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tsotha
From an energy perspective, as Heinlein pointed out "Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system."
phreeza
Except if you want to go somewhere - and then stay there.
a3n
Once you go somewhere, you're halfway to staying there.
Dylan16807
Capture doesn't need all that much energy unless you're taking a really impatient path to a distant location.
fsg7sdfg789
Beyond the information presented, this is really neat to see interactive visualizations with code that can be edited inline.

It reduces the apparent distance between "wow cool visualization" and the code that generated it.

The more people see code regularly, and can connect it with something they understand, the more likely they are to be code fluent.

Macsenour
Prolly off topic but: I show my code to my sister who is a professional artist every chance I get. It demystifies the process in her mind and makes me better at understanding what is happening around her.
dharma1
I was delighted to learn recently you can get a nanosatellite to orbit for not very much money, and at the same time disappointed to find out that it would not stay up there for very long. Somehow I thought satellites could stay on orbit permanently
rtkwe
Yep there's still a good bit of atmospheric drag even at the ISS's altitude. Once you get beyond the atmosphere you get solar wind creating drag too. The ISS is periodically reboosted into a higher orbit by engines on one of the Russian modules.
DavidSJ
Also, small satellites have much higher surface area to mass ratios.
rtkwe
Yeah that's another big factor in how fast they decay. The fact that they deorbit easily is good though, if they stayed up for a long time it'd be harder for NASA to approve so many so easily because they'd become a threat to LEO operations. A lot of them are launched from the ISS.
dharma1
How do the approvals work if you are not in the US?
rtkwe
The ESA and JAXA both seem to run approvals too. I'm not sure about their current plans/proposal request statuses the only ones a surface googling finds are several years old so they might be in between proposal cycles.
zardo
There are a couple projects working on miniaturized ion drives for cube sats.
dharma1
how much energy do these consume? would solar panels on a cubesat provide enough energy for staying on orbit for years?
Terr_
I'd be interesting to see some example orbits re-scaled so that instead of showing physical distance, their "altitude" is actually the energy necessary to establish and maintain them for a reasonable period of time.