Spent a ton of time on Hotline servers in the 90s. I wonder if any of them still exist. I'd dearly love to be able to pop back into my teen self and mess around on one.
> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base.
Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.
Von Braun knew that if you didn't ask questions, your government might just give you Jewish forced labor for your rocket plant, which you'd gladly accept.
Von Braun also knew that if you built missiles for the power-hungry US military, they'd conveniently forget the fact that you were a Nazi.
There are also a proliferating number of sun-sync earth observation small sats. These are often from capital/mass/volume limited new space companies. Lowering their initial launch mass allows them to prove out a business model for a lower cost and then refuel it if it works with future capital. Benchmark's "pay as you go" SaaS-like model is also interesting in the same vein.
This is super feedback. Glad you like the newsletter. I feel like we often find it hard get a view into when startups hit what they consider important milestones—those seem to get lost in the noise of flying grain silos and such. Some attempt at aggregation of space startup press releases or similar might be place to start… I'll have to give this a bit more thought. -Ben (co-editor of OI)
This had the only details I could find anywhere on the Internet about the actual encoding of the images (4-sec video still -> audio signal). Plenty of stuff on decoding, but nothing except this that has primary sources that I could find.
Was doing research for the latest issue of Orbital Index (orbitalindex.com).
One half of Orbital Index here… I highly recommend The Prepared as well. I happen to be guest editing it next month while the normal writer is on paternity leave, so I might be biased (but also a longtime happy reader :-).
There are starting to be some lower cost options. A recent Kickstarter promised a ~$250 price point for a Femtosat/Sprite size craft launched as a rideshare inside a 3U Cubesat: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ambasat/ambasat-1-an-ed... (not speaking to the likelihood of it actually launching, just that it is purportedly an option)
I find the power system constraints for the mission super interesting. The MMRTGs are pretty hefty (45 kg) and end up providing about 2.4 W/kg, without the batteries (which are sized independently) required to store their output. Also, just noticed it puts out ~2kW of thermal power in addition to the 110W of electrical power, hadn't seen a number on that previously.
I'm interested to see how this mission is couched from a PR standpoint (specifically the long long transit time). Emily Lakdawalla from the planetary society had a good tweet related to this: https://twitter.com/elakdawalla/status/1144492247032799238?s...
It's been really fun diving into some of the more technical space news each week. A longtime friend and I are writing it and we'd love feedback and/or good submissions (esp, interesting independent blog/Medium/other sources).