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.
Since the very first spy satellites were placed into orbit, adversaries have carefully tracked their orbits so that they could avoid exposure during an overpass. This form of cat and mouse game has had various options thrown at it, from satellites that can change their orbits, to "cover" satellites which operate as one thing and provide surveillance capability in addition to their "public" persona.
SpaceX threw up 2 satellites on a ship that was carrying 60 separate satellites (the others being Starlink nodes). But it could throw up 60 black sky satellites if asked. Further it could do that fairly quickly[1] from time to request to launch using a flight proven booster. Or perhaps 30 satellites with their own booster engine to maximize the number of orbits they could reach.
At some point continuous monitoring of a point on Earth becomes simply a question of cost. That can be kind of game changing from a geopolitical perspective.
[1] Where quickly here is anywhere from 10 to 60 days depending on whether or not a company like black sky could have the upper stage on hand with the delivery system.
Planet Labs already has full coverage of the Earth, and with the latest SkySat (another 3 launched earlier today) they will have the ability to image the same point on earth 12x a day.
I think it's very unlikely that the USA and maybe others don't have this capability already.
That was going to be my question. Doesn’t the NRO need big optical lenses for their missions? Are there any “telescopic” advancements that can fit into small sats that can meet their mission objectives?
In 2012 the NRO turned over two satellites to NASA [0] for research purposes. The scientists who have examined them (they have not been launched yet) described them as being better than Hubble even though they are comparable in size (designed to fit in the Shuttle bay). Given the unlimited funds available to them, I expect they're a decade ahead of industry.
The NRO is probably going for larger lenses in future satellites to increase their field of view. Could they use a series of smaller sats orbiting in a cluster to form a virtual lens, much like the multiple mirror telescope in Arizona [1]? Maybe.
To clarify what they turned over were lens and optics assemblies that are a sort of cousin to the hubble space telescope's structural body and lens, not whole satellites. No power systems, no control electronics, no batteries, no comm systems, etc.
There are proposals[0] for mirror-fleet based exoplanet detecting and imaging, as well as for resolving the purported 20 km neutron star seen/known as the Crab Pulsar.
But accurately controlling such a swarm seem like a still-untested concept.
Yes. My understanding of these things based mostly on trolling through the various digital imagery company websites, is that many of the small satellites can generate detail as good as the "big guys" (at least as far is known in open sources) by using a telescopic lens. The difference however is aperture. Given the size of the optics on a small satellite the amount of area it can cover at 1 meter per pixel resolution is much smaller than something with a very large aperture could. As a result if you take a 10 Mpixel image with 1 meter per pixel accuracy that is a region roughly 3.2km on a side. Not a particularly large area.
There's also rules on launching a satellite with capabilities below 10m per pixel on the basis of national security. At least if you're an American company anyway, can't vouch for elsewhere but they're a bit behind the tech curve (at least in the private sector) in this field (but not by much) so it hasn't really come up yet as an issue so far.
There was an image that Trump tweeted a satellite image about something in Iran a while back, I forget the actual reason. But it was a declassified image of something and some keen eyed observers did some analysis on it and concluded the resolution was better than what is "Officially" out there. So it's safe to say there's better out there that we just don't know about yet.
Made me think of the movie "Enemy of the State" from 1998, and another action/sci-fi B-Movie from before 1980 which I can't remember the title anymore because forgettable, except of the FLIR inserts they made. Which were as good as anything you can personally buy today as private person.
In a B-Movie! From before 1980! (Maybe even 1975/76) W-T-F?
I really can't remember the title anymore, because "loading, looking, lösching!" (loading, watching, erasing)
Yes. The difference between 100k-400km in LEO is far different from 22000km in GEO. Planet Labs updated their licenses for a few satellites a couple of months back to gain double digit percentage resolution quality increases by dropping the orbit (I think it was somewhere about by 50km to the lower end of that range) for example. The trade off is that you hit more atmosphere in that lower orbit and will reenter the atmosphere much sooner. So that increases the number of launches you need to do to replenish your fleet. Which is $$$.
Also, they have greater relative velocities so require better targeting and command & control technology to compensate.
Higher orbits are much more expensive to launch a satellite into. I think partially because of this, commercial imaging satellites will be in the range of 600-800km altitude unless there's a really good reason otherwise. So I don't think that distance would account for a very large factor.
>That can be kind of game changing from a geopolitical perspective.
Don't forget from a civil rights perspective. Remember this[1] from a few years ago, or this[2] a few weeks ago? Now imagine that the government can do the same thing, all over the us, 24/7, with zero marginal cost.
I think the poster meant it as a colloquialism which itself was popularized (?) by Shakespeare; i.e. as a turn of phrase that inspired the title of Huxley's work.
Cars go underground, beneath underpasses, inside of parking garages. I can't imagine any way even 100% aerial visual coverage can possibly track individual cars with any degree of certainty.
Why bother with this, instead of having the emerging sat constellations deployed in ways that offer continous coverage of any place on earth, anytime, from various angles, in all useful spectra?
Call it iLive by Setec Astronomy.
Maybe make it public in ways like OpenStreetMap, combine with something like Internet Archive, have it distributed by some P2P-protocol. Done.
How powerful does an earth-based laser need to be to temporarily blind any optical sensors without damaging any other part so that "innocent" satellites are unaffected? It probably will be standard to illuminate up all suspect satellites coming up the horizon in this way at sensitive locations and/or sensitive times in this way
Picture the ocean. Can we agree that it's immense? How many ships can we launch until it becomes too crowded?
