12 ms·

FCC approves SpaceX plan for satellite broadband network

347 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

eddieh 9y ago
So there are ~1,459 artificial satellites orbiting the Earth right now. Am I the only one that thinks adding 4,425 is a bit much? Certainly there is a way to do this with less space junk?
- stcredzero 9y ago
  If 4,425 low orbit satellites which are responsibly recovered can subsume the function of some large chunk of the ~1,459 currently existing, then this will actually substantively reduce the amount of space junk being introduced to Earth orbit. This is assuming that the launches and satellites create zero debris, which is in line with SpaceX's goal of total reusability. (Harder to reuse a vehicle that has things falling off of it.) Low orbit satellites will fall back to earth much sooner than ones in higher orbit. I would also expect SpaceX to responsibly de-orbit and scuttle their satellites, if for no other reason than to make their own lives easier.
- throwahey 9y ago
  Space is big, we won't be running into any issues with satellite collisions since they can be positioned in three-dimensions and there is a lot of space. Operational satellites are not considered space-junk since they typically have predictable or fixed orbits which can be avoided. Space junk is non-operational stuff, with potentially unpredictable orbits.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    so long as it has a sufficient radar cross section, the orbits of non-operational stuff can be predicted just fine. NORAD tracks the location of everything big enough to track, and makes it all available.
    - dingaling 9y ago
      > and makes it all available Well not 'all'; naturally the published elements omit objects related to 'national security' and objects which weren't announced as space vehicles e.g. debris. They are also published under a very restrictive license; I can't forward the elements to you, nor publish anything derived from them, such as predictions for a pass. End-user eyes only.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    All satellites will eventually be non-operational, so the question is: do they have a plan for picking up these 4500 pieces of future space junk once they are no longer in use?
    - coolspot 9y ago
      Low orbit junk quickly falls back onto earth if not supported by engines.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        "quickly" can still be several years, or more.
        Tuna-Fish 9y ago
        The industry standard is deorbit within 25 years after end of mission. The SpaceX proposal (1) plans for deorbiting of every satellite within one year after the end of their mission. (1) http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/report...
    - golergka 9y ago
      They're in LOE, so they just go into atmosphere and burn.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- TrainedMonkey 9y ago
  These satellites are in MEO (1150km) which is relatively sparsely trafficked. Here is a good visualization http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/ . If you zoom out MEO would be just above the dense sphere of space stuff in LEO. And if you think 4.5k is a lot wait until you hear about phase 2. Thankfully that is in close LEO and without constant propulsion things would deorbit in a matter of weeks. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satellite-broadband-internet-network.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satel...
  - maccam94 9y ago
    yeah, from what I've read they will have enough fuel to stay aloft for ~5 years. They won't be a source of permanent space debris.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      Isn't space debris more about collisions which spew out thousands of tiny bits which are hard to track and may have a ludicrous velocity relative to things they run into? AIUI, large objects a relatively easy to track and avoid if you have the gas and are on a collision course.
      - azernik 9y ago
        Every satellite floating around without maneuvering capabilities is one more chance for that existing tiny debris to hit something and cause a chain reaction.
      - maccam94 9y ago
        The worst kind of space debris sits in orbits outside of the atmosphere where there is negligible drag. Since these satellites will be in very low orbits that require propulsion to stay aloft, any potential debris from collisions or inoperable satellites will fall back to Earth relatively quickly. https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html
      - Kemschumam 9y ago
- topspin 9y ago
  > Am I the only one that thinks adding 4,425 is a bit much? Probably not; all such endeavours are met by fear. Allow me to further unnerve you; this is just the first phase. The complete system, should it ever be realized, will have more than 8,000 satellites. And that's just SpaceX. There are competitors planning to launch systems of similar scale. My wife called it the 'Cambrian explosion of space.' Effective, if not entirely correct, analogy.
  - ddoolin 9y ago
    The article mentions 12,000 total final satellites, but the other 8,000 operate at different altitudes/frequencies so they will need to be approved separately.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      The other 8000 are going to be orbiting so low that they'll have to constantly raise their orbit to avoid re-entry.
- martythemaniak 9y ago
  Maybe your sense of "much" is thrown off by not-to-scale visualizations. Space is big, even near-earth space is bigger than the entire surface Earth. These 1500 satellites are probably, on average, the size of a van. Is 1500 vans distributed on surface of the earth "much"? These SpaceX / Starlink satellites are considerably smaller - about the size of an oven or washing machine. What does it mean for 4500 ovens spread out over the surface of the earth to be "much"?
  - topspin 9y ago
    > These SpaceX / Starlink satellites are considerably smaller - about the size of an oven or washing machine. The dimensions that appear in the FCC application[1] are 4.0 x 1.8 x 1.2 meters. About size of a small passenger van actually. Doubtless that will not be the launch size, but they will have these dimensions while in operation. [1] http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=1159449 http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=1...
  - nkoren 9y ago
    Yes, space is, like, infinitely bigger than people imagine it to be. However your analogy is incomplete unless those 4500 ovens are wandering the surface of the Earth at mach 25.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Well, we do have thousands of airplane-sizes airplanes wandering the atmosphere at mach speeds. And we wouldn’t consider the airspace "full".
