Hacker News: kartikkumar

We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.

Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.

The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.

Enjoy the read!

An overview of optical communication systems for satellites (updated)

kartikkumar — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:32:36 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-for-small-satellites-and-cubesats-product-roundup

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30954674

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

An overview of Ka-band communication systems for satellites

kartikkumar — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 09:39:17 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.satsearch.co/2022-03-29-ka-band-transceivers-transmitters-and-receivers-for-satellites

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30904756

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

A guide to small satellite propulsion systems

kartikkumar — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 11:48:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-07-10-cubesat-thrusters-and-in-space-propulsion-products-for-small-satellites-on-the-global-marketplace

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28140825

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kartikkumar in "Launch HN: Turion Space (YC S21) – Space debris removal and satellite servicing"

kartikkumar — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 18:18:43 +0000

This is quite a popular idea but there's a lot of challenging economics that haven't been figured out yet.

CisLunar Industries [1] for example wants to harvest and process metal from debris on orbit.

Their initial application is to create metal fuel rods for thruster technology being developed by Neumann Space [2].

[1] https://www.cislunarindustries.com

[2] https://neumannspace.com

New comment by kartikkumar in "Launch HN: Turion Space (YC S21) – Space debris removal and satellite servicing"

kartikkumar — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 17:58:44 +0000

Congrats on your launch!

Back in 2015, I was part of an EU Marie Curie ITN network called Stardust [1] working on something similar.

We utilized robotic arms and a novel non-contact, detumbling technology (using eddy currents) to approach and remove Ariane rocket bodies [2].

It was a fascinating project and I subsequently worked on investigating mission analysis approaches to compute multi-target rendezvous sequences, specifically assessing the impact of orbital perturbations on the use of semi-analytical transfer leg design algorithms [3].

You might be interested in the follow-up to the Stardust network, dubbed Stardust-R [4]. Happy to connect you with any of the organizations involved if it's helpful.

It was the frustration of trying to manually deal with collecting information for component, subsystem, and system trade studies that led to me wondering if an 'amazon for space' [5] wouldn't help engineers focus on the really hard engineering instead of Googling :) [shameless plug]

Would love to learn more about your Droid platform if you're interested in chatting!

[1] https://www.stardust2013.eu

[2] https://www.dfki.de/web/forschung/projekte-publikationen/pub...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02731...

[4] http://www.stardust-network.eu

[5] https://satsearch.com