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Comment by quadcore | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could put software in one of those shoebox satellites.

I just had a daydream of Satellites as a Service. "give us a docker image extending our base image, no larger than x MB delta, and we will run it on a chosen satellite for a certain time slice for $y"

I can see that future. Even if purely as a learning tool for students.

Students can design, build, validate and launch their own cubesats through special programmmes.

Even cooler if one of them launches a flying data center. Limited bandwidth would be an issue.

Bandwidth is usually less of a problem than latency.

Would the satellites have some known set of sensors or something like that? Just trying to figure out what would be the point, other than just the coolness of running code in spaaaaaaaace.

Yes, some common API for access to attitude sensors. Maybe a radio. But honestly the point I envision is that it's cool. And teaches kids/teens that this space stuff isn't that far out of reach.

I just remember growing up thinking that I'm a C student and so all this stuff is to be left to the smart people. And that error in perspective drove my thinking for a long time.

You never really know what will be the spark that helps someone discover their passion. Maybe it's Nyancat Sputnik.

Raspberry Pi In The Sky

AFAIK, that's what Satellogic (https://www.satellogic.com) sells. You may want to contact them.

Disclaimer: while I am not directly involved with what they do, I happen to know personally both of the founders and a lot of the people working there.

Check out the AstroPi challenge [1] for a similar idea on the ISS. Including support for multiple sensor and cameras.

[1] https://astro-pi.org/

Considering the cost of storage it's probably cheaper to launch N sensors and just keep a record raw everything. Which is more or less the model of the existing earth-sensing satellite world.

That defeats the whole point by optimizing for the wrong thing.

It’ll take some money, some talking (do you have a local university that builds satellites?), or, most likely, both, but there are ways and means of getting things into orbit.

See, for example:

https://www.cubesatshop.com/product/pumpkin-cubesat-kits/

Our startup is working on way to allow easier software development in space. Stay in touch, and we will get this ability.

in the not very far future it probably will be possible to buy hosting services on a platform that is a xen or kvm hypervisor in low earth orbit.

Hopefully, soon it will be "just another AZ".

How would you name that? space-west-1? Cardinal directions are sort of irrelevant.

A formula describing its path across the latitude/longitude graph.

Not saying it's a good idea but you can fit a two line element orbital data field into a hostname or DNS entry.

No need to do anything complicated. Just name them leo-1, leo-2, ..., and have a page with info about the orbit path for each (visualized, as well as in e.g. keplerian elements)

A true cloud provider

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