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        It's full enough that it requires continuous guidance and collision avoidance measures. And the majority of those planes are not going even close to as fast as satellites in LEO/MEO move.
        9y ago
- rtkwe 9y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "doing this." Having them in a lower orbit means smaller equipment required to connect, lower latency compared to connecting to satellites in GEO, and smaller lower power satellites. To get those benefits they have to be close which means more satellites for full coverage. Also it's not like even this particular orbit will be full when SpaceX is done at 1150 km orbit the 4425 satellites would each have a bit over 80,000 km^2 to themselves on average if they're spread out evenly.
- gizmo385 9y ago
  How are SpaceX going to monitor and maintain TT&C on 3x the number of satellites that are currently orbiting the planet? That seems like a bigger question in my mind.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  There's only ~1459 satellites in orbit and already someone wants to prevent more building. What's the reason for this? Preserve neighborhood character? too much noise? are you worried about the traffic? If you arbitrarily regulate everything before you even begin to innovate, you'll never know what inventions could have been created: that's why there hasn't been hardly any innovation in housing construction over the last 20 years.
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    In New Zealand, if you installed certain new fangled plastic plumbing a few decades ago, you house may now be unmortgagable for a new buyer because it's been silently spraying water inside your walls for years. 20 years ago there was also a rush of monolithic cladding, now many of those houses are silently rotting due to invisible leaks into the walls. Fun new construction does reduce costs but can ruin people many years later if it's too wild west.
    - nickik 9y ago
      For this to be a good argument you have to assume that the regulater understands all of these things and makes systematically better choices then the people who build the houses. Or it would require qualifing all materials before being uses. That would increase time before deployment massivly, making new devlopment less attractive. Economist talk about 'permissionless innovation' being incredible important for progress.
0x7f800000 9y ago
Fuck you, Comcast.
- neo4sure 9y ago
  While I disagree with your language I agree with the sentiment. :)
  - tomerico 9y ago
    Upvotes should not be about agreement, but whether you believe that this contributes to the discussion and something that you'd like to see more of.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
cvaidya1986 9y ago
This is awesome!
akshayB 9y ago
Who controls/regulates this piece of the internet? Because this is more like internet for the planet.
- TrainedMonkey 9y ago
  FCC gets the final say because SpaceX headquartered and launches from U.S. That said in theory SpaceX will have to comply with regulations of all of the countries where it wants to operate. Some of those countries undoubtedly will pass laws/regulations to protect domestic telco incumbents.
  - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
    Don't they still launch in international waters? EDIT/ Thank you for the correction, that's just landing. /EDIT Headquartered yes, but the barge ~~launches~~ landings keep making me think long term SPaceX will be looking at extra-territorial options.
    - vkou 9y ago
      It doesn't matter where they launch from, since their customers live on Earth. If they want to sell, they will have to be follow local laws.
    - Buttons840 9y ago
      Like Mars? ;)
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      They've never launched from international waters that's just where the core recovery happens.
    - nkoren 9y ago
      They don't launch from barges. They land on them.
    - azernik 9y ago
      It doesn't even matter where they launch from - the Outer Space Treaty is written in terms of who does something, not where they do it from (cf SeaLaunch, and the absolute lack of ambiguity about state regulatory jurisdiction for objects it launched. In fact, emerging consensus (because the Outer Space Treaty is vague on the subject) is that it doesn't even matter who is launching the object, just which country('s citizens) owns and operate the satellites. cf. the recent incident where some American satellites were launched unlicensed on an Indian PSLV, the US government got all huffy at the company, and the Indians agreed by default that the US had jurisdiction (by washing their hands of responsibility).
soperj 9y ago
The timeline, 2200 in the next 6 years is mind boggling.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  that's Musk favorite sport
  - berg01 9y ago
    Along with his habit of setting unreallistic and overly aggressive targets, let's not forget that he is also consistently late. So maybe by 2030 (2018+2*6) this plan will be executed. Let's hope so!
    - soperj 9y ago
      It's not a plan though. They won't be able to continue sending up satellites without meeting the target unless they get approval from the FCC.
      - Robotbeat 9y ago
        Dunno why you were downvoted. This isn't just some Muskian highly optimistic projection, it's a regulatory requirement by the FCC. If they don't launch half the constellation within 6 years, they risk losing their license.
- zamalek 9y ago
  That's 7 satellites per launch at the current SpaceX cadence.
  - soperj 9y ago
    Yes, but that would mean they're not launching anything else... the mind boggling part to me was that they're planning on over doubling the number of satellites in space in the span of 6 years.
athenot 9y ago
When I read satellites & internet, latency is the first thing that came to mind. But at the altitude the satellites (will) operate, that adds about 8ms delay (round trip for satellite immediately above, might be slightly worse). In contrast, the fastest round-trip to a geostationary sat is 233ms. That's a big improvement.
- erentz 9y ago
  It gets better. The speed of light in a fiber optic cable is about 2/3rds of C. The proposed system (from what I understand) essentially uses free space optics between the constellation of satellites as the backbone. Instead of regular satellite internet service which routes up to a satellite then down to a ground station then over a fiber optic backbone. SpaceX’s system will route traffic across the constellation of satellites then down directly to the remote end (or the closest egress point to whatever the remote end is if they aren’t on the network). This means although total distance travelled is longer, the speed it’s travelling at is 1/3rd faster. So overall this will become very interesting for latency sensitive long distance communications.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > the speed it’s travelling at is 1/3rd faster About 50% faster if the speed of light in fibre is 2c/3.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Just did some back of napkin math, and assuming you wanted to transmit information half way across the world with a fiber optic cable at sea level that goes exactly where you want it to, it would go 12566 miles (2pi4000/2) @ 124,666 miles per second (2/3)c, or take ~.1 seconds. If you transmitted data straight up 700 miles, and then around the constellation all at 700 miles elevation, and then back down 700 miles, it would need to go 16165 miles (700*2 + 2pi4700/2) @ 187,000 miles per second (1c), or take 0.086 seconds. This seems like pretty exciting stuff.
