Romalar
4353
The biggest constellations have all been planned or moved down to orbital altitudes of between about 350-650 km. (That’s at least SpaceX, Amazon/Kuiper, and Kepler, with OneWeb being the prominent outlier right now.)
At such altitudes it appears that Kessler Syndrome shouldn’t be able to happen due to the Earth’s atmosphere dragging down any defunct satellites and debris within a few years. Collisions would still cause a short-term hazard, but shouldn’t be able to reach a high enough density to block launches. It’s still important to avoid, just shouldn’t be the kind of apocalyptic concern it’s often treated as.
BTW, just painting satellites a darker color doesn’t help since they then absorb so much solar heat that it fries them from inside. You have to do something more clever, so we’ll see if the things being tried now will work well enough.
antlers
4354
It would be nice if at one point the ITU or humanity in general had settled on a single high-bandwidth global satellite infrastructure. We don’t need 5 or 6 of these. It’s like if each railroad had had to build its own nationwide rail network and its trains wouldn’t run on any other track.
Well that’s pretty much happened for the railroads. It took decade for countries to standards on a single guides, some never did and each country pretty much had their own gauge for many decades after that.
You aren’t wrong, it would nice for humanity to standardize. But there are risks standardizing too early, that you pick an inferior technology. I do wonder if there is ANSI or IEEE group working on standardizing communication satellite, the technology should be getting mature enough.
Yeah railroad gauge is a good analogy. Eventually the large players bullied the smaller to standardize, and elbowed the economic parasites off the “conversion” economy. After the Civil War the whole of the south converted to the north’s gauge completely over a period of TWO DAYS ; over 11Kmiles of track were adjusted just a few inches to the 4’ 8.5" standard.
http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html
The UK is still on a different gauge to the rest of Europe. And different platform heights.
and the moat/channel thing
When trains come through the chunnel their wheels are pushed streadily closer or further apart depending which way they’re going…
The Chunnel itself (and the UK track into London) is on European (Berne) gauge, but it’s segregated from the rest of the network. Anything built to run on general UK tracks has to be custom made, so it costs more than anywhere else.
CraigM
4362
British exceptionalism at its finest! Says the American who has plenty to say about the places where his own country is touched in the head.
Menzo
4363
Theoretical Starship SN15 test this afternoon.
So, launch is expected “in the afternoon timeframe”. What timeframe is the explosion expected in?
Just saw this today and thought it was a fun way to remember someone.
I agree with Christian a very interesting exchange.
In the stop clock, is right twice a day department, maybe Space force isn’t such a bad idea.
Matt_W
4368
An odd statement given that space technology has always been generally developed by commercial companies under government contracts, just like how SpaceX developed its crew capability.
Right. Neil Armstrong was landed on the moon by North American and Grumman.
Big difference between Apollo and SpaceX. Is that for Apollo NASA developed very detailed specifications which the various defense contractor executed.
In contrast, for Commercial cargo and crew. The RFP was essentially. Deliver so many pounds of cargo to the ISIS at rate of X number launches per year and then for crew it was Y number of astronauts, with the additional requirement that you must mets NASA safety requirements.
Boeing, Lockheed, and SpaceX were all given a lot of latitude more than the Apollo era in how they did it. NASA essentially was highly involved in the development and acted as the prime contractor and managed the myriad of sub contractors, in the commercial era NASA is just a customer albeit the most important customer.
Because they had tried letting companies do their own thing until Gagarin went to space and caught the US with their pants down. After the moon race, the political focus on the shuttle with accompanying cost cuts makes things hard to compare. There were certainly no shortage of ideas at NASA of how to things differently and more efficiently, but no one cared about space anymore, so they were shut down.
[citations needed], I know. It’s what I understood from who knows where. One reference was an ExtraLife series, I know that, and they don’t always get it right.
