Comment by ceejayoz
3 months ago
> No new tech is needed.
Sure, in the same sense that I could build a bridge from Australia to Los Angeles with "no new tech". All I have to do is find enough dirt!
3 months ago
> No new tech is needed.
Sure, in the same sense that I could build a bridge from Australia to Los Angeles with "no new tech". All I have to do is find enough dirt!
No, but building bridges is a good example - it's also a solved problem. Show civil engineers a river, tell them how much and what type of traffic needs to allow it, and they'll tell you it obviously can be done, they'll even tell you what structural elements will be needed and roughly how expensive they are. The problem to solve here isn't whether this can be done, but which off-the-shelf parts to use to make a design that you can afford.
We're past the point of every satellite being a custom R&D job resulting in an entirely bespoke design. We're even moving past the point where you need to haggle about every gram; launch costs have dropped a lot, giving more options to trade mass against other parameters, like more effective heat rejection :).
But I think the first and most important point for this entire discussion thread is: there is a paper - an actual PDF - linked in the article, in a sidebar to the right, which seemingly nobody read. It would be useful to do that.
> Show civil engineers a river, tell them how much and what type of traffic needs to allow it, and they'll tell you it obviously can be done, they'll even tell you what structural elements will be needed and roughly how expensive they are.
Now ask them to do the Australia / Los Angeles one.
"lol no"
The where and the scale matter.
Where: Low Earth Orbit.
Scale: Lots of small satellites.
I.e. done to death and boring. Number of spacecraft does not affect the heat management of individual spacecraft.
Much like number of bridges you build around the world does not directly affect the amount of traffic on any individual one.
3 replies →
> Now ask them to do the Australia / Los Angeles one.
> "lol no"
Given how many people dream of megastructures, I bet someone has this as an interview question, some variant of https://what-if.xkcd.com/160/ — I'd guess "a few trillion, tens of trillions of USD" for floating-bridges with anchors etc., but that's just my uninformed not-a-civil-engineer guess.