Orbital Economy

> If the satellites could be manufactured in orbit,
> the cost of lift-
> off would be eliminated.
>
> The problem that comes to mind immediately is, of
> course, resources.
> With solar power collectors and automated
> assemblies, the main issues
> it seems to me are materials and maintenance labor.
>
> What other problems/advantages does the group see?
>
As someone who has built many satellites, I do not
think a satellite could be built without humans.

To understand this, you must look at the phases a
satellite goes through during construction:

1) Requirements
2) Design
3) Manufacturing
4) Assembly, Integration and Test (AIT)
5) Launch
6) Operations

First off, the requirements and design tend to be
unique and change over time. There is a movement to
attempt to modularize satellite manufacturing so that
you can plug various payloads into a standard bus. At
this point, this is still pretty far off and I am not
at all confident this will happen. So it is going to
be very hard to build a manufacturing facility in
which the requirements and design of a satellite are
going to be consistent enough to build an autonomous
factory to put out satellites.

Now manufacturing and AIT are essentially what you are
trying to move out to space. The real question is can
you keep the recurring costs of these operations done
in space vs on ground to be lower than the cost of
launch. It is this point where I do not think it is
possible due mainly to reasons I mentioned stemming
from r&d phase.

Satellites are just not a mature enough technology at
this point to be built and tested without humans being
there. I think that once we have an established human
colony in space with an established industrial
capability, then yes it makes sense. But a satellite
is just to complicated to be automated by today's
standards. Currently it takes a minimum of 2 years to
build a cookie-cutter satellite (by cookie cutter I
mean one utilizing an already proven design with
little changes). For a more advanced satellite, start
throwing on the years. Even something as small as a
globalstar/iridium satellite took 5 years to develop.
And those were obsolete before they even launched!

Ryan Z

Ryan Z