SpaceX Plans To Send the First of Its 4,425 Super-Fast Internet Satellites Into Space in 2019 (cnbc.com) 160
Elon Musk's SpaceX has laid out a plan to create a network of internet-providing satellites around Earth. The company hopes to start launching satellites into space in 2019, and will continue to send them in phases until 2024, when the network is expected to reach capacity. From a report:On Wednesday, Patricia Cooper, SpaceX's vice president of satellite government affairs, said later this year, the company will start testing the satellites themselves, launch one prototype before the end of the year and another during the "early months" of 2018. Following that, SpaceX will begin its satellite launch campaign in 2019. "The remaining satellites in the constellation will be launched in phases through 2024," Cooper said before the Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology. [...] SpaceX argues that the U.S. lags behind other developed nations in broadband speed and price competitiveness, while many rural areas are not serviced by traditional internet providers. The company's satellites will provide a "mesh network" in space that will be able to deliver high broadband speeds without the need for cables.
alleviate the challenges (Score:2)
This will alleviate the challenges such as digging trenches, laying down fiber and dealing with property rights issues
...and replace those challenges^Westablished practices with much more interesting challenges, like, wireless mesh networks, unreachable satellites, space debris, etc.
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My understanding was that mesh networks are largely a solved problem, just one without much economic incentive outside places where traditional infrastructure is essentially nonexistent.
First thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the idea of more or less global Internet access. I mean, once I've paid Musk's fee... is he going to care if I talk to his satellites from Australia instead of Canada? No matter where I go, if I have power and a dish I should be able to get access.
On the other hand... if the NSA doesn't have a tap on this, I'll be very much surprised. And that bothers me on an ideological level even if it is unlikely to have an immediate and significant effect on me.
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Now those people who are allergic to Wifi will have no where to hide.
Tinfoil hats will be the fashion of the future
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Hard to tap this since there will be many (? hundreds) of downlink points scattered all over the world. Not saying that it couldn't be done but it's a non-trivial problem.
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Easy to tap, if you run your tap onboard the satellites...
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He's going to care, because even if he may have a spectrum license in Canada, he may not in Australia, and even if he does, it may not be the same spectrum.
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In a satellite mesh network, every ground station is an uplink.
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Ugh. I haven't personally had satellite Internet ever, and have only dealt with it second hand once, a long time ago.
I forgot about the standard of 'satellite direct for downlink, land line plus central transmitter for uplink'.
So much for global mobility if that's what Musk is talking about here. I need direct two-way communication between my base station and a satellite before I care about this system. Perhaps I'm asking too much for a consumer-grade ground transmitter to get a signal to a LEO satellite
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It might be, but then again satellite phones are a thing, so the basic technology required is well proven.
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I forgot about the standard of 'satellite direct for downlink, land line plus central transmitter for uplink'.
Now it's a up/down link via satellite, that's why you have to have a FAA license to install, you don't want some redneck knocking out superbowl commercials by pointing the dish at the wrong bird.
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over throw the government or some such nonsense." (This was before 9/11/01)
9/11 falls under "or some such nonsense."
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Not even in the same league. 9/11 wasn't an attempt to overthrow the government, it wast the last gasp of a tiny, dieing terrorist organization making a final bid for relevancy. And we gave them *exactly* what they wanted, in spades: relevancy. In the form of an openly aggressive foreign invader crushing local militaries, overthrowing governments, and slaughtering civilians. Nothing like an evil foreign occupation to drum up members and, more importantly, money. So much so that they were catapulted int
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I don't know whether or not is was the last gasp of a tiny, dieing terrorist organization making a final bid for relevancy, but destroying two of the tallest building in the world, in the most populous and richest city in the richest country in the world demanded violent reprisal.
In the form of an openly aggressive foreign invader crushing local militaries, overthrowing governments, and slaughtering civilians.
You're conflating Afghanistan with Iraq.
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Sure, violent reprisal against the perpetrators, instead we used it as an excuse to attack unrelated nearby countries. As it was, it's like a small group of Canadian terrorists without government support crashed a plane into Big Ben, and the Brits responded by crushing the US military and government while slaughtering millions of our civilians. Just *slightly* ridiculous.
