The Gateway Foundation

[tater]

4 hours ago, YNM said:

How much do they cost per kg ? How much more would they cost if it's a one-off ?

 

A lot more.

Smaller is cheaper" is only a thing when you don't care about capability.

Yeah, a 1U cubesat is cheaper than a 1,500kg planetary orbiter probe, but the former cannot do the job of the latter, the high-gain antenna alone masses more than the cubesat. If we picked a capability, say imaging a planet at some resolution, and sending that data back, we might well decide that a constellation of smallsats is the best method. Mars, for example. MRO cost 716 M$ over its prime mission timeframe. It is 2180kg wet, 1031 dry. The main camera is 65kg and cost 40 M$. I can buy a bigger telescope (.6m)—"add to cart" LOL) for 91 grand right now. It masses 96kg.

https://optcorp.com/collections/all?tab=products&sort_by=price&page=1

(fun to look at these)

A slightly smaller one is under 40k$, but for the same resolution we'd need the same aperture (telescope angular resolution is a function of objective diameter). Let's assume we want better than MRO, so let's do the 600mm scope. Let's assume we need more mass for shading it, and other thermal management issues. 5-10 kg? More? Need some camera gear as that is just the glass. Add a couple hundred k$ for a camera. Add a radio, and since we're doing a constellation, we can have smaller radios and antennas for most, and we'll put the high-gain and radio on 1-2 others to relay back to Earth. Each can have some lower res off the shelf cameras with flight heritage (Planet Labs?). We can easily get this thing up to a half a million bucks each in off the shelf equipment, plus a bus—we can use Starlink spacecraft, they're supposed to cost a few hundred k each and are ~250kg each. We're at 400kg each, maybe? Whatever a Starlink costs, plus $500,000? A few get no large camera gear, but get high gain antennas, more powerful radios, and large amount of storage to buffer images from the other sats. Like several terabytes or more. For the price of 1 MRO camera we could send over 40 of these. Yeah, they use off the shelf stuff, and a bunch could fail.  We can send so many—because mass is not an object at a few orders of magnitude less expense per kg.

Edited January 14, 2021 by tater

[HebaruSan]

They posted a new video promising they can go from zero to completion in under 8 years. The previous update (which I think went into more detail on the construction ring idea) didn't mention the lottery, so I guess that's out; they seem to be seeking traditional investors now.

 

[tater]

47 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

They posted a new video promising they can go from zero to completion in under 8 years. The previous update (which I think went into more detail on the construction ring idea) didn't mention the lottery, so I guess that's out; they seem to be seeking traditional investors now.

While I think this is largely a company of YouTube videos, the basic idea of creating payloads for a launcher like Starship makes plenty of sense. The habitat builder they mentioned actually building a prototype of is a cool idea.

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, tater said:

While I think this is largely a company of YouTube videos

I think they're individually/personally completely sincere, but struggling with how to realize such a huge project. Which is fair enough, my own plans for a galactic civilization certainly haven't progressed any further than theirs.

[Shpaget]

6 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

The previous update (which I think went into more detail on the construction ring idea) didn't mention the lottery, so I guess that's out;

Possibly someone explained to him just how impossible it is to organize a worldwide lottery. Maybe he's reading these forums.

[tater]

I think the ideas are in fact pretty reasonable, and the push to demonstrate the building tech is great if they can actually do it. I'd like to see that prototype actually built, then the video can be of the thing building something—even inside a cheap warehouse someplace.