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Comment For the DoD (Score 2) 74

If he can replace the GPS constellation with 12U cubesats, I'd say that's a better business to be in than air launch. (Current GPS sats have a launch mass of around 4 tons.) But I'm sure that was just trying to use an example of a satellite constellation people are familiar with.

Anyway, with the "responsive launch" focus, this is clearly a defense contract play, which is fine. A lot of people make money that way, though it's a bit dangerous for a small company when you have one customer. Commercially, it's pretty small and their architecture isn't going to scale up well, and commercial customers don't care about responsive launch. I doubt they can put much of anything into SSO, which is a big target for earth-observation (and thus LEO) payloads. It's an okay price, but already beat by Electron, which is already flying, if you can do rideshare (which most one-offs can) or have several things to launch at the same time (which most constellations do).

Comment Re:We should know this already... (Score 1) 287

We have lots of data for everything in 1G. We have some data on various life forms (mostly humans, some plants, and a few other animals) in ~0G. The only data for anything in-between is the ~24 man-days on the Moon of the Apollo crews, and that data is essentially "well, they didn't die."

So basically we know nothing about the long-term effects of Moon or Mars gravity. Nothing at all. How much gravity do we need to be functionally the same as Earth? How much gravity is functionally the same as micro-G? What are the effects in the middle of those values? Are they the same numbers for plants? None of this is known in the slightest--and is all of very high importance for any significant human presence off-Earth.

And it's not even all that hard to test in LEO, so it's pretty perverse that no space science organisation has done so. NASA and co have put lots of resources into figuring out how humans work in 0G, which is a stupid place to live, and none into mid-G which is how the Moon and Mars must work, and is also an option for long-term orbital habitats if it works better (as it likely will).

And why is that? One can posit lots of answers, but I'd have to say that it's another demonstration that the real purpose of the major space programs is prestige and pork.

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