And for added veracity of the analogy, the Canadian government should have "discretely" been a rapaciously colonial puppet of the Brits.
"Super fast" (Score:3)
>> The company's satellites...without the need for cables.
I thought "wireless" was understood...in space.
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Great, ruin all my astrophotos (Score:4, Informative)
Also solves global warming (Score:2, Funny)
Soon, once there's a few competitors doing this, we'll have enough satellites surrounding the planet that it'll cut down the incoming sunlight enough to reverse global warming.
Yea this didn't work before... Iridium take 2? (Score:2)
But MAYBE he's got a better cost model that makes this financially viable? Iridium didn't work out too well.
I suppose his launch costs will be lower, but I have a feeling that this won't work out as cheaply as he thinks. It will be viable in places where there are no providers now, but usually those are the same places that don't have the 2 things this scheme needs... 1. People who need/want internet access and 2. People who have money to pay for it. You got to have all that to make this work out, unless r
This is not a new Iridium (Score:5, Informative)
Iridium was/is about satellite phones. This isn't. You will need a rather big phased array antenna and this is not a mobile setup.
It's about replacing the last mile (or the last 10/100/1000 miles) with satellite links. It's about getting WiFi/LTE backhaul everywhere with just a small device to buy and set up instead of digging in cables or whatever.
It's like the airplane eating railways and the airplane ate railways. Cables and everything you have set up on the ground is expensive because it's different everywhere and you have to buy real estate and do research and actually get your hands dirty. Setting up a satellite terminal is convenient and easy and it's just the same everywhere.
I mean, this does not mean that it will work out as a business, but the logic behind it is quite convincing.
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My biggest complaint about this is it eats spectrum space, high data rates require very large bandwidths. I'm trying to imagine how you can do this spectrum wise and it's starting to look pretty difficult to me. Even if you think of the satellites as mini-Cell towers that move around on you, you are going to need some pretty complicated phased array things on the satellites to keep all this in any kind of reasonable amount of spectrum space and still be able to keep data flowing to any reasonable number of
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I suppose his launch costs will be lower, but I have a feeling that this won't work out as cheaply as he thinks. It will be viable in places where there are no providers now, but usually those are the same places that don't have the 2 things this scheme needs... 1. People who need/want internet access and 2. People who have money to pay for it. You got to have all that to make this work out...
A surprisingly large number of people in North America have money and no decent ISP. The US is big but people still live in the wide open spaces, and Canada is even bigger. My parents are less than 30 minutes from a major metro area and can't get either cable or even crappy DSL for any price. Offer to pay for the cable run for a few miles and the local monopolies still aren't interested. So yeah, SpaceX has a market for this. A market in the millions if they can avoid Iridium's mistake in pricing.
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Xplornet has a quarter million subscribers in Canada alone, and they're extremely expensive and extremely slow. There's a huge potential market in rural and even sparse suburban areas.
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Bad predictions here (Score:2)
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
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And a lot of latency.
Re:That's a lot of satellites (Score:4)
Not really. I don't think 25-50 ms is that bad, and I've played online with far worse.
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I would be more concerned with Jitter, Depending on the pricing of service and if it was portable I may consider a terminal for various portable applications and VoIP is one application that is practically a must have.
Re:That's a lot of satellites (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, they are going to use phased arrays to track the satellites, so jitter should only be a real concern once every half-hour or so when it switches satellites.
I wouldn't call it a simple problem, but each piece of the puzzle is relatively well-understood now.
Getting a fleet of satellites into orbit will be expensive, but being a launch company takes some of the sting out of that.
Still, with a fleet of 4K satellites and 5- to 7-year lifespans, they will need to replace hundreds of satellites annually. They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
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It makes great sense from a business perspective. I suspect the internet operations side will be a subsidiary that's either public or jointly held with google. That subsidiary will then be singularly responsible for the lions share of the global launch market. It'll generate billions in business for SpaceX without compromising the private ownership that allows Musk to pursue Mars.
