hahaha

humans aren't becoming a "real spacefaring nation" for at least another century or two

And when we run into the covenant we'll be wiped out. The end.

Of course real space fairing civilization will be in a while

But the initial kickstart is very very soon

We already got the space industry privatized

We got the Space Force up to keep our foregin adversaries and they're space domination attempts under control

That's already a HUGE move

uh

space is barely privatised

the only sector that isn't is comms

I didn't expect any of this in this short amount of time. Honestly when I saw the last shuttle mission, I was really upset and thought space travel would suck and not make much progress for the next 50 years

everything else is HEAVILY subsided by the government

We got over 100 kickstaring companies ranging from cubesats to small sat launchers

tiny shit

Tiny but a HUGE move

a huge move in the right direction

We're able to fit the same old tech from a billion dollar satellite

but we need a move many orders of magnitude greater

Into a tiny 10x10x10cm cube

Like that's just insane

uh

you sure?

I uh seriously doubt that

This is a generalized statment

Of course

But you get the idea

you ain't fitting multi million dollar spectrometers or giant lenses in a 10cm^3 cube

Which is why

You launch a swarm of small sats

That replicates same task as a single sat at cheaper costs

far harder to achieve the same resolution

Sure optics ir spectrometers have some way to go

But let me use IMUs as a example

I literally have a IMU chip the size of a pin head on my flight computer

Like that's freaking crazy

Cell phone advances had sped up microchip tech so much, cubesats can do so many things for cheap

Another example is starlink. Sure not a cubesat, but still a relatively small spacecraft. With a swarm it's cheap, you can lose a few, you don't need one 3 billion dollar satellite taking 10 years to build

I'm not saying we're there yet

But just look at the progress we made in space just in the last 10 years

It's insane