There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
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Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#2Stealing the swipe action like that is really scummy.
Otherwise it’s a pretty interesting article. Lots of amazing space projects going on lately.
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#3Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#4There is direct link to a summary done by C. Niederstrasser, Northrop Grumman engineer:
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#5Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
We pretty much are!
Both nanosatellite and small launcher companies are booming hard in the last few years.
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#6Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
With Kessler syndrome looming it may be the wrong kind of excitement
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#7Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
By launched volume, it seems like. By diversity of launch platforms ... maybe not. SpaceX seems poised to dominate everything with Starship, even small launch.
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#8Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
Either that or the beginning of a new dot-com bubble.
Most of those smallsat companies are financially viable on the expectation that they capture a meaningful fraction of the smallsat market - like 1/5th or more. They can't all win - and that's assuming any of them win. SpaceX seems to be planning to own the rideshare market [0], and so unless a customer really cares about having a particular orbit that's going to be pretty tough competition.
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#9Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
With Kessler syndrome looming it may be the wrong kind of excitement
Low earth orbit satellites decay very quickly. Without extra boost most satellites launched by these rockets will reenter within a year or two.
On a wider note, I find the dramatic pessimism of our times rather unfortunate. It seems every technical advance is now met with some prediction of doom. I miss when technical forums were optimistic.
Re: There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development
#10Toward the bottom:
> How to make Plutonium [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sh5XZo5wRE]
tl;dw: First get a few gallons of a (radioactive, poisonous, pyrophoric) transuranic element called neptunium.
I'm glad this didn't turn out to be an easy DIY video, since that would probably cause, you know, the end civilization. It's a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox: A civilization advances until someone posts simple instructions for making plutonium on shared hive mind storage.
It seems like the best way to evade a similar risk is to get the heck away from Earth as fast as possible, like the top of this blog post describes. The fact that a not-small gold rush is developing to do just that is the most hopeful news I've heard in approximately ever.