Massimo Piazza

Engineer @ space systems, computer vision, constellations | e/acc.
Here mostly to geek out on aerospace, AI, nuclear, free markets, geopolitics.

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

That's the same tendency to max out (at least on paper) that we've seen in the 90s & in 2015, but under different scarcity constraints. Some of that is very real, some of that is not.
- In the 90s folks rushed to fill up GEO, bottlenecked by the effective orbital real estate available. (Important to note "effective" because you may have a huge geostationary orbital plane, but at multi-hundred-meter orbit uncertainty covariances there's not much you can safely park there)
- In 2015 operators rushed to fill up RF spectrum with LEO constellations. Current filings are nowhere close to maxing out on what's possible from an effective real estate perspective (i.e. you end up w/ plenty of shells available at all sorts of inclinations & altitudes between 350 km and say ~1200 km). It's not about how much we can fit, but rather about how much we can emit & coordinate w/o interfering @ given frequency, beamwidth, sidelobes, etc.
- Now we're somewhat back to the 90s scenario, but with a way larger real estate compared to GEO, still limited by the fact that everyone wants the dawn-dusk premium. Interference is basically impossible if all your data is routed through laser links (to the extent that optical comms doesn't even need to be regulated).

Given the right amount of coordination, GNSS-like covariances and Stargaze, I'm confident plans for 1M+ satellites are absolutely doable from a safety standpoint. But still, you better max out now.

I would in general expect anyone w/ access to internal launch at cost to file for a similarly sized constellation, i.e. waiting for you Rocket Lab.

[Aaron Burnett @aaronburnett]

Blue Origin filing for 51k ODC satellites. 3 months ago we suggested that SSO could become a land grab in our analysis. there is a good reason for it. The new space race is all about inference

https://t.co/2snoaSO3C6

[Kiko Dontchev @TurkeyBeaver]

Couldn’t agree more with Shana. Thinking about the entire team at Blue. We’ve been there before and there are very few things worse than losing a vehicle on the pad. Remember @blueorigin, it’s the darkest before the dawn and you will be measured not by this anomaly, but by how you respond. We are all rooting for you to get safely back to flight as soon as possible!

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

@AnthropicAI kinda impressive for something that 5 years ago didn’t exist

[Chun @satofishi]

https://t.co/xbnJgTNDDI

This is part of the reason why this mission is necessary. When this remains the mainstream opinion, we will never become a multiplanetary civilization.

True. There are risks. Everything comes with risks. Instead of holding back, we are proactively looking for solutions to mitigate those risks. This is how progress is made.

I feel a bit sad when people claim that a crewed flyby has little to no scientific value. They fail to understand that the science of human spaceflight is, in large part, medical science. Despite years of ISS operations, there are still many gaps in our understanding of the impact of spaceflight on the human body.

Many of the studies we carried out on fram2 were medical studies. Even though the mission was short, I carefully chose them to help us better understand and prepare for future long-duration deep-space flights. We will do the same on our journey to Mars. A precursor mission before committing to a landing will deepen our knowledge and help answer long-standing questions that ground experiments like Mars-500 could never answer.

Doraemon only exists in manga. The Anywhere Door does not belong to our physical world. A nuclear engine will not solve every problem. In the end, we still have to spend months, if not years, in deep space to reach another planet or asteroid. This is orbital mechanics.

When you recognize that life is short, the universe is vast, and that making life multiplanetary is inevitable and urgent, the only meaningful answer is:

Work. 💪

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

@stonk_daddy @SawyerMerritt I can no longer distinguish incompetence from perverse media outlet incentives tbh

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

rapidly reusable Mars gateway signs are now the bottleneck

[Chun @satofishi]

Oh, no…

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Views of Starship in space from a @Starlink satellite

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

First ever public onboard imagery of a near-miss event that I'm aware of @michaelnicollsx
This is why you share your GNSS ephemerides, folks.
The problem has never been "the number of objects". It's literally just about a bunch of bad covariances or bogus state vectors from irresponsible operators.

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

@xdNiBoR Absolutely mindblowing that 10x Starlink v3 launches literally double total network capacity launched to date

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

quite literally!!

[Chun @satofishi]

Starship will fly us to Mars. 🚀

[Jack Kuhr @JackKuhr]

Alright, I pulled 24 tidbits from SpaceX's S-1. Here they are, ranked 👇

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

Starlink casually generating SaaS-like margins, and we still live in a pre-Starship world. 10x v3 launches literally double current network capacity. This really is just the beginning

[Mo Islam @itsmoislam]

.@SpaceX just filed its S-1.

Revenue
2023: $10.4B
2024: $14.0B (+35%)
2025: $18.7B (+33%)

Net income
2023: $(4.6B)
2024: $791M <- profitable year
2025: $(4.9B)

Capex
2023: $4.4B
2024: $11.2B
2025: $20.7B

Nearly 5x in two years. Almost all of the increase is AI compute infra.

Total Assets: $102B
Total Liabilities: 60.5B

PP&E nearly doubled in one year to $42.6B at YE. Not rockets --> but AI data centers.

Segment breakdown 👇

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

@elonmusk Charity makes sense for problems you cannot (yet) address via technology. New technology compounds, charity doesn’t. It’s just that sometimes it’s the only available option.
One should always lean towards the biggest impact on human civilization when allocating capital though.

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

@lexfridman We need a post-summit pod with Xi

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

This goes beyond the "SpaceX/Tesla Mafia" starting companies that are poised to reshape the whole tech ecosystem imo.
The mere transparency in the process that led them to redefine what it means to build a complex system, and its blatantly evident speed & capital efficiency has profoundly shaped an entire generation that just read or listened to those stories. This goes way beyond the borders of Hawthorne, Starbase, Austin, Fremont, etc.
Every single engineer on Earth should read the Berger books.

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

LEO2Earth downmass charts 2025 through 2030 are gonna look insane. DS2Earth PGM downmass is next.

[delian @zebulgar]

https://t.co/nF604EZ5x1

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

let's not do what France did to helicopter rotor direction, the space industry is better than this

[Ezra Feilden @ezrafeilden]

There's a huge risk to orbital datacenters which I'm surprised I haven't seen discussed anywhere.

All SSO datacenter operators need to align their orbital direction: strictly prograde (dusk-dawn) or strictly retrograde (dawn-dusk). If even a small number of players decide differently from the rest then head-on collisions are essentially guaranteed. A single collision would release 40 tons of TNT, quickly turning this very special orbit into a debris field.

The good news is - the solution is very simple. There are few benefits of mixing dawn-dusk with dusk-dawn. Everyone just needs to choose dawn-dusk.

Starcloud is working hard to make this happen. DM me if you are a dawn-dusk SSO user and would like to help.

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

Let that sink in

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

It's official:

Nvidia, $NVDA, has surpassed silver as the second largest asset in the world, worth $5.52 trillion.

Google is less than 4% away from becoming the second company in history to hit $5 trillion in market cap.

We are witnessing a historic technological revolution.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

First full stack of Starship V3

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

If you teach your kids to value delayed gratification, you should also teach them the importance of free market capitalism.

Do things that compound, kids.

[Massimo Piazza @squareospace]

@BellikOzan Imagine complaining about launch costs “not going down anytime soon” and then two days later complaining about one of the most capital efficient rocket programs in history which is the only realistic short-term source of pricing pressure in the medium-lift class 🙃