Discussion
Today I had coffee with an aerospace engineering postdoc who happened to be in Regina briefly. He works on technology for refueling and fixing satellites in orbit, which is EXACTLY the kind of engineering we need! Don't chuck that 3 or 5 year old satellite into the atmosphere, FIX it and make it keep working longer!
Really delightful chat, and the best part is this connection actually happened because of the cow-culation April Fool's day paper I helped write: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29324
@sundogplanets We need a cheaper way to get stuff into orbit before it makes sense to refuel and repair satellites in orbit. Especially for cheap satellites like the Starlink satellites, where the cost of launching a new satellite is about the same as the cost of launching refueling and repair equipment.
@badtux The cheapness and disposability is the entire problem. Make Starlink operate with 100 very expensive, well-built satellites that are worth maintaining for decades. That's the engineering challenge.
@sundogplanets The thing about a mesh network is that the more nodes you have in the mesh the more reliable and resilient it becomes. A mesh with 1000 nodes is orders of magnitude more reliable than a mesh with 100 nodes.
@badtux And the easier it is for Kessler Syndrome to begin. I know many reasons why they're doing it this way, I'm just saying that the engineering challenge is not to do it this way, because it's unsafe and unsustainable.
@sundogplanets working on a way to bring down old space junk without just burning it up would be good too
@sundogplanets Ah, what a great story. Love it when cool papers like that result in meetings and other great results (collaborations, lesson plans, etc).
@sundogplanets Yes.
It gets forgotten these days, but the original promise of Shuttle (pre Challenger explosion) was exactly that. It only ever was used for Hubble and a couple of comm sats, but the potential was there. Several Landsats had never-used refueling ports, as did (IIRC) Spitzer, a legacy from when it was supposed to be in LEO (the S in SIRTF originally stood for Shuttle).
@simonbp @sundogplanets I remember a discussion with Rashid Sunyaev at the IAS many years ago where he commented that the Hubble repair was so expensive that the government was keen on putting other satellites further away so that the scientists don’t get too comfortable with having serviceable satellites.
@hannorein @simonbp Wow good historic info! The SIRTF-then-recently-renamed-Spitzer launch I watched a live broadcast of at Caltech, with the enthusiasm of a naive undergrad about to start a summer project with its data. I gradually realized how incredibly stressed the people in the auditorium were around me, who had all been working on this for years and had a LOT riding on whether or not the launch worked. Did not know about the S for Shuttle! Cool.
@sundogplanets @hannorein @simonbp
I can very much relate to that stress. Mid 2023 many in Euclid could have been out of a job very quickly...
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