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My name is Joe Morrison, and I’m ready to be roasted on here again. Please feel free to ask me anything or challenge any of what I’ve written!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
punnerud 4y ago
First thank you for the article. Looking forward to Part II. Two questions: How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? Not the author, but Starlink’s parallel competitive threats are usually exaggerated. They have cheap capital and they own their own trucks. That helps. But it’s not a blocking advantage. Their existing fleet is only a marginal competitive advantage to a new sensor suite; there is little evidence they build better birds than anyone else (versus their rockets, which are in a class of their own). > congestested frequency spectrum Lasers.
  - georgeg23 4y ago
    An order of magnitude lower launch costs to LEO (about $1K/kg now for Falcon 9) and another two magnitudes with Starship.. is a blocking advantage. Constellations don't make sense otherwise, see history: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background Keep in mind lasers don't work to the ground unless there are no clouds and stable atmosphere. RF 10-30 GHz work fine to ground and are directional enough that spectrum can be reused and multiple beams formed with one phased array. The real limitation is ITU regulation on total power flux density on the ground for all constellations in these frequencies.
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Also, conventional radio can be steered with multiple transmitters, right? Is there a way to steer laser beams in a solid state way?
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > way to steer laser beams in a solid state way? Yes, MEMs and waveguides.
        georgeg23 4y ago
        Unfortunately not ready for prime time yet, optical beamforming today is only a few degrees steerable angle and single beam. Also low power and poorly focused.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > not ready for prime time yet Totally agree. But the frontier is advancing thanks to LiDAR. And in the meantime, the advantages of laser relay and downlink are vast enough to make mechanical actuation worth it. Particularly for unboosted birds in LEO.
        georgeg23 4y ago
        Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication? At best that is time-multiplexing, not multiple parallel beams of information?
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication? Lasers don’t care if they’re carrying data out or on return. The same optics being pursued for LiDAR have applications in communications. Solid-state waveguides and MEMS being examples.
    - 4y ago
- campchase 4y ago
  > How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?). And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers. I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out. > And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space? Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert. What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).
  - Thervicarl 4y ago
    > their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon The main criteria should be: who has hardware in space ? So the answer is, despite all their problems, OneWeb.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wazer5 4y ago
When Mike Griffin started the Space Development Agency under Trump in 2019, he said we need LEO constellations to track hypersonic missiles and be proliferated to be robust against anti-satellite tech. However, existing MEO satellites have proven capable of tracking hypersonics just fine. Meanwhile LEO satellites are way more vulnerable to ASAT, they can be directly hit. No... LEO only makes sense when you look at Mike Griffin's history working on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He sees LEO constellations of sensors as the first step to including space-based kinetic interceptors (hypersonic reentry vehicles, aka space weapons) which need to be close to Earth in LEO to work. He is part of the hawks in Washington trying to build a space-based power projection system for boost-phase interception and prompt global strike. The whole thing seems built on deceit.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Not invalidating the rest of your chain of reasoning, since I agree with the idea this is likely to lead to eventual space based mid course interception…. While MEO satellites are able to do the job, they pose a greater “systemic risk” than LEO satellites do. If a war goes hot with long range use of prompt global strike style hypersonic weapons against the USA or its closely allied military alliance partners like UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc… we’re talking about a scenario where the potential adversaries are going to be precipitously close to the use of anti satellite weapons, and potentially even nukes but let’s ignore them and focus on the satellites. If you have a smaller number of larger MEO platforms (and they need to be larger to accommodate instruments that can to do their job from further away) your much more vulnerable to having large parts of your system knocked out. These larger platforms will also cost more, so you have less redundancy, higher costs, and are more vulnerable when your system will be needed most. The final systemic risk element is the post action debris risk… if a war goes hot and someone starts chucking ASAT weapons around, then we’re going to have a pile of debris, the sort of debris left behind by a kinetic kill ASAT in medium earth orbit is easily an order of magnitude more of an issue to other satellites for decades to centuries, it’s further away from all the existing space surveillance radar and optical systems on the ground making it harder to track the kind of small high velocity shrapnel that will have spread furthest away from the original orbit, which complicates the replacement of any destroyed space based assets as it will take longer to work out new safe orbits. LEO assets on the other hand have much shorter debris risk lifetimes, decades is usually the case as opposed to centuries, and LEO is much easier to track higher risk shrapnel debris down below 10cm, leading to better operational safety before and after a potentially satellite destroying hot war, meaning they are more likely to have a working system when needed and be able to replace it faster when damaged. It’s a logical and reasonable argument on several fronts. However I do still agree with the assessment that eventually if the military has a sophistication LEO fleet of hundreds or thousands of Starlink style satellites, they are basically half way to the Star Wars “Brilliant Pebbles” architecture and it won’t be long until someone tries to build the other half of the architecture assuming they aren’t already planning this.
moffkalast 4y ago
With what sounds like the industry moving to something more like high throughput real time mapping, does that mean that there's a chance we'll see an open source imagery dataset/tile server sometime afterwards, when the current dated offerings become less competitive?
- m2fkxy 4y ago
  if only. archive satellite imagery pricing schemes are absurd.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    I’d love to see someone step up and try to improve this, there’s programs in place at both NASA and ESA for making access to their own archives of satellite imagery and other data, but there’s a lot more imagery out there. It would be good to have some kind of internet archive style depository run by an organisation dedicated to preserving the data. So that satellite imagery providers could chuck them a copy with contractual guarantees about how and when the information can become public access, that satisfy the imagery providers and make the process streamlined enough to keep up with the increasingly volume of imagery being produced. It would be a shame to see valuable archives of imagery that catalogs the history of our planet, lost due to someone losing track of the either the data itself or the copyright ownership (and thus are legally unable to keep the data) between now and the absurdly long time in the future that such images become public domain over a hundred years from now. Most companies don’t last a hundred years so this kind if stewardship feels like an important thing to start working on now rather than later.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- campchase 4y ago
  I hope so. I wrote a whole article about it: https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/open-all-of-the-satellite-imagery https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/open-all-of-the-satellite... Even Maxar is starting to deeply discount old imagery via their ARD program: https://twitter.com/marcpfister/status/1541858657473744898?s=46&t=q4cDhokwGt3jp55B86649Q https://twitter.com/marcpfister/status/1541858657473744898?s... RIP Open California, but at least Planet gives away their monthly mosaic of the mid-latitudes now via their partnership with NICFI (non-commercial use): https://twitter.com/planet/status/1435229673882017794?s=46&t=q4cDhokwGt3jp55B86649Q https://twitter.com/planet/status/1435229673882017794?s=46&t...
agolio 4y ago
Hi Joe, thanks for the article. I am thinking of getting into satellite data science (from a data science/ software eng background). If you can recommend any datasets that are open to the public that can be fun to play around with or any other advice I'd be happy to hear it.
- chrishare 4y ago
  Not OP, but try https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?src=0&query=satellite%20image&docid=L2cvMTFyd3hneTFnYg%3D%3D https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?src=0&query... There's a paperswithcode dataset that looks good, at a glance.
  - agolio 4y ago
    Thanks for this, I am wondering whether to study a MSc in the field or whether just self-led work will suffice for progress, I guess I will play with some of these datasets and see what I learn on the way.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

