Cowboy Space (I hate their name so much) published their consolidated response a week ago but we just noticed it.
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I miss the crackpots of yesteryear, who knew that creating insane cosmologies took a serious hands-on work ethic.
Today's crackpots have it so easy with their LLMs and whatnot. End of an era.
@Phosphenes @sundogplanets Totally. "This in attachment is my conversation with chatgpt, I hope you can find it interesting.." etc
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@sundogplanets Their demo video is not reassuring: https://youtu.be/xt_Kn4DggPg?t=122
I can’t help from working that the American accents feel extremely forced. It’s almost like they were told to speak away. Say a British audience imagine they did..
Remind you, I really love all the old bond flicks
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Sure, completely untested, brand-fucking-new company that has never built or launched a satellite. You can definitely launch 20,000 of the biggest satellites ever built.
Oh apparently their first demo mission is scheduled for OCTOBER 2026? Gosh these guys are fucking unreal. The mission is listed as "power beaming demonstration"
What does that even fucking mean? Guess they're going to fry some birds and maybe some pilots? Hm. Watch for that I guess.
@sundogplanets
The science fiction i read as a teenager had more credibility than this. -
Cowboy Space (I hate their name so much) published their consolidated response a week ago but we just noticed it. EDIT: It was due at 5pm EDT today. So... I guess I have to read this shit. Swearing a lot here will get me through it.
A reminder: this is the 4th company that wants to launch fucking enormous "AI data center" satellites into sun-synchronous terminator orbits, giving Earth a ring. This particular company wants 20,000 satellites in one ring.
@sundogplanets “cowboy” and science makes me think of early nuclear experiments like the Demon Core, or the meltdown that happened in my community in the 50s cause they kept turning the reactor back on without figuring out why they had to keep hitting SCRAM.
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Bigger picture: What about other potential effects? What happens when we have an upper atmosphere chock full of metal and exotic chem particles? And sats that outshine everything in the sky by order of mag? What else breaks or is degraded?
The Aurorae?
Earth's albedo?
Sat-ground radio comms?
Ground-ground radio?
Raincloud / storm formation? Lightning intensity?
Etc.Scientists used to worry that atomics might burn the sky. Maybe these are accelerants.
@jakebrake
I think during the Manhattan project one scientist worried about igniting fusion in the Nitrogen of the atmosphere, then did the maths and decided that it was not possible, and stopped worrying, along with anyone else who had taken note of what he was spending time calculating. -
@sundogplanets This is so colossally stupid. Like, I know AI + Space! is a perfect VC honeypot but has anyone even thought about the fact that GPUs go out of date inside like 2-3 years? Are they really planning to launch 10,000 satellites per year indefinitely?
Also, has anyone given ANY thought to radiation hardening? GPUs of the sort that people are using for AI are typically manufactured on a 3nm process or so. Most orbital hardware which we actually want to keep running is manufactured on like 50nm because radiation absolutely destroys tiny circuits.
But I'm sure it'll be fine...
@faithisleaping @sundogplanets you see, you're thinking small, they'll laugh 1000s the first year, then tens of 1000s by the time the 1000s are obsolete they'll have A BAJILLION satellites so what's a thousand satellites more or a thousand satellites less
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I can’t help from working that the American accents feel extremely forced. It’s almost like they were told to speak away. Say a British audience imagine they did..
Remind you, I really love all the old bond flicks
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @sundogplanets Goldfinger remains the quintessential Bond film. And it always will be.
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell @sundogplanets Goldfinger remains the quintessential Bond film. And it always will be.
If I recall correctly, at least for Sean Connery Thunderball was his personal favorite film.
It has been so long since I’ve watched any of these films. I really should again. I’ve had some fun watching thin man. I really appreciate most the first two movies.
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@faithisleaping @sundogplanets I brought the same thing up to some friends. They were like there are other ways to build in redundancy and besides the output isn't critical anyway.
I'm like... Cool so we're just going to have transistors randomly turning on causing shoot through. What could go wrong.
@fullywoolly @faithisleaping @sundogplanets stochastic parrot is extra stochastic today.
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@sundogplanets Sorry, that's probably not fair to dogs.
@ScottMGS @sundogplanets as a dog, no it's not lmao
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After modelling this in detail, I can say that that these companies can't even do basic geometry, apparently. They want tens of thousands of satellites to have 24 hour sunlight, so sun-synchronous terminator orbits, baybeeee!
