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Comment by platistocrates | Hacker News Reader

what's cool is, it doesn't even feel futuristic anymore.

Someday potentially we could buy/lease/rent our own satelites over satelites.com use it for personal research, photography etc.,

You can already make your own and get it launched if you have enough money. Cubesat components are pretty much off the shelf except the payload. And launch costs are to the tune of 30k per kg or so. I'm sure a lot of overhead / integration is added but it's financially possible for the well-off :)

Launching a satellite is already sub $100k. Technology both miniaturizes and industrializes at an exponential rate. Think about how small and cheap computers have become in the span of a hundred years, from "occupies a building and costs a fortune" to "fits in your pocket and everyone can afford one". Sputnik 1, the first satellite ever launched cost 33 billion 1985 US dollars. 45 years later, you can get a cubesat into orbit for $100k.

I really don't think Sputnik cost more than the entire Apollo program, nor 8x the cost of the JWST. I can only find a couple of sites saying "33.000 million" for Sputnik's cost, unsourced.

That could be an EU/US issue. In the EU it is common to separate thousands (or millions) with dots, and decimals with commas. In the US it is the other way around. So those sources could be saying (or were read by GP) as 33 thousand million (33 billion) or it could mean 33 million and 0 thousands.

The billion sounds linguistically more correct, but I have no idea if those are inflation adjusted dollars or whatever. It could be an error that telephones around the internet as 33.0 million by the US system then converted to someone in the EU to 33.000 because they misread the number.

I definitely interpreted it as 33 thousand million. Whoops :D

Amateur groups have been launching satellites for decades now...

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