    - Cerium 9y ago
ct520 9y ago
Didn’t space x blow up facebooks Internet sattilite?.. Accident.. hmm.. https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12750872/spacex-explosion-facebook-satellite-internet-org-zuckerberg https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12750872/spacex-explosion-...
88 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16711996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16711996
callesgg 9y ago
I wounder how the FCC handles this, i have very low confidence in the FCC based on the experiences with the FCC regarding net neutrality.
logfromblammo 9y ago
Article mentions that this is just the high-altitude constellation in MEO, and there will be as many as 12000 total at all altitudes. Putting 4425 in MEO, another ~7500 in LEO, and maybe a few in higher orbits, is likely a plan to reduce latency and increase bandwidth. SpaceX has already launched some (50?) IridiumNEXT satellites, a planned constellation of 66 operational in LEO, plus 9 spares in a lower orbit, and 6 spares on the ground.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  The high altitude constellation is still definitely in LEO (extends to 2000km), not MEO. The second constellation is in LEO, too, but SpaceX calls it "VLEO" because it's so low that atmospheric drag would pull down an unpowered satellite within weeks.
buvanshak 9y ago
It is amusing to see a person manging to continue funding vaporware with more vaporware...
- tdb7893 9y ago
  Seeing how he actually has cars in production and he can not only launch but also land rockets those are definitely not vaporware. It remains to be seen whether either is going to be a huge business but he's definitely launched some actual products.
  - metaobject 9y ago
    I really don't understand the hate for Musk. Shit, a lot of these projects are really experiments that he's funding. They're really cool experiments, at that, and experiments aren't supposed to be successful all the time, anyway. It's like the people who bash NASA for having failures. This has never been done before!
    - detaro 9y ago
      While Musks companies do impressive things, there also is a lot of polarizing stuff that seems overdone: overconfident marketing for the "Autopilot", bashing the car industry as being incompetent while failing to get their own production up, Musk bubbling on Twitter about "direct democracy on Mars" while fighting organization among his own employees, ... It's pushing the hype with often little basis, which is guaranteed to create dislike from people disagreeing. It's very different from bashing mistakes IMHO.
  - buvanshak 9y ago
    > Seeing how he actually has cars in production You see, the the projected promise is not to have electric cars in production. It is to build cars with tech that is far advanced and game changing, to a point that owning an ICE vehicle does not make sense... > but also land rockets those are definitely not vaporware The promise is not that they will build rockets. The promise is mars. That is why people are cheering for them and is investing in them.. Then there is Hyperloop. Classic vaporware..You might be seeing why I think these are vaporware now... Thanks idiots of HN for flagging the comment. A fool and his money is soon parted. If there are too many fools in the world, it is only the preservation of that law that is dictating that entities like Musk should appear.
tyingq 9y ago
Awesome for rural dwellers. No more dial up, bottom end dsl, or high latency / high orbit satellite connectivity. Probably good for airline inflight WiFi too.
- abawany 9y ago
  Also for people who are stuck with a 'diversity' of choices, i.e. 'cable' or 'phone'. I live in an area that is mere miles from Google Fiber but I will never get an option to use them. I am not latency sensitive at all and will be delighted to try out the SpaceX option if they make it available.
  - pavs 9y ago
    > I live in an area that is mere miles from Google Fiber but I will never get an option to use them. In the world of physical fiber connectivity, a "mere miles" could be anything from 100s of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars worth of investment to connect you. Unfortunately. It would only make sense for them to provide service in your area if the infrastructure already exists or there is enough population density to make service profitable.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- adventured 9y ago
  I'm curious to see how this style of space broadband impacts the second tier broadband nations, such as France, Italy, Australia, Greece, etc. They have persistently lagged far behind in broadband speeds for the last 20 years running. For everybody else below that, it's a revolution in access. If you're in Brazil, Colombia or Argentina where the average is around 5-8mbps, this could be a huge change if the price is close enough to what their markets can bear. It should help all of these nations leap over the need to build out very expensive national fiber to the premises systems.
  - stephen_g 9y ago
cdnsteve 9y ago
Literally skynet
marmottus 9y ago
Can we one day run out of resources on Earth if we send away a lot of objects to space or is it negligible?
- orky56 9y ago
  There's obviously an upper limit but we are very far from reaching that. Satellites are made up of many components much of which is aluminum most composed of bauxite. Apparently we have a lot reserves and are able to meet demand for quite awhile into the future.[1] Worst case we can always recycle that space junk but it's still way cheaper to recycle what we have on our surface before we run out of mines or grab stuff from orbit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite
- cr0sh 9y ago
