Thanks for the more direct links. I’m starting to update in favor of this working, but I’m still bothered by the amount of speculative tech involved. (If we’re going to use new RAM coming out in a few years that’ll be cheaper/faster/less error prone, our comparison needs to not be to current tech / costs, but to tech / costs after that new RAM has been integrated.)
I suspect it’ll be easier to replace silicon than to get the rest of the thinsat to match the thermal expansion of silicon, but that suspicion is rooted in professor friends who do semiconductor research, not industry, so the costs there might be way higher.
This page was the only thing I could find on the economics (he mentions elsewhere he wants to keep the business plan private).
Another thing to think about: have we sent up stacked things to space like this before, and managed to disengage them from each other? I believe a number of solar sails have failed to unfold correctly, and so there might be a similar problem here. Thankfully, they don’t need to be attached to each other, like solar sails do, but now it’s a problem if they do get attached to each other, and I don’t know which of those is a more difficult engineering problem. (The only description I saw of that on the wiki was ‘peeling’ them apart.)
Thanks for the more direct links. I’m starting to update in favor of this working, but I’m still bothered by the amount of speculative tech involved. (If we’re going to use new RAM coming out in a few years that’ll be cheaper/faster/less error prone, our comparison needs to not be to current tech / costs, but to tech / costs after that new RAM has been integrated.)
I suspect it’ll be easier to replace silicon than to get the rest of the thinsat to match the thermal expansion of silicon, but that suspicion is rooted in professor friends who do semiconductor research, not industry, so the costs there might be way higher.
This page was the only thing I could find on the economics (he mentions elsewhere he wants to keep the business plan private).
Another thing to think about: have we sent up stacked things to space like this before, and managed to disengage them from each other? I believe a number of solar sails have failed to unfold correctly, and so there might be a similar problem here. Thankfully, they don’t need to be attached to each other, like solar sails do, but now it’s a problem if they do get attached to each other, and I don’t know which of those is a more difficult engineering problem. (The only description I saw of that on the wiki was ‘peeling’ them apart.)