In the relatively dense cloud of space junk that is the asteroid belt, I’d imagine there are lots of temporary pairings like this. “Temporary” might be 10K or 100K years, but it isn’t forever. The whole place is a veeerrrrrrryyyyy slowly simmering mass of meetups and breakups.
We just got lucky finding one of the many one-night stands in progress.
Astra soon to be gone?
Not the first victim of the Great Culling, and won’t be the last. High interest rates means less venture capital bucks, not to mention expensive loans. Anyone with a business model that still involves burning a ton of cash and doesn’t already have a big warchest is in for a rough time. Most of these startups won’t survive. I’m not even sure about Rocket Lab, and they’re in a better position than anyone (except SpaceX, obviously).
While I like to see space investment, ultimately I’m not too concerned with a belt-tightening here. I’m a little more concerned with the impact on green energy startups–it’s not a great time to be killing these off. I hope they can get a bit of a boost via other means.
Was browsing the thread for old Astra posts, when I came across this from ~2 years ago:
And here we are. We may or may not be on the verge of a recession, but VC money has dropped significantly over the past year, and there are no cheap loans. People are looking for safer bets, and small launch startups are not that.
I vaguely wonder if the SBF/FTX debacle will cause some to reallocate their limited capital from dubious crypto startups to… pretty much anything else. Maybe there will be a teeny bump from that, but I’m not holding my breath.
We’ve seen a couple recent comments from Gwynne Shotwell and Musk that both SpaceX and Starlink are cash flow positive, or at least have had individual quarters where they were. They’ve managed to keep their consts under control, despite the large investment in Starlink and Starship. They should weather the storm easily, but we’ll see about the others.
The great cull in the e-VTOL / Urban Air Mobility space I follow closely will be similar.
2024 and into 2025 will be a very bloody show. For similar reasons. Far too many me-toos with no realistic appraisal of what it really takes (in effort and in time which equates to dolllars^4) to get a flying machine past the regulators and into service.
The optimism about market size is the other big factor. Getting to low-priced machines imply massive production volumes to get economies of scale and good amortization of non-recurring costs. Which is also what enables low cost of the actual service delivery. But which requires both huge customer demand and correspondingly huge ground infrastructure in place first.
The real world is not like the web (or cyrptocurrency), which are conveniently elastic and can quadruple in scale in a few weeks at low cost with minimal pushback from anyone.
IMO when times get tough, the volatile money will not move into financing real stuff with real but boring returns. Their desire for outsized returns pretty well guarantees it’ll have to be something in the comparatively “frictionless & regulationless” = virtual / IT arena. More crypto, not less. Or maybe more VR / Meta stuff.
Interesting take. Real-world stuff is definitely capital heavy when it comes to scaling. Even the best-run companies that make physical products took immense capital to get there. So, perhaps you’re right that in lean times, VC money will go to those that can scale better with low resources.
AI may or may not fit in there. On one hand, it is pretty frictionless compared to manufacturing. But it does still depend on huge quantities of GPUs. It’s not quite like a factory, but there’s definitely some capital involved.
That’s a good thing. Most of those were sucker traps for ZIRP (zero interest rate) money. The world has been awash in fanciful product ideas designed to separate investors from their money and little else. Notice all the Hyperloop companies seem to have vanished? I’m sure there are still a couple around, but they’ll find their investment capital drying up.
Software is about to get a lot less permissionless. Biden’s new AI executive order touches a LOT of software makers, and a lot of the regs in there will be pretty onerous. Couple that with coming cryptocurrency regulation, and we might see the rapid gworth in software capability comes to a screeching halt. Or at least a slowdown.
In the online service space, we are going to run into increasing conflicts with EU-style regulation of speech, which is not compatible with the first amendment in the US. That will probably result in even more regulation.
My understanding is that any AI available ot the general public is losing money hand-over-fist. The companies that own them are buying mind-share by giving the product away for free. Eventually those AIs will stop being free and anyone depending on them to write advertising copy, training manuals, or whatever will either have to pony up or rehire the writers they layed off. Since venture capital is drying up, that day of reckoning will come sooner rather than later.