  If I am understanding what you are asking, then yes - in theory, one (ok - an advanced species; note, that is not humans - not yet) could consume all the materials of the Earth, convert them, and turn them into "things" that are in space; in short, strip mining the Earth until it was completely gone. Certainly that could be done in theory - but the amount of energy it would take would be of a scale we haven't even begun to barely imagine. We certainly aren't generating that amount to do it, or harnessing such amount either. So practically, the answer to your question is "no"; what we "send away" from the Earth is negligible. In order for you to understand why, I encourage you to research the scale of things you are trying to understand. The Earth is big - really big. It may not seem like it, but it really is. What might cause you both a bit of "fright" and "wonder" though is the atmosphere: Compared to the Earth, the atmosphere is thin - very thin. For instance, if you imagined a baseball as the planet Earth, the atmosphere would be a very thin layer over the surface of the baseball, much lower than the ridges formed by the lacings. Then you compare the scale of the Earth (it's size) to that of say - Jupiter (heck, just the Great Red Spot!). Then compare Jupiter's size to the size of the Sun (hint: Jupiter is tiny). Then compare the Sun to the size of our nearest neighboring star. Then compare the size of that to other known stars. Eventually you get to the size of our galaxy - which is an insanely large collection of stars... Then take a look at the Hubble Deep Space image - and realize that all of those points, far in the background - that all of those are each a galaxy, separated by vast distances from each other... ...and then realize that what we see on that image is only a tiny amount of the whole universe. The Earth? Compared to all that, we aren't even the size of a quark on the butt of a bacterium...
chatmasta 9y ago
So now one company controls the satellites in the skies, from the uplink to the downlink. When do we add other companies into the mix? We could have an "Internet of satellites" that operates on a BGP type protocol. The satellites could autonomously position themselves and route traffic amongst each other according to the protocol. It would be just like the Internet now, but with routers that could arrange themselves in 3-dimensional space. That would be so cool.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  They have no real satellites up there yet. They do have two prototype testing sats though. In fact, SpaceX is actually really behind on this. http://www.oneweb.world/ http://www.oneweb.world/ actually has sats built now and are building the rest of the constellation now. So SpaceX will not be alone if they actually manage to build a constellation. Also, the Iridium next constellation is half way up and running. Which is technically a LEO constellation that can provide internet.
  - tbabb 9y ago
    SpaceX currently has test satellites in orbit.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Given all the incredibly complicated stuff that needs to be done to talk between things whizzing around the Earth that quickly, I don't think it's going to standardized any time soon.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  There are at least 2 other serious players in LEO satellite constellations who have launched prototypes or will shortly. Oneweb (which doesn't do sat-to-sat comms, so is just a "last mile" provider, like Globalstar is for sat phone) and Telesat (following an Iridium-like sat-to-sat approach, just like SpaceX is), which launched a bunch of prototypes even earlier than SpaceX did. ...and a whole bunch of other players. So competition is definitely a thing.
malyk 9y ago
There are already people doing this. Not that it means no one else should, but this isn't a new idea. http://onewebsatellites.com/ http://onewebsatellites.com/
- marricks 9y ago
  That link just says they make satellites, not a global satellite based internet.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  OneWeb didn't invent the idea, either. In fact, SpaceX once partnered with OneWeb, but OneWeb wasn't on board with Musk's crazily ambitious plans for the LEO constellation, and OneWeb's constellation is kind of lame because it doesn't do satellite-to-satellite communications. There was a rash of these schemes in the 1990s. Teledesic was the most similar one, and they went bankrupt and the constellation never launched. Voice-centric Iridium and Globalstar did launch, though, but they also went bankrupt but continued operating and have been refreshing their constellations. Iridium does sat-to-sat and is thus more capable, but Globalstar does not (they do "bent pipe" ala OneWeb). And there's also Telestar's LEO constellation also being launched nowadays. It's sat-to-sat and is closer to Teledesic in size than SpaceX's Starlink.
- nickik 9y ago
  They are not already doing it, they are like SpaceX planning it. The might be a little ahead of SpaceX but we really don't know. SpaceX is playing Starlink extremly secretly and we don't know how far they really are.
13of40 9y ago
Didn't the FCC just stomp on "SpaceBee" for trying to bootstrap something similar? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/40542629/reminder-dont-put-your-satellites-in-space-without-fcc-permission https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/40542629/re...
- teraflop 9y ago
  They got into trouble because their application was denied (ostensibly because their satellites were too small to be reliably tracked by ground-based radar) but they went ahead and launched anyway.
- skellera 9y ago
  I personally think they should be barred from future launches. We should not set precedence that a company can launch whatever they want without approval and just pay a fine. All these other companies follow the guidelines.
- notatoad 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "bootstrap" or if you're implying that spaceX should be treated similarly, but the key difference here is that spaceX isn't doing anything without regulatory approval first.
gregoryrueda 9y ago
Why does anyone need permission to deploy satellites? Governments want to regulate outer-space?
- lopmotr 9y ago
  The permission is for providing broadband services, which uses the regulated local radio spectrum.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Humanity wants to keep space safe and governments are its representatives.
dayaz36 9y ago
Week old news
ChuckMcM 9y ago
This is just the Teledesic[1] project respun with more up to date hardware. Back in the late 90's Motorola and Microsoft teamed up to put 288 satellites in orbit, the number being constrained by costs and launches. [1] http://www.mobilecomms-technology.com/projects/teledesic/ http://www.mobilecomms-technology.com/projects/teledesic/
- imron 9y ago
  You say 'just', but the reality is, SpaceX can do this because they are directly responsible for reducing said cost and launch constraints. That's no small feat.
kgc 9y ago
Financial services will love this. I bet they would pay out the nose for the extra millisecond or so of reduced latency.
taneq 9y ago
Next, are they gonna re-approve SpaceX for showing video footage of their launches?

