[Ground-station] Interplanetary CubeSat Workshop - poster session report + two brief presentation notes

[Phil Karn]

On 9/6/18 09:43, Ground-Station wrote:

> The contrast between the program leads from NASA and the industry people
> that want to sell busses was pretty stark in several respects. The most
> obvious was diversity. The trade show wing of the workshop was all white
> and male and from mid-tier aerospace industry companies. There was at
> least one start-up there, but most had been doing this for a while and
> have decided to solidly move into CubeSat territory due to the increase
> in market.

That's been my observation too. Also, nearly all of the commercially
available parts and subsystems, while much cheaper than traditional
aerospace stuff, is still tens of dB$ more than it should really cost,
or that we can afford as hams. So there's still plenty of room for us to
innovate good but truly cheap spacecraft bus parts. That's the kind of
thing that attracted me to AMSAT in the first place.

>The NASA and University speakers were very diverse in age,
> gender, and race. The science was the focus, but each and every one of
> them talked up the commercialization of space as if it was a net positive.

Yup, because it's a standard talking point they feel compelled to parrot
if they want to attract funding for their projects. My own take on many
of the university projects is that their main result will not be some
operational satellite system, space science discovery or even some new
and novel piece of hardware or software. It'll be the education of the
students involved. And for me, that's reason enough. Especially for a
diverse group.

> Force" goodies. It's completely unclear to NASA people that were there
> what the policies will be, how it will affect things, whether or not any
> number of programs will continue, or whether or not the Space Force will
> be a real thing.

I bet that if you bought any of them a beer, they'd eventually confess
that they see Trump's "Space Force" as a total joke that it's bound to
blow over in a matter of months if not weeks when Trump loses interest
in it. But they're deathly afraid to say so in public.

Phil