thadjones

3 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by thadjones 2mo ago

   I'm slowly working on a spacecraft design webapp: https://vesperastro.com . Think PCPartPicker for spacecraft. You can build out and trade hardware in the master equipment list and immediately visualize how any changes impac
2. 2.▲
   Show HN: A spacecraft block diagram editor(satblocks.com)

   3 points by thadjones 4mo ago|0 comments
3. 3.▲
   by thadjones 5mo ago

   Appreciate it! Totally agree, your experience is what drove me to start building Vesper in the first place. Not only do you have to find the right hardware and manually scrape the specs, but then any time you change hardware you have to upd
4. 4.▲
   by thadjones 5mo ago

   Thanks! The goal is for it to be primarily an architecture tool, although right now it leans more towards SatSearch as I think that will get eyes faster and because there needs to be a decently robust component library for the architecture
5. 5.▲
   by thadjones 5mo ago

   I develop spacecraft architectures for work and the spacecraft design bible is Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD [1]. While much of the information in SMAD can be generalized to cubesats it is focused primarily on larger missions, s
6. 6.▲
   by thadjones 3y ago

   Very cool, glad to see interest in this space. How does this differ from SkyDweller?
7. 7.▲
   by thadjones 3y ago

   In practice, considerable difficulty. Like you said LEO moves fast. You are talking 10 min in line of sight (LOS) depending on the orbit. So the handoff algorithms (and necessary network) are very challenging and cost prohibitive. I mention
8. 8.▲
   by thadjones 3y ago

   Lasercom has been demonstrated well on Earth but it still is a very nascent technology in the space domain. There are several challenges that lasercom faces. First, in order to enable global communication you need a constellation and good c