Seriously. The PongSat and the CubeSat have been succeeded (joined?) by the TubeSat. You can find the Slashdot thred here. What better proof do we need that the cost to orbit of all kinds of goods is going to way down? At the very least, the kind of expertise that comes from this many iterations will be wonderful and will help more people make a living and build credentials in helping get humans really living out past the earth's surface. Which, among other things, makes more obviously viable a nobody-owns-it successor to the internet, with groups of techies just shooting up an open-protocol sat or three whenever they get some cash put together. Tell that to the big telcos and government bluestockings.
Ya know, there's just no way that anybody could have anticipated a thing like this.
Oh, yeah. Right. I did. Over ten years ago.
To all of you MBA-types, techies, and cocktail party sages who took considerable and condescending glee in "explaining" to me that I "just didn't understand how the real world works", allow me to take this chance to say, once again, fuck you.
-Rustin
Note, btw, that NASA has claimed a cost per pound as low as $10,000 for shuttle launches. In theory, that makes this project nothing actually all that impressive. Except for one little thing. While the actual lauch cost in dollars may be somewhere around $10,000 per pound for some larger payloads, the vast, crippling, and ideosyncratic paths to be navigated to get your payload accepted by NASA for the shuttle cost millions. You can't exactly whip up a device with your friends over the weekend, put in in a Foster's can, and drop it by Goddard with a check for nine or ten K and just expect to see your beastie on a shuttle payload list later that year.
This isn't just about cost ber weight. This is about accessibility. Does that make things clearer?
Posted by: Rustin H. Wright | August 03, 2009 at 01:37 AM