If things go well, we'll soon enter a new technological boom.
Like computers. I am surrounded by these things. Something like a smart watch is only feasible after a drastic decrease in cost and massive increases in capability. If you went back a few decades and suggested people would be strapping supercomputers on their wrists, you'd likely be committed to an institution. It would be unthinkable to devote the required amount of resources to such a frivolous task.
A similar thing will happen with spacecraft. Right now, it is still expensive, but SpaceX dragged down the price enormously. This is likely to decrease even further, either due to competition, or with the likes of the Starship(how many satellites could we fit on that monstrosity?).
This will enable entire new industries, both existing(satellites will become commodities), and also ones we have no idea about - yet. Pretty sure some "frivolous" tasks will pop up once this is cheap enough.
The difference here is that space is a lot more international (and thus harder to police) than your wrist.
We really want to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome, and so far humanity has shown a pretty terrible track record when it comes to exploiting earth's commodities or ensuring the prevention of long-term global disasters...
Already we have astronomers being increasingly hindered by man-made objects dashing through the field of view of ground-based telescopes.
Scott Manley made a good youtube video about just how much of the "basic" stuff one can already see around the earth by recording the sky in a 360-degrees video from a deserted place[0]. The current trends in launches with little thinking about the long run reminds me a bit of how we've approached fossil fuels.. we're basically waiting to hit the wall hard before re-thinking our approach.
fiddling with the settings for activating the satellite tracking plugin and TLE-data import, and maybe even import ones own horizon panoramic silouette for perfection.
You don't even need to be in a deserted place, with super-human vision to see this! Just grab a pair of binoculars, go out on your roof, and look at the sky.
I'm in the middle of a light-polluted city, and I can observe a satellite transit directly overhead every minute or two.
See A Satellite Tonight (https://james.darpinian.com/satellites) is a nice tool for finding these. I have a young kid and it's been fun heading out at night and spotting these.
I’ve spotted a similar frequency of satellite transits by eye and don’t recall seeing so many as a child. Not sure if I’m more observant now or if there’s really been a marked increase.
Everything is more international nowadays. Not sure this is a problem at all?
Kessler syndrome is far more likely to be caused by war than progress in satellites. Space is big and sats are tracked and powered nowadays.
How about we stop starting wars instead of stopping progress?
Space based telescopes are going to be vastly more useful and popular than land based telescopes today.
As costs come down dramatically access to space is going to expand rapidly, that is a good thing, not something to fear.
Until we start mining other planets, pretty much all space missions are going to have a huge costs on precious resources either directly or indirectly. We are basically hitting the point of no return if we haven't already passed it when it comes to destroying the natural balance on our own planet, and when things get bad here on Earth, leaving to civilize space or another planet will be reserved for affluent. Right now we are basically just helping them accomplish that goal for them to one day say... "So long suckers!"
The good news (for now) is most of these low cost satellites are going into LEO and will deorbit on their own, even if something goes wrong with their planned deorbit (like a collision).
Post processing of images i desired at all times. Filtering out moving dots isnt that hard. not even if the sky gets 1000 times more populated.
I know this is not a populair view, but sky pollution by satelites is way too overestimated. City light pollution is much more affecting the nightly life of people
How much are you willing to wager that filtering out moving dots with intensity comparable to or somewhat below the statistical noise in an instrument is easy?
Furthermore, for transit-hunting experiments, a slight dip in a star's brightness once per year or once per decade is the entire signal. Even if the satellite doesn't produce a moving dot, surely it cannot be transparent and non-refractive.
Lowered launch costs can't compare with the expedience of ground-based experiments.
Some things work really well in space, some do not. Low-cost launch will revolutionize some experiments, but not all.
Building radio experiments like SKA, big telescopes like TMT, or starting up innovative low-budget instruments like Dragonfly is still impossible with low-cost launch. In the latter case, until a graduate student with a screwdriver can make daily adjustments to an on-orbit instrument, we will lose the earliest-stage R&D capability.
Finally, it is essential for our future generations to see a dark and unfettered sky with the human eyeball. That perpetual perspective, for 7,500,000,000 people, is inaccessible with launch vehicles.
Isn't there another "Kessler syndrome" we need to talk about?
The colision of signals travelling in free space, that is.
Unless we talk about super directional signals, eventually we will run out of bandwidth to talk to those satellites.
Perhaps higher orbit satellites could talk to SpaceX satellites in lower orbit(again, very directional signals) which in turn could relay those signals via internet, not yet practical though.
That is quite different as it's a gradual worsening, which stops getting worse if we stop broadcasting signals.
The issue with kessler syndrome is that once it starts, space is immediately unusable for decades if not centuries, even if we turn everything off and stop launching new satellites.
The launch canisters that contain these cubesats are large and weigh more than the cubesat itself. They do that so they don’t jeopardize the main payload. But, if it was only cubesats, the launcher could probably be simplified.
The Starlink deployment system is preatty minimalistic (just a bunch of rods holding the stack of satellites together) so maybe something similar could be done for cubesats as well, possibly by making them a bit more sturdy at some extra added weight.
On the last Starlink launch, they launched 58 starlink satellites and 2 blacksky. The 'regular' starlink launches with re-use of the first stage have capacity for 60 satellites.