Re: That's a lot of satellites (Score:2)
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If they can reduce costs sufficiently and get some additional uses out of the rockets that have flown multiple times, then this could be a brilliant way to create value while further demonstrating how many times their rockets can fly.
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They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
Musk specifically mentioned rural US, but they could probably service other countries too, like nearby Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, maybe Central America.
And once the satellites are in orbit, why couldn't they offer the service to the entire world (similar to how GPS is world-wide)? Seems like 7.5 billion potential customers could probably make that economy of scale work. Maybe my understanding of communication satellites is flawed?
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> Still, with a fleet of 4K satellites and 5- to 7-year lifespans, they will need to replace hundreds of satellites annually. They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
They're pretty small satellites (I don't remember the exact dimensions, but it was something vaguely like a cubic meter), so they're going to be putting quite a few of them on each rocket. If they replace 600 a year, that could potentially be doable with nothing more than monthly launches using maybe 3-4 new rockets a year
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Almost certainly you'll need a special transceiver to communicate with the satellites - low power wireless communications at a distance of 60+ miles is not so simple. That's why DirectTV, etc come with those parabolic pizza-pan dishes to focus the signal onto the antenna. Without that large, bidirectional signal "amplifier" you'll need considerably more sophisticated electronics, assuming the signal can be detected over the background noise at all.
Though... satellite phones are getting increasingly compact
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Of course you could always just snip the antenna if you wanted to be off the grid - though I wouldn't put it past manufacturers to require working connection even for things that have no non-surveillance need for it.
Like Tesla?
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Do Teslas actually *require* a working link? I would think that would be a major problem for a whole lot of people who don't get a good signal in their garage, not to mention anyone who parks in an underground parking garage.
Though I suppose a looser "need a link at least every N miles" requirement would be more workable.
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Indeed. It's a phased-array antenna. It'll look like a flat sheet of individual printed mini-antennas. Switching satellites will be basically instant. With phased array you can even allocate varying fractions of a single dish to multiple satellites at once.
And as was noted, latency will be low, as this is a LEO constellation, not GEO. LEO isn't actually very high up. In many cases latency will be lower than with ground networks - fewer hops, no getting routed through particularly out-of-the-way location
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SpaceX doesn't want to become an ISP. In China they would just sell their service to local ISPs to replace cables with satellite links. Think airplanes against railways. You can sell airplanes without having to run them and it's still cheaper for the customer than putting tracks down to every town.
It's actually a quite good idea and the fact that many people out there don't understand it doesn't matter because they won't have to buy it anyway (others will buy it and resell the service to them in much easier
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And as was noted, latency will be low, as this is a LEO constellation, not GEO. LEO isn't actually very high up. In many cases latency will be lower than with ground networks - fewer hops, no getting routed through particularly out-of-the-way locations, etc.
Yes and no. While the first couple of hops are quite straightforward, most of the Internet, and especially all the big server farms, is still connected to the major fiber backbones, and therefore still subject to the vagaries of whatever whacky peering agreements the MBAs can dream up. No longer being subjected to the wankeries of routing Comcast indulges in will certainly help, but the other end isn't exactly pristine.
If they succeed, the revenue potential is almost unthinkably large - they could become the entire planet's ISP.
Also yes and no. Sure they potentially have a global reach, but securing spectrum lice
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We're not talking about server farms, we're talking about connections for every home and
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> Yes and no. While the first couple of hops are quite straightforward, most of the Internet, and especially all the big server farms, is still connected to the major fiber backbones, and therefore still subject to the vagaries of whatever whacky peering agreements the MBAs can dream up. No longer being subjected to the wankeries of routing Comcast indulges in will certainly help, but the other end isn't exactly pristine.
SpaceX intends to do as much of the backhaul in space as possible, meaning they can
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I'm still hoping that eventually all cellphones will be able to do sattelite communication in an emergency but it doesn't appear that anyone is interested in it.
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I don't think 25-50 ms rtt is bad either.
But I don't think it will actually be 25-50 ms rtt.
That said, where does the 25-50ms range come from?
Re:That's a lot of satellites (Score:5, Interesting)
Satellites in geostationary orbit are about 500-600 ms, with most of that time being due to the bounce out to orbit and back.
