301–310 of 318 posts
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Someone's been reading Money Stuff.
It's hilarious reading! :)
His coverage of the downfall of FTX was hilariously good as well. Wrt. to the infamous Excel sheet, he wrote something like "when you're trying to calculate this, Excel shouldn't give you back a number, it should warn you about going to prison", lmao.
Just came here to mention that "Eccentric Orbits" the book about the creation of the Iridium system is an amazing book. It's a business heavy book so probably more interesting to people trying to start business or do deals, as opposed to space fans.
I think they saw how SpaceX was using Starlink as launch lever to provide SpaceX a baseline of regular launches at bare-minimum cost. As RocketLab starts to scale up, being able guarantee a minimum number of launches is a significant hedge against the dips in the global satellite market. Also, RocketLab builds their own sats and can add the Iridium constellation replacements to their order book. It's a win-win. A sma…
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> How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere? Militaries generally find this capability pretty relevant, among others, and they have deep pockets. They were the ones to bail out Iridium the first time around, after all.
It's competing with Starlink in that market, which is a much stronger product today.
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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…
Yes, that would totally work while countries like China, Russia, North Korea exist. They could all have a group hug and sing Kumbaya straight afterwards.
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>but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"? I find it extremely d…
People are not worried about the mass increase in the entire atmosphere, but very selective layers of the atmosphere (mesosphere and stratosphere). These are delicate layers that are highly affected by nano particles created from satellite burn-up.
s/are/may be/
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Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time? It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
How would starting earlier have stopped industries from outsourcing CO2 emissions to other/exempt countries? If you look at graphs of global emissions it's like they didn't skip a beat once legislation and treaties in the west kicked in.
But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
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?
Sailors may be a small and dwindling community, but this is our core use case. When you are sailing offshore you need to download weather predictions so that you can chart your course to catch favorable winds. My experience with Iridium is that you open a targeted set of ports for the modem to feed your phone via, and then you don't have to think about it again. 100+ nautical miles offshore and it just works.
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Iridum gains 23 launches per year with 100% success rate in the past 12 months, a satellite manufacturing pipeline with 6 satellites produced and launched, and a cost-to-orbit of $25K/kg operational (with an in-development design targetting $4K/kg). They are late compared to SpaceX, to be sure: 150 launches per year, 2400 satellites manufactured per year, $3K/kg operational with F9, target $200/kg in development with…
You act as if 'launch' is a thing. All Rocket Lab launches ever combined don't even fill a single SpaceX rocket. Those are not the same thing. Lets see their reliability when they have a bigger rocket and if they can land reliably. Because their rocket will be quite expensive to build.
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That is false. They were a purely NZ operation launching sub-orbital rockets before they got into DARPA contracts. What you meant to say is "Before they ever launched Electron", and I'm pretty sure that is false too, they weren't "primarily" American, the majority of the workforce was in NZ until years after that.
SpaceX has most staff in California. It's a Texas company.