spacemark

As a former paraglider who's been eyeing sailplanes, I'd love to believe this - got any good links to data at hand?

I'm a mechanical engineer (satellites currently, launch vehicles and satellite payloads previously).

On the side I sell budget star tracking astrophotography mounts I designed and build in my basement. I also do a few consulting gigs each year. These efforts combined bring in an extra ~25k annually. My plan is to develop two more space-related products, hire a tech, and transition to more of an oversight and design role rather than the one guy running the whole thing.

For the record I don't think most people should do this, it is not a balanced life to work this much, generally speaking. But for me it's a worthy discomfort to relieve financial pressures from student debt and being the only breadwinner of a young family. Plus it's fun stuff, I get to design cool products which is what I do for fun anyway, I just usually stop at the level of prototype when it's just for me. ;)

I think you overestimate how much control we technologists actually have. Takes far more than a few seats on some standards boards.

So, it's either keep grasping at something that isn't there, give up on the thing and accept it isn't there, or come to Jesus and get it in the afterlife.

I've always been baffled by CS Lewis. Quite a mix of insight and rational incoherence.

Yes, deliberate ignorance pendulum swings too far. Of course "free" information is not very useful because someone else is paying for it, motivated by their interests not yours. So do the adult thing and don't throw up your hands and give up, instead pay just a bit for useful information. That way you know a bit more about who is funding it and why.

Oops my bad, thought this was a comment under another thread discussing terrestrial lensing which uses Earth's atmosphere, not gravitational lensing. Disregard!

Oops my bad, thought this was a comment under another thread discussing terrestrial lensing which uses Earth's atmosphere, not gravitational lensing. Disregard!

I'm an engineer (current job is designing and building small spacecraft), so forgive me for raining on physicists' dreams, but a huge reason such a telescope is not currently practical is the enormous amount of propellant required to get you there and then station keep to stay focused on a target. The latter is usually glossed over in this concept but it alone blows mission cost out of the water. Would make James Webb look like a cute little project.

If you don't have an active propulsion system for station keeping then you cannot pick targets. Who wants that? Nobody.

This concept is 50 years off at minimum.

Yes, it's possible but the refractive index decreases with increase in wavelength to the point that this would not be feasible.

Radio wavelengths are ~9 orders of magnitude larger than optical, meaning the detector would need to be placed roughly 30 light years from earth. A bit out of our reach.

(assuming I did my back of the envelope math right)

A tenth the cost? No. Half the cost? Possibly but even that is a stretch. A huge amount of the work effort (and funding) would have to be repeated. All the testing, validation, hardware-specific characterization and calibration, troubleshooting, and attendant analysis. Not to mention partial redesign since many of the parts used are no longer produced and the tooling long gone.

Source: just my perspective after 20 years working on space systems.

Seriously. Pretty insulting to assign a senior a 4 hr take home assignment when the hiring manager can just pick up the phone and talk to references, look up authored papers, etc. Ridiculous. Glad the tide is turning in favor of workers.

No, it's really not that simple. Inflation causes are many fold and it was an issue prior to Russia's invasion. Might help, but inflation isn't going to vanish with a "simple" policy change.

I'm confused. Are you saying Nader didn't do any good thus regulation is a fool's errand?

Very interesting. I work in the industry and have not heard about this concept. It appears quite a bit of low-TRL work has been done by our friends in Europe and Japan. Appears possible in the near future, especially with market pressures due to the popularity and anticipated congestion of LEO.

But holy cow, the thruster in their diagram appears to be 80% of the spacecraft volume. These aren't going to be small birds, requiring likely multiple kW to stay in orbit.

Thanks for sharing.

Not saying it doesn't have an effect, just that it's vastly overstated and the real picture is more complex. As usual, the nature of things is difficult to convey in a tweet.

