My name is Joe Morrison, and I’m ready to be roasted on here again. Please feel free to ask me anything or challenge any of what I’ve written!
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“Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
101–110 of 151 posts
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia and China have been weponizing space for decades and they already have working hypersonic missiles.
If you know the history China/Russia are doing smaller-scale R&D type development mainly to respond to to US ditching arms control treaties and building offensive tech first (usually happening when Republicans in power).
This is non-sense, unless you are in the know about the Russia’s and China’s space programs. Their space technologies are generally behind the US (although China is working hard to catch up), and are less transparent, so we’ve heard more about initiatives such as SDA. That doesn’t mean their military space R&D are purely in response to US’s programs. Russia intended to use space for reconnaissance very early on after Sputnik [0]. They didn’t wait for the US to make a move first.
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not ready for prime time yet Totally agree. But the frontier is advancing thanks to LiDAR. And in the meantime, the advantages of laser relay and downlink are vast enough to make mechanical actuation worth it. Particularly for unboosted birds in LEO.
Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication? At best that is time-multiplexing, not multiple parallel beams of information?
> Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication?
Lasers don’t care if they’re carrying data out or on return. The same optics being pursued for LiDAR have applications in communications. Solid-state waveguides and MEMS being examples.
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#104My name is Joe Morrison, and I’m ready to be roasted on here again. Please feel free to ask me anything or challenge any of what I’ve written!
When Mike Griffin started the Space Development Agency under Trump in 2019, he said we need LEO constellations to track hypersonic missiles and be proliferated to be robust against anti-satellite tech.
However, existing MEO satellites have proven capable of tracking hypersonics just fine. Meanwhile LEO satellites are way more vulnerable to ASAT, they can be directly hit. No... LEO only makes sense when you look at Mike Griffin's history working on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He sees LEO constellations of sensors as the first step to including space-based kinetic interceptors (hypersonic reentry vehicles, aka space weapons) which need to be close to Earth in LEO to work. He is part of the hawks in Washington trying to build a space-based power projection system for boost-phase interception and prompt global strike.
The whole thing seems built on deceit.
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before you do that, you might want to understand the other side, and how ignorance contributes to an unnecessary arms race. We in the US have driven most provocation in space. The military budget is more than the next nine countries combined (including China). Whether it be the Strategic Defense Initiative, unilaterally leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Prompt Global Strike, hypersonic missiles, the US is de…
Russia and China have been weponizing space for decades and they already have working hypersonic missiles.
You are offering a pretty narrow worldview here, and a blatant simplification of geopolitics. Ignoring the elephant USA in the room here who’s militarization dwarfs any competition, then escalation (or even answers in kind) is not the only option on the table. There is also international agreements.
International agreements has proven much more effective as a grand strategy then escalation. The nuclear non-proliferation is a good example, but so is the Iran nuclear deal (which even gives us an AB testing scenario since Iran’s nuclear armament became much closer to reality after the USA withdrew).
Now if USA was really concerned about militarization of space, then they would have pushed for international agreements long ago.
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The military budget is more than the next nine countries combined That's because it's more expensive to pay people in a wealthy nation than a poor one. 25% of the budget just goes to paying salaries. You are totally uninformed about what you're talking about, and beyond naïve to think that the US can just stop investing in defense and somehow end up in a more peaceful world. Please stop stoking ideological argument…
> That's because it's more expensive to pay people in a wealthy nation than a poor one. 25% of the budget just goes to paying salaries. It's uncool to accuse people of stoking ideological arguments because they stated a relevant fact. And can you please use better reasoning? How, in your view, does spending 25% of a budget on salaries explain a budget that's higher than the next nine countries combined?
On the contrary: how does spending more than the next nine countries, all of which have totally unique geopolitical positions and defense needs, have anything whatsoever to do with what we need to spend to achieve our goals? It's like saying Walmart spends more on inventory than the next 9 retailers combined: Walmart has a totally different business than Nike and GAP. In fact it's even more asinine than that: it's like saying that Walmart spends more than the biggest retailers in India and China, countries with different currencies, where quality differs, and where things cost different amounts.
But anyway. Suppose we spent only as much as China does, the #2 defense spender. They spent $229 billion. They also don't really value human life, soldiers are expendable in vast quantities if it advances the aim of the state--loss of life is much less tolerable in America. Do you think that would be sufficient for the US defense goals? We currently spent $173B just on salaries for servicemen, and then another $286 billion on operations, followed by $141 billion for procurement and $106 billion for research and development. Yes there is waste in the military, but is there $450 billion worth of waste and cruft? Are we to believe that are leaders and generals have miscalculated by more than 50%? Should we fire half our soldiers, scuttle our carrier strike groups, and abandon efforts to modernize the air force?
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
IoT sensor aggregation is already a major edge-compute use-case, it's not just for reducing latency for end-users. In this analogy you're just co-locating the edge compute on the same LAN as the sensor. All of the orchestration, runtime, and framework concerns from existing edge compute systems still apply. Edge compute isn't solved; it's an area under active and aggressive development. The Cloudflare Workers wasm ru…
Why are we selling colocated processing on a piece of mass-constricted ultra-expensive hardware we have to launch into orbit again? That seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Sibling thread provides some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34210236
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a dual-use technology, and while my job is to focus the commercial half of the equation, I’m not ashamed to support the US military and intelligence communities, either.
... Did you see what happened in Afganistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, South America? ... Did you hear about the torture, black sites, global surveillance, drone assassinations, and censorship? ... Did you see what happened to the people who blew the whistle on this stuff? And you're not ashamed to play a part in this? Is there some line they haven't crossed yet that would do it for you?
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Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's because it's more expensive to pay people in a wealthy nation than a poor one. 25% of the budget just goes to paying salaries. It's uncool to accuse people of stoking ideological arguments because they stated a relevant fact. And can you please use better reasoning? How, in your view, does spending 25% of a budget on salaries explain a budget that's higher than the next nine countries combined?
On the contrary: how does spending more than the next nine countries, all of which have totally unique geopolitical positions and defense needs, have anything whatsoever to do with what we need to spend to achieve our goals? It's like saying Walmart spends more on inventory than the next 9 retailers combined: Walmart has a totally different business than Nike and GAP. In fact it's even more asinine than that: it's li…
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
- Eisenhower
You really ought to read the original comment you replied to again - their point about unnecessary arms races seems to have triggered some kind of automatic defense in your brain.
Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ. Even if the vessel…
> fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean This is the dorm delivery idea for space businesses. Everyone is working on it, including folks with no commercial ambitions, and the number of people willing to pay for it is small, and they’re cheap.
Yes and no. These island nations are pretty small and poor, so obviously Fiji or Vanuatu aren't going to be paying for it. Instead, what I would expect is that the US, Australia, and New Zealand would pay for it to maintain good graces with these nations. WRT geopolitics, this is a good stick for beating up on China as they're one of the main offenders in IUU.