347 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

So there are ~1,459 artificial satellites orbiting the Earth right now. Am I the only one that thinks adding 4,425 is a bit much? Certainly there is a way to do this with less space junk?

stcredzero 9y ago
If 4,425 low orbit satellites which are responsibly recovered can subsume the function of some large chunk of the ~1,459 currently existing, then this will actually substantively reduce the amount of space junk being introduced to Earth orbit. This is assuming that the launches and satellites create zero debris, which is in line with SpaceX's goal of total reusability. (Harder to reuse a vehicle that has things falling off of it.) Low orbit satellites will fall back to earth much sooner than ones in higher orbit. I would also expect SpaceX to responsibly de-orbit and scuttle their satellites, if for no other reason than to make their own lives easier.
throwahey 9y ago
Space is big, we won't be running into any issues with satellite collisions since they can be positioned in three-dimensions and there is a lot of space. Operational satellites are not considered space-junk since they typically have predictable or fixed orbits which can be avoided. Space junk is non-operational stuff, with potentially unpredictable orbits.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  so long as it has a sufficient radar cross section, the orbits of non-operational stuff can be predicted just fine. NORAD tracks the location of everything big enough to track, and makes it all available.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    > and makes it all available Well not 'all'; naturally the published elements omit objects related to 'national security' and objects which weren't announced as space vehicles e.g. debris. They are also published under a very restrictive license; I can't forward the elements to you, nor publish anything derived from them, such as predictions for a pass. End-user eyes only.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  All satellites will eventually be non-operational, so the question is: do they have a plan for picking up these 4500 pieces of future space junk once they are no longer in use?
  - coolspot 9y ago
    Low orbit junk quickly falls back onto earth if not supported by engines.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      "quickly" can still be several years, or more.
      - Tuna-Fish 9y ago
        The industry standard is deorbit within 25 years after end of mission. The SpaceX proposal (1) plans for deorbiting of every satellite within one year after the end of their mission. (1) http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/report...
  - golergka 9y ago
    They're in LOE, so they just go into atmosphere and burn.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TrainedMonkey 9y ago
These satellites are in MEO (1150km) which is relatively sparsely trafficked. Here is a good visualization http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/ . If you zoom out MEO would be just above the dense sphere of space stuff in LEO. And if you think 4.5k is a lot wait until you hear about phase 2. Thankfully that is in close LEO and without constant propulsion things would deorbit in a matter of weeks. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satellite-broadband-internet-network.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satel...
- maccam94 9y ago
  yeah, from what I've read they will have enough fuel to stay aloft for ~5 years. They won't be a source of permanent space debris.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Isn't space debris more about collisions which spew out thousands of tiny bits which are hard to track and may have a ludicrous velocity relative to things they run into? AIUI, large objects a relatively easy to track and avoid if you have the gas and are on a collision course.
    - azernik 9y ago
      Every satellite floating around without maneuvering capabilities is one more chance for that existing tiny debris to hit something and cause a chain reaction.
    - maccam94 9y ago
      The worst kind of space debris sits in orbits outside of the atmosphere where there is negligible drag. Since these satellites will be in very low orbits that require propulsion to stay aloft, any potential debris from collisions or inoperable satellites will fall back to Earth relatively quickly. https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html
    - Kemschumam 9y ago
topspin 9y ago
> Am I the only one that thinks adding 4,425 is a bit much? Probably not; all such endeavours are met by fear. Allow me to further unnerve you; this is just the first phase. The complete system, should it ever be realized, will have more than 8,000 satellites. And that's just SpaceX. There are competitors planning to launch systems of similar scale. My wife called it the 'Cambrian explosion of space.' Effective, if not entirely correct, analogy.
- ddoolin 9y ago
  The article mentions 12,000 total final satellites, but the other 8,000 operate at different altitudes/frequencies so they will need to be approved separately.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    The other 8000 are going to be orbiting so low that they'll have to constantly raise their orbit to avoid re-entry.
martythemaniak 9y ago
Maybe your sense of "much" is thrown off by not-to-scale visualizations. Space is big, even near-earth space is bigger than the entire surface Earth. These 1500 satellites are probably, on average, the size of a van. Is 1500 vans distributed on surface of the earth "much"? These SpaceX / Starlink satellites are considerably smaller - about the size of an oven or washing machine. What does it mean for 4500 ovens spread out over the surface of the earth to be "much"?
- topspin 9y ago
  > These SpaceX / Starlink satellites are considerably smaller - about the size of an oven or washing machine. The dimensions that appear in the FCC application[1] are 4.0 x 1.8 x 1.2 meters. About size of a small passenger van actually. Doubtless that will not be the launch size, but they will have these dimensions while in operation. [1] http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=1159449 http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=1...
- nkoren 9y ago
  Yes, space is, like, infinitely bigger than people imagine it to be. However your analogy is incomplete unless those 4500 ovens are wandering the surface of the Earth at mach 25.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Well, we do have thousands of airplane-sizes airplanes wandering the atmosphere at mach speeds. And we wouldn’t consider the airspace "full".
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      It's full enough that it requires continuous guidance and collision avoidance measures. And the majority of those planes are not going even close to as fast as satellites in LEO/MEO move.
      - 9y ago
rtkwe 9y ago
Depends on what you mean by "doing this." Having them in a lower orbit means smaller equipment required to connect, lower latency compared to connecting to satellites in GEO, and smaller lower power satellites. To get those benefits they have to be close which means more satellites for full coverage. Also it's not like even this particular orbit will be full when SpaceX is done at 1150 km orbit the 4425 satellites would each have a bit over 80,000 km^2 to themselves on average if they're spread out evenly.
gizmo385 9y ago
How are SpaceX going to monitor and maintain TT&C on 3x the number of satellites that are currently orbiting the planet? That seems like a bigger question in my mind.
pascalxus 9y ago
There's only ~1459 satellites in orbit and already someone wants to prevent more building. What's the reason for this? Preserve neighborhood character? too much noise? are you worried about the traffic? If you arbitrarily regulate everything before you even begin to innovate, you'll never know what inventions could have been created: that's why there hasn't been hardly any innovation in housing construction over the last 20 years.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  In New Zealand, if you installed certain new fangled plastic plumbing a few decades ago, you house may now be unmortgagable for a new buyer because it's been silently spraying water inside your walls for years. 20 years ago there was also a rush of monolithic cladding, now many of those houses are silently rotting due to invisible leaks into the walls. Fun new construction does reduce costs but can ruin people many years later if it's too wild west.
  - nickik 9y ago
    For this to be a good argument you have to assume that the regulater understands all of these things and makes systematically better choices then the people who build the houses. Or it would require qualifing all materials before being uses. That would increase time before deployment massivly, making new devlopment less attractive. Economist talk about 'permissionless innovation' being incredible important for progress.