But as Hugh Lewis pointed out (I know, ew, linkedin sorry) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sun-always-shines-tv-hugh-lewis-tlkbe/ IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK unless you're above 1400km altitude. And then you're not in the *magical* low-latency low-altitude zone that these companies actually want for fast comms.
@sundogplanets
I had naively assumed that sun-synchronous orbits were perpendicular to the ecliptic, not the equator. Presumably such orbits don't benefit from the same rotation that keeps them facing the Sun? -
If I recall correctly, at least for Sean Connery Thunderball was his personal favorite film.
It has been so long since I’ve watched any of these films. I really should again. I’ve had some fun watching thin man. I really appreciate most the first two movies.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @sundogplanets And he did it twice, too.
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@sundogplanets This is so colossally stupid. Like, I know AI + Space! is a perfect VC honeypot but has anyone even thought about the fact that GPUs go out of date inside like 2-3 years? Are they really planning to launch 10,000 satellites per year indefinitely?
Also, has anyone given ANY thought to radiation hardening? GPUs of the sort that people are using for AI are typically manufactured on a 3nm process or so. Most orbital hardware which we actually want to keep running is manufactured on like 50nm because radiation absolutely destroys tiny circuits.
But I'm sure it'll be fine...
@faithisleaping @sundogplanets
… has anyone heard an explanation of how these satellites will shed their waste heat?The more I hear/think about the problems, the more convinced I am that (actually deploying orbital data centers) is not the actual point of these filings.
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@faithisleaping @sundogplanets
… has anyone heard an explanation of how these satellites will shed their waste heat?The more I hear/think about the problems, the more convinced I am that (actually deploying orbital data centers) is not the actual point of these filings.
@Red_Shirt_no2 The pictures in the marketing material show radiators. Are they enough? Probably not. Do they know that? Of course not!
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@Red_Shirt_no2 The pictures in the marketing material show radiators. Are they enough? Probably not. Do they know that? Of course not!
@Red_Shirt_no2 I think a lot of these muppets are under the impression that space is cold. I don't think they have any idea just how hard it is to shed waist heat.
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And then there's a whole section where they say that the FCC isn't allowed to consider environmental regulations, and they point to Reflect Orbital getting approved where the FCC specifically said they're not allowed to consider anything except radio broadcasts. This section might actually make me cry.
Next section is just... complaining, I think?
And then they end with saying that clearly they need to be approved.
Fuck you, FCC. Kessler Syndrome is on you.
@sundogplanets it's really a question if you can hope physics stops them before or after they do unfixable damage to the orbit.
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Apparently ALL the opposition letters mentioned how 20,000 bright satellites would absolutely destroy astronomy, so that's nice.
Ok, well, this section is 100% gaslighting, which I expected. "No no no, radio astronomers, you are overreacting! We will totally not clobber your bands and we magically don't have harmonics or unintended radio emissions, despite not having actually ever built a satellite before. Also we'll use lasers to fix everything. Radio astronomers, shut up."
@sundogplanets Did anybody mention the risk of evil space aliens seeing the shiny ring around our planet and enacting a programme to darken the overly lit forest?
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Sure, completely untested, brand-fucking-new company that has never built or launched a satellite. You can definitely launch 20,000 of the biggest satellites ever built.
Oh apparently their first demo mission is scheduled for OCTOBER 2026? Gosh these guys are fucking unreal. The mission is listed as "power beaming demonstration"
What does that even fucking mean? Guess they're going to fry some birds and maybe some pilots? Hm. Watch for that I guess.
This just really highlights the freaking audacity of greedy DOGE Bros:
Speculative.
Arrogantly wrong about everything.
Lazily entitled to money that isn't theirs.
Apathetic to consequences. -
WOW it gets even more whimsical and hand-wavy in the orbital debris section. Actual quote: "Certain commenters raise concerns regarding the extent of the orbital debris mitigation information provided in the application but ignore Cowboy Space’s steadfast commitment to operating
safely."In other words: "Why won't scientists believe the words that we wrote down without any actual data, information, citations, or sketches?"
@sundogplanets Oh, a "steadfast commitment to operating safely"? Why didn't you say so earlier? That changes everything.
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@sundogplanets I note that in my engineering job, we call people "cowboys" as a pejorative, to describe someone who hasn't done solid calculations and is making decisions based on vibes
Yep. That's the meaning I'm used to. But since they seem to turn other meanings around as well (Tolkien, Cyberpunk,...) I assume they see themselves as bold nonconformists when they use the word.
