191–200 of 318 posts
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.…
I like RocketLab. Looking forward to Neutron etc. But this is a bad investment, no other way to put it.
> But this is a bad investment Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
When Amazon bought Globalstar a couple months ago I had the same question and it's pretty much the same answer. For Globalstar there was basically 0 net income so the return on investment looked like it mostly came from spectrum gambling. Maybe that's the value for Iridium as well? Iridium does have some net income of around $100 million last year, but I don't know if RocketLab's vertical integration is going to be enough to flip the script. If RocketLab could have built and launched the Iridium Next constellation for $2 billion in 2017 would $100 million of net income 10 years later be a success?
As an ex-Motorolan (1998-2008), I sometimes look at what remains of the big mighty company and there is not much. 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.
One of the best books I have read in recent years, somehow immensely relevant now: _Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story_ by John Bloom, that explores exactly what went wrong, the bankruptcy filing and so on. I wonder if you might find your experiences reflected there.
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This is on a similar scale to complaining about there being too many tennis balls on the surface of the earth. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
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Risk is theoretical, that is; a) never demostrated, b) most probably overblown c) any methods of mitigation were never even given a chance to develop. All in all you people take the precautionary principle so far as to cripple your own progress in fundamental stuff like spaceflight but at the same time see no reason to apply it in social stuff like that survelliance camera affair or the net-id. And also fervently bel…
Okay buddy, that was a Gish gallop if I've ever seen one. The risk is real. The math isn't complicated, you could stand up a basic debris simulation in a few hours with numpy from first principles. And we also know it's real because it's actually happened multiple times now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision This is a real thing that satellite operators worry about all the time . Conjunction analysis…
Some old crap got shot up. Who cares, we can launch 10x or 100x.
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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…
And how did the Dutch collect the toll and who received the tax benefits for it? I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
There was no tax or toll to consider.
People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor.
My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent.
All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align. One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation.
Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.
Rocket lab used to be a New Zealand source of pride, having started there. From the press release, now it’s American. What happened?
For regulatory and capital raising reasons the parent company has been US based for quite a few years now. They've also been on a multi-year acquisitions spree and picked up quite a large US workforce through that.
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.…
A gigantic amount of stuff from space hits the atmosphere. Most not made by humans.
SpaceX is launching say ~10 tonnes of satellites per day
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Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
Except everything in orbit is also moving at those same speeds, so the relative speed difference between any two objects is orders of magnitude smaller than that. (Of course, yes, there's outlier cases where that's not as true, but those are the rare exceptions to the rule; the constellations being discussed don't fall into the outlier cases).