151–160 of 318 posts
Here in Europe it is even less, at least in the US you see the umpires (or somebody else, not sure as I fo not know baseball) with their half-headsets with the Motorola logo.
It is a shame, I liked this company very much.
I dunno. I would be surprised if a 30 year old telecommunications network is going to be technically competitive with a SpaceX's LEO network that is still launching satellites as we speak. How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?
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Hank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help fund orbital cleanup and internalize the externality of polluting orbital shells. It's an idea that deserves more discourse IMO. Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos
Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against onlin…
If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative.
The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.
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And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine. I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself. Hell, I'd call America a place so natur…
We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionable value. In 100 years will the sky at night just be a massive grid of dots moving across the sky? Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.…
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They didn't circumvent phone antennas being largely omnidirectional (unlike VSAT or phased arrays, which are highly directional) and as a result having much lower gain, they just work with it, just like Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, Thuraya, and all the other early players in what's now called "direct to device". The market is as bimodal as ever on the device side: On one side, you have small, battery-powered, (most…
I suspect that the lack of ability to form nulls in the beam is as big or even a bigger limitation than the reduction in gain when going from a big array to a phone. The SNR in Shannon’s Law has a log in front of it, but spectrum reuse is more or less linear. If there are five visible satellites and I can null out four of them, then I can receive from and transmit to the fifth without substantial interference. (I’m n…
That's why Iridium has the constellation planned out so that you never have more satellites in the sky than strictly necessary for full coverage on the equator (where satellite density is lowest), and outer spot beams get turned off progressively as the satellites approach the poles as they'd only create interference without increasing bandwidth due to the lack of terminal-side steering.
Now I wonder if they already changed that for the second generation sats, given that there are some steered terminals available that could probably make good use of the extra satellite density near the poles, which is also an area underserved by geostationary beams?
We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionable value. In 100 years will the sky at night just be a massive grid of dots moving across the sky? Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.…
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It was always an American company. In order to launch rockets from countries in the US sphere of influence (even from NZ), companies must obtain an FAA license. Rocket technology itself is so intensely regulated by US export control laws that it’s practically impossible to develop an orbital launch vehicle without being a US- or Europe-registered company. It is a real shame. It also looks like a lot of engineering wo…
Why do people reply with this "it was always american" response? Do you feel like it is necessary to protect RocketLab or something? It was founded by a guy in new zealand with the first launch complex and first launches coming out of new zealand. to characterize that as "always american" is so silly it makes you seem like a non serious person. of course they would have had american resources and connections from the…
It was created by somebody from New Zealand and a lot of early operations was in New Zealand nobody is denying that.
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The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine. I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself. Hell, I'd call America a place so natur…
How many individual people were involved in collective dike maintenance, so we know the model scales? 100 million? 200 million?