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branchan

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I find it hard to believe that they are completely re-designing the avionics/flight computers because of this gamma ray incident. There must be another reason.

If it's seriously the main concern, wouldn't it be much easier to just encase the computer in several inches of lead shielding?

It’s likely that your work and life has greatly benefited from technologies that originated from the military.

Imagine you are SpaceX. You are going to be launching a Starship. Given how booked your launch manifest is, would you rather launch a cubesat or a full-sized payload? Which would earn you more money?

1. It's not always feasible to launch your spacecraft with Starship (e.g. it wouldn't make sense if you are just launching a cubesat).

2. That's a pretty aggressive timeline to have Starship built and flight-proven.

Starship still needs to fire rockets in order to land. I would say it's a crazier idea than the ones you have mentioned. The previous solutions you have listed were used precisely because they were less crazy ideas.

I mean, the whole statement is not correct. Sure JPL manufactured some things but it also acts just like NASA, managing the Mars projects. Most of the spacecraft I would say were manufactured in partnership with other industry aerospace companies.

Every manufacturer needs a good revenue source. Unless you are a manufacturer that is making mass market cars like Honda and Toyota, you need to create cars that people will buy if you want to continue making your niche sports cars.

when the Cayenne was introduced, Porsche was ridiculed for making such a big, ugly car compared to their 911s but look how popular they are now.

Manufacturers don't make cars just for the hell of it. They make cars that the market demands, even if it's to the disgust of car enthusiasts.

I totally agree. You still need to get the fuel to space regardless of who is doing the propulsion work. Let's say that your tug is already on-orbit, how is the fuel going to be brought up? Would you not need to launch another spacecraft to bring you the fuel? How much would that spacecraft weigh?

Besides this, they would have to develop on-orbit refueling technology, as well as force the other spacecraft to use a bus that allows for rendez-vous and docking/proximity ops.

And also, how big is the market for satellite startups that are heading to GEO orbit? For now, it seems like it is just Astranis and GapSat.

I think this is only true for small LEO spacecrafts that are more or less 'disposable'. For higher cost GEO and interplanetary spacecraft, consumer electronics are not going to be hardened sufficiently and flight-proven to be used in those applications.