Re:Orbital Test Launch of Starship in ~4 hours
by tgsovlerkhgsel on Monday April 17, 2023 @05:47PM
(#35607074)
Part of the insane costs of satellites comes from the launch cost: If the launch is expensive, the satellite needs to work, and it needs to last. If every kg you launch is $$$, it's worth using much more expensive materials to make it lighter.
If the launch is closer to the price of shipping a parcel internationally, you can cut a lot of corners. No more specially optimized titanium parts where cheap sheet metal will do. No more space-rated parts at 100x markup, launch with off the shelf parts, see what fails, and iterate based on that.
No more designing for super redundancy and quintuple-checking everything, if it fails let it fall out of orbit and send up a new one (LEO satellites deorbit reasonably quickly, so not a major "orbital waste" concern).
If the launch is closer to the price of shipping a parcel internationally, you can cut a lot of corners. No more specially optimized titanium parts where cheap sheet metal will do. No more space-rated parts at 100x markup, launch with off the shelf parts, see what fails, and iterate based on that.
No more designing for super redundancy and quintuple-checking everything, if it fails let it fall out of orbit and send up a new one (LEO satellites deorbit reasonably quickly, so not a major "orbital waste" concern).