Can we kill the "genius" trope already? In 15 years at the nation's best engineering schools and another 10 at companies and institutions that employ their graduates, I have yet to meet a nobel prize winner, CEO, professor, astronaut, politician, or other individual that is single-handedly "propelling global human advance." Perhaps these magical minds are hiding under some rock I haven't overturned yet, but it's much more likely that the "genius" model is just not a very good one. There are plenty of clever people around and there will always be a tail end of the bell curve, but the idea that these individuals are lifting up the rest of us is self-serving and ironically, demonstrably false. It's hero culture for intellectuals. There are plenty of humans with tail-end IQ, none of whom become anything without the rest of society getting up and going to work to support investment in their minds and the infrastructure that enables them to utilize their capacity.

Einstein would have been nothing without cooperation from a wide range of scientists, mathematicians, family members, and hell his garbage man.

/end rant

Thank you for sharing that link, though - the bit about reproduction has some meat to it. I've wondered whether innovation will slow as global population levels off. We'll get better at being efficient with the capacity we have, to be sure, but I wonder if eking out efficiencies will also asymptotically stall.

Hey if these unicorns get you going, let me introduce you to my friend "Space Based Solar Power." You'll really feel alive.

Unless you live in Antarctica the ozone hole has little bearing on how much UV exposure you're getting. The stronger sun down in NZ and Aus is mostly due to Earth's elliptical orbit (closer to the sun during south hemisphere summer than north) and fewer pollutants in the air that absorb light, which is due to the fact that 90% of the world's population lives north of the equator.

Couples filing jointly can buy $20k/yr, not an insignificant amount for normal people. There are ways to get more, like gifts, trusts, tax returns.

I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in Russia. The US doesn't even come remotely close. You can look up corruption indexes, Russia is near most corrupt, US somewhere in the bottom quartile iirc. A quick example from my industry - roughly 1/3 of the ~USD $3 billion spent on the new Russian spaceport is unaccounted for (stolen). I assure you that's many orders of magnitude worse than the contracts in play at Cape Canaveral.

A good (extremely depressing) film to watch is "Leviathan" (2014).

I don't think they have a problem recognizing those that subscribe to the warrior cult mentality - notice how often our politicians publicly call Putin a "thug"? It's dealing with it that's the issue. You literally have to change a culture - how does one do that? Clearly sanctions are a blunt tool and often backfire. And violence is supposed to be the last resort for those of the equality mindset, whereas it's the first for the warrior mindset. It's tricky.

I've tried to map this model onto Afghanistan but I think that's a bit of a different beast. America was 100% foolish to invade, I agree. But an equality mentality and a warrior mentality are not the only cultural philosophies. Religion alters the picture in yet another way.

Thank you, this is a very useful model of the philosophical differences between Russia and the west since the fall of the soviet union and provides some quality food for thought about how to change the direction geopolitics are going with the resurgence of strongmen across the globe.

I have traveled to Ukraine and Russia several times, dated a Russian briefly, then a Ukrainian, worked with Ukrainians in DC for several years, learned a bit of Russian and Ukrainian along the way... One of the things that I did not anticipate at first was the shared philosophical heritage with the west - my Russian ex-girlfriend's favorite book was Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, for one random example. For another, take a visit (in better times) to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and notice how the museum honors greek/roman philosophy and empire as much as any western museum.

The philosophical position upon which this country was founded - the rise of what recon517 is calling the "Everybody Must Be Soft" philosophy - has only been a dominant force recently, really only coming onto stage in the 20th century. It is not what has ruled the world for the majority of our 6,000 years of civilization and there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. The idea that those who take and keep power by whatever means have a moral right to it is not new. I recently finished reading Xenophon's Anabasis (aka The Persian Expedition), and this philosophy seeps through just about every page as the Greek army lays waste to anyone not deemed of benefit to them, even fellow Greeks. Xenophon was a close friend of Socrates, remember.

Xenophon addressing the army, Anabasis book 6: "As long as you stay together united as to-day, you will command respect and procure provisions; for might certainly exercises a right over what belongs to the weaker."

