Damien Morton wrote:
>
> Ok, Ok, so this is a little far fetched, but..
Not at all.
> A store and forward repeater with, say, 75Gig capacity, in a shoebox, in low
> orbit, blasting out MP3s and DIVXs to all and sundry.
Instead of magnetic tape today one would use flash.
But it will be a while before you'll see the thing passing within
communication range. It will streak by pretty fast, too, so visibility
will be minutes at best. And, even in LEO, omnidirectional radiator needs
a lot of juice.
I've thought about the issue today a few minutes. You'd want many
identical satellites up there, preferably so that you get criticality
(at every single instance at least one of them is within range),
redundancy, and routing between them.
You'd want to mass-produce a batch, and haul it up by the pallet. I wouldn't
bother with stabilization, and make the (initially cubical, ~10 cm edge)
satellites do beamforming towards ground (and targets on ground) in realtime
as they tumble along. They need to unfold the panes, so I would use springed
hinges. You could imbed the things into something easily sublimating (dry ice
would be neat if not for weight) or photolytic foam, so that they would be unfold
after a while. You could also consider a slowly burning (say, gellied
nitrocellulose-based) pyrocharge as coating, a kind of satellite cluster bomb.
The layer protects the tightly packed microsat cubes at launch, then it keeps
them from unfolding the panels/antennae while they're drifting apar and provides
thrust as it burns off. Another possibility would be said photolytic coat, and
a photovoltaically driven railgun.
After this baby wents off you have a cloud of redundant microsats. Given the
low power requirements of digital pulse radio / AEtherwire, and mutual time-of-flight
triangulation this would also make GPS looks very old indeed.
This would double as time standard, global positioning system, and networking
infrastructure.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:58 PDT