
A Millennial’s Tiny Satellites Are Helping China Advance in the Space Race - Leary
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-13/a-millennial-s-tiny-satellites-are-helping-china-advance-in-the-space-race
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forkLding
I do feel like people need to stop putting the word "Millennial" in titles or
treating that word as an actual definition of a group of people.

I feel grouping groups of 18 to 40 year olds (or any other arbitrary starting
and ending age depending on the definition of millennial we're using) as one
category called Millennial is one of the most confusing terms. You can't even
use it as a scientific classification or categorization or even define a
person properly using the word Millennial because definitions vary and the
person could be 20, 30 or as in this article, 36.

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pmorici
Millennial typically covers people born from the early 80's through the 90's.
The oldest millennials are about 36 right now.

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daurnimator
TIL I'm one of those millennials people keep complaining about.

I thought it was people born after the turn of the millenium.

What happended to "gen Y"?

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chrisseaton
It’s people who became adults around the turn of the millennium, not people
born then.

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rsynnott
Or at least people who were aware around the turn of the millennium; a 25 year
old is a millennial, but an 18 year old probably isn't, for example.

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cauldron
Western media reports tend to grossly exaggerate Chinese tech advances
especially startups, those guys never shy away from any PR opportunity even if
the only thing they have is a PPT in order to rake in juicy VC and government
money. Don't believe what they are saying, let them show the thing.

In this article, the author seems to have mistaken Spacety with another
startup LaserFleet when it comes to "offering to provide Wi-Fi service on
airplanes", the latter explicitly cliams in their job listings to "have
government backing", when a Chinese company says that, you set expectations
low, coz they don't aim to be financially viable and usually don't have real
advanced technology, maybe not even serious, let alone their grand plans.

The main subject "Spacety", all they did so far is building some concept-proof
and experimental cubesats (which seems to be their real and only business
model), offers 2 types of cubesat platform to do "space experiments", again,
at 100K RMB price point, sounds just like yet another company caters to
government policies.

Private space industry is a hot topic right now, with Spacex succeeding,
former doubters(which abouds on Chinese Quora) are forced to come up with
face-saving me-too policies and projects, personally I doubt any of the
existing space startups in China is viable, partly because state enterprise's
inherent desire and ability to eliminate competition.

Remember that Chinese guy who cliamed to actually build Nicaragua canal? His
company is under stock suspension for 2 years now and no signs of resuming any
time soon, that's after a daring news report questioning their glorious
Cambodia telecom operation which the company claimed to have a whopping 60%+
net profit ratio and accouts for 90%+ of their revenue. Unsurprisingly, they
too claim they have government backing and military ties and is "for the party
and country".

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sytelus
I have been looking in to nano satellite and while they are intriguing, I
haven’t seen any useful tasks that you can do. You also have options to
subscribing/renting bigger satellite data. In less than 1.33kg form factor,
sensors gets very limited and life in LEO orbit pretty short. It seems like
they would be good for some school projects but are there any compelling
applications?

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nradov
In a hypothetical future war between major powers they would likely knock out
each others' large satellites. So the combatants would have to make do with
nano satellites for low resolution overhead imagery and low bandwidth
communications. Nano satellites are small enough to be somewhat survivable,
and losses can be easily replaced.

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maxden
Do you mean knock out by kinetic weapons? So would some sort of EMP get them
all instead, get past any shielding?

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nradov
Could be kinetic weapons, directed energy, persistent jamming, maybe something
else. It's hard to predict. EMP seems unlikely because emitting enough power
to destroy satellites requires nuclear weapons and that would be a last
resort, but anything is possible.