Now imagine the Earth has no land masses and oceans cover all of it. How many more ships can we add?
Now imagine that the Earth is bigger than what it is. A few hundred KM larger in radius. Your oceans have become so much bigger now as they have a larger area. And now imagine your ships are not only on the surface, but they could be submarines, or they could be planes, all crossing one another without ever touching.
This is what space looks like. It's ridiculously big. The only issue is that some orbits are way more useful than others, so they get more use. We can fit a crapton of stuff there, provided that we stop doing dumb things (like blowing up satellites).
LEO also has plenty of drag, so they decay. Higher orbits are more problematic.
Even "the impact from a tiny piece of space debris, possibly a paint flake or small metal fragment no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimetre across" can crack the windows on the ISS:
Maybe it's time to start some research into making Star Trek's deflector shields a reality - not just to avoid being locked into the planet in case of a Kessler Syndrome, but also to make spacecraft of all kind (from satellites over ships to stations) less dependent on (vulnerable and heavy) physical shields.
I could believe that some form of high resolution and high speed radar combined with some form of "gun" could solve the problem - similar to Israel's Iron Dome, blast whatever is detected and deemed dangerous away or out of the way.
Compressed air or another gas could work IMO as a first step, we already have the basic tech for that in trash sorting solutions.
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
(And yeah LEO is just a tiny infinitesimal scrap of "space", but its still big enough even humanity hasn't managed to mess it up completely yet...)
Even adding thousands more satellites the chance that any will hit each other is incredibly small, and even if they hit it's probably not going to cascade. The Kessler effect only becomes a real possibility once we start purposefully blowing up many satellites.
I think it’s funny that people are surprised by this. It’s not new technology really, the defence sector has had taskable satellite imagery for decades, it’s just a matter of the cost coming down to the point where it’s feasible commercially. That is super cool though. There are a lot of applications for space based real-time imagery that could be tremendously more useful to the majority of society than tracking bad guys.
It's not about how fast you can task a satellite and get data back that the article is talking about.
It's taking about between when the satellite was launched, and when it was able to send images back down was 58 hours. That is impressive. In the past it would normally take a week or more to get a satellite into a stable orbit and do all the checkout tests. After that, sure, task away and get all the images you want.
A random example of a useful application: realtime forest fire detection. In e.g. Sweden during the summer months people are still paid (well, compensated for their expenses) to fly around in Cessnas looking for smoke plumes.
Imagine being able to dispatch a helicopter to drown out a typical forest fire within 10 minutes of the fire starting while it's still small. That's a game changer.
> Imagine being able to dispatch a helicopter to drown out a typical forest fire within 10 minutes of the fire starting while it's still small. That's a game changer.
And not necessarily a good one. Many forest ecosystems depend on somewhat regular fires to "clean out" debris. The problem however is that "thanks" to climate change leading to drier forests, what once used to be a fire that only consumed fallen off leaves etc. while leaving the big trees unharmed now burns intense and long enough to actually damage the big trees.
Sounds like you need to wait for the big trees to still be wet enough, but the leaves dried up, and then light a fire to have it burn while you're keeping an eye on it and know it won't burn down your nice forest.
I knew this was true when google earth launched. Every conflict area (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) has very up-to-date images. I assumed these were military image-requests making their way into the commercial imagery catalogue.
Getting a satellite into the planned orbit is often takes quite a while, because every bit of onboard fuel either adds cost or reduces available instrument weight.
That is is becoming more commercially viable to begin operation immediately is exciting!
I saw an insurance company claiming that it uses satellite imagery (among other things) to “provide cheaper insurance” to homeowners.
Not sure if what they really mean is that they are trying to more accurately price it; who knows what unknown behavior might increase your premium since it’s associated with more claims... e.g. friends come over too often making too many cars parked? Higher premium.
I know that underwriters will use google maps (and other services) to check for things like fire risks (overflowing bins).
I also know that some try to automate aspects of this, for example using image libraries to detect large trees that are close to property, that would cause significant damage if they were to fall..
What, exactly, used to be so difficult about this? Do new satellites take time to train their orbits, or test systems, or otherwise commission when they're in the air? What technological changes have happened recently to make this feasible?
Maybe it wasn't always "so difficult", but was never worth optimising for before. I don't know of anything that would have made this impossible before if it had been made a design goal.
Pretty much. However the biggest change is the capability per kilogram that can be packed into a satellite now. Today a 3U cubesat weighing roughly 20kg can take thousands of images, process them locally to manage for weather effects and orbital skew, and then transmit them to a single ground station several times a day.
The first spy satellites weighed tons and literally dropped film canisters back into space to re-enter and be recovered by aircraft or helicopters which would then take the film to a laboratory to be developed[1]. Typically, a satellite would take a few weeks to both stabilize in the environment in space, calibrate its optics, take some test photos for analysis, re-calibrate based on those results, and then be ready to go.
It's also a bit hard to gauge and appreciate how much of an improvement the feat in TFA is, without previous numbers to compare to (preferably in the form of a timeline).
I do not look forward to the time where something akin to Google Maps starts to approach real-time (yeah I realize the government can more or less do this, but I'm happy with being obscure enough to not catch their gaze)
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/