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Does anybody have any ideas as to what opportunities might open up for lightweight start ups from the general trend of decreasing launch costs? I mean aside fro

Does anybody have any ideas as to what opportunities might open up for lightweight start ups from the general trend of decreasing launch costs? I mean aside from the obvious ones such as starting a launch company or anything that requires a ton of investment. I understand that lower costs of launching satelites massively changes the economics but I can't figure out how it might affect auxiliary industries/businesses. Satellites seem to be more related to communications which tends to come under utilities and is managed by government entities

kiba 6y ago
Decrease costs how? SpaceX isn't resting on its laurel letting newer startups show them up. They're working on catching million dollars crate and on their next generation systems.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The best guess I can think of for potentially lower cost per unit is a space cannon but that sort of megaproject doesn't exactly qualify as "lightweight" and would probably call for ruggedization of payload to survive the launch.
  - wcarey 6y ago
    Ruggedization is a vast understatement given the energies involved. On top of that, your payload needs to be able to circularize from a negative perigee, so it would need lots of onboard delta-v. You’d also either have an aimable cannon or deal with expensive plane change maneuvers.
atharris 6y ago
The core question is, 'what's the use of space anyways?' Orbits have two nice properties - they're high up, so you can see lots of stuff, and they're reasonably stationary with respect to the rotation of the earth, which lets you get global(ish) coverage without needing a huge number of accessors or high system replacement rates like aircraft or ground-based sensors need. Communications and surveillance are the two largest opportunities, and a variety of companies have already sprung up (Starlink, Kuiper, Planet, Spire...) in addition to traditional players (OrbCom, Iridium, Maxar). There are some esoteric proposals for other uses, like manufacturing or bitcoin mining [0], but I don't think they provide nearly enough benefit compared to Earth-based competitors at this point. [0]https://www.space.com/25626-bitcoins-satellites-deep-space-industries.html https://www.space.com/25626-bitcoins-satellites-deep-space-i...
devit 6y ago
A possible novel opportunity could be truly physically secure servers: if you put the server in space, it's really expensive to physically interfere with it (potentially impossible if you launch towards outer space instead of Earth orbit), but you can still communicate with it. I'm not sure that there's any market for that at current launch costs though.

kiba 6y ago

Decrease costs how? SpaceX isn't resting on its laurel letting newer startups show them up. They're working on catching million dollars crate and on their next generation systems.

Nasrudith 6y ago
The best guess I can think of for potentially lower cost per unit is a space cannon but that sort of megaproject doesn't exactly qualify as "lightweight" and would probably call for ruggedization of payload to survive the launch.
- wcarey 6y ago
  Ruggedization is a vast understatement given the energies involved. On top of that, your payload needs to be able to circularize from a negative perigee, so it would need lots of onboard delta-v. You’d also either have an aimable cannon or deal with expensive plane change maneuvers.

atharris 6y ago

The core question is, 'what's the use of space anyways?' Orbits have two nice properties - they're high up, so you can see lots of stuff, and they're reasonably stationary with respect to the rotation of the earth, which lets you get global(ish) coverage without needing a huge number of accessors or high system replacement rates like aircraft or ground-based sensors need. Communications and surveillance are the two largest opportunities, and a variety of companies have already sprung up (Starlink, Kuiper, Planet, Spire...) in addition to traditional players (OrbCom, Iridium, Maxar). There are some esoteric proposals for other uses, like manufacturing or bitcoin mining [0], but I don't think they provide nearly enough benefit compared to Earth-based competitors at this point. [0]https://www.space.com/25626-bitcoins-satellites-deep-space-industries.html https://www.space.com/25626-bitcoins-satellites-deep-space-i...

devit 6y ago

A possible novel opportunity could be truly physically secure servers: if you put the server in space, it's really expensive to physically interfere with it (potentially impossible if you launch towards outer space instead of Earth orbit), but you can still communicate with it. I'm not sure that there's any market for that at current launch costs though.