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Communications The Internet

SpaceX Wins FCC Approval To Deploy 7,518 Satellites (bloomberg.com) 114

Posted by msmash from the up,-up,-and-away dept.
SpaceX won permission to deploy more than 7,000 satellites, far more than all operating spacecraft currently aloft, from U.S. regulators who also moved to reduce a growing risk from space debris as skies grow more crowded. From a report: Space Exploration Technologies has two test satellites aloft, and it earlier won permission for a separate set of 4,425 satellites -- which like the 7,518 satellites authorized Thursday are designed to provide broadband communications. It has said it plans to begin launches next year. Space companies riding innovations that include smaller and cheaper satellites -- with some just 4 inches long and weighing only 3 pounds -- are planning fleets that will fly fast and low, offering communications now commonly handled by larger, more expensive satellites. Right now there are fewer than 2,000 operating satellites, and the planned additional space traffic demands vigilance, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said before the agency voted Thursday on a variety of space-related matters including SpaceX's application, debris rules, and other space matters.
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SpaceX Wins FCC Approval To Deploy 7,518 Satellites More

SpaceX Wins FCC Approval To Deploy 7,518 Satellites

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  • ...Nobody in the FCC will face any consequences if it all goes horribly wrong, so where is their motivation to not let it go horribly wrong? And how do they propose to fix things when (not if) it does?

    • Re:The thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday November 15, 2018 @02:26PM (#57650136) Homepage

      It's all about probabilities. The satellites all have to have a mechanism to deorbit them at end-of-life. So if you can get some given estimate of reliability out of the satellites remaining operational through deorbit and the deorbit function working, you can estimate the number of failures you will have, and model the significance of these failures (including how errors in your reliability estimates might affect the outcomes).

      Smaller satellites means less potential for debris in the case of a collision, and faster natural deorbit times. For a satellite, the crosssection of thermosphere/exosphere that they pass through is proportional to their radius squared, but their mass is proportional to their radius cubed, so the smaller you make a satellite, the quicker it tends to reenter. Just the fact that we're talking LEO satellites makes any failure modes less significant; GEO failures are more problematic, as the debris persists for much longer, orbits are much more shared, and it's much harder to track GEO debris.

      The most recent 7518 satellites are going to be particularly short-lived without reboost, orbiting at only 340km. That's quite close; they're going to need very frequent reboosts. Without reboosts I'd expect them to reenter after only 1-3 months. Remember that ISS (~330km) needs reboosts several times per year, and that's obviously a far higher kg/m^2 object than a Starlink satellite.

      • obviously a far higher kg/m^2 object than a Starlink satellite.

        Not obvious at all. The ISS has very large solar arrays and radiators, plus a lot of habitable volume (i.e. filled with nothing but air). I expect most satellites to have a higher kg/m^2 value.

    • The FCC would only approve their frequency use plan of 7000 satellites, and not 7000 satellites per se as clutter. That would be something else.

    • Nobody in the FCC will face any consequences if it all goes horribly wrong, so where is their motivation to not let it go horribly wrong? And how do they propose to fix things when (not if) it does?

      The only thing that can go horribly wrong is SpaceX somehow leaves a fundamental design flaw in their satellites and they don't work and all have to be deorbited early. This lower constellation of satellites will orbit at 340 kilometers altitude. That's an orbital sphere of 1.45 x 10^6 square kilometers. That's a satellite every 193 square kilometers, and these are low-weight satellites, under 500 kg each, much much smaller than Hubble or most geosynchronous satellites. If you were sitting on one of the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        The other way they can fail is when they fly over competitor nation countries without their approval and the decide to deorbit the craft with directed energy weapons. Unfortunately in the current diplomatic climate, this is all too likely to happen. Honestly tall towers make the most sense, connected by fibre optics, simple, readily updated and way cheaper and really secure. Nothing beats fibre optic cable for cost, durability and data through put, hook up some tall and not so tall towers for wireless and y

  • Sure (Score:3)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Thursday November 15, 2018 @02:16PM (#57650042) Journal

    It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.

    • It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.

      You have a better idea? One that actually could be accomplished?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jahoda ( 2715225 )
      Geosynchronous orbit is ~35780 km. Calculating the surface area of a sphere with that radius (using google), gives me a surface area of 1.61 * 10^10 square kilometers. How "finite" do you think the available "room" in such an orbit is?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        What do Geo orbits have to do with the topic at hand?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Jahoda ( 2715225 )
          I assume these will be in a geosynchronous orbit, but I know nothing about the topic at hand. Frankly whether it's LEO or Geo, it really doesn't change the numbers that much. It's an enormous amount of available space, and so we certainly don't need to be "the sky is falling" about 7,000 satellites.

          • You must be new here "the sky is falling" is slashdots favorite past time..

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )

            I assume

            Well there's your problem. Stop doing that. You're probably not very good at it.

          • You assume wrong and you are also wrong about available space, there might be infinite space up there, but that doesn't mean you can put infinite amount of comsats up there and have them all functioning. The limit is something you haven't thought about and it's a pretty tight limit, try to assume less and think more.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            Also your math was wrong as well. Altitude isn't measured from the core of the planet, it's from sea level.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        GEO is effectively two dimensional. Everything passes through the equator, so you can't have two sats at the same longitude.