punnerud 4y ago

First thank you for the article. Looking forward to Part II. Two questions: How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? Not the author, but Starlink’s parallel competitive threats are usually exaggerated. They have cheap capital and they own their own trucks. That helps. But it’s not a blocking advantage. Their existing fleet is only a marginal competitive advantage to a new sensor suite; there is little evidence they build better birds than anyone else (versus their rockets, which are in a class of their own). > congestested frequency spectrum Lasers.
- georgeg23 4y ago
  An order of magnitude lower launch costs to LEO (about $1K/kg now for Falcon 9) and another two magnitudes with Starship.. is a blocking advantage. Constellations don't make sense otherwise, see history: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background Keep in mind lasers don't work to the ground unless there are no clouds and stable atmosphere. RF 10-30 GHz work fine to ground and are directional enough that spectrum can be reused and multiple beams formed with one phased array. The real limitation is ITU regulation on total power flux density on the ground for all constellations in these frequencies.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Also, conventional radio can be steered with multiple transmitters, right? Is there a way to steer laser beams in a solid state way?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > way to steer laser beams in a solid state way? Yes, MEMs and waveguides.
      - georgeg23 4y ago
        Unfortunately not ready for prime time yet, optical beamforming today is only a few degrees steerable angle and single beam. Also low power and poorly focused.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > not ready for prime time yet Totally agree. But the frontier is advancing thanks to LiDAR. And in the meantime, the advantages of laser relay and downlink are vast enough to make mechanical actuation worth it. Particularly for unboosted birds in LEO.
        georgeg23 4y ago
        Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication? At best that is time-multiplexing, not multiple parallel beams of information?
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication? Lasers don’t care if they’re carrying data out or on return. The same optics being pursued for LiDAR have applications in communications. Solid-state waveguides and MEMS being examples.
  - 4y ago
campchase 4y ago
> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?). And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers. I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out. > And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space? Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert. What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).
- Thervicarl 4y ago
  > their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon The main criteria should be: who has hardware in space ? So the answer is, despite all their problems, OneWeb.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wazer5 4y ago