That model has been expensive for early investors but ultimately successful in many other IT-heavy endeavors. Might well work here too.
The real problem is once the public gets used to getting the product for free, it’s real hard to graft non-trivial pricing onto it. Witness the screaming about Google finally cracking down on ad-blockers on YouTube.
And, possibly, increased regulation (see Biden’s EO). Always hurts the little guys more than the big ones.
I dunno, though. Open models are already pretty good. They’ll only get better over time. Maybe the closed models will be so much better that no one will use the open ones, but that really depends on the price, and how much they dick people around. I see a lot of people being really frustrated with GPT-4 because it seems to degrade in weird ways, and it seems like OpenAI is trying to save money by shortening the context window or use weaker models or something else. Not to mention all the “safety” stuff that may make it so it’s less likely to say racist stuff, but also refuses to say things that are controversial or maybe just seem controversial. Those things may drive people to open models where at least they know what’s going on.
There are lots of pairings, but no reason to assume that they are especially short-lived.
IANA orbital mechanics guru. Unlike perhaps yourself or others here. I suck mightily at Kerbal.
ISTM that stability comes from large primaries, small secondaries, and both with uniform nearly spherically symmetrical gravity fields. With few other nearby or passing objects of sufficient scale to generate significant perturbations.
My back of the envelope WAG is that all 4 of those desiderata are in (relatively) short supply in the Belt.
The wiki cite certainly discusses what’s out there in 2023. It did not, that I could see, really discuss how long-lived any given pairing might be.
Not trying to argue a foregone conclusion here; just hoping to learn.
My extremely crude intuition comes from the phenomenon of lunar “mascons”, which makes the gravitational field of the Moon lumpy. With few exceptions, it means low orbits around the Moon are unstable and the object will crash into the surface in a few months or years.
But it seems that these binary asteroid systems aren’t nearly that unstable. I found this paper:
It has a table showing a bunch of binary Main Belt systems (like 22 Kalliope) under a few perturbation scenarios (a distribution of possible impactors). There’s a wide variation, but note the scale: all the numbers are in megayears. Collisions are certainly not the only perturbative effect, but if the systems are that resistant to actual collisions, they can’t be too unstable overall.
Very interesting. Thank you!
As they say, they’re just considering what they call “smashing” or “evaporation”, both of which are strictly collisional phenomena. So their conclusions should be taken as an upper limit on actual binary survival since there are other disruptive influences in play that are not in-scope for their research paper.
But nevertheless, I agree their findings are suggestive that binary lifespans are a lot longer than I had naively thought. As in multiple orders of magnitude.
I think AI is really the dark horse here … at this stage nobody can with any reasonably degree of certainty predict future revenues/profits from AI … but I think we can all agree that this market has the potential to become HUGE. … and by huge I mean “like the internet / www business in the 90ies - huge”
so,
I am not an expert, but just how ‘lumpy’ is the gravitational field of the moon? Are the mascons sufficient to perturb it that much? Compared with Newton’s concept that the gravitational field of a uniform sphere can be modeled as a point?
Or to put it another way: are there possible lunar orbits which are actually fairly stable?
There are stable orbits, known as 'frozen ’ orbits:
Then there’s TMA-1….
Yes, it’s very lumpy compared to that. I did mention a “few exceptions”, which are the frozen orbits that Sam_Stone brought up. They’re the cases where the perturbations cancel out in some way. But they’re relatively rare. I’d liken them to how, if you have a 4-legged table on a lumpy surface, you can always find a stable position if you rotate it enough. There are positions where one lump is decreasing while another is increasing, and when they intersect you have a stable position. But there are only a few rotations where that happens.
And those positions of the table / lunar orbits may really suck versus whatever mission you’re trying to get your orbiter to accomplish. Orbiting the Moon is a real PITA if you’re trying to do it for very long.