egg changed the topic of #kspacademia to: https://git.io/JqLs2 | Dogs are cats. Spiders are cat interferometers. | Document well, for tomorrow you may get mauled by a ネコバス. | <UmbralRaptor> egg|nomz|egg: generally if your eyes are dewing over, that's not the weather. | <ferram4> I shall beat my problems to death with an engineer. | We can haz pdf | Logs: https://esper.irclog.whitequark.org/kspacademia
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<WeylandsWings> idle thought i had today, Nation States will likely be the only ones doing deep space probes (beyond Mars) for quite a while because of the massive capital cost of making a DSN with the giant dishes
<SnoopJ> also not a lot of value out there for the brainworms-in-space crowd
<SnoopJ> (I imagine private capital would just rent DSN time?)
<WeylandsWings> brainworms in space?
<SnoopJ> I guess it's mostly SpaceX but there have been a few other contenders
<SnoopJ> and mostly the SpaceX that exists in PR rather than the one that actually exists and services contracts
<WeylandsWings> SnoopJ: but at the same time, the DSN or a similar system is a bespoke long lead time system. plus you also need it for the prospecting missions to find where the valuable commodities are
<SnoopJ> you aren't wrong about the first part
<WeylandsWings> the second part, yeah you might be able to get away with renting the DSN (what does NASA charge though?)
<SnoopJ> the second part is indistinguishable from SF
<WeylandsWings> oh?
<WeylandsWings> there are a handful of companies working on ISRU and mining tech
<WeylandsWings> while it is still a couple years - decades out, it is coming
<SnoopJ> and they mostly produce PR
<SnoopJ> Even Planetary Resources
<WeylandsWings> expecially once the cost to get to space drops
<SnoopJ> yea it requires a few shakes of the magic wand to even start thinking about this
<raptop> There are, though I suspect that ISRU will be like crewed spaceflight in that government agencies (notably NASA) will be monopsonies for a long time
<SnoopJ> I mean, I guess I wonder: ISRU to what end? At a *minimum* we're talking about rare materials exploitation or something, although it seems more common that people are talking about it for colonization efforts or whatever
<WeylandsWings> SnoopJ: at the same time ISM is slowing becoming a thing, Made in Space has found a couple things (like ZBlan) that makes sense to make in space and return and Varda Space is about to launch a test manufacturing mission
<WeylandsWings> like i agree that it isnt there yet, but fully expect it to be a thing within my lifetime
<SnoopJ> Expect away