I think that a lot of companies are seeing a regulatory capture opportunity mixed with a very limited ressource (orbits) meaning they can lock out the competition by being the first one to do it.
It is easier to do stuff on the ground. Always. However, not having to deal with neighbors, cities, activists and representatives of thereof who complain about the impact of your data centers on people’s livelihoods is an opportunity. The FCC is in the pocket of SpaceX and other space companies. They don’t really care about impacts on astronomy, ozone layer, the atmosphere and the whole of the biosphere that needs dark nights.
Free sun energy is a good bonus.
But if you can be the first to deploy such a constellation and occupy all those sun synchronous orbits on the day/night terminator in low earth orbit, no one else can, giving you a monopoly on activities in those orbits.
This is the hype. That’s the promise. That’s what they want to sell VCs to get their money. The article highlights with numbers how unreasonable this endeavor is.
Maddy, the main developer of Celeste is trans. Not that it matters for gameplay on a platformer but the main character is canonically trans as well. I don’t even think it really comes up that much in the story line. It shouldn’t matter.
But because of that, I such a gem of a game is banned in countries that would execute you for being trans.
Oh yeah ofc. The Hubble upgrades and repairs are a good example to show how good planning, good technology and will can ensure long standing missions delivering incredible science.
The planning for these mega constellation is different for sure and the goal is money, not science, which is sad. That’s why they will burn in the atmosphere no matter what.
Just here to comment that I only pasted the title of the article as the title of the post. I find the content of the article interesting. I'm not actually asking that question, though answer it if you please.
There will be no repairs in space. Everything they launch is set and done and comes crashing back in the atmosphere 5 years later. They fully expect radiation and debris to render the space data center satellites unusable after 5 to 7 years (in the article). We all know that after 5 years those chips will be obsolete anyways.
This is a huge issue, the amount of mass being sent into orbit that is planned to just burn up in the atmosphere 5 years later.
The article goes somewhat in depth about it. Basically, heat dissipation in space is a solved physics problem. It is now in the engineering domain to try to make it more lightweight, efficient, scalable and ultimately cheap. Ars Technica does reference a great video by Scott Manley where he just does the math to figure out how large the heat sink panels need to be. His back of the envelope math leads him to believe that a starlink sized solar panel or something in that order of magnitude will be enough.
Though I am confident they are going to try really hard to make it work. They just want to time it so that VC doesn't hold the short end of the stick when the music stops (lol I love mixing analogies like that).
I am worried of the impact of launching so many vehicles into space. They will launch a lot of vehicles, there is no denying that, even if it doesn't get to 1M satellite constellation. All the shit they send to LEO will have to fall back down eventually. It will burn up in the atmosphere. That's a lot of extra stuff in the atmosphere. That's also a lot of stuff up there that will interfere with astronomy. A lot of stuff that can lead to Kessler syndrome.
I just want a music player indicator to see what they are listening to without have to listen to their music.
What they listen to can be pretty telling.
Would be magic if I could press pause as well, for the people without headphones on the train.
That is a very old pic. The logo has been different for a while, they don’t really sell those robots anymore, they went bankrupt and got bought by a Chinese company. iRobot created the vacuum robot and failed at staying in the game.
The video says they are handling “banking info, health data and personal records”
It is a government agency: the town hall of a small town of 2,000 people.
I wish they would merge the two options: “I’m annoying and not interesting and I don’t like it”