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Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

economist.com

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Re: Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

#11

Post by electromagnetic »

I wonder what the lower weight limit is on these. The solar panels produce 1kw/kg the batteries store 350 watts per kg. The whole thing weighs 50kg and has a 23m wingspan.

Training gliders weigh about 600kg, and they have a 41kw gas engine to self propel and have a wingspan of 18m (based on the one linked on the wikipedia article). Average weight is about 80kg for a male. So these can likely get 160-200kg airborne with ease. RTGs produce about 500w/kg.

Basically we could have done this in the 1960s with a payload of about 80-120kg of equipment.

I wish we could get over our fear of nuclear. It would be very easy and efficient to build one of these with an RTG and you would have the ability to include redundancies and even in the event of engine failure you're not at risk of losing equipment and it can be glided to land. It could also carry its own landing gear and you could automate take off and landing schedules so you need minimal overlap on craft. One goes up to take the place while another gets serviced. With redundancies you could keep them flying with a fixed pitch for potentially years.

Re: Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

#13

Post by aharonovich »

gizmo686 wrote: post #4
nlkndlk wrote: post #2

>That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX, announced on the same day that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency’s Galileo constellation (intended to rival America’s Global Positioning System), had entered a “non-nominal injection orbit”—in other words, gone wrong—shows just how difficult the commercialisation of space can be. >If spacecraft are so precarious, then perhaps investors…

Never is a really long time. Even if we make 0 investment in space travel, we will almost certainly be better equipped for space travel than we are today. The only possible exceptions to this that I can think of are: modern civilization collapsing (or some less extreme variant) or us having depleted some critical resource.

We also lose knowledge as engineers age and die.

Re: Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

#14

Post by TeMPOraL »

alexvr wrote: post #6
nlkndlk wrote: post #2

>That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX, announced on the same day that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency’s Galileo constellation (intended to rival America’s Global Positioning System), had entered a “non-nominal injection orbit”—in other words, gone wrong—shows just how difficult the commercialisation of space can be. >If spacecraft are so precarious, then perhaps investors…

That's what Elon Musks are for :)

Maybe we're getting our technocracy after all. Increasingly, it's people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, et al. - ones with enough resources to liberate themselves from the yoke of the greedy algorithm our economy is, and at the same time with enough understanding to know and care about important issues - that are shaping the future of mankind.

Re: Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

#15

Post by seanflyon »

btown wrote: post #9

If a network of these aircraft becomes a viable alternative to satellites, this could be a partial solution to the imminent problem of growing space debris, whose quantity and danger posed are decidedly super-linear to the number of objects launched into space: > As the chance of collision is influenced by the number of objects in space, there is a critical density where the creation of new debris is theorized to occ…

Relatively low flying satellites are also a solution space debris as they only stay up a few years. The are much cheaper to launch so the fact that they don't last as long is not prohibitive.

Re: Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

#19

Post by seanflyon »

nlkndlk wrote: post #2

>That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX, announced on the same day that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency’s Galileo constellation (intended to rival America’s Global Positioning System), had entered a “non-nominal injection orbit”—in other words, gone wrong—shows just how difficult the commercialisation of space can be. >If spacecraft are so precarious, then perhaps investors…

> we're never going to become a interplanetary, space-faring civilization under this current economic system.

I disagree. Just look at SpaceX's development of reusable rockets. We are closer than ever before to becoming interplanetary [OK, that's basically a tautology] and developing space technology faster than any point after landing on the moon.

Re: Pseudo-satellites: A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off

#20

Post by seanflyon »

nothiggs wrote: post #18

As for using it for military purposes - wouldn't any country it flies over that has the ability to detect it, just shoot it down?

At 70,000 feet it would be expensive to shoot down and quite possibly difficult to detect.
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