[ExI] Arkyd

Mirco Romanato painlord2k at libero.it
Sun Jun 2 20:54:44 UTC 2013


Il 01/06/2013 15:12, Alfio Puglisi ha scritto:
> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:04 AM, Dan Ust <dan_ust at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:dan_ust at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> 
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0/description
>
>  Comments?
> 
> 
> What? After lining up such an impressive list of "investors", as
> they call them:
> 
> http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/
> 
> now they need kickstarter to raise $1M? Must be a joke

It is not.

It is the way real free market capitalists operate:
they find new customers for their products.

I think it was in their presentation a few months ago.

They developed the Arkid and they will use it (and its brothers) to look
for NE asteroids. But the same telescope useful to them will be useful
to others, so if they can recoup their costs faster AND built a customer
base for other services, they will do so.

If the first telescope pay itself back even before being launched, they
have another good reason to build more of them.

> Being so small, it will have a resolving power of about 1 arcsecond -
> about the same as you can get on the ground ! Basically, you don't
> need to send such a telescope in orbit, except maybe to gain some
> wavelength coverage. But for the same $1M, you could buy hundreds of
> commercially available 20cm telescopes.

And not the manpower and the money to pay it.

There will be a lot more Arkid than one. And they will analyze the sky
together and will put together their images.
And Earth telescopes can not be pointed down to Earth to be used as a
personal Google Earth. If they cost little to use, many people or
entities will be willing to use them for mundane economical uses and
there are places of Earth where a telescope would be not economical to
place.

The money stream will payback the initial investment faster, allow to
iterate the development of new generations of satellites and build more
satellites, bringing down the production costs and, if more are built,
more satellites will need to be lifted in orbit and will use more
launchers allowing more launches and reduced costs of the single launch.

Mirco




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