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I want a joint venture between Starlink and Cloudflare. Put compute resources on the satellites and have a distributed CDN + edge workers in space. Having satel

I want a joint venture between Starlink and Cloudflare. Put compute resources on the satellites and have a distributed CDN + edge workers in space. Having satellite internet with latency competitive with cable is fine and all, but what if you could beat it?

Arrath 6y ago
IT person sighs heavily, clamping down their helmet as they board the Dragon capsule for the weekly turning it off and on again.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  Supposedly, in the 1940s, when Arthur C Clarke (now mainly known as an SF author) proposed the idea of geostationary satellites [0] as extra-terrestrial radio relays, he believed that they would have to be manned space-stations because of the need to keep changing the valves that had blown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary_communications_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary...
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    If GEO becomes crowded enough, it's not possible to just send more hardware and park the defective one somewhere else and launch costs keep going down I wonder if we'll see more human serviceable hardware.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  We just need a Terraform provider that maps provisioning to launching a Falcon-9, and deprovisioning to firing a photon torpedo at the satellite.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    Sounds like a job for a fleet of orbital rocket boots. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm
  - chills 6y ago
    All the jokes about launching rockets in the "what is a monad" articles are finally coming true!
nonameiguess 6y ago
You say this jokingly, but onboard software is a feature in some satellites right now. The ability to push and update applications that run directly on the vehicle instead of needing a downlink to a ground processing station is on the roadmap for increasingly compute expensive operations, but still pretty basic right now. I don't think there are any that will run untrusted code from arbitrary developers, though. That's a pretty steep risk. I'm having trouble finding any unclassified examples of this, but you can read about TechSat-21, which was supposed to be a proof of concept back in 2004 but the program was canceled because of cost overruns: https://ml.jpl.nasa.gov/papers/the_techsat-21_autonomous_sciencecraft_constellation_demonstration/the_techsat-21_autonomous_sciencecraft_constellation_demonstration.pdf https://ml.jpl.nasa.gov/papers/the_techsat-21_autonomous_sci...
- tengbretson 6y ago
  My followup comment about Terraform was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm absolutely serious about wanting edge processing on-satellite, and I think its bound to happen in the future. I think that either Starlink will adopt a strategy like this, or Amazon's Project Kuiper will, and further cement AWS's technological lead.
pdelgallego 6y ago
Project Kuiper?

Arrath 6y ago

IT person sighs heavily, clamping down their helmet as they board the Dragon capsule for the weekly turning it off and on again.

KineticLensman 6y ago
Supposedly, in the 1940s, when Arthur C Clarke (now mainly known as an SF author) proposed the idea of geostationary satellites [0] as extra-terrestrial radio relays, he believed that they would have to be manned space-stations because of the need to keep changing the valves that had blown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary_communications_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary...
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  If GEO becomes crowded enough, it's not possible to just send more hardware and park the defective one somewhere else and launch costs keep going down I wonder if we'll see more human serviceable hardware.
tengbretson 6y ago
We just need a Terraform provider that maps provisioning to launching a Falcon-9, and deprovisioning to firing a photon torpedo at the satellite.
- teddyh 6y ago
  Sounds like a job for a fleet of orbital rocket boots. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm
- chills 6y ago
  All the jokes about launching rockets in the "what is a monad" articles are finally coming true!

nonameiguess 6y ago

You say this jokingly, but onboard software is a feature in some satellites right now. The ability to push and update applications that run directly on the vehicle instead of needing a downlink to a ground processing station is on the roadmap for increasingly compute expensive operations, but still pretty basic right now. I don't think there are any that will run untrusted code from arbitrary developers, though. That's a pretty steep risk. I'm having trouble finding any unclassified examples of this, but you can read about TechSat-21, which was supposed to be a proof of concept back in 2004 but the program was canceled because of cost overruns: https://ml.jpl.nasa.gov/papers/the_techsat-21_autonomous_sciencecraft_constellation_demonstration/the_techsat-21_autonomous_sciencecraft_constellation_demonstration.pdf https://ml.jpl.nasa.gov/papers/the_techsat-21_autonomous_sci...

tengbretson 6y ago
My followup comment about Terraform was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm absolutely serious about wanting edge processing on-satellite, and I think its bound to happen in the future. I think that either Starlink will adopt a strategy like this, or Amazon's Project Kuiper will, and further cement AWS's technological lead.

pdelgallego 6y ago

Project Kuiper?