When Mike Griffin started the Space Development Agency under Trump in 2019, he said we need LEO constellations to track hypersonic missiles and be proliferated to be robust against anti-satellite tech. However, existing MEO satellites have proven capable of tracking hypersonics just fine. Meanwhile LEO satellites are way more vulnerable to ASAT, they can be directly hit. No... LEO only makes sense when you look at Mike Griffin's history working on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He sees LEO constellations of sensors as the first step to including space-based kinetic interceptors (hypersonic reentry vehicles, aka space weapons) which need to be close to Earth in LEO to work. He is part of the hawks in Washington trying to build a space-based power projection system for boost-phase interception and prompt global strike. The whole thing seems built on deceit.

techdragon 4y ago
Not invalidating the rest of your chain of reasoning, since I agree with the idea this is likely to lead to eventual space based mid course interception…. While MEO satellites are able to do the job, they pose a greater “systemic risk” than LEO satellites do. If a war goes hot with long range use of prompt global strike style hypersonic weapons against the USA or its closely allied military alliance partners like UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc… we’re talking about a scenario where the potential adversaries are going to be precipitously close to the use of anti satellite weapons, and potentially even nukes but let’s ignore them and focus on the satellites. If you have a smaller number of larger MEO platforms (and they need to be larger to accommodate instruments that can to do their job from further away) your much more vulnerable to having large parts of your system knocked out. These larger platforms will also cost more, so you have less redundancy, higher costs, and are more vulnerable when your system will be needed most. The final systemic risk element is the post action debris risk… if a war goes hot and someone starts chucking ASAT weapons around, then we’re going to have a pile of debris, the sort of debris left behind by a kinetic kill ASAT in medium earth orbit is easily an order of magnitude more of an issue to other satellites for decades to centuries, it’s further away from all the existing space surveillance radar and optical systems on the ground making it harder to track the kind of small high velocity shrapnel that will have spread furthest away from the original orbit, which complicates the replacement of any destroyed space based assets as it will take longer to work out new safe orbits. LEO assets on the other hand have much shorter debris risk lifetimes, decades is usually the case as opposed to centuries, and LEO is much easier to track higher risk shrapnel debris down below 10cm, leading to better operational safety before and after a potentially satellite destroying hot war, meaning they are more likely to have a working system when needed and be able to replace it faster when damaged. It’s a logical and reasonable argument on several fronts. However I do still agree with the assessment that eventually if the military has a sophistication LEO fleet of hundreds or thousands of Starlink style satellites, they are basically half way to the Star Wars “Brilliant Pebbles” architecture and it won’t be long until someone tries to build the other half of the architecture assuming they aren’t already planning this.

moffkalast 4y ago

With what sounds like the industry moving to something more like high throughput real time mapping, does that mean that there's a chance we'll see an open source imagery dataset/tile server sometime afterwards, when the current dated offerings become less competitive?

m2fkxy 4y ago
if only. archive satellite imagery pricing schemes are absurd.
- techdragon 4y ago
  I’d love to see someone step up and try to improve this, there’s programs in place at both NASA and ESA for making access to their own archives of satellite imagery and other data, but there’s a lot more imagery out there. It would be good to have some kind of internet archive style depository run by an organisation dedicated to preserving the data. So that satellite imagery providers could chuck them a copy with contractual guarantees about how and when the information can become public access, that satisfy the imagery providers and make the process streamlined enough to keep up with the increasingly volume of imagery being produced. It would be a shame to see valuable archives of imagery that catalogs the history of our planet, lost due to someone losing track of the either the data itself or the copyright ownership (and thus are legally unable to keep the data) between now and the absurdly long time in the future that such images become public domain over a hundred years from now. Most companies don’t last a hundred years so this kind if stewardship feels like an important thing to start working on now rather than later.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
campchase 4y ago
I hope so. I wrote a whole article about it: https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/open-all-of-the-satellite-imagery https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/open-all-of-the-satellite... Even Maxar is starting to deeply discount old imagery via their ARD program: https://twitter.com/marcpfister/status/1541858657473744898?s=46&t=q4cDhokwGt3jp55B86649Q https://twitter.com/marcpfister/status/1541858657473744898?s... RIP Open California, but at least Planet gives away their monthly mosaic of the mid-latitudes now via their partnership with NICFI (non-commercial use): https://twitter.com/planet/status/1435229673882017794?s=46&t=q4cDhokwGt3jp55B86649Q https://twitter.com/planet/status/1435229673882017794?s=46&t...

agolio 4y ago

Hi Joe, thanks for the article. I am thinking of getting into satellite data science (from a data science/ software eng background). If you can recommend any datasets that are open to the public that can be fun to play around with or any other advice I'd be happy to hear it.

chrishare 4y ago
Not OP, but try https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?src=0&query=satellite%20image&docid=L2cvMTFyd3hneTFnYg%3D%3D https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?src=0&query... There's a paperswithcode dataset that looks good, at a glance.
- agolio 4y ago
  Thanks for this, I am wondering whether to study a MSc in the field or whether just self-led work will suffice for progress, I guess I will play with some of these datasets and see what I learn on the way.