0x7f800000 9y ago

Fuck you, Comcast.

neo4sure 9y ago
While I disagree with your language I agree with the sentiment. :)
- tomerico 9y ago
  Upvotes should not be about agreement, but whether you believe that this contributes to the discussion and something that you'd like to see more of.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

cvaidya1986 9y ago

This is awesome!

akshayB 9y ago

Who controls/regulates this piece of the internet? Because this is more like internet for the planet.

TrainedMonkey 9y ago
FCC gets the final say because SpaceX headquartered and launches from U.S. That said in theory SpaceX will have to comply with regulations of all of the countries where it wants to operate. Some of those countries undoubtedly will pass laws/regulations to protect domestic telco incumbents.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  Don't they still launch in international waters? EDIT/ Thank you for the correction, that's just landing. /EDIT Headquartered yes, but the barge ~~launches~~ landings keep making me think long term SPaceX will be looking at extra-territorial options.
  - vkou 9y ago
    It doesn't matter where they launch from, since their customers live on Earth. If they want to sell, they will have to be follow local laws.
  - Buttons840 9y ago
    Like Mars? ;)
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    They've never launched from international waters that's just where the core recovery happens.
  - nkoren 9y ago
    They don't launch from barges. They land on them.
  - azernik 9y ago
    It doesn't even matter where they launch from - the Outer Space Treaty is written in terms of who does something, not where they do it from (cf SeaLaunch, and the absolute lack of ambiguity about state regulatory jurisdiction for objects it launched. In fact, emerging consensus (because the Outer Space Treaty is vague on the subject) is that it doesn't even matter who is launching the object, just which country('s citizens) owns and operate the satellites. cf. the recent incident where some American satellites were launched unlicensed on an Indian PSLV, the US government got all huffy at the company, and the Indians agreed by default that the US had jurisdiction (by washing their hands of responsibility).

soperj 9y ago

The timeline, 2200 in the next 6 years is mind boggling.

agumonkey 9y ago
that's Musk favorite sport
- berg01 9y ago
  Along with his habit of setting unreallistic and overly aggressive targets, let's not forget that he is also consistently late. So maybe by 2030 (2018+2*6) this plan will be executed. Let's hope so!
  - soperj 9y ago
    It's not a plan though. They won't be able to continue sending up satellites without meeting the target unless they get approval from the FCC.
    - Robotbeat 9y ago
      Dunno why you were downvoted. This isn't just some Muskian highly optimistic projection, it's a regulatory requirement by the FCC. If they don't launch half the constellation within 6 years, they risk losing their license.
zamalek 9y ago
That's 7 satellites per launch at the current SpaceX cadence.
- soperj 9y ago
  Yes, but that would mean they're not launching anything else... the mind boggling part to me was that they're planning on over doubling the number of satellites in space in the span of 6 years.

athenot 9y ago

When I read satellites & internet, latency is the first thing that came to mind. But at the altitude the satellites (will) operate, that adds about 8ms delay (round trip for satellite immediately above, might be slightly worse). In contrast, the fastest round-trip to a geostationary sat is 233ms. That's a big improvement.

erentz 9y ago
It gets better. The speed of light in a fiber optic cable is about 2/3rds of C. The proposed system (from what I understand) essentially uses free space optics between the constellation of satellites as the backbone. Instead of regular satellite internet service which routes up to a satellite then down to a ground station then over a fiber optic backbone. SpaceX’s system will route traffic across the constellation of satellites then down directly to the remote end (or the closest egress point to whatever the remote end is if they aren’t on the network). This means although total distance travelled is longer, the speed it’s travelling at is 1/3rd faster. So overall this will become very interesting for latency sensitive long distance communications.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > the speed it’s travelling at is 1/3rd faster About 50% faster if the speed of light in fibre is 2c/3.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Just did some back of napkin math, and assuming you wanted to transmit information half way across the world with a fiber optic cable at sea level that goes exactly where you want it to, it would go 12566 miles (2pi4000/2) @ 124,666 miles per second (2/3)c, or take ~.1 seconds. If you transmitted data straight up 700 miles, and then around the constellation all at 700 miles elevation, and then back down 700 miles, it would need to go 16165 miles (700*2 + 2pi4700/2) @ 187,000 miles per second (1c), or take 0.086 seconds. This seems like pretty exciting stuff.
  - Cerium 9y ago

ct520 9y ago

Didn’t space x blow up facebooks Internet sattilite?.. Accident.. hmm.. https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12750872/spacex-explosion-facebook-satellite-internet-org-zuckerberg https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12750872/spacex-explosion-...