My point with all of this is 1) we have more shared history than you might think, and 2) that if you enjoy the fruits of an equality mindset over the fruits of a winner-takes-all mindset, then do not take it for granted. Its dominance in politics is not guaranteed, at home or abroad.

Live it, understand it, be it, calmly share it, never force it. We cannot win this war of ideas by treating it like a war. The irony is that in the end it is far more powerful to cooperate than to take, but the success rests upon preventing individuals from concentrating and exercising that power.

My two cents, another imperfect model for consideration.

>I'd hope that they think that protective system would be good enough.

They most certainly won't. Peruse this site if interested. Long story short, the kind of wattage you're talking about (writing on clouds visible from the ground) is incredibly dangerous, not just to airplanes but to those on the ground, and you would have to demonstrate through licenses and permits that you know what you're doing. I don't think $50k will get you even halfway there, if possible at all in any kind of urban center.

https://www.laserpointersafety.com/rules-general/cdrh-conseq...

Good points. If I can take a crack at the exercise for the reader, I think the inconsistency has fairly straight forward reasons, even if they're frustrating: humans are terrible at reasoned risk analysis (if they even see the value); people prefer absolutes and easy heuristics to "it depends"; most people have first-hand experience with the extremes of smoking and drinking and it's thus easy to vilify; the best defense of vice is pleasure, which isn't much of a defense in the eyes of many, whereas exposure to pollution and cosmic rays is impossible to prevent without giving up near-universally valued things (transportation, energy).

We see similar patterns with nuclear power, climate change, and pandemics...

...which everybody does. There is nothing special about that particular smart person's ability to predict the future. Appeals to authority based on selectively chosen past performance... let's see how this ages 10 years from now.

>get the whole world access to the internet

Starlink is yet another printing press, a tool to control information. It can be wielded for good and bad, just like any other technology, and it will be for both. Has the internet made the world happier? Better? By whose definition? It's certainly made many wealthier, but it's also destabilized countries, facilitated genocide, spread misinformation like nothing before. Just like any other communications technology.

The worship of tech as savior in silicon valley and its followers never ceases to amaze me. Tech is inert; has no intrinsic moral value at all.

Not true at all, totally depends on the type of observation campaign. Plenty of big observatory projects are negatively impacted by the eternal march of "progress."

Apologies, my last sentence was unprofessional and unhelpful. I was not at my best in that comment.

My other points stand, though. Everyone in the industry that's paying attention knows that Starship, IF it delivers on its promises, will change the game. It's a strawman to say those in industry are ignorant of this. Yet we've heard Starship-esque promises many times before, spoken with just as much fervor and certainty as displayed by your friend the JPL blogger.

I don't perceive this as a forum for ruthless debate but rather sharing ideas in an atmosphere of cooperation. Debate closes off context and undermines trust, which in turn limits communication bandwidth severely and often destroys it entirely.

The act of debate can most certainly be productive, but in an open and unbounded forum where the ruleset of "debate" - and thus its goals - are undefined, competitive framing has a consistent tendency to devolve into semantics and entrenchment of positions rather than productive insight.

Of course, you're free to pick my statements apart further, if you find that productive. But I will spend my time elsewhere.

Man, there you go again, trying to turn this into a debate where we pick apart everything the opponent says line by line. What a waste of time. Take care, good luck with your mental health.

Jeez dude, these were just random programs off the top of my head to illustrate industry distrust of launch vehicle promises. My comment wasn't meant to initiate a debate but offer the perspective of someone who is quite literally writing proposals about launch vehicle selection for NASA missions. But hey, you can read Wikipedia, so...

In any case to those reasonable out there, don't worry. If SpaceX can prove reliable launch to orbit and deliver on their promises, change will come. It's kind of silly to write articles about how everyone should change the way they operate NOW because change is coming. Of course it's coming, everyone accepts it's likely, and things will move quickly once it does and is proven. What more do the fanboys want!?