In early 2023, I jumped into this rabbit-hole of lists maintained by Patrick Collison, Alexey Guzey and Gwern and thought it would definitely be interesting to keep a list of questions for myself to explore and investigate.
- How significant is the space debris problem?
A lot of people ask me what I think about space debris and if we're going to contribute to it with Pixxel's satellites. My generic answer is that the satellites are built to de-orbit in 7 years (which they are) and that governments have begun regulating how long satellites can stay dead in orbit before licensing them to go to space (which they have).
But space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. The questions I want to explore are: what has the impact of space debris been so far, how big is the potential problem of orbit pollution and what companies and countries are actually doing or can do to solve the problem (if there is one).
- How do you determine the correlation between the mass of satellite buses and payloads?
Cubesats are easy to understand and the volumetric constraints present simple ways of identifying correlation between the mass of the satellite bus and the maximum payload mass. For larger satellites, it is not as straightforward. Sizing a spacecraft is important to compute launch parameters, costs and project timelines. Is it possible to come up with a sure-shot formula for computing the masses of the satellite bus and the payload it can support by defining easily quantifiable requirements for both?
Last Updated: 2023-12-30