88 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16711996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16711996

callesgg 9y ago

I wounder how the FCC handles this, i have very low confidence in the FCC based on the experiences with the FCC regarding net neutrality.

logfromblammo 9y ago

Article mentions that this is just the high-altitude constellation in MEO, and there will be as many as 12000 total at all altitudes. Putting 4425 in MEO, another ~7500 in LEO, and maybe a few in higher orbits, is likely a plan to reduce latency and increase bandwidth. SpaceX has already launched some (50?) IridiumNEXT satellites, a planned constellation of 66 operational in LEO, plus 9 spares in a lower orbit, and 6 spares on the ground.

Robotbeat 9y ago
The high altitude constellation is still definitely in LEO (extends to 2000km), not MEO. The second constellation is in LEO, too, but SpaceX calls it "VLEO" because it's so low that atmospheric drag would pull down an unpowered satellite within weeks.

buvanshak 9y ago

It is amusing to see a person manging to continue funding vaporware with more vaporware...

tdb7893 9y ago
Seeing how he actually has cars in production and he can not only launch but also land rockets those are definitely not vaporware. It remains to be seen whether either is going to be a huge business but he's definitely launched some actual products.
- metaobject 9y ago
  I really don't understand the hate for Musk. Shit, a lot of these projects are really experiments that he's funding. They're really cool experiments, at that, and experiments aren't supposed to be successful all the time, anyway. It's like the people who bash NASA for having failures. This has never been done before!
  - detaro 9y ago
    While Musks companies do impressive things, there also is a lot of polarizing stuff that seems overdone: overconfident marketing for the "Autopilot", bashing the car industry as being incompetent while failing to get their own production up, Musk bubbling on Twitter about "direct democracy on Mars" while fighting organization among his own employees, ... It's pushing the hype with often little basis, which is guaranteed to create dislike from people disagreeing. It's very different from bashing mistakes IMHO.
- buvanshak 9y ago
  > Seeing how he actually has cars in production You see, the the projected promise is not to have electric cars in production. It is to build cars with tech that is far advanced and game changing, to a point that owning an ICE vehicle does not make sense... > but also land rockets those are definitely not vaporware The promise is not that they will build rockets. The promise is mars. That is why people are cheering for them and is investing in them.. Then there is Hyperloop. Classic vaporware..You might be seeing why I think these are vaporware now... Thanks idiots of HN for flagging the comment. A fool and his money is soon parted. If there are too many fools in the world, it is only the preservation of that law that is dictating that entities like Musk should appear.

tyingq 9y ago

Awesome for rural dwellers. No more dial up, bottom end dsl, or high latency / high orbit satellite connectivity. Probably good for airline inflight WiFi too.

abawany 9y ago
Also for people who are stuck with a 'diversity' of choices, i.e. 'cable' or 'phone'. I live in an area that is mere miles from Google Fiber but I will never get an option to use them. I am not latency sensitive at all and will be delighted to try out the SpaceX option if they make it available.
- pavs 9y ago
  > I live in an area that is mere miles from Google Fiber but I will never get an option to use them. In the world of physical fiber connectivity, a "mere miles" could be anything from 100s of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars worth of investment to connect you. Unfortunately. It would only make sense for them to provide service in your area if the infrastructure already exists or there is enough population density to make service profitable.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
adventured 9y ago
I'm curious to see how this style of space broadband impacts the second tier broadband nations, such as France, Italy, Australia, Greece, etc. They have persistently lagged far behind in broadband speeds for the last 20 years running. For everybody else below that, it's a revolution in access. If you're in Brazil, Colombia or Argentina where the average is around 5-8mbps, this could be a huge change if the price is close enough to what their markets can bear. It should help all of these nations leap over the need to build out very expensive national fiber to the premises systems.
- stephen_g 9y ago

cdnsteve 9y ago

Literally skynet

marmottus 9y ago

Can we one day run out of resources on Earth if we send away a lot of objects to space or is it negligible?

