A Promising Internet Satellite Is Rendered Useless By Power Supply Issues (arstechnica.com) 37
Astranis, a geostationary communications satellite operator, successfully deployed its "Arcturus" satellite from a Falcon Heavy rocket in May to provide internet connectivity from geostationary space. However, the satellite experienced an unexpected issue with a supplier's component on the solar array drive assembly, affecting its ability to maintain continuous power. Ars Technica reports: "The Astranis engineering team has been doing an incredible job working around the clock to troubleshoot the issue," [Astranis co-founder John Gedmark] said. "We have now reproduced the problem on the ground in a vacuum chamber, zeroed in on the exact source of the failure, and know how to fix it for future spacecraft. Because this failure occurred within the internal workings of a component supplied by an external vendor, we're not in a position to go into the full technical details." The disappointment in Gedmark's update is palpable. "This is a frustrating situation -- the Arcturus spacecraft is in a safe state and fully under our control, the payload and our other Astranis in-house designed components are all working perfectly, and the tanks are fueled for years of on-orbit operation," he said. "But unless something major changes, the mission of providing Internet connectivity in Alaska will be delayed."
Astranis was founded in 2015 to determine whether microsatellites built largely in-house could deliver high-speed Internet from geostationary space at a low price. The launch of Arcturus marked the first demonstration that Astranis' small satellite technology worked in space and could survive the harsh radiation and thermal environment previously dominated by much larger satellites that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Given that this was an effort to test this technology on a shoestring budget, it is perhaps not surprising that the satellite ultimately failed due to some unforeseen problem. The real acid test for Astranis, now, is to ensure that it learns from this failure and that the company's second satellite works in space.
In his update, Gedmark said the company understands how to quickly solve this issue on future spacecraft that are in production. The company is also working toward a solution to provide Internet service in Alaska, via Pacific Dataport, as initially planned with Arcturus. The backup plan, he said, "involves a special, multipurpose satellite that can operate as an on-orbit spare and bridge us to a full replacement satellite. We call this satellite UtilitySat. It can operate anywhere in the world, on multiple frequency bands, with the flexibility of a software-defined satellite. UtilitySat has been in the works for over a year, is in the final stages of integration, and is manifested on our very next launch that will take place at the end of this year."
Astranis was founded in 2015 to determine whether microsatellites built largely in-house could deliver high-speed Internet from geostationary space at a low price. The launch of Arcturus marked the first demonstration that Astranis' small satellite technology worked in space and could survive the harsh radiation and thermal environment previously dominated by much larger satellites that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Given that this was an effort to test this technology on a shoestring budget, it is perhaps not surprising that the satellite ultimately failed due to some unforeseen problem. The real acid test for Astranis, now, is to ensure that it learns from this failure and that the company's second satellite works in space.
In his update, Gedmark said the company understands how to quickly solve this issue on future spacecraft that are in production. The company is also working toward a solution to provide Internet service in Alaska, via Pacific Dataport, as initially planned with Arcturus. The backup plan, he said, "involves a special, multipurpose satellite that can operate as an on-orbit spare and bridge us to a full replacement satellite. We call this satellite UtilitySat. It can operate anywhere in the world, on multiple frequency bands, with the flexibility of a software-defined satellite. UtilitySat has been in the works for over a year, is in the final stages of integration, and is manifested on our very next launch that will take place at the end of this year."
Oh FFS ! (Score:4, Interesting)
I get it "We have always been at war with Eastasia!"
But does EVERY story have to be accompanied by posts railing against China?
I know that they are the bogeyman du jour in the US (and Russia is not mentioned so much nowadays) but mindless repeating of the party line doesn not provide good optics for the so-called land of the free.
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clearly more than Putinesque Russia is paying you.
You can defect any time, bro.
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I'll see you the Biden Crime Family and raise you the Former Alleged President Crime Family. He is Putin's bitch. Kushner and his wife are now appendages of Saudi Arabia. Even priceless artifacts from Israel on loan for a Hanukkah celebration at the White House when this degenerate family was there mysteriously found their way to Mar-A-Lago. Gee, how did THAT happen?
Then there is his constant fund raising for court costs after getting his tail caught in a crack by stupidly trying to steal an election and th
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It's West East Asia
"external vendor" (Score:1)
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Bet it was Gigabyte:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/... [theverge.com]
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And that's fundamentally the problem with trying to go low-cost. Incorrect assumptions, by anyone in the supply-chain from as early as the original foundries producing raw materials through the final integrator/prime contractor leave the possibility of failure of the mission because one tiny thing did not behave as it needed to.
Their describing the confirmation of failure when ground-testing in a vacuum chamber does lead to speculation that the problem is a result of the vendor-supplied equipment trying to
Geostationary? Internet? (Score:1)
What am I missing? Geostationary is 22,500 miles high, it takes some considerable time for signals to get up there and get back, and your ping on your Call of Duty game is going to be huge if your signal goes thru that sat. Not something you can charge someone premium bucks to provide their internet for. Is there a class of internet service that just says, "It can get there when it gets there, we're not in a hurry?"
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Tell that to about every other satellite internet provider except Starlink and they will tell you the amount of money they rake in. Satellite internet is/used to be outrageously expensive and slow as molasses running through an Alaskan town in winter. And with horrendous latency to boot. It's meant to be reliable and available at 'impossible' locations and is mostly based on high-altitude satellites because you don't need a metric shit-tonne of 'em. The Musk company is the exception, not the norm.
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Tell that to about every other satellite internet provider except Starlink...The Musk company is the exception, not the norm.
