Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rwesterdahl 1776 days ago
Our current design is capable of just over 1 year of continuous propulsive operation. Feel free to mess with our services tool on the website to simulate various missions to see how many operations a single droid could perform! But to answer your question, yes, several orbital inclinations are highly populated with operational satellites and debris. A mission such as going from 55° inclination to polar would be possible but very expensive (ie would likely drain a significant amount of life out of the Droid on a single mission). This is why we want to build a constellation of vehicles spread across many inclinations.
1 comments

> Our current design is capable of just over 1 year of continuous propulsive operation.

> (...) would likely drain a significant amount of life out of the Droid on a single mission

These two sentences are contradictory.

Unless by "continuous propulsive operation" you mean something that is, confusingly, not continuous propulsive operation.

They are not contradictory you've just removed the context explaining why they wouldn't put said inefficient thing in a mission plan. There are plenty of objects to clean up without having to shift your orbital inclination so drastically.
Unless it's using a low-thrust-high-efficiency drive such that significant inclination changes take a year.
Unless of course the maneuver takes a significant part of a year