      • Pretty limited actually. Not because you mechanically couldn't fit more stuff in there, but because radios start interfering with each other, satellite dishes only have so much angular resolution and there is only so much bandwidth to share.

    • Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)

      by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Thursday November 15, 2018 @02:31PM (#57650176)

      It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.

      Actually, the FCC is simply approving the frequencies the satellites use while over US territory. They don't care about how many satellites or what orbits these satellites use. They will require additional approvals from the governments from other countries to operate over their territory.

      This is basically a green light for frequency coordination, that Space X has the right to transmit from space on a set of frequencies, while flying over the USA.

    • It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.

      That's not even what they're approving. The US FCC is approving SpaceX's use of the radio spectrum by their satellites. The actual physical use of the orbital slots are very much secondary. Until the SpaceX constellation, that part was pretty much pro forma. This is the first time when paying attention to the paragraph about deorbit plans actually matters.

      Incidentally, SpaceX will have to get approval from every country's FCC-equivalent if they want to provide service there.

    • It's not so much the permission to be in space, as much as it is to handle all of the elements involved with getting up there. The means fuel, contracts with companies that want you to put stuff in space for them, etc...

  • Broadband for all (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mirthful1 ( 5068349 ) on Thursday November 15, 2018 @02:29PM (#57650158)
    This Starlink super-constellation has a real opportunity to disrupt the current broadband market in the US in a big way; not to mention the world. Broadband _anywhere_; at sea, in the air, rural areas, extreme areas... put up your antenna and you're good to go. Excited to see what the bandwidth and pricing look like. I hear "5g like speed" and "inexpensive". But we'll s ee. Also, I wonder if this project (and others with similar goals) explain some of the incredible slow-walking of rural broadband initiatives. Perhaps it's one of those "Why spend millions digging trenches and laying wire to get folks onboard when this kind of thing is just around the corner". Sucks to be in a rural area with maybe just shoddy DSL... but maybe the worm has turned here.
    • I agree. The rural (or even just semi-rural exurb) broadband market in the US is miserable. For pretty reasonable reasons. It costs a fortune to serve a small number of people on that back side of some hill or valley via fiber. This could really make a difference.
      • But does it fundamentally cost a fortune? Seems like the road to drive there would cost a lot more. I'm thinking that basic cost is not the issue.
        • I honestly never got the economics of why rural areas were so hard to light up. They are there, for sure. And it sucks to be stuck in one of these areas (unless you're a motivated geek, haha). I hope rural areas finally get that last bit of the country with HSB. Been a LONG wait for many.

        • But does it fundamentally cost a fortune?

          We're talking about, say, a 50-mile road with farm entrances every couple of miles, and each of them with a mile+ driveway to their house. Stringing up fiber under those circumstances is tens of thousands of dollars per home. Nothing the home owner will ever pay for the use of that service will come close to paying for the cost of provisioning (let alone maintaining) it.

    • Leave it to Musk to finally bring about Teledesic. Best part? No fucking Gates.

  • Current number of ALL satellites in orbit is (Score:5, Informative)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Thursday November 15, 2018 @02:33PM (#57650200) Homepage

    Current number of ALL satellites in orbit is 4857, BTW, and the number of _working_ ones is less than half of that.
    Just so you know the scale of what they're trying to do here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ganv ( 881057 )
      Yes, this is a huge increase in the number of satellites. There are about 500,000 pieces of space debris being tracked (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html). The key question though is about the lifetime of the orbits the satellites are being placed in. There is little problem with putting lots of small tracked craft in very low orbits with less than 50 year time to natural de-orbit. Space is big, the satellites can be tracked, and small craft that burn up on re-entry po

  • Elon Musk's mom (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    she so fat, 7518 smaller fat women orbit around her.

  • I think this might mark the beginning of the end of humanity sending signals out into space indiscriminately, at least at the scale we do now. I'm talking primarily about high-frequency radio, television, and radar to a lesser extent. When people ask why we don't hear from other civilizations, ours may be an example. Our own signals started around 1939 and could potentially be dramatically reduced (though probably never completely) by 2039, so just 100 short years.

    If someone comes along and sells relatively

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Socguy ( 933973 )
      Na, by the time any signals reach hostile aliens and those aliens can mount any kind of armed invasion a few thousand years will have passed.

  • Anyone who is launching over 100 satellites should have a plan for how to remove existing space junk from orbit. When those 7000+ satellites stop working, they're going to be in the way of newer satellites.

  • 3 wishes (Score:4, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:19PM (#57651360)

    Elon Musk drove with his golden Tesla to the sea to do some diving.
    He donned his golden air bottle and his golden diving mask and went for a dive.
    In the deep waters he detected a bottle with a golden cap. He took it and swam back to land.

    After opening the bottle a genie appeared. 'Thanks a lot for rescuing me, I was down there for centuries!'
    Musk replied: 'Glad to help' and began preparing to dive again.

    The genie said: 'What about the 3 wishes?'
    Musk sighed and asked.'What do you need?'

  • With the BFR it would just take one launch.

  • The amazing thing is that FCC Director Pai didn't bow to his big telco masters and deny SpaceX the permit. They must be behind in their payments.

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