Space Is Expensive
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 A...