and they’d be just fine.
Theoretically, even if we assume SpaceX is overshooting, that's an interesting thought:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
In practice? I'm more concerned about interest in funding astronomy in the first place.
That, and big fat telescopes are fundamentally expensive. And (at least for the optical variety) "swarming" them with a bunch of cheaper units isn't as effective as building a big one.
I'd love to be wrong though. There are some interesting papers on swarms of optical telescopes for a larger effective aperture, but I'm not qualified to assess them.
Oh, I wasn't thinking swarms the same way these million sats will be, I was thinking just using the whole payload diameter of around 9m for the lens/mirror (minus any housing) but they could potentially just buy the whole starship and be cheaper than past options and that is the housing.
James Webb cost billions because of it's complexity and launch costs, none of which is needed when there's 9meters to work with without any complexity at all.
If you wanted, you could make a super crazy expensive satellite that worked just like James Webb and have a massive mirror as well, but that's a bit different than my large quantity of cheaper telecopes in space. I wonder how big you could get the mirror if you did it James Webb style in starship.
I wonder how big you could get the mirror if you did it James Webb style in starship.
Presumably 7x ~8m hexagons folded up?
That is a good point though. And if one were to design a "budget" 9m space telescope, they could amortize the R&D dramatically by launching the same design many times, perhaps with different sensors for different purposes? Amortization is why the Falcon Heavy and such are so cheap, and why the Space Shuttle and JWST are obscenely expensive.
Okay, you've sold me. I hope this does happen.
Ya, that would get costs down further if they were able to amortize it over a larger quantity.
We could also get them pretty far out with starship refuelling, but refuelling a starship back to full capacity to then go somewhere would raise the cost a lot. But imagine a 7x 8m folded hexagon one sent out into deep space. That would be super expensive though, we wouldn't get a lot of those haha.
This is all a massive big IF though. Starship being fully reusable like they think is still very far from a given, so none of this might come true in our lifetimes.
Yeah. I prefer the idea of a bunch of 9-meters unless they can really perfect a cheap folding mirror to mass produce.
A small upper stage, an ion drive or something could get them to deep space. It's not worth flying a whole Starship out there and burning more fuel to get it back; the return trip only makes sense for LEO.
Who needs the night sky when you can download the old night sky via satellite internet with gig speed downloads in vr? /s
He never respected his fellow man, why start now?
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
