Black Sky satellites return images just 58 hours after launch
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Like computers. I am surrounded by these things. Something like a smart watch is only feasible after a drastic decrease in cost and massive increases in capability. If you went back a few decades and suggested people would be strapping supercomputers on their wrists, you'd likely be committed to an institution. It would be unthinkable to devote the required amount of resources to such a frivolous task.
A similar thing will happen with spacecraft. Right now, it is still expensive, but SpaceX dragged down the price enormously. This is likely to decrease even further, either due to competition, or with the likes of the Starship(how many satellites could we fit on that monstrosity?).
This will enable entire new industries, both existing(satellites will become commodities), and also ones we have no idea about - yet. Pretty sure some "frivolous" tasks will pop up once this is cheap enough.
And that's only unmanned flights.
EDIT: I've found this amusing - that's in the direction of what I'm talking about, we are just missing the "1-click launch": https://www.rocketlabusa.com/book-my-launch/
We really want to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome, and so far humanity has shown a pretty terrible track record when it comes to exploiting earth's commodities or ensuring the prevention of long-term global disasters...
Already we have astronomers being increasingly hindered by man-made objects dashing through the field of view of ground-based telescopes.
fiddling with the settings for activating the satellite tracking plugin and TLE-data import, and maybe even import ones own horizon panoramic silouette for perfection.
Stellarium is a really very good program!
I'm in the middle of a light-polluted city, and I can observe a satellite transit directly overhead every minute or two.
Furthermore, for transit-hunting experiments, a slight dip in a star's brightness once per year or once per decade is the entire signal. Even if the satellite doesn't produce a moving dot, surely it cannot be transparent and non-refractive.
Some things work really well in space, some do not. Low-cost launch will revolutionize some experiments, but not all.
Building radio experiments like SKA, big telescopes like TMT, or starting up innovative low-budget instruments like Dragonfly is still impossible with low-cost launch. In the latter case, until a graduate student with a screwdriver can make daily adjustments to an on-orbit instrument, we will lose the earliest-stage R&D capability.
Finally, it is essential for our future generations to see a dark and unfettered sky with the human eyeball. That perpetual perspective, for 7,500,000,000 people, is inaccessible with launch vehicles.
Kessler syndrome is far more likely to be caused by war than progress in satellites. Space is big and sats are tracked and powered nowadays. How about we stop starting wars instead of stopping progress?
Space based telescopes are going to be vastly more useful and popular than land based telescopes today.
As costs come down dramatically access to space is going to expand rapidly, that is a good thing, not something to fear.
This is not an either/or choice - we can both improve life on earth and expand into space, and we will.
The colision of signals travelling in free space, that is.
Unless we talk about super directional signals, eventually we will run out of bandwidth to talk to those satellites.
Perhaps higher orbit satellites could talk to SpaceX satellites in lower orbit(again, very directional signals) which in turn could relay those signals via internet, not yet practical though.
The issue with kessler syndrome is that once it starts, space is immediately unusable for decades if not centuries, even if we turn everything off and stop launching new satellites.
You can still launch through a Kessler shell. It's not very dense in absolute terms.
Depends what size of course, SpaceX are claiming 400 Starlink satellites per launch vs 60 on a Falcon 9, and for a lower price.
We need real technology that saves labour, like washing machines, dishwashers, sewage processing, electricity grids.
I think satellites can provide services that join that club, by allowing decentralization through ubiquitous access to medium speed internet.
Smart watches tend to provide information that really doesn't matter, like number of steps in a day. Yes there is the example of the heartbeat, but for most that is just informational also, plus other dedicated devices already existed.
I think too much of new tech are just toys, hopefully this is just an interim stage and we are about to get to the real stuff again.
I guess there’s commuting and sleeping. Maybe eating and exercising?
Right now even for those there's a solution, but they involve outsourcing things which cost more money / recurring expenses; laundry service, cleaners, takeout / delivered food, personal assistants, day care / babysitters, etc. I can't really see a revolution happening in those areas.
I mean I'm sure in time it'll be possible to buy a machine that does full service laundry, but it'll take up a lot of space. Maybe something for apartment building basements, and your clothes would need to be tagged (e.g. RFID) with ownership and washing information.
Of course, alternatively you go for the dys/utopian scenario where everyone lives in worker housing complexes, wears the same functional outfit, eats in food halls / canteens three times a day, etc. I'm sure some people do live or have lived like that already. But the issue with that is that in those scenarios, people live to work, there's not much outside of their employment, and they live where they work. I'm sure this happens a lot in SF anyway.
1. Living walking distance from work/school
2. Working fewer days
3. Communal eating option (eg local subsidized cafes)
Spaceship capacity to LEO >100,000 kg (wikipedia) Cubesat max mass 1.33kg (wikipedia)
That comes out to 75k max mass cubesats.
Cubesat is (10cm)^3, 100 fit in 1m^3, 75k fit in 750m^3. Starship pressurized cargo volume is 1000m^3 (plenty of space).
