A Millennial’s Tiny Satellites Are Helping China Advance in the Space Race | Hacker News Reader

A Millennial’s Tiny Satellites Are Helping China Advance in the Space Race

bloomberg.com

57 pointsLeary35 comments

I do feel like people need to stop putting the word "Millennial" in titles or treating that word as an actual definition of a group of people.

I feel grouping groups of 18 to 40 year olds (or any other arbitrary starting and ending age depending on the definition of millennial we're using) as one category called Millennial is one of the most confusing terms. You can't even use it as a scientific classification or categorization or even define a person properly using the word Millennial because definitions vary and the person could be 20, 30 or as in this article, 36.

Well to be fair if “Millenial” is used in a caption then it’s probably about a man, halving the number of possibilities who it could be to just, dunno, a billion people or so? Because if it’s about a woman, she’s likely to just be called “woman” in headlines the same way, regardless of age. WaPo just titled “Smithsonian names woman to top post at American History Museum” a few days ago. Same nonsense. How hard is it to just state a person’s name/age/whatever the relevant characteristic is? Because is surely isn’t gender or a very vague age group statement.

I'm surprised nobody's tried to coin "millenienne" or something similar. I suppose we have the new phrase "#metoo generation", referring to the "new phenomenon" of women who object loudly to being sexually assaulted.

#me2ennial

Not to mention the "descriptivist" definitions of millennial when they use it to complain about kids in middle or high school. It may be wrong but if it becomes prevalent enough it is own meaning.

Millennial typically covers people born from the early 80's through the 90's. The oldest millennials are about 36 right now.

Different groups define different age ranges for this group. The earliest would then put the age at 39 or even 40.

The point remains, however, is that the span is too great for a single term to define them to any degree whatsoever.

The one that makes most sense to me, and seems to correspond with most descriptions, is people born before the millenium who became adults after it.

The cutoff I've always heard, is if you remember 9/11. (Millenials are a primarily US phenomenon, so that would be a major cultural milestone.)

How old do you reckon someone would have to be to remember something like that? 5 years old? 10 years old?

Not to dox myself, but I was about five when the event happened, and my brother who is three does not recall it.

That would be damn near everyone, unless you mean people that don’t remember 9/11 are millennials, which is false. No one born in the 2000s could be a millenial, you must have been “growing up” into adolescence during the first decade of the new millennium, and must have witnessed the shift from the analog to the modern digital era.

Remembering the actual event would probably mean you were around 5 at the time, and a cutoff that gets thrown around would be 1995.

The people after 1995 are the next generation after millennials.

True of all generational symbologies.

TIL I'm one of those millennials people keep complaining about.

I thought it was people born after the turn of the millenium.

What happended to "gen Y"?

Millennial was a renaming of gen Y. People born after the turn of the millennium are normally down as gen Z, though I assume someone will come up with a snappier name for that in time. Precisely what their view on avocados is remains unclear.

Note that if you're in the older end of the cohort (mid-30s), there's some effort to rebrand those as 'Xennials', if for some reason you're really bothered by being called a millennial :)

It’s people who became adults around the turn of the millennium, not people born then.

Or at least people who were aware around the turn of the millennium; a 25 year old is a millennial, but an 18 year old probably isn't, for example.

Gen Y == Millennial

This is why there is a Generation X/Millennial "transition" group of people that is sometimes referred to a Xennials[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

Both Gen Y and Millennials were the generation after Gen X, but different analysts placed the cutoff at different points and around different events. The people who coined the phrase 'millennial' thought that generation started in '82 and ended in '02 while the people who came up with the name Gen Y were, if I recall correctly, placing the cutoffs at '78 and '98 (or thereabouts).

'Millennial' seems to have been the catchier name, so it stuck around more - I think most people who are Millennial or Gen Y are also the other.

Ended in '00 you mean? But earlier comments allude to whether the person remembers 9/11 or is aware at the turn of the millenium. So that probably results in a range from '82 to '96.

"A 36-year-olds’s Tiny Satellites Are Helping China Advance in the Space Race"

Is 3 letters longer.

the guy definitely looks 36

Hey don't worry so much, Millennials are a perfectly cromulent granfaloon.

Western media reports tend to grossly exaggerate Chinese tech advances especially startups, those guys never shy away from any PR opportunity even if the only thing they have is a PPT in order to rake in juicy VC and government money. Don't believe what they are saying, let them show the thing.

In this article, the author seems to have mistaken Spacety with another startup LaserFleet when it comes to "offering to provide Wi-Fi service on airplanes", the latter explicitly cliams in their job listings to "have government backing", when a Chinese company says that, you set expectations low, coz they don't aim to be financially viable and usually don't have real advanced technology, maybe not even serious, let alone their grand plans.

The main subject "Spacety", all they did so far is building some concept-proof and experimental cubesats (which seems to be their real and only business model), offers 2 types of cubesat platform to do "space experiments", again, at 100K RMB price point, sounds just like yet another company caters to government policies.

Private space industry is a hot topic right now, with Spacex succeeding, former doubters(which abouds on Chinese Quora) are forced to come up with face-saving me-too policies and projects, personally I doubt any of the existing space startups in China is viable, partly because state enterprise's inherent desire and ability to eliminate competition.

Remember that Chinese guy who cliamed to actually build Nicaragua canal? His company is under stock suspension for 2 years now and no signs of resuming any time soon, that's after a daring news report questioning their glorious Cambodia telecom operation which the company claimed to have a whopping 60%+ net profit ratio and accouts for 90%+ of their revenue. Unsurprisingly, they too claim they have government backing and military ties and is "for the party and country".

I have been looking in to nano satellite and while they are intriguing, I haven’t seen any useful tasks that you can do. You also have options to subscribing/renting bigger satellite data. In less than 1.33kg form factor, sensors gets very limited and life in LEO orbit pretty short. It seems like they would be good for some school projects but are there any compelling applications?

In a hypothetical future war between major powers they would likely knock out each others' large satellites. So the combatants would have to make do with nano satellites for low resolution overhead imagery and low bandwidth communications. Nano satellites are small enough to be somewhat survivable, and losses can be easily replaced.

Do you mean knock out by kinetic weapons? So would some sort of EMP get them all instead, get past any shielding?

Could be kinetic weapons, directed energy, persistent jamming, maybe something else. It's hard to predict. EMP seems unlikely because emitting enough power to destroy satellites requires nuclear weapons and that would be a last resort, but anything is possible.

It’s posaible to take out satellites with ground based high powered lasers or ballistic missile interceptors like the SM3

Companies that are deploying lots of them are doing things like photographing the Earth (lots of cheap satellites means you can get frequent coverage), listening to various from Earth signals and selling that data (like AIS or ADS-B transponders), weather sensors (space and/or Earth weather), things like that. I think the normally accepted definition of a nano sat goes up to 10kg, which gives you a bit more to work with.

you mean all these Chinese company are actually firing some TOY sat to orbit, which can only last a very short time?

That's weird, this sounds like throw the money to ocean and hope you can get it back with some profit.....

"Short" in this case may mean a few years. Compare with SpaceX's test communications satellites, with a lifetime of six months: https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/microsat-2.htm

Lower orbits are cheaper to reach, and just like cellphones the high turnover of technology means that they will become obsolete quickly too. Today you might want a ""5G"" base station in space (+), in a few years time you'll want a ""6G"" one.

(+) this is an analogy

maybe someone should invest a company of cleaning space trash / iRobot in space or something like that to deal with these wreckage we shoot up in space.

Although space is quite big / endless, but the surface area of our earth in space isn't that big enough.

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