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d_silin

I have the privilege of being the space startup founder.

If you have any specific questions - I am happy to answer them.

P.S. Going offline now, but send questions anyway - I'll to reply them later.

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What is your business model, your website does not make it clear.

Do you plan on selling time on orbital computers?

It's all fine and good until the orbital computer rehabilitates a disgraced ex-console jockey currently selling drugs in chiba city to retrieve the hardware crypto key required for a wintermute/neuromancer merger.

Just what was the colour of the sky above Chiba, anyway? I used to think a stormy grey turmoil, and now people seem to think it was a uniform brilliant blue.

I think Gibson was trying to describe an overcast gray with a lot of reflected city light on its underside. Sort of like VHF/UHF analog TV snow. He literally wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter, despite the subject matter, in the late 70s and early 80s Gibson lived a quite low tech lifestyle.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...

Yes, that's correct. We'll revamp the website to make business model more clear.

Can I have the MicroNOVA placed into orbit for me? I can't seem to do that from your site.

It is not likely to survive orbit deployment, unfortunately.

Long term or short term? I don't need a century-level deployment, but I would like to see how long it would survive.

It would probably be cheaper and easier to test at a terrestrial cyclotron

For some reason I can't reply to your comment below, so Iam answering here.

- From purely hardware perspective, microNOVA has a nonzero chance of being operational for at least few minutes in space environment.

- From rules & regulations point, launching it as a standalone cubesat is not possible. It is not compliant enough with cubesat specs (plastic frame, non-approved components, no radio licenses)

If you load a comment and it's been less than 2 minutes sometimes you can't reply.

I dig the actual reply, I actually considered whether it was radiation or just cooling of the components, but I didn't consider the regulations point.

Edit: I was planning on making something accessible over AWS Ground Station so I was wondering if it was possible to get the payload into orbit in the first place. Thanks for being reachable and replying.

But why in orbit where cooling is MUCH harder?

As someone without much knowledge of use cases for orbital computing, what's the ELI5 use cases for this?

Cheers!

The strongest use case is in-space data analytics on Earth Observation data (camera images, simply said).

Orbital compute presents a pretty good physical security model as well (X-37B notwithstanding). I've often thought it would be fun to build a smallsat providing crypto functions (signatures, certificates, message passing).

There's a lot of investment and development going on in asat tech...

I could imagine. An unhardened satellite is going to be a pretty soft target for EMP/laser attacks.

Is there something drastically new besides the change in the economics? From layperson's perspective, SpaceX so far has done nothing new that hasn't been done 50 years ago. Yes, robotic rockets landing on robotic ships is cool but that's not core space tech that changes everything IMHO. It's nice that there's a new way to go to ISS but Soyuz was doing it since ever and very reliably. There was a buzz about how the new ship docks automatically but Soyuz was doing it too for decades AFAIK?

What I am missing here? Is there a new frontier or is this simply a business opportunity to fill a gap?

> From layperson's perspective, SpaceX so far has done nothing new that hasn't been done 50 years ago.

https://bucket2.glanacion.com/anexos/fotos/85/2912485.gif

In the last 50 years we did not have anything like this. Rocket re-utilization, now only for first stage but also second stage in the future is a game changer in the economics of launching a rocket.

Yes it’s cool and being cheaper is a nice thing but what does it enable that wasn’t possible before?

Cost is the usually the main factor determining whether something is possible.

What is this thing that wasn’t possible before but possible now thanks to the discount?

I know the talking points but what about the specifics?

Specifically a manned flight to mars, which before depended on the cyclic political will and state of the cold war to be funded. There are also other uses for starship like 30 minute suborbital flights between new york and london. Maybe it's easier to see if you look at the limits: given an infinite amount of money and labour, we wouldve seen a manned mars landing in the 1980's perhaps. If on the other hand funding was finite and reaching mars cost 100% of world gdp, it would never happen.

SpaceX launch cost is roughtly half of competitions for same payload: 40mil USD vs 90mil (Ariane Space).

40mil is far more affordable than 90mil, and they are promising lower prices in future.

Starlink becomes economically viable.

Building a satellite constellation with 42,000 satellites comes to mind.

Is this possible due to the rocket re-use? Do you have the numbers? I want to understand the economics of this.

I know the talking points but I’m septic because nobody seems to know the specifics.

Since the satellites are mass produced each one is comparatively cheap. That means losing them is an option and SpaceX can launch them using parts that no other customer would want (first stage boosters that have been flown 4 or more times already). Their main costs are the second stage ($20 million), payload adapter and fairings (which are simpler than the normal $10 million version), fuel ($300k) and ground support etc ($1M?). That puts you in the range of $30 million. A regular launch would cost twice that, and any competitor easily twice of that again. So it's a 4x launch cost reduction, and a lot of the remaining cost can be written off as R&D as it's exploring the failure points of reused boosters, eventually allowing them to put regular customers on more heavily used boosters with confidence.

Imagine you go to a furniture factory and visit the owner. You tell him the factory is cool but what does it do that wasn't possible before? All the machines are just cutting wood. A carpenter with a hand saw could have done the same things during the iron age.

If you don’t think robotic tech changes anything about the core of space flight, I just don’t know what to tell you.

Okay, what it changes? I know the talking points(yes, it is cheaper but not in order of magnitude) but where's the substance here? If it's the cool videos, that could have been done in CGI too. What is the new things, the thing that is a leap forward? Sure, it is nice to end the reliance on Russia but that's a political advancement. If it's the wild stock market, you can do it with cryptocurrencies too(maybe rockets are more environmentally friendly?).

If it is Mars, this is some CGI so far and kids in Eastern Europe can do it too.

Re-do everything with the electronics and software of the 2020's is interesting of course but my understanding is that the reason the space age ended is because we need multiple orders of magnitude more energy to reach far distances in reasonable times and what we have in the distance that we can realistically reach isn't particularly important. The new space companies don't bring the orders of magnitude cost savings or energy into the play, they bring re-do of what was done in the Space age and I fail to see how this is changing the fundamentals.

Please somebody stop repeating the talking point and explain this thing that everybody understand but nobody talks about.

"Everybody knows what robotics will do to the space"

Well, tell me please what robotics(which is not actually new in space) will do to revive the Space Age? I am not one of the everybody who knows, please explain.

The space age ended because there are few economical reasons to go to space. You can deploy satellites profitably and that's about it. Anything that goes beyond this has to be funded by a national space program and unless there is a nationalistic reason like a space race against the soviet union the national space program is going to be at the bottom of government priorities. The only way one could possibly change that is by reducing launch costs.

IMO what all these commenters and mainstream narratives miss is: cheap launch cost enabling space based industry and development. Once you move resource extraction of space based resources and industrial production INTO space it’s game over. The solar systems vast riches are available. Mars and the moon value in the long term is their relative shallow gravity wells.

I don’t know how robotics plays in here, that’s the innovation to come.

How much would it cost to put something like microNOVA into orbit around Mars?

Several millions US dollars, at least. Interplanetary missions are expensive, even the small ones.

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