Are there any interesting project's one can participate in by launching say 1 kg in space?
$5k sounds abit accessible
How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
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Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#62Given these insanely cheap prices, I have to wonder about the viability of sending your own microsatellites into space to create your own personal communications cluster. I don't know enough to know what all would be required, how / if you could communicate with other networks, etc., but even just having your own personal LEO satellite-based communications network seems relatively plausible based on these launch cost…
You're still looking at over a hundred thousand dollars to put a single 1U cubesat in orbit (including development, testing, and certification for the sat itself). And that would be moving at 6-7km/s relative to the ground, so you can see how expensive it would be to put any kind of useful personal constellation into orbit still
How much would it roughly cost to have a constellation of private satellites?
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#63In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (b…
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Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#64How would these numbers change if we had a proper carbon tax?
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#65In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
Trash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.
Or a rail gun.
My understanding for why we don't use those for spacecraft is because people and fine machinery can't take the Gs.
Trash could.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trash isn't full of valuable materials though. It's full of food (mostly water by weight I guess) and paper and plastic with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.
True, I was being hyperbolic (oof, the pun material is just too good). But the organics pretty much take of themselves, leaving behind just the bits we might want to reuse. Of course, we could be composting the organics and reusing them now, my city does that, though they give the compost away to any takers, which suggests the economics are still a work in progress.
Right, I understood you were exaggerating and replied because the energy investment will probably never make sense if the goal is material recovery (a landfill is the worst ore for anything interesting).
It might happen for other reasons like remediation or whatever.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#67How would these numbers change if we had a proper carbon tax?
Probably not much. Rocket output is practically nothing compared to that of commercial airlines and ocean freight.
Furthermore, SpaceX’s upcoming rocket can be carbon-neutral since it burns methane, which can be extracted from the earth’s atmosphere.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#68Are these numbers inflation adjusted? The difference would be far more dramatic if not.
Not at my computer, but this function in mathematica would help:
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/InflationAdjust.h...
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#69Are these numbers inflation adjusted? The difference would be far more dramatic if not.
They seem to be unadjusted. The source link under the picture links to this dataset:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbR...
There's a column there for inflation-adjusted prices, but not much data in it.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#70It just isn't plausible that Starship launch costs for LEO could be 1/28th the costs for Falcon Heavy. This sounds like more Musk optimism to me.
Saying it just isn't plausible that ambitious thing will happen without an argument for why it won't happen... doesn't really lead to an interesting conversation. Especially when all the arguments for why it is possible already exist in public forums.
I mildly disagree with you, but I can't even begin to take the other side of the argument without knowing why you think the price estimates given aren't plausible (or even basic facts like what the cost you are using for the Falcon Heavy is...). Other responses to you spew out random facts trying to argue that Falcon Heavy is expensive in ways that Starship isn't, but I really can't tell if those random facts are even closely related to why you think it's implausible.