131–140 of 155 posts
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Exactly, you're not going to have the first mover advantage if you are waiting for someone to be ahead of you.
But if you are someone like lockhead you have money to wait for spacex to fizzle out, headhunt their talent, and outperform with your military industrial complex connections and 70 years of working in aerospace.
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At least for semiconductors you won't have to haul up all that high vacuum equipment :)
You'd still need it LEO at 500km varies between 10-700 nPa and UHV is a max of 100 nPa. It's too variable an environment to really develop chips in due to space weather and the variability in the extreme thin reaches of the atmosphere in Earth orbit.
I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade. Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general. Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity. (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) So if you really want a career in s…
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You'd still need it LEO at 500km varies between 10-700 nPa and UHV is a max of 100 nPa. It's too variable an environment to really develop chips in due to space weather and the variability in the extreme thin reaches of the atmosphere in Earth orbit.
What could we be able to manufacture in space in the next 15/20 years in your opinion?
I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade. Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general. Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity. (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) So if you really want a career in s…
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You'd still need it LEO at 500km varies between 10-700 nPa and UHV is a max of 100 nPa. It's too variable an environment to really develop chips in due to space weather and the variability in the extreme thin reaches of the atmosphere in Earth orbit.
What could we be able to manufacture in space in the next 15/20 years in your opinion?
I think the first things we'll really make in space will be super structures and pressure vessels because those are the simplest things to make and the materials don't require a massive supply chain. We could even gain a lot just by lifting up generic stock from Earth (metal powders, sheet stock that could be formed into tubes, or just a lot of generic tube stock [1]) and learning how to assemble them via machine in space. It would let us build larger stations or telescopes than we could launch from the ground.
For example if we build a super structure in space we could launch a lot of large inflatable modules to fill it in with that would be mechanically simpler and lighter because they don't have to bear and transmit the thrust force just support their own mass under thrust.
[0] Which increases the amount of benefit needed to justify redesigning an entire chip fab for example to function in zero-G.
[1] Though lifting tubes has the problem that there's a lot of wasted space in a stack of tubes which is one of the problems we're trying to avoid by building vehicles in space to begin with.
No one has suggested this so far, strangely enough: start with content. Aim to become the place for excellent news, interviews, videos, etc. about anything space related. Or, go a fictional route - if George Lucas / Lucas Films wanted to get into actual, real space travel or space products, he's in an excellent position to do so. The brand is related and they've got billions to spend. I would bet that this happens so…
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"That means they drop launch costs to $20/kg at scale..." Yeah, probably not in your lifetime, buddy: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/background/facts/... "NASA’s goal is to reduce the cost of getting to space to hundreds of dollars per pound within 25 years and tens of dollars per pound within 40 years." Starting a business based on that _now_ seems to be a bit... premature :) "...start building permanent…
That's NASA's goal. SpaceX has historically been much more ambitious than NASA: https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m... (($2M/launch) / (100 Mg / launch) = $20/kg Now obviously those are aspirational numbers; Starship is too early in its development cycle for anyone to be making truly accurate cost projections. Furthermore the cost per launch to SpaceX isn't necessarily the same as what they'l…
I have to imagine that with the advent of reusable launch vehicles, even NASA has to be a bit more optimistic about future launch costs now than they were 9 years ago.
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Why would it? Ariane 5 is still doing reasonably good and Ariane 6 seems promising too. SpaceX needs a ton of launches to make reusable rockets financially feasible so.
It was kind of a joke but come on, Arianespace's leaders have been pretty salty about SpaceX in public so clearly there is some jealousy. And as I understand it most of the oldspace launch providers aren't significantly cheaper than SpaceX even if latter operate their rockets in expendable mode.
NOTE: The below suggestion is assuming Starship pans out and launch costs drop dramatically. The way I see it, there are 3 (overlapping?) ways of making money in space: 1) put something up there (like a satellite) 2) take something down (asteroid mining, space based manufacturing, etc) 3) do something in space you can only do there Here's an idea that falls into category 3 that I've been kicking around - space based…