Cubesats: Tiny Spacecraft, Huge Payoffs
Cool? or space junk?
“I hope the CubeSat is like the personal computer, you don’t know what the heck you’re going to do with this little box when you build it or what markets will be enabled. But it’s so cool, you’ve got to do it,” Twiggs concluded.
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
Subscribe to Main Blog feed here:
Subscribe to Comments too (below):
Bad Behavior has blocked 8158 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Most of these cubesats will be space junk that will burn in the upper atmosphere when their orbit decays, but the precious few that will be useful will be worth the rest. Innovation at a higher pace is required to bootstrap true commercialization of space, and this is one such channel for such innovation.
Seems like junk, but at least the story mentions some of them are adding devices to slow the “cubes” down – so they re-enter and burnup instead of adding to the current space-junk problem.
With the story mentioning spring-loaded launchers, which eject the cubes from the rocket – and the possibility of “chucking them out of a space station airlock” – it doesn’t seem like these things will be in a very precise orbit.
What seemed really far-fetched – to put it nicely – was the idea that some of these would conduct experiments, and then parachute back to Earth – so the results could be retrieved. Parachute back to where, exactly? Don’t you need a pre-etermined orbit, and accurate control of re-entry, to have any chance of determining where the cube will come down?
NASA’s recent experience with recovering satellites – equiped with parachutes – should also be considered. 🙂