At $2M per launch, it comes out to $27 per cubesat.
Either the funny farm or the funny pages.
Smart watches are pretty powerful these days, but you'd have to go pretty far back to find a supercomputer with comparable performance
Thr Cray-1 had 8.39 megabytes of RAM and 303 megabytes of storage.
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/blacksky-global.htm
On the last Starlink launch, they launched 58 starlink satellites and 2 blacksky. The 'regular' starlink launches with re-use of the first stage have capacity for 60 satellites.
Does anyone want to guess at the dollar per kilogram price the Blacksky company paid to launch the most recent two?
very bad theoretical calculation: if a 60-satellite starlink launch, re-using an already flown first stage booster and assuming successful landing and re-use of the booster costs $5 million, that's about $83,333 per satellite. Meaning that the raw launch cost for those two satellites might have been slightly under $200k?
I imagine the $/kg also includes a lot of the cost of the time and engineering work for the spacex payload team to design and machine the payload adapter/release mechanism. Also whatever electrical command and control/DC power bus might be built in to feed power to satellites after the fairing/encapsulation is done while awaiting launch.
As for if and when a "one click" commercial launch for small satellites will become a thing, I'm not so sure. Unless a satellite has no thrusters and no maneuvering/stationkeeping propellant on it, they're inherently dangerous when fully fueled and imminently awaiting launch.
This requires custom engineering and interface work on the part of the satellite manufacturer, satellite operator, and launch service operator. There is no single standard physical interface I'm aware of for attaching a satellite (larger than cubesat size) to a payload adapter, while ensuring inherently safe behavior of the satellite, for the protection of ground crews.
From a purely technical standpoint, I see no reason why SpaceX or another organization couldn't provide a 'satellite skeleton' that people could add an array of standard modules to using an online configurator and click "build/deploy/launch". And have it go to a customer-specified orbit and orientation.
But it seems it would make more sense for that provider to just launch those satellites themselves and provide access to the data.
I'd imagine that adding any non-standard component so that your satellite has differential value-add vs. existing commodity satellites would add at least some fair bit of 'real' engineering. But likely a 'satellite skeleton' (framework, bare-bones satellite) could take a ton of work out of that endeavor.
But given that we're talking about people who say "I need my own satellite(s)" and specifically not "I need data from existing or soon-to-exist satellites"....I'd be surprised if people with those needs would care that much about the (seemingly?) relatively small savings from a pre-designed satellite structure, especially given how any design decisions for that barebones solution inherently implies genuine tradeoffs vs their own design.
I can't imagine everyone buying a spaceship, or even 1 in 10.000 people, if spacecraft costs were 10.000 times the super-computer costs of the past.
So no comparable revenue-stream to further drive down cost.
This isn't all positive, it will also increase the Kessler effect[1] whereby "the density of objects in low Earth orbit due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions. One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations."
The last 100 years have shown that while capitalism has rendered an unprecedented jump in quality of life overall for the vast majority of people, the "waste" that is inherent in this industrial jump has been ignored completely, which is what puts us in the situation we are in today, where oceans are full of plastic and the air is full of dangerous particles from fossil fuels. One could hope that we don't repeat this ignorant approach in developing space, because even if you can clean up most waste after the fact, obviously it's much more effective and economical to make sure the waste doesn't reach critical mass at all first.
I'm assuming collisions would also speed this process up.
Since the very first spy satellites were placed into orbit, adversaries have carefully tracked their orbits so that they could avoid exposure during an overpass. This form of cat and mouse game has had various options thrown at it, from satellites that can change their orbits, to "cover" satellites which operate as one thing and provide surveillance capability in addition to their "public" persona.
SpaceX threw up 2 satellites on a ship that was carrying 60 separate satellites (the others being Starlink nodes). But it could throw up 60 black sky satellites if asked. Further it could do that fairly quickly[1] from time to request to launch using a flight proven booster. Or perhaps 30 satellites with their own booster engine to maximize the number of orbits they could reach.
At some point continuous monitoring of a point on Earth becomes simply a question of cost. That can be kind of game changing from a geopolitical perspective.
[1] Where quickly here is anywhere from 10 to 60 days depending on whether or not a company like black sky could have the upper stage on hand with the delivery system.
Call it iLive by Setec Astronomy.
Maybe make it public in ways like OpenStreetMap, combine with something like Internet Archive, have it distributed by some P2P-protocol. Done.
Global transparency/awareness for all. Next best thing to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
I think it's very unlikely that the USA and maybe others don't have this capability already.
That was going to be my question. Doesn’t the NRO need big optical lenses for their missions? Are there any “telescopic” advancements that can fit into small sats that can meet their mission objectives?
Also, they have greater relative velocities so require better targeting and command & control technology to compensate.