Since these satellites are 1/30 of the distance (~1200 km vs ~35000 km), the ping time should drop significantly.
Light traveling in a vacuum (or through the atmosphere) is noticeably faster than light in a fiber optic cable. And sat-to-sat links are straight lines, whereas fiber gets laid wherever there are rights of ways---so the satellite mesh may offer superior latency for some routes.
All things considered, this really sounds doable. Replacing hundreds of satellites every year would have been an inconceivably expensive cost just a few years ago. But with cheaper launches, smaller satellites, and a potential global market... I would say that this approach makes more sense today than geostationary satellites. As long as there is enough demand to keep lifting new hardware.
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And the big thing for SpaceX, is that by ensuring a continuous market for large numbers of launches, they can ensure economies of scale for launches as well. Which gets launch costs even lower.
I couldn't possibly wish them more luck in succeeding with this project.
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And the big thing for SpaceX, is that by ensuring a continuous market for large numbers of launches, they can ensure economies of scale for launches as well. Which gets launch costs even lower.
There's a hidden benefit as well. Tesla cars currently have cellular antennas and Tesla has to pay cell phone companies to enable the over-the-air updates so highly touted for their vehicles. Once the SpaceX constellation is in orbit, Tesla vehicles can start using it instead (with a service call for existing vehicles and a hardware revision for new ones), and Elon Musk's two biggest companies become very cozy. Either the Tesla company gets a really great price break on vehicle connectivity, or SpaceX st
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I also wouldn't put it past him to be planning to refuel the satellites in orbit - it would be a wonderful, highly scalable testing ground for autonomous orbital refueling systems, a potentially incredibly lucrative market when you consider that station-keeping fuel is usually the limiting factor on a satellite's useful life. Especially since he would be his own first, and probably largest, customer. And, from there he might even be considering using the refueling craft as a "tugboat" to haul satellites b
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Refueling the satellites doesn't make sense, since their 5-7 year lifespan is based on technological obsolescence rather than the limitations of the fuel supply for their electric propulsion. They're planning to de-orbit a few hundred satellites a year and replace them with newer and faster ones. Refurbishment doesn't make sense either, as the cost of the satellites is likely to be pretty small in comparison to the cost of launch.
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When I was using Anik F2 for internet years ago my average ping was about 570ms The ADSL2+ line at work now averages somewhere around 40ms.
As for demand what kind of caps are going to be on this new service? Is it finally going to be something decent like 1TB?
If It offers a decent speed say 50Mbps with a 1TB or higher cap and would still work even if it's raining here or in new york i'd even switch from the LTE connection I have now.
Re:That's a lot of satellites (Score:4, Informative)
SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms, similar to the latencies measured for wired Internet services. Current satellite ISPs have latencies of 600ms or more, according to FCC measurements [fcc.gov].
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In practice it could also suck badly. Have to wait and see. Price is important too.
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Not really, 25-35ms round trip. Not super amazing, but not all that bad. Remember, these are LEO satellites, not GEO. The round trip distance will be roughly 1/30th that of a geostationary satellite.
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So while direct fiber on the ground is still going to be the best possible case, this migh
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*See RFC 1193 i
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Even if you could lay fiber in a "straight" (great circle) line, London to Singapore is still ~11,000 km as the crow flies. That's too far to have a line of sight between overhead satellites - they'd need to be about 3,300km up for that, but assuming the relayed signal roughly follows a great circle, you're talking about a relayed satelite signal distance of roughly 1,200km*2 + 11,000km*((1.2+6.4)/6.4) = 15,500km. Factor in the fiber signal speed being only 2/3 that of a free space signal, and a "top prio
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The problem with fiber is the fiber companies who lease space on their trunks, and your local ISP who is a fucking cheapskate and tries to stick 400% capacity on the inadequate space they've leased. But since they're a monopoly, what the fuck are you going to do about it? So you never see fiber speed even though you pay fiber speed.
Hopefully this will shake things up a little more. Or maybe the US will adopt another 3rd world policy and ban satellite internet use except through the state approved and owne
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And a lot of latency.
