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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Lots and lots of satellites that keep passing overhead and you compose the images to abstract away the fact they came from multiple physical satellites.

Idk how many companies/govs have this capability but: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/

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Interesting that Palantir video shows SpaceX dragon as an example of "integrating with existing satellites". Plantir's Thiel and Elon go way back...

They don't call it the Paypal Mafia just cause

Pretty clear this guy is a key player in their mafia https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

> In 2002, Griffin was President and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests. During this time, he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.

They did what now?

Yeah, so the lore goes, Musk just wanted to send humans to Mars, and had no intention, originally, to build his own rockets. The first tactic was to retool an ICBM for spacier spaceflight, but the Russians laughed them out of the country.

It was a simpler goal than that.

From the first paragraph or two of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX

> In August 2001, Musk shared a plenary talk with Mike Griffin at the fourth Mars Society convention where he announced his plans to send his greenhouse to Mars.[6] In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished Dnepr ICBMs that could send the envisioned payloads into space.[7]

Elon got the Mars idea from Griffin.

IIRC originally Elon wanted to land a greenhouse on Mars, not people from the very start.

Establishing a massive functioning greenhouse on Mars, before sending people, still seems like a smart idea to me.

In fact, setting up as much automation as possible, pre-people, would be a good way to establish the human safety of Mars flights.

As well as supercharging the productivity and quality of life of the first Marsers when they finally do arrive.

IIRC the very original plan was a small glasshouse with a camera. But your idea sounds good as well. :)

Why would the Russians laugh at that? They did this themselves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepr_(rocket)

They were not laughing because it was an impossible idea. They were laughing because they have seen an opportunity to part a rich person from his money.

Or laughing because it was absurd, Griffin was CIA. The US had just left the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, and so it was obvious to everyone they wanted to develop low cost launch for a Brilliant Pebbles reboot. Now it's finally happening.

Planet.com. Maxar. Etc.

CubeSats are cheap and effective.

But then it’s hard to claim that such a system is targeting any one specific place.

Well, it’s certainly easy to claim that

*credibly :)

There's only one company with that capability and that's the only organization in the world ever to achieve first stage (and soon all stage) reusability for LEO launches.

Because to achieve that you need to put a lot of stuff in orbit and the only way to affordably do that is cheap (reusable) launches.

I don't believe that's true. There are quite a few companies with tons of satellites in space. Walmart put up an array in 1987.

The technical change is that you can build very useful, very small sats, which are cheap. Current SpaceX launch costs are lower, but like 1/2 price and 2x is not a big premium for a national security need.

10x cost for Falcon 9 (actual internal cost) and 100x less for Starship when available..

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