Forty Suns - Blog

  Space Costs Are Dropping, Capabilities Are Rising By Dave McDaniel, everyone’s sorta-smart space guy. ( Sorta-Smart = Maybe knows what he’s talking about, sometimes. ) Contents By The Numbers Price Theory Rockets Up, Prices Down Rocket Economics 101 Demand Random (But Related) Note Space Is The Answer __ Space is expensive. Like all advancing technologies, costs will go down. By The Numbers Let’s start with an analogy. You’ve probably heard how meager was the computing power aboard the Apollo moon landers back in the 70s. Those missions had 4 KB of memory, with 32 KB hard drives. (KB is a Kilobyte, or a thousand ‘bytes’ of digital data, a term now rarely used.) Today we typically use either MB (Megabyte, a million bytes) or GB (Gigabyte, a billion bytes). Lately we’ve even been breaking out the TB (Terabyte, a trillion bytes) and, for the big data centers, PB (Petabyte, a quadrillion bytes) and beyond. We humans love our big-number prefixes. When it comes to the systems used on Apoll

  Power And The Pursuit Of Space By Dave McDaniel, everyone’s sorta-smart space uncle. ( Sorta-Smart = Maybe knows what he’s talking about, sometimes. ) Contents I Have The Power! Viva La Revolution Pushing The Envelope Fusion Did You Know? Power As A Yardstick The Illusion Of Scarcity __ Everything begins with power. From our own bodies to the civilizations that sustain us, the world turns on the generation and consumption of power. Power is what defines us. I Have The Power! Throughout most of our existence here on Earth we’ve not been able to bring much more power to bear than a single human could generate. More often than not that human was us. Animals became an option somewhere along the way, manual tools and techniques added to our abilities, however humanity’s extreme tech curve didn’t begin until individuals were able to easily command energy well beyond their own two hands. Once we moved past that barrier, everything took off. Global power underpins our space program and all o