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Comment by tibbe | Hacker News Reader

Aside: does that mean that Falcon 9 could carry ~20,000 CubeSats at the cost of 62M/20k = USD 3,100 per satelite? That would be awesome. Now if I could just find another 19,999 people who want to ride-share with me.

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I wonder if this is a good thing. On one hand, the common availability of cubesats would be so much fun from a hacker point of view, but on the other I worry that such a low cost per satellite will start to pollute space. If every bay area hobbiest has one floating in the sky, we're inevitably going to have ones that go unmanaged, rogue, etc with no plans for cleanup/repair if things go wrong.

Perhaps SpaceX could offer (a slightly more expensive) CubeSat module that has built in deorbiting thrusters that will bring it down after X years.

Air resistance will already take care of that, depending on the orbit. (And for 3k, you aren't getting an ultra-high orbit)

If a cloud of 20000 cubesats were released by a single rocket, at least they would all be in approximately the same orbit, which is better than having 20000 cubesats spread out over 20000 orbits. Not to mention, they don't stay up indefinitely- launched into a low orbit, drag eventually pulls them back down.

I'd definitely buy a cubesat launch slot for 3k. Perhaps someone should set up a kickstarter or something.

Yet another use case for solar sail laser arrays: deorbiting clouds of debris and tiny satellites.

Oh, they'd be able to deorbit big satellites, too, which is a bit of a problem.

Many of the cheapest, hackeriest cubesats are deployed into low orbits that decay within weeks or months. Space isn't completely empty, only mostly empty, and even minute air resistance is enough that things like the ISS need to thrust regularly to stay in orbit [1]. I believe it's a common mission profile for cubesats that're built as aerospace engineering senior projects, for example.

[1]: http://www.heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx

You can't get a launch license unless you fit within the deorbit standard that was internationally agreed upon. "No plans"?

Unless your Australian... in which case the government says you have to have a stupidly huge insurance policy and other red tape that would make it easily 10x that cost.

If you use the 10 flights of a f9 is that more like $310 per satellite?

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