From CNBC

amounting to an injection of $200 million.

This means they are raising $200 million, not that the valuation is $200 million.

I was thinking the same thing. Hard to see a path to getting your $200 million back.

There could also be a huge planet way out near the oort cloud. With an orbital period in the thousands of years and a temperature near the background, it might take a tremendous stroke of luck to find it before we have a flotilla of Webb class space telescopes dedicated to the topic of outer solar system objects.

You do realize he made his first fortune building a payment processing system, right? As in, he is a software guy turned rocket nerd, not the other way around.

Wow, this really underscores how consistent the Russians have been with their manned space program. Decades of almost constant levels.

Yeah, but one of them blinked, so they gotta do a reshoot....

And porn. Don't forget porn.

Time moves at different rates in different reference frames. Deep in a gravity well, time moves slower.

So yes, if you were in a ship 2 light years from a black hole and were observing people in close orbit around the black hole, they would be moving very slowly. You would be moving very quickly from their point of view. This is not an illusion... time really moves at different rates.

"We are going to have a rocket to compete with Falcon 9 as soon as we finish developing our new, clean sheet rocket! Governments are stepping g up to help develop the technologies for the parts now!"

Yeah.....

Since it is still a paper rocket, I suppose they could design something to compete with Starship.... they just always seem to be aiming a generation behind.....

They built observatories to time the seasons and calculate the heavens thousands of years ago.

No, it wasn't official until Wired said so.

I have it on good authority that it will be picked up by a race of sentient machines, repaired, given an artificial intelligence, and returned to earth.

Yeah, it is plausible that some group is already vetting the data on a spectral analysis of an exoplanet atmosphere that reveals the presence of life. Or maybe that moment is a decade away. Or 10 decades.

But I think we all believe that moment is indeed just a matter of time and telescopes.

Infinity being an infinite universe.

But in this case it should be whatever fraction of the 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way have planets that are potentially habitable, instead of the infinity that is the whole universe. We are probably not sending probes to other galaxies for the better part of 5 billion years or so, until Andromeda comes to us.

Step away from the cable news. Our long term prospects have never been better in the entire history of primates.

The last paragraph is where the thousands of years comes in.

Develop tech to send say, 100 tons at a significant fraction of the speed of light. ---- thousands of years.

Build and send out probes to every star system within 100 light years... hundreds of years.

Then you find your answer, if it is within that population.

Else? Continue sending probes and waiting increasingly long times for the answer.

But eventually, either we aren't here to send probes, or we find the answer. Moat of the Milky Way is within 50,000 light years, so some .5C probes could potentially get you the answer from most of our galaxy within 150,000 years.... if you had 100 billion probes and the requisite launchers.

More than a thousand years. Probably more than a thousand thousand years.

There, happy now?

"I wonder how far back in spacetime the resulting images will be"

Everything they are talking about mapping is inside the Milky Way. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. Most of the stuff they are mapping would be within 50,000 light years, give or take. It is all gravitationally bound, so there is no expansion component. That is how far back in time the images will be.

"But they moved a little bit in the last 20,000 years" isn't all that interesting. I mean, yeah, it all orbits the galactic center. But that is kinda baked into "I am observing things inside the Milky Way."

They do not do anything at all like looking at the Milky Way from remote galaxies.

They use the light from remote galaxies and quasars to map the gas and dust in the Milky Way. It is like holding a flashlight behind a piece of paper and trying to figure out what is written on it by looking at how the light dims. Except they use radio waves of various wavelengths. They look at how the light is scattered and absorbed and map the material doing the scattering and absorption.

This is a massive inspiration and source of wonder for me. It also is a major failing of our education. Even highly educated people have no real grasp of the scale of things.

I have this conversation every few years with religious and non religious folk. Both completely miss the scale of the universe and the implications of this scale.

One of the greatest achievements of mankind is the Voyager probes. They are the first manmade objects to ever be sent out of our solar system. Just a few years ago they reached the heliopause... touted as "leaving the solar system" in a myriad of articles. After 45 years as the fastest vehicle ever launched, Voyager 2 is some 130 times farther from the sun than we are. It has traveled far beyond Pluto.

And it is still maybe 300 years from reaching the sphere of comets that surrounds the Sun known as the Oort cloud. And that is just a small fraction of the way to the nearest star.

That it is the final frontier.....

Yeah, I quoted Roddenberry.

Yeah, that would probably cover it.

Do we have a cost? The numbers I saw are Ll guesses, and they are roughly equivalent despite the disparity in payload.

They decline to state commercial launch prices, but estimate $50-60 million. 22,000 lbs to LEO. GSLV Mark 3 production capacity is currently is about 5 per year.

Falcon 9 is 37,000 lbs to LEO for ASDS landing, commercial numbers are similar, I think. Capacity is around 50 per year... who knows how many more second stages they can build.

I wonder why people like OneWeb are going to India? Why pay more for less if F9 is available? Surely they could get a package from SpaceX to launch all of their satellites faster than they can build them, with a package discount that makes it less than GSLV Mark 3.

This article says 36 satellites are going up on the GSLV Mark 3. It took some looking, but I found an article that says SpaceX will carry 48 per launch on their hastily arranged replacement for Soyuz rides. They also had a fuzzy number, but it looks similar to the Indian price. So.... why pay the same price when you could launch 1/3 more with SpaceX at a faster cadence?

Just imagine how much more quickly and cheaply they could have gotten the 6 ready if they had used off-the-shelf components!