Does anyone want to guess at the dollar per kilogram price the Blacksky company paid to launch the most recent two?
very bad theoretical calculation: if a 60-satellite starlink launch, re-using an already flown first stage booster and assuming successful landing and re-use of the booster costs $5 million, that's about $83,333 per satellite. Meaning that the raw launch cost for those two satellites might have been slightly under $200k?
I imagine the $/kg also includes a lot of the cost of the time and engineering work for the spacex payload team to design and machine the payload adapter/release mechanism. Also whatever electrical command and control/DC power bus might be built in to feed power to satellites after the fairing/encapsulation is done while awaiting launch.
As for if and when a "one click" commercial launch for small satellites will become a thing, I'm not so sure. Unless a satellite has no thrusters and no maneuvering/stationkeeping propellant on it, they're inherently dangerous when fully fueled and imminently awaiting launch.
This requires custom engineering and interface work on the part of the satellite manufacturer, satellite operator, and launch service operator. There is no single standard physical interface I'm aware of for attaching a satellite (larger than cubesat size) to a payload adapter, while ensuring inherently safe behavior of the satellite, for the protection of ground crews.
> There is no single standard physical interface I'm aware of for attaching a satellite (larger than cubesat size) to a payload adapter, while ensuring inherently safe behavior of the satellite, for the protection of ground crews.
From a purely technical standpoint, I see no reason why SpaceX or another organization couldn't provide a 'satellite skeleton' that people could add an array of standard modules to using an online configurator and click "build/deploy/launch". And have it go to a customer-specified orbit and orientation.
But it seems it would make more sense for that provider to just launch those satellites themselves and provide access to the data.
I'd imagine that adding any non-standard component so that your satellite has differential value-add vs. existing commodity satellites would add at least some fair bit of 'real' engineering. But likely a 'satellite skeleton' (framework, bare-bones satellite) could take a ton of work out of that endeavor.
But given that we're talking about people who say "I need my own satellite(s)" and specifically not "I need data from existing or soon-to-exist satellites"....I'd be surprised if people with those needs would care that much about the (seemingly?) relatively small savings from a pre-designed satellite structure, especially given how any design decisions for that barebones solution inherently implies genuine tradeoffs vs their own design.
> A similar thing will happen with spacecraft. Right now, it is still expensive, but SpaceX dragged down the price enormously.
This isn't all positive, it will also increase the Kessler effect[1] whereby "the density of objects in low Earth orbit due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions. One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations."
The last 100 years have shown that while capitalism has rendered an unprecedented jump in quality of life overall for the vast majority of people, the "waste" that is inherent in this industrial jump has been ignored completely, which is what puts us in the situation we are in today, where oceans are full of plastic and the air is full of dangerous particles from fossil fuels. One could hope that we don't repeat this ignorant approach in developing space, because even if you can clean up most waste after the fact, obviously it's much more effective and economical to make sure the waste doesn't reach critical mass at all first.
Have smart watches really improved daily life for the masses? I really don't think they have.
We need real technology that saves labour, like washing machines, dishwashers, sewage processing, electricity grids.
I think satellites can provide services that join that club, by allowing decentralization through ubiquitous access to medium speed internet.
Smart watches tend to provide information that really doesn't matter, like number of steps in a day. Yes there is the example of the heartbeat, but for most that is just informational also, plus other dedicated devices already existed.
I think too much of new tech are just toys, hopefully this is just an interim stage and we are about to get to the real stuff again.
I'm a type 1 diabetic and I get real time glucose information from a Dexcom CGM to my Garmin watch. This is extremely useful, but maybe we're a bit too small group to be counted as masses...
I actually stopped to think about your question for a while, and honestly all I can think of what "we" still need to do ourselves is organizing everything - getting ready in the morning, organizing and preparing meals, and housework, even if it's helped with vacuums and dishwashers etc. I'm sure there's tech companies working in this area (like the overcomplicated clothes folding machine, or Soylent).
Right now even for those there's a solution, but they involve outsourcing things which cost more money / recurring expenses; laundry service, cleaners, takeout / delivered food, personal assistants, day care / babysitters, etc. I can't really see a revolution happening in those areas.
I mean I'm sure in time it'll be possible to buy a machine that does full service laundry, but it'll take up a lot of space. Maybe something for apartment building basements, and your clothes would need to be tagged (e.g. RFID) with ownership and washing information.
Of course, alternatively you go for the dys/utopian scenario where everyone lives in worker housing complexes, wears the same functional outfit, eats in food halls / canteens three times a day, etc. I'm sure some people do live or have lived like that already. But the issue with that is that in those scenarios, people live to work, there's not much outside of their employment, and they live where they work. I'm sure this happens a lot in SF anyway.
Like computers. I am surrounded by these things. Something like a smart watch is only feasible after a drastic decrease in cost and massive increases in capability. If you went back a few decades and suggested people would be strapping supercomputers on their wrists, you'd likely be committed to an institution. It would be unthinkable to devote the required amount of resources to such a frivolous task.
A similar thing will happen with spacecraft. Right now, it is still expensive, but SpaceX dragged down the price enormously. This is likely to decrease even further, either due to competition, or with the likes of the Starship(how many satellites could we fit on that monstrosity?).
This will enable entire new industries, both existing(satellites will become commodities), and also ones we have no idea about - yet. Pretty sure some "frivolous" tasks will pop up once this is cheap enough.
And that's only unmanned flights.
EDIT: I've found this amusing - that's in the direction of what I'm talking about, we are just missing the "1-click launch": https://www.rocketlabusa.com/book-my-launch/