Planetary Resources today announced a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for its space telescope Arkyd.
Planetary Resources today announced a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for its space telescope Arkyd.
Forgive me if I am less than enthusiastic about this. Supposedly Planetary Resources had big money backing from a lot of wealthy people, including some Silicon Valley Google billionaires. Why then do they need this campaign? It makes me suspect that the company is an emperor with no clothes.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Planetary Resources today announced a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for its space telescope Arkyd.
Forgive me if I am less than enthusiastic about this. Supposedly Planetary Resources had big money backing from a lot of wealthy people, including some Silicon Valley Google billionaires. Why then do they need this campaign? It makes me suspect that the company is an emperor with no clothes.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
A million dollars should be chump change for the backers they supposedly have – maybe some backed out since their original announcement. While this Kickstarter campaign seems to be for a single scope to be used by the public, it’s very odd that this would come about well before they have anything more directly financed in orbit.
Maybe their backers just have no interest in educational outreach.
I know that if I was an investor in this company I’d be asking why they’re wasting their time with it.
Thankfully I’m not.. so I pledged $100.
Kickstarter is very trendy these days. It could have more to do with pr than a lack of funds.
A bit of both actually. While I’m sure Planetary Resources could have gone door knocking to find 100 folks willing to donate $10,000 to providing space telescope access to classrooms, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.
I vote for describing it as “participatory propaganda”.
This can be used for good and for bad.
In WW2, it gave people in the continental US a feeling that they were helping the war effort when they went without sugar, or tires on the car, or meat on one day a week, etc.
Today it makes people invest emotionally in environmental politics, when they teach their children how to separate their garbage into different containers for newspapers, plastics, yard debris, etc.
Not least, it could be used as the “thin edge of the wedge” to get respectability for incrementally increasingly costly space projects funded by Kickstarter, by smaller companies, who can grow up to be orbital customers for Planetary Resources.
This could also be a form of market research to gauge the level of public interest and get some diverse user experience. It would be interesting to know the cost of building and launching this public access space telescope. I suspect that even without counting development cost, it will cost over a million dollars to deliver on their promises.
About $10M I’m told.. and that’s just the marginal cost of this educational outreach telescope.