We learned this when Trump tweeted an image of the Iranian missile/launch vehicle disaster.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-index_metamaterial
can change that? Also I'm sometimes wondering what happened to Holography, and if something like
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act came into play?
There was an image that Trump tweeted a satellite image about something in Iran a while back, I forget the actual reason. But it was a declassified image of something and some keen eyed observers did some analysis on it and concluded the resolution was better than what is "Officially" out there. So it's safe to say there's better out there that we just don't know about yet.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29634/trump-tweets-int...
Made me think of the movie "Enemy of the State" from 1998, and another action/sci-fi B-Movie from before 1980 which I can't remember the title anymore because forgettable, except of the FLIR inserts they made. Which were as good as anything you can personally buy today as private person.
In a B-Movie! From before 1980! (Maybe even 1975/76) W-T-F?
I really can't remember the title anymore, because "loading, looking, lösching!" (loading, watching, erasing)
The NRO is probably going for larger lenses in future satellites to increase their field of view. Could they use a series of smaller sats orbiting in a cluster to form a virtual lens, much like the multiple mirror telescope in Arizona [1]? Maybe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraSAR-X
&
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TanDEM-X
edit: optical [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 but with rather low resolution.
But accurately controlling such a swarm seem like a still-untested concept.
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Olivier_Lardiere/public...
Any tricks used to aid small optical platforms will have as much, or more, of an improvement if applied to large optical platforms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...
https://qz.com/1226962/an-unauthorized-satellite-launch-in-i...
Don't forget from a civil rights perspective. Remember this[1] from a few years ago, or this[2] a few weeks ago? Now imagine that the government can do the same thing, all over the us, 24/7, with zero marginal cost.
[1] https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/how-buzzfeed-news-revealed-hidd...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3zvwj/military-fbi-flyin...
I suppose license-plate readers do something similar, but this is space-based, blanket, all-seeing.
Brave new world....
Did you mean Orwellian? Unless I have my dystopian novels confused
Cars that go into parking garages are typically among the ones that later come out.
Cars that pass beneath underpasses are generally among the ones that emerge from the other side. Etc.
Clever software should easily be able follow all cars with very few errors.
Picture the ocean. Can we agree that it's immense? How many ships can we launch until it becomes too crowded?
Now imagine the Earth has no land masses and oceans cover all of it. How many more ships can we add?
Now imagine that the Earth is bigger than what it is. A few hundred KM larger in radius. Your oceans have become so much bigger now as they have a larger area. And now imagine your ships are not only on the surface, but they could be submarines, or they could be planes, all crossing one another without ever touching.
This is what space looks like. It's ridiculously big. The only issue is that some orbits are way more useful than others, so they get more use. We can fit a crapton of stuff there, provided that we stop doing dumb things (like blowing up satellites).
LEO also has plenty of drag, so they decay. Higher orbits are more problematic.
Except that we're not worried about just the large things like "ships" (satellites), but all the small things as well.
Something measuring 1 cm on a side can cause critical damage, and things that 10 cm would be catastrophic:
* https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11664668/iss-window-chip-...
Even "the impact from a tiny piece of space debris, possibly a paint flake or small metal fragment no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimetre across" can crack the windows on the ISS:
* http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2016/05/Impact_chip
And I'd rather we worry about these things while they are not a problem, rather than later when they become one: an ounce of prevention and all that.
Compressed air or another gas could work IMO as a first step, we already have the basic tech for that in trash sorting solutions.
Moving to avoid potential collisions is relatively common.
(And yeah LEO is just a tiny infinitesimal scrap of "space", but its still big enough even humanity hasn't managed to mess it up completely yet...)
Imagine being able to dispatch a helicopter to drown out a typical forest fire within 10 minutes of the fire starting while it's still small. That's a game changer.
And not necessarily a good one. Many forest ecosystems depend on somewhat regular fires to "clean out" debris. The problem however is that "thanks" to climate change leading to drier forests, what once used to be a fire that only consumed fallen off leaves etc. while leaving the big trees unharmed now burns intense and long enough to actually damage the big trees.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
That is is becoming more commercially viable to begin operation immediately is exciting!
Not sure if what they really mean is that they are trying to more accurately price it; who knows what unknown behavior might increase your premium since it’s associated with more claims... e.g. friends come over too often making too many cars parked? Higher premium.
I also know that some try to automate aspects of this, for example using image libraries to detect large trees that are close to property, that would cause significant damage if they were to fall..
It's taking about between when the satellite was launched, and when it was able to send images back down was 58 hours. That is impressive. In the past it would normally take a week or more to get a satellite into a stable orbit and do all the checkout tests. After that, sure, task away and get all the images you want.
The first spy satellites weighed tons and literally dropped film canisters back into space to re-enter and be recovered by aircraft or helicopters which would then take the film to a laboratory to be developed[1]. Typically, a satellite would take a few weeks to both stabilize in the environment in space, calibrate its optics, take some test photos for analysis, re-calibrate based on those results, and then be ready to go.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image-f-3....