Yup, I believe (based on job postings) they largely built the satellites
themselves. Certainly, they integrated them themselves. SpaceX thinks they
can leverage their experience using cheap, near-COTS electronics and solar
array tech, build them themselves, and reduce costs to a tiny fraction of
the typical cost per unit dry mass of commsats. And I don't think they're
entirely wrong, either. One thing that having extra cheap mass gives you is
the ability to simply shield your electronics using metal (which works out
way better for LEO radiation for silicon than it does for deep space
radiation for humans). Like Dragon, they can also use essentially unlimited
quantity commercial silicon cells which cost ~$1/Watt instead of the
(available only in limited quantities).$100/Watt for triple junction Gallium Arsenide space rated cells
I'm sure the build/buy balance is proprietary information, but if the
SpaceX satellite department operates anything like the SpaceX rocket
department, then they bought whatever they could, reverse engineered it,
and built their own version.
On Friday, February 23, 2018, Jake Anderson <jake@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 23/02/18 16:41, Ben Brockert wrote:
On Thursday, February 22, 2018, Jake Anderson <
dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 09/02/18 15:28, Henry Spencer wrote:He already did. They launched two of their test satellites this morning.
On Thu, 8 Feb 2018, John Stoffel wrote:
Or heck, how big a SAR do you think you could put up on FH? Or
telescope? Or bunches of telescopes? Just think of what you could do
with 10 hubbles in orbit, instead of just one... more command and
control issues... but lots more science time across a range of
subjects. And if one fails, it's not the end of the world.
Uh, in case it hasn't come to your attention, building Hubble cost
vastly more than launching it. The same is true of JWST. Cheaper launches
would have made almost no difference to those projects.
The same ecstatic burbling about launching zillions of cheap payloads
was heard in the early days of the shuttle. It didn't happen, *NOT*
because the launches didn't turn out to be as cheap as expected, but
because *launch was not the key problem*. It sure helps if you have cheap
launch, yes, but then you've got to reform the *payload* builders, which
is, if anything, even more difficult. And it's not something Elon can help
with.
You saying if Elon can't find somebody to build swarms of satellites at
a price he thinks they should cost he won't just start a swarm satellite
company?
Did they build their own sats though or buy them?
