This is my first trip to this venerable conference, which for decades was held in Logan, UT, where the university there, Utah State, was a hotbed of this developing technology as a result of innovative faculty. This year it’s at the convention center in Salt Lake City, and it’s huge, as would befit this burgeoning industry. There’s a cavernous exhibit hall with hundreds of exhibitors.
My concern is that the industry may be in a bubble. I’m seeing several vendors for some of the technologies, and it’s not clear to me that they’ll all survive, or how they’ll compete. But that’s the dynamic nature of new tech.
I remember the first time I read an article where a researcher was talking about developing a satellite. Then he got to the part of the narrative where he put the satellite in a briefcase and went off to the airport with it.
It made me realize I needed to reappraise my mental image that went with the word “satellite”.
Heh. “New tech”. Our team MSS project at ISU was “Smaller Satellites, Bigger Business?”. This was back in 2001, when the idea of small sats was still fairly fresh. My classmate Robbie did end up as one of the leads at Planet Labs, as well as a fellow SGF alumnus.
Hopefully what’s changing is the focus, from applications identified back in the 50s, mostly terracentric, to ideally a focus on identifying the resources and energy in the Solar System available for harvesting (at near-zero ecosystem cost) for the benefit of humanity.
But everyone knows that’s just foolishness, like removing polluting industry from our ecosphere by moving it off planet. Arrant nonsense. Confounded hippy, get off the lawn!