Nope. The satellites will be at an altitude of only 1,100 km; not a geostationary orbit of 35,786 km. That's only 3% latency of typical GEO satellite internet.
On top of that, the links between satellites in the mesh will run faster in the vacuum of space than through glass fiber in underwater cables.
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The much lower orbits are a good point, I hadn't thought of that.
That makes the 25-50ms figure a good deal less implausible -- but I'll believe it when I see it. There's all sorts of other potential delays - and also greater distances to span compared with surface cables.
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The distances are unlikely to be significantly greater. You'll be higher up, but the links at a higher level are going to be straight lines, and not fibers that follow rights of way and the curvature of the earth. Then consider that light is about 50% faster in a vacuum.
For long distance intercontinental routes it's entirely possible that this will be faster end-to-end.
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Between nearby locations that will indeed be an issue - you've got an extra ~2,400 km vertical component, and about 19% greater "horizontal" distance than a perfectly straight (great circle) point-to-point surface cable. But light speed is also a lot faster through air/vacuum - fiber is supposedly about 2/3 the speed, and copper is... well, laughable in comparison, really. So, assuming you've got a perfectly straight fiber link the break-even point for lag is about 1/4 of the way around the planet, ignori
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Of course ground stations are only relevant when communicating with someone not also connecting via MuskNet...
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Maybe so. But the iridium network contains only 66 satellites, with extremely limited and long-range inter-satellite communications. Musk is proposing something very different, it would be foolish to make any assumptions about similarities between the two.
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Well you probably don't want to do high end gaming on it, but my ping to /. via fiber from Norway is a stable 133 ms. GEO = 2 * 120 ms latency at lightspeed + overhead, SpaceX's orbits about 2 x 4 ms + overhead and they're aiming for 25-35 ms actual. Even if they have to bounce if off another satellite or two it should cut latency by 200+ ms compared to current satellite offerings. Basically it'd make them quite ordinary users for anything but twitch games.
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And I'm not personally real thrilled with more garbage being put up there for something completely unnecessary.
clearly you've never lived in a mountain community that has to rely on satellite communications.
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Maybe not hard, but expensive. And I'm not personally real thrilled with more garbage being put up there for something completely unnecessary. I look forward when one fails causing two of them hit and creating a cascade effect blocking us from launching anything at all for several decades while we wait for it to all fall out of orbit.
That would require two satellites to fail, in exactly the wrong way. Otherwise, you could simply move the second one until the failed satellite's orbit decays and it burns up.
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Maybe not hard, but expensive. And I'm not personally real thrilled with more garbage being put up there for something completely unnecessary. I look forward when one fails causing two of them hit and creating a cascade effect blocking us from launching anything at all for several decades while we wait for it to all fall out of orbit.
Don't worry. Anything that gets bumped or fails at an orbit of 1200 km will fall back to Earth in short order. There is significant drag in LEO.
You are thinking about space junk at GEO or a LaGrange point. Those places are very far away, and far less populated due to the exponentially increased cost of getting something there. 30x high doesn't mean 30x more expensive for a launch-to-orbit. It's far higher because you have to bring all of your fuel with you. There's a standard equation, but I forget th
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1200 km is not really Low Earth Orbit anymore. There is very little drag there, this is stable for hundreds or thousands of years.
SpaceX wants to lower the orbit of satellites that are near the end of their service life, so that they decay within a year or so, but failing satellites will stay up there for a very long time. With such huge numbers of satellites they WILL have duds and they WILL have to care for this one way or another.
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LEO is 0 to 2000 kilometers, beyond which it's MEO. You're right that these things won't be de-orbiting due to drag, although it's not like failed satellites won't be in a predictable location. If it does become a problem, they could always work on a vehicle for doing cleanup.
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Cascading reactions are unlikely to be a major issue - even with 4000+ satellites we're talking about maybe car-sized objects separated by hundreds of miles, and it's all but impossible for a satellite to "accidentally" move any significant distance in it's orbit without *lots* of warning. Station-keeping thrusters typically amount to pushing a car around with a bottle rocket. You'll have days of warning before it drifts anywhere near you, plenty of time to fire your own bottle-rocket in response to push
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If I had a dollar for every one of these hairbrained schemes (with round-trip times larger than your mother) I'd be as rich as Elon
Almost as dumb as those hairbrained reusable launch vehicle schemes.