orky56 9y ago
There's obviously an upper limit but we are very far from reaching that. Satellites are made up of many components much of which is aluminum most composed of bauxite. Apparently we have a lot reserves and are able to meet demand for quite awhile into the future.[1] Worst case we can always recycle that space junk but it's still way cheaper to recycle what we have on our surface before we run out of mines or grab stuff from orbit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite
cr0sh 9y ago
If I am understanding what you are asking, then yes - in theory, one (ok - an advanced species; note, that is not humans - not yet) could consume all the materials of the Earth, convert them, and turn them into "things" that are in space; in short, strip mining the Earth until it was completely gone. Certainly that could be done in theory - but the amount of energy it would take would be of a scale we haven't even begun to barely imagine. We certainly aren't generating that amount to do it, or harnessing such amount either. So practically, the answer to your question is "no"; what we "send away" from the Earth is negligible. In order for you to understand why, I encourage you to research the scale of things you are trying to understand. The Earth is big - really big. It may not seem like it, but it really is. What might cause you both a bit of "fright" and "wonder" though is the atmosphere: Compared to the Earth, the atmosphere is thin - very thin. For instance, if you imagined a baseball as the planet Earth, the atmosphere would be a very thin layer over the surface of the baseball, much lower than the ridges formed by the lacings. Then you compare the scale of the Earth (it's size) to that of say - Jupiter (heck, just the Great Red Spot!). Then compare Jupiter's size to the size of the Sun (hint: Jupiter is tiny). Then compare the Sun to the size of our nearest neighboring star. Then compare the size of that to other known stars. Eventually you get to the size of our galaxy - which is an insanely large collection of stars... Then take a look at the Hubble Deep Space image - and realize that all of those points, far in the background - that all of those are each a galaxy, separated by vast distances from each other... ...and then realize that what we see on that image is only a tiny amount of the whole universe. The Earth? Compared to all that, we aren't even the size of a quark on the butt of a bacterium...

chatmasta 9y ago

So now one company controls the satellites in the skies, from the uplink to the downlink. When do we add other companies into the mix? We could have an "Internet of satellites" that operates on a BGP type protocol. The satellites could autonomously position themselves and route traffic amongst each other according to the protocol. It would be just like the Internet now, but with routers that could arrange themselves in 3-dimensional space. That would be so cool.

kilroy123 9y ago
They have no real satellites up there yet. They do have two prototype testing sats though. In fact, SpaceX is actually really behind on this. http://www.oneweb.world/ http://www.oneweb.world/ actually has sats built now and are building the rest of the constellation now. So SpaceX will not be alone if they actually manage to build a constellation. Also, the Iridium next constellation is half way up and running. Which is technically a LEO constellation that can provide internet.
- tbabb 9y ago
  SpaceX currently has test satellites in orbit.
greglindahl 9y ago
Given all the incredibly complicated stuff that needs to be done to talk between things whizzing around the Earth that quickly, I don't think it's going to standardized any time soon.
Robotbeat 9y ago
There are at least 2 other serious players in LEO satellite constellations who have launched prototypes or will shortly. Oneweb (which doesn't do sat-to-sat comms, so is just a "last mile" provider, like Globalstar is for sat phone) and Telesat (following an Iridium-like sat-to-sat approach, just like SpaceX is), which launched a bunch of prototypes even earlier than SpaceX did. ...and a whole bunch of other players. So competition is definitely a thing.

malyk 9y ago

There are already people doing this. Not that it means no one else should, but this isn't a new idea. http://onewebsatellites.com/ http://onewebsatellites.com/

marricks 9y ago
That link just says they make satellites, not a global satellite based internet.
Robotbeat 9y ago
OneWeb didn't invent the idea, either. In fact, SpaceX once partnered with OneWeb, but OneWeb wasn't on board with Musk's crazily ambitious plans for the LEO constellation, and OneWeb's constellation is kind of lame because it doesn't do satellite-to-satellite communications. There was a rash of these schemes in the 1990s. Teledesic was the most similar one, and they went bankrupt and the constellation never launched. Voice-centric Iridium and Globalstar did launch, though, but they also went bankrupt but continued operating and have been refreshing their constellations. Iridium does sat-to-sat and is thus more capable, but Globalstar does not (they do "bent pipe" ala OneWeb). And there's also Telestar's LEO constellation also being launched nowadays. It's sat-to-sat and is closer to Teledesic in size than SpaceX's Starlink.
nickik 9y ago
They are not already doing it, they are like SpaceX planning it. The might be a little ahead of SpaceX but we really don't know. SpaceX is playing Starlink extremly secretly and we don't know how far they really are.

13of40 9y ago

Didn't the FCC just stomp on "SpaceBee" for trying to bootstrap something similar? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/40542629/reminder-dont-put-your-satellites-in-space-without-fcc-permission https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/40542629/re...

teraflop 9y ago
They got into trouble because their application was denied (ostensibly because their satellites were too small to be reliably tracked by ground-based radar) but they went ahead and launched anyway.
skellera 9y ago
I personally think they should be barred from future launches. We should not set precedence that a company can launch whatever they want without approval and just pay a fine. All these other companies follow the guidelines.
notatoad 9y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "bootstrap" or if you're implying that spaceX should be treated similarly, but the key difference here is that spaceX isn't doing anything without regulatory approval first.

gregoryrueda 9y ago

Why does anyone need permission to deploy satellites? Governments want to regulate outer-space?

lopmotr 9y ago
The permission is for providing broadband services, which uses the regulated local radio spectrum.
mynewtb 9y ago
Humanity wants to keep space safe and governments are its representatives.

dayaz36 9y ago

Week old news

ChuckMcM 9y ago

This is just the Teledesic[1] project respun with more up to date hardware. Back in the late 90's Motorola and Microsoft teamed up to put 288 satellites in orbit, the number being constrained by costs and launches. [1] http://www.mobilecomms-technology.com/projects/teledesic/ http://www.mobilecomms-technology.com/projects/teledesic/

imron 9y ago
You say 'just', but the reality is, SpaceX can do this because they are directly responsible for reducing said cost and launch constraints. That's no small feat.

kgc 9y ago

Financial services will love this. I bet they would pay out the nose for the extra millisecond or so of reduced latency.

taneq 9y ago

Next, are they gonna re-approve SpaceX for showing video footage of their launches?