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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

#21

Post by tsotha »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #14
alexvr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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...

Eh, what? SpaceX is profitable.

And you can't get away from basing your space program on the economy, either because it determines your tax base or (potentially) because companies do space things for profit.

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

#22

Post by dmd »

seanflyon wrote: post #20
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.

Why would it be expensive to shoot down? Just send another one of these up after it, and crash into it.

Why would it be difficult to detect? It's fairly hard to hide when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal.

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

#23

Post by gress »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #14
alexvr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your view, what important issues do these people who are shaping the future of mankind know and care about?

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

#24

Post by TeMPOraL »

gress wrote: post #23
TeMPOraL wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your view, what important issues do these people who are shaping the future of mankind know and care about?

Climate change, ensuring continous access to energy, making humanity an interplanetary species, giving everyone access to all knowledge of mankind, life extension, fighting disease and death. Stuff like that - things we all care about, but don't really do anything about them because they're not short-term profitable.

I don't mean to pass moral judgement here. I only observe that some of the most important problems we have don't yield themselves well to capitalism (which is sort of obvious - the ones that were important but compatibile with greedy optimization are the ones we already solved).

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

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

tsotha wrote: post #21
TeMPOraL wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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... Eh, what? SpaceX is profitable. And you can't get away from basing your space program on the economy, either because it determines your tax base or (potentially) because companies do space things for profit.

Let me clarify what I meant. Sure, SpaceX is profitable. It has to be. But Elon right now seems to be using the economy to pursue his own goals with Tesla and SpaceX, but those goals are not dictated by what is profitable. He had to amass some capital and then basically force the economy to accept his visions. Tesla Motors pretty much created the market for electric cars that don't suck. SpaceX and Tesla were not economically viable concepts at the beginning.

The thought I wanted to express is that our economic system is an optimization process that shapes (and is shaped by, in a feedback loop) the progress of technology. It's the economy that decided we won't be having moon bases or jetpacks anytime soon, even though we could. It's the force that decides that a random photosharing app is worth more than feeding the poor or curing cancer.

Current economy as an optimization process was aligned with human values pretty well so far (though not perfectly; government regulations are one of the tools we use to try and fix that alignment). But as a greedy process (in the CS sense of the word), it often gets stuck in local optimas. That's where Elons, Brins, etc. come in - they have enough cash and vision to force us out of the local optimum and help find a better one.

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

#26

Post by cbr »

dmd wrote: post #22
seanflyon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would it be expensive to shoot down? Just send another one of these up after it, and crash into it. Why would it be difficult to detect? It's fairly hard to hide when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal.

    when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal
reconnaissance satellites

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

#27

Post by TeMPOraL »

dmd wrote: post #22
seanflyon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would it be expensive to shoot down? Just send another one of these up after it, and crash into it. Why would it be difficult to detect? It's fairly hard to hide when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal.

> It's fairly hard to hide when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal.

I wonder if this would be possible to solve by going "the GPS way". As far as I understand how the system works, GPS signal as received on the ground is 20dB below thermal noise. We can still find and amplify it because we know the seeds and algorithms of random number generators on the satellites. But if you were an alien that just came to Earth, you wouldn't be able to find those transmissions. To read them, you need to know that they are there and what to look for (i.e. have a synced RNG).

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

#29

Post by T-hawk »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #17
nkozyra wrote: post #10

Missed opportunity at "pseudollite"

Maybe "quasi-satellite" or just "quasilite"? It's like "pseudolite" but without the negative connotations.

"Quasi-satellite" already has a different astromechanical meaning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-satellite

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

#30

Post by trhway »

one of the things that really can be resolved by technology here is re-fueling in air. You don't need solar panels and batteries if your drone hanging at 20km can be automatically supplied by refueling missions of another drone.

Say 40kg of batteries would contain 14KWh, ie. equivalent of 1.5 liter of gas or with adjustment for the thermodynamic efficiency of a gas turbine - 4 liter. Thus 30kg (lets allocate 10kg for the gas turbine and other stuff) of gasoline is a 10 day supply of fuel. Thus your re-fueling drone would need to make 1 trip/week.

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