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>I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules?

Not just Bigelow but many other space startups. SpaceX is dominating the news atm with Blue Origin to follow but the reality is that the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation. This is only now starting to be realized with companies deploying fleets of cubesats for Earth observation but in the next decade there are plenty of companies that are looking to build commercial space stations. Some of these projects are more conservative, like using technology proven on the ISS coupled with cheaper components and more streamlined operations. These 2 factors combined with the fact that these are not cost plus contracts with the government mean at least an order of magnitude of cost savings. Then there is Bigelow who wants to move to the next stage of inflatables but also the Gateway foundation who want to launch the materials in space and assemble a huge station there. Everybody is waiting for the price per kg to drop to a certain threshold and then cheap human transportation to be made available. Crew Dragon is probably the first step towards that that might enable some small station but the big deal is BFR( when and if it launches).

> the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation

This is an opinion, not a fact. They are presently in transportation. Moreover, the space mining and manufacturing pitch has been made (incorrectly) for at least forty years. I have yet to see a convincing business model for any of these activities, even assuming cheaper launch costs.

Actually launch industry is minuscule compared to satellites ($5.5B for launch industry vs $13B only for satellite manufacturing)

Edit: and then of course there is the satellites services which the report estimates in hundreds of billions $.

[1] https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-SSIR-2017...

42% is minuscule? They have reasonably comparable market caps considering the amount of time the industries have existed. The commercial launch industry really is in it's first/second decade (arguable depending on what you define as commercial, this field is radically changing), and you can trace satellite commercial use back decades to the 70's with GPS and telecom (the first satellite tv use was in 1978 for reference).

Of course satellite manufacturing is only a small part of the satellite industry. I updated comment to reflect that.

Even by their original figures, wouldn't it be 30%? 5.5B/(5.5B + 13B)?

The point is, to some people "miniscule" implies different orders of magnitude.

I'm talking about LEO activities right now. Satellite operators per year make way more than the satellite launch market is.

Lowering launch costs will dramatically reduce the value of stuff in orbit. It’s the brutal math that hammered the telecom sector through the 90’s and presents a major risk for the next few decades.

Ex: If you pay 1000$/lb to get something into orbit and your competitor waits 5 years to get better stuff into orbit at 500$/lb that means you need to lower prices while still paying back the same loans.

It doesn't work that way. If you paid 1k$/lb now and the competitor waited 5 years you got 5 years of profits which easily accound for 4 or 5 rocket launches on today's costs. Satellite operators make millions/day of operations.

What I think will be a very interesting development is when we scale a DaVinci Surgical robot from Intuitive to be remote-hands in the assembly of space things.

If we can have people simply logging into a davinci-style-space-avatar who can get about to do the tasks required to assemble things, and have the dexterity of these robots have, that will be an interesting step.

Another thing that shold be interesting is whomever develops the first orbital hangar.

If we were to start by sending up components which get lego-ed into a platform onto which we can attach things we are building, and the robots we build them with - then we will be able to develop a repeatable method of bolting things together in space.

Given that (from my ignorant perspective) the only real limiting factor to any space-born craft is the size and shape of the componentry which can be launched from earth to orbit - it would seem that just ensuring your minimal denominating factor is fitting into the weight/dimensions of the payload capabilities of the launcher.

Then, ensuring that things have a standard way to fit together would be great, but if not - use a davinci style romote-arms for the fine work...

Or is that all just naive daydreaming?

> What I think will be a very interesting development is when we scale a DaVinci Surgical robot from Intuitive to be remote-hands in the assembly of space things.

Most of that kind of surgery is done in the same room, so dealing with latency will be a major issue. (I know there have been some experiments in long-distance tele-surgery, but it's hardly routine.)

A low-earth-orbit installation (like the ISS) has a variable latency depending on where it happens to be and what chain of relays and other systems are being used. A geosynchronous satellite would have predictable latency (~250ms round-trip) but it'd be more expensive to launch and service at that distance.

Anywho, I think "remote satellite work" will involve heavy reliance on pre-programmed sequences, "simulate locally, then send for execution remotely" tactics, and just generally structuring the manufacturing process to minimize any steps that can't be done atomically with pausing-points in-between.

Yeah, I was more referring to the dexterity of the bots than anything else.

And frankly, it must be stopped. We can’t have loads and loads of space junk floating around in near earth orbit.

Space isn’t the internet, you “can’t move fast and break things,” and you can’t just create more of it. We have to be careful and systematic and decide exactly what is important enough to be placed into orbit.

Having a high cost at least prevents a glut of crap being put up there, if it doesn’t necessarily prevent meritless things from being launched.

Someone has to say humbug to this before the Lords of Silicon Valley screw it up and make the rest of us pay for it.

Poorly placed comment when the parent was discussing things like cubesats. Tiny satellites like these are probably better in the long-run for orbital debris due to a number of reasons. Firstly, by virtue of being smaller, atmospheric drag is greater and their decay is faster given a certain orbit. Second, they're more disposable than the larger sats, meaning lower orbit more economical when weighed against the capital cost of the mass-produced device itself.

The real problem for debris is higher orbits that don't decay after a reasonable service life. Those just accumulate forever.

On that subject, you would have a point for things like SpaceX's recent idea of putting up internet satellites, because those would be slated for orbits higher than more LEO missions, and would involve a large number of heavy objects there effectively on a permanent basis.

Atmospheric drag affects small satellites more than large satellites, all other things equal?

I think it's more than as you go smaller the mass reduces faster than the drag, thus resulting in a higher amount of drag per unit of mass.

In other words, typical cubesats have a low ballistic coefficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_coefficient

Roughly speaking, mass (which needs to be decelerated by the drag) is proportional to the cube of the size but drag force is proportional to square of the size; so yes, atmospheric drag affects small satellites more.

I don’t see how. You miss with cubesats it still ends up being a complete fucking disaster.

The point is that this all has to be done correctly and carefully. I see a very cavalier attitude about it because of SV startup culture and the expectation that getting things wrong is okay in the name of progress.

I’ll admit I was more directly thinking about stupid publicity stunts like Tesla Roadsters in space, but the gravity of the situation doesn’t really change because a mistake is slightly less of a disaster than an apocalyptic one.

Cubesats are typically in pretty low orbits that decay fairly fast. I wouldn't worry about junk at that altitude very much.

If I am not mistaken the roadster is not orbiting the earth it is in solar orbit near or past Mars. It's not endangering earth's access to space in anyway.

The roadster is not orbiting the Earth. You lack understanding of the topic and thus fall victim to fear mongering by clickbait articles. Right now, with little done to protect from debris the chances of Kessler syndrome actually happening are tiny. Also most of the new constellations that are coming up in the following years will be in LEO where atmospheric drag is enough to get them down and burn in the atmosphere on their own within months of them malfunctioning. The problem is in higher orbits in which the amount of space is multiple orders of magnitude bigger and the number of satellites is much smaller as well. Also those higher orbits have little financial incentive for the new space age companies.

Depends on the orbit: the ISS is in an automatically decaying orbit, as are quite a lot of near-earth satellites. It's geostationary that we need to worry about crowding.

We need to worry more about LEO. Orbits decay automatically, but less and less the higher you go while still within LEO. There are many polar launches which makes debris come potentially from any direction, while in GEO all satellites go in roughly the same direction.

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