You mention 20m dishes, but we are focusing on 30m. Yes, there several 30 metre dishes around the world, but not all have a long life ahead of them and not many are located in a convenient place for other activities. The 3 dishes selected match roughly the NASA longitudes for their DSN and thus may be able to be of some use to NASA under some circumstances, although this is not likely and we are not counting on it. The trio do however provide continuous tracking as the world turns of any spacecraft that is above Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Yes, it is the “start only” as you suggest. There has been a lot more thought put into both the arrangements for the business plan and the way to refurbish the dish to. Agree that the main costs will be staff. The potential customer for the US site wants to install 2 x 11 metre dishes and will staff them. We thus have staff on call for some activities of a minor nature or agreed nature without the cost of continuous staffing. We also have allowed more money to buy the necessary electronics for the project.

We are collecting the operational costs as we speak. These include the fees to the county, electricity, diesel, air con, water, fibre, staffing, fire, accommodation, licensing, selling, consumables, transport, etc and even septic tank pumping.

We will eventually offer TT&C services and expand the site for fixed dishes and other services. The future services for the dish are private missions to the Moon (and Mars) as well as some work that cannot as yet be declared. In all the income including server hosting should be great enough to be profitable before we even look at fixing the dish to offer services through it, although that will still be part of the initial funding.

Frequencies should be good to 15GHZ according to specs and a recent dish survey. It may be good for some services to 40GHz with level degradation, but that is yet to be tested.

We have access to other dishes on a lease basis and thus can do duplex. The base of the BWG (Beam Wave Guide) will be typically a fast configure circular track allowing different systems to be added as desired and easily configured at short notice.

We are happy to discuss deeper information under a non-disclosure agreement.

Regards, Robert Brand

The cost of running such a dish for deep space is not just the cost of the dish, or of the electronics (which could easily be $ 1 million per dish, and which you are highly unlikely to get surplus), but primarily personnel costs. Are you going to staff your antenna sites ? 24×7 ? (That takes 5 shifts, BTW.) Can you find a partner to help with site staffing ( that is how to really get costs down). How are you going to handle multi-national crews ? How, for that matter, are you going to train them ?

On the technical side, what spacecraft do you want to communicate with ? At what frequencies ? (Earth orbiters typically use S band, while Deep Space has moved to X or even K/Ku bands). Are you going to support multiple frequencies ? Is your tracking going to be open, or closed, loop ? Are you going to build your own feeds ? Are you going to do duplex transmit / receive operations ?

I like the Occams Razor method which “essentially” says ‘the simplest answer is most often correct’. One Apollo associated example of Occam’s razor is found in conspiracy theories about moon landings.

Many believe that the first Moon Landing was staged and filmed in a studio, part of an elaborate hoax. Their justification relies upon many twisted and convoluted theories, whereas the NASA argument is fairly straightforward. The conspiracy line of reasoning contains too many suppositions: “If this happened, then this may have happened.” Too many ‘ifs’ is a sign that a statement needs simplification and clarifying. Therefore, using Occam’s razor, the NASA argument should be regarded as correct. This is not the same as saying that it is proved, only that a more complex argument is very less likely. Why stage 8 landings when any one of them could go wrong and expose the so called hoax?

As for Apollo 18? Remember that the Apollo missions cost US taxpayers at times over 4% of their tax dollar. Currently NASA is having massive funding cuts and it is only costing 0.5% these days. So budget cuts or aliens? You tell me.

I was almost hired recently to work with the Australian military on applications with the US Dept of Defence satellites. The Australian company going after that contract did not get it so I was spared the joys of another job that I could never talk about.