SABLE-3 was launched on August 11th, 2007 with a payload, consisting of a Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera set to take 1 image every minute and a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS Tracker, that the Kaysam 1200 gram balloon carried to 36km. The last payload camera photo from the ground was just before it was launched, and the last photo before the balloon burst was the photo above, exactly 2½ hours or 150 images later. And what a photo. The composition couldn’t have been better or the horizon more level and out of the 196 images taken during the flight, only 1 other image is as good. What are the chances?
totally awesome. there’s a few more of these:
My project launched a payload with GPS, camera, sensors and communications to an altitude of 30km.
Pictures taken with a Pentax k10d from a high-altitude sounding balloon. Experiment conducted by Oklahoma State University while testing a new cosmic radiation detector.
Using simple symbols and equations, the IRS progressively builds a mathematical foundation for the introduction of our understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, ultimately giving a glimpse of life on Earth.
A 0.5km diameter asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion in nickel, iron and platinum-group metals.
a few quintillion worth of elements up for grabs This is what worthwhile start ups look like: solving hard problems, not trivial toys.
Great to see Planetary Resources — a company I invested in launch officially today. Their first mission: to mine asteroids for the benefit of humanity! Check out the video below. What could you do with a huge amount of currently rare materials on earth? Or a lot of raw material for building things in space?
this goes into considerable detail about the plans for asteroid mining.
why we need asteroids as gas stations. that is, until we can switch away from chemical propulsion.
Planetary Resources has shifted the company’s focus to a more mundane space resource: water. Water found on or near asteroids could be processed into fuel to extend the useful lives of aging commercial satellites. “I still consider that mining. We’re going to take the resources of space and turn them into a usable material.”
In the recent article `Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observation’ Ken D. Olum, using some inflation-based ideas and the anthropic premise that we should be typical among all intelligent observers in the Universe, arrives at the puzzling conclusion that `we should find ourselves in a large civilization (of galactic size) where most observers should be, while in fact we do not’. In this note we discuss the intriguing possibility whether we could be in fact immersed in a large civilization without being aware of it. Our conclusion is that this possibility cannot be ruled out provided 2 conditions are met, that we call the Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture.
this is one of the more interesting papers on the fermi paradox: we are basically too dumb to be of interest to older civilizations.
While it seems next to impossible to believe that we’ll be able to maintain flights back and forth between Earth and the ISS in a post-oil economy, it is nonetheless quite fascinating to think that, someday, depressed teenagers in suburban Arizona might pop space-made antidepressants, affecting hormonal moods through the use of literally extra-terrestrial substances; or musicians in small apartments in Prague might swallow attention deficit drugs crystallized in microgravity, writing the world’s most intricate symphonies in response; or perhaps even illegal new hallucinogens will be developed in windowless, symmetrical rooms hovering 400 km above the Earth’s surface, and they’ll be taken by Rem Koolhaas-reading students at SCI-Arc who then draw up plans for self-healing tentacular cities, under the influence of space.
Either way, imagine that as your summer job! Up in space, wearing a hermetically sealed white suit, growing proteins.
None of the 4 new design concepts now offer as credible a price tag as the SERT designs, simply because sufficient funding has not yet been available to evaluate the uncertainties and develop sharp cost estimates. But in at least 3 of the 4 cases, there is excellent reason to expect that costs will be much less than 17 cents / kWh when we get there. There are important risks – but with all 4 options together, the objective risk of not being able to beat coal or fission on cost is probably less here than with any other technology large enough to meet all the world’s energy needs.
Why are we wasting time and money on ethanol again? Another company thinks 2500MW of space based solar power plants for $4b is doable. A similar nuclear reactor would come to ~$18b. 2021-09-01: With starship, this now seems feasible and perhaps inevitable.
Assuming a 70% transmission loss from orbit (beaming power by microwave to antenna farms on Earth is inherently lossy) we would need 60TW of PV panels in space. Which is 60k GW of panels, at 1 km^2 per GW. With maximum optimism that looks like somewhere in the range of 3k-60k Starship launches, at $2M/flight is $6b to $120b … which, over a period of years to decades, is chicken feed compared to the profit to be made by disrupting the 95% of the fossil fuel industry that just burns the stuff for energy. The cost of manufacturing the PV cells is another matter, but again: ground-based solar is already cheaper to install than shoveling coal into existing power stations, and in orbit it produces 4x as much electricity per unit area. Even if Musk doesn’t go there, someone is going to get SBPS working by 2030-2040, and in 2060 people will be scratching their heads and wondering why we ever bothered burning all that oil. But most likely Musk has noticed that this is a scheme that would make him unearthly shitpiles of money (the global energy sector in 2014 had revenue of $8t) and demand the 1000s of Starship flights it will take to turn reusable orbital heavy lift into the sort of industry in its own right that it needs to be before you can start talking about building a city on Mars.
A satellite has steered power in a microwave beam onto targets in space, and even sent some of that power to a detector on Earth. “No one has done this before. They’re bringing credibility to the topic by demonstrating this capability.” The transmitted power was small, just 200 milliwatts, less than that of a cellphone camera light. But the team was still able to steer the beam toward Earth and detect it with a receiver at Caltech.
2024-01-22: NASA study goes into great detail, and concludes
The following combination of revised assumptions yields SBSP solutions that are cost competitive with terrestrial alternatives, with lower GHG emissions:
launch cost: $50M per launch, or $500/kg; $425/kg with 15% block discount
electric propulsion orbital transfer from LEO to GEO
extended hardware lifetimes: 15 years
cheaper servicer and debris removal vehicles: $100M and $50M, respectively
efficient manufacturing at scale: learning curves of 85% and below
We suggest that the outer regions of the Galaxy are most likely locations for advanced SETI targets, and that sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase.
Space travel should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon was reached 50 years ahead of time.
This is what worthwhile start ups look like: solving hard problems, not trivial toys.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 