It's funny...because I read this in the same vein as every other gun vendor who got insanely critical of that Austrian plastic gun maker that came onto the scene a couple decades ago.
Then that "exception" to the gun industry, became the standard. Now everyone makes the same product.
Re:Geostationary? Internet? (Score:4, Informative)
I'd say that most of "the internet" can be used with higher latencies. Reading and posting here in Slashdot could be done with high latencies. The same is true for most social media. You can watch your video on demand with high latencies. You can download your games with high latencies.
Its mostly just real time applications that like low and consistent latency, which includes VoIP, live video streams, multiplayer for real time video games (doesn't affect turn based that much or much slower paced games).
Sure, the people who push that kind of cloud gaming racket won't like something like this. But for many other services it's fine if they offer high transfer rates at the expense of higher latencies.
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Virtually any kind of service works well with high transfer rates. Some of them don't work well with low transfer rates.
Virtually any kind of service works well with both low latencies and high transfer rates. Some of them don't work well if either one or both of those conditions are not met.
Having a criteria for "only high latencies" is a spurious criteria within that context. There's no such
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So, the question remains, are there enough places that don't care about latency to subscribe to the high-latency service to pay for a geo sat. Anyone who SOMETIMES needs low latency isn't going to be happy with a geo sat. How many folks WILL be happy with a geo sat? Enough to make it make money? I expect so, as I expect those putting the satellite up there know what they're doing, and have determined that there are a horde of people that don't give a F about latency and will pay for their geo sat ser
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This is of interest to basically any place where you can't get a better service for a better price, likely because none of the other ISPs bothered to expand their infrastructure into those areas for reasons like lack of profitability.
Geostationary satellites come with that one advantage that they can cover a huge area and of course with the big disadvantage that everyone within that cell (larger than single continents) has to share the bandwidth. The main competitor there w
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I believe the colloquialism is, "half a chicken is better than no chicken."
If high-latency, lackluster bandwidth Internet in Rural Alaska is expensive right now then a lot of people are either paying more than they would like because the must have Internet connectivity, or they don't have Internet connectivity because it's too expensive. If a lower-cost option were to become available, then both existing customers who wish to pay less would switch to it, and new customers who couldn't justify the costs bef
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Yeah, that's a niche where such a service could slot into, despite being sub-optimal for some kind of universal use. I can't say for how much they'd be offering their services, but I would guess that they'd have to come up with competitive prices, which may still not be great, but better than what's available right now. If it's an overall improvement relative to the needs of the people of cour
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The geostationary satellite services work well because the satellite terminals spoof the latency. In the real world this doesn't affect anyone significantly except for VPN users and players of online games.
Anyone who says satellite internet is "slow" has obviously never used it. Anyone who says satellite internet has "high latency" knows exactly what they're talking about and also how it's dealt with and, while it's not great, it's not terrible.
Satellite internet performance is a solved problem.
Starlink a
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What am I missing?
Meaningful and relevant personal experience. But you thought you'd go ahead and post anyway.
Geostationary is 22,500 miles high, it takes some considerable time for signals to get up there and get back, and your ping on your Call of Duty game is going to be huge if your signal goes thru that sat. Not something you can charge someone premium bucks to provide their internet for.
1) Their stated mission was to provide low-cost service.
2) Lots of people have long paid premium bucks for geo satellite internet, at least for what they're getting... because it's the only thing around. Before Starlink existed, and when I lived in the sticks, I paid $80/mo to get 5 Mbps down (maybe) and 1 Mbps up (also maybe) from Exede, which is from Viacom and carried on ye olde Viasat. Real-world RTT was around 7
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Exede, which is from Viacom
Really? I'm pretty sure you meant that Exede is from "Viasat."
It's the same company who also brought us WildBlue.
Translation (Score:3)
Sounds like the software industry:
unforeseen problem == a bug
shoestring budget == cut corners on QA
Bugs are cheaper to fix if theyâ(TM)re caught early. When youâ(TM)re putting something in to space, can you really afford to have them discovered after release?
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Unless you're willing to do it the 'rapid development' and 'blow up often' style... How much (increasingly expensive) problem seeking do you do vs. finding the problems in situ 'once' and then make sure you have fixed them in the next iteration? Both ways cost money. NASA or. SpaceX?
The big question is: did they foresee the possibility of some scraps to find the problems and have the money for it? Else their business model is flawed and that can lead to much more unpleasant consequences from grumpy investor
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The only entities that are going to certify their equipment for space operations are going to charge huge amounts of money because they've gone through the process of testing their equipment for space operations.
It sounds like this company bought off-the-shelf parts that had not been tested for this sort of application, and then discovered the hard way that the selected components have certain limitations. If the only major change was the switch from operation in atmosphere to operation in a vacuum, I'm ex
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> "The Astranis engineering team has been doing an incredible job working around the clock to troubleshoot the issue," [Astranis co-founder John Gedmark] said. "We have now reproduced the problem on the ground in a vacuum chamber, zeroed in on the exact source of the failure, and know how to fix it for future spacecraft.
I suspect that this is not about lack of testing but of testing with the wrong parameters, maybe about testing components and not assemblies. The summary says that this thing launched on
Bad luck (Score:1)
Insurance industry is also reeling from ViaSat-3 (Score:2)
The insurance industry is also reeling from the this month's ViaSat-3 failure [gizmodo.com], which will result in a >$420M payout.
Have we hit critical mass in the costs of insuring space payloads?
Shame to hear (Score:1)