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If they were all several hundred miles apart, as the satellites will be, I doubt there would be any problems. Despite the fact that the rockets are all accelerating powerfully, while the satellites all sit basically "stationary" in their orbits.
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In their orbits, they pretty much are. The orbit is inherently rotating at umpteen miles per minute, but everything in that orbit is keeping pace. Put a hundred satellites in the same orbit, and they will all remain stationary with respect to each other, just as rocks embedded in the treads of a tire remain stationary with respect to each other, despite the wheel spinning at a substantial speed. Satellites are a bit more mobile in their orbits than those rocks in the treads, but only a bit - like ants wa
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Well at least he still has hair to generate these ideas with. ...
Jeff Bezos on the other hand
Elon has (very convincing) hairplugs. Here's a photo of him & Peter Thiel in their PayPal days
https://ibb.co/fWYfY5 [ibb.co]
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> Re-syncing to the next sat as it comes into view is expensive. Handoff is non-trivial, and if you miss the handoff or the next sat doesn't want to talk to you because it is already saturated, bye-bye connection.
The benefit of having 4,000+ satellites is that even with LEO there are going to be a whole bunch of satellites in view at any given time, meaning you've got a ton of time to do the handoff.
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Quick... tell Elon that his scheme won't work!
Yeah right. This is the same guy that decided that tunneling under Los Angeles is the solution to their traffic problem. He cares not for the voices of reason. That seems to work for him.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It would be nice having so much money to not have to consider if something is practical to do.
Does he remind anyone else of cave johnson?
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SpaceX wants to use phased array antennas (so no moving parts) and while these ARE expensive I guess this will change quickly as soon as you start to build them in the millions... They're actually quite suitable for cheap mass production.
And this is NOT necessarily about individual users to buy their own satellite link. It is mainly meant to replace running cables all over the place. Supplying an LTE tower with data is a much more likely scenario for that than you putting such a beast on your roof. And for
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You would be surprised, it's not like when the term "Phase array" was classified, as when the Patriot System [wikipedia.org] system was called SAM-D. We've got integrated circuits running in excess of 3Ghz that do the heavy lifting now. Things get expensive when you're doing Aegis Combat System [wikipedia.org] class phase array tracking to aim your brand new rail guns, but we're talking satellites here.
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Yer bot is getting closer but still not quite right.
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Yer bot is getting closer but still not quite right.
It's a little bit alarming, but bots now pass the Turing Test online, as long as we stipulate that they only have to be indistinguishable from a dumb human.
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Yes it is.
It seems almost coherent but it doesn't flow nor keep in line with its original subject but it was off to a good start I was going to ask about the 10mbps with dialup return until I read the rest of the comment.
For starters I looked in 2005 such a service did not exist for those speeds also afaik you can't run a 10Mbps stream with only 48kbps upload. Maybe with a custom UDP service but not standard web TCP.
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I have a total of $170/mo I can dedicate to home internet where does that rank on the desperate scale considering I can get no wired options for that?
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A month?!
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Seriously, I wouldn't pay more than 3 billion a month for this.
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Why? To enforce cable monopolies?
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Wrong.
In the US, the FCC has mandated that home owners associations & landlords *must* allow dishes. I have fought an HOA, and won.
Summary: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/... [fcc.gov]
More to the point, why do you assume that you will even need a dish? The GPS in your phone is currently receiving signals from space. Existing Iridium cell phones have no dish. It's a fair guess that the Elon network would have at least as good technology.
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Phased array: the receiver will look a lot like a pizza box. You'll want to put it on the roof, and people living in an urban core with good broadband options are not going to be the target customers. People living in more rural areas are, both because the customer density is going to be something the satellites can manage, and because they're likely stuck with pretty slow service to begin with.
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Providing internet access truly a way we move the entire world into the 21st century.
Not as much as you would think, some get dragged forward, most get dragged back. It's kind of an averaging thing.