5 ms·
We know a little more about Amazon's satellites
- 9dev 2y agoThe video of the satellite release looks really eerie; it’s got something biological to it, like an insect releasing its pods.
- thinkingemote 2y agovideo: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajeev-badyal-807b3233_were-just-over-72-hours-into-our-first-full-scale-activity-7324119958236336131-e6Sq https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajeev-badyal-807b3233_were-j...
- ghaff 2y agoTo a first approximation, no one is going to forgo better Internet for whatever definition of better because they don’t like some billionaire’s politics or behavior.
- perihelions 2y agoThe sibling story has further details, https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-rocket-launch-monday-night-may-finally-jumpstart-amazons-answer-to-starlink/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-rocket-launch-monday... ("A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink")
- ks2048 2y agoInteresting bit towards the end: they need the FCC to extend their “network authorization”. And the FCC is of course now headed by a Musk/Trump ally.
- ralfd 2y agoI dont expect there to be any problems for an extension. Carr is a market friendly pragmatist and Jeff Bezos is friendly towards Trump. Musks influence into space seems limited, he couldnt prevent proposed budget cuts to NASA (and NASA is SpaceX biggest customer).
- croes 2y agoSo more satellites to block the view for astronomers.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoProgress tends to have downsides. Highways and rail tracks destroy the environment and make areas hard to cross, but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing. In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.
- croes 2y agoYou could turn that around. Progress in Earth bound astronomy has the downside of less satellite internet.
- nkrisc 2y agoI'm fairly certain that Earth-based astronomy predates artificial satellites by at least a few years.
- croes 2y agoAnd since then there was no progress? We can build better, bigger and more sensible telescopes but we can hardly use those new capabilities if they are impaired by satellites. Space telescopes are expensive and harder to maintain.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoWhat progress? I gain nothing from this. I have symmetrical cheap reliable fiber to my house.
- dboreham 2y agoI don't, so there's that.
- ks2048 2y agoI wonder how competition will play out against StarLink. People just choose which billionaire they like better?
- gus_massa 2y agoNah, people will chose on price, reliability, price, speed, price and free gigas.
- ceejayoz 2y agoAh, yes. A low barrier to entry market with many competitors, like ISPs, cell phone companies, etc. Uh oh.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoWell, there will be at least two, and people will have terrestrial options as well.
- thrance 2y agoThe myth of the rational consumer again, of homo economicus.
- gus_massa 2y agoMore like "Homo avaricious" that discovered the panes seat that don't have enough room for your legs.
- 190eH169ps 2y ago[flagged]
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoI wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites. Anything like that would explain the secrecy...
- jvanderbot 2y agoProbably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoEven if it would just deliver 1 or even just 10 meter resolution, I would imagine the high revisit frequency would make it commercially valuable, and potentially also provide some value to military/intelligence groups because it would make it harder to hide activity through careful timing and the data would come with fewer secrecy requirements. And I have no clue what is doable with SAR, but I'd imagine multiple satellites following each other would enable some interesting features, as it essentially gives you a giant antenna.
- jvanderbot 2y agoOther companies do this already, and better. E.g. Planet.
- amy_petrik 2y ago> has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards). state of the art is about 2x diameter, with adaptive optics methodologies that avoid needing to polish a giga-mirror over several years
- perihelions 2y agoThe observation cadence could be game-changing. Instead of once-, twice- daily revisit times, in principle you could contemplate continuous observation, of large parts of the Earth, from LEO, with enough downstream bandwidth to make interesting use of all that data.
- greatgib 2y ago[flagged]
- eastbound 2y agoIt’s not big corps. Interns. Student projects. I make software typically used in the space industry and our customers are surprisingly small, just s dozen people each time. Startups, half of them funded by the EU startup funds. The kilogram in orbit is supposed to go down to $1000, and everyone’s joking that it becomes affordable to send a turd to space “for the lulz”. It’s literally the case. Ariane 5G is already down to 10k$/kg, Falcon 9 is at 6500k$, pricing on https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ and you can literally click “Buy” and enter your credit card number.
- daymanstep 2y agoI see a minimum price of $325k I don't think a student is going to be able to afford that any time soon
- xmcqdpt2 2y agoI think it’s cheaper for student groups. If you google “student club sends satellite” you get a bunch of examples, https://globalnews.ca/news/9818771/university-of-saskatchewan-student-satellite-in-space/ https://globalnews.ca/news/9818771/university-of-saskatchewa... https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/09/16/satellite-development-cost-project-horizon/ https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/09/16/satellite-developme... https://www.utoronto.ca/news/launch-its-first-satellite-student-team-charts-course-new-knowledge https://www.utoronto.ca/news/launch-its-first-satellite-stud... etc
- syedkarim 2y agoSpaceX isn’t providing a discount to student groups. The program, Cubesat Launch Initiative, is funded by NASA and covers the cost of launch and integration into the deployer.
- 2y ago
- neuroelectron 2y agoThe article doesn't even mention AWS, which I think is the obvious implication being overlooked here. AWS has Government and defense contracts, with DoD notably. This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers (of which there are a lot) and of course, to any point on the Earth. The idea that this is for "underserved communities" is probably a sly nod to battlefield logistics.
- parsimo2010 2y agoThey will undoubtedly sell some aspect of Kuiper through AWS. They already have IP addresses and DNS in the AWS product list, and they have all kinds of data transport services. I don’t know if the government implication is as big as you think, as the US government has been doing secure satellite communications for decades and has already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield. So undoubtedly Kuiper would love a piece of the action but there is already competition and Kuiper is a bit late to the game.
- nine_k 2y ago> already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield Many key things the government buys need to have more than one independent source. This way Kuiper may be just in time.
- parsimo2010 2y agoThe federal acquisition regulations have fairly strict rules against acquiring duplicate systems. It totally permits buying systems from multiple vendors, but there are interoperability requirements, and these would have to be interpreted and negotiated. If Kuiper wants to provide services to the government, I’d expect that they would have to be compatible with the Starshield user equipment at a minimum. The military doesn’t want to be lugging around multiple satellite terminals to connect to both the SpaceX and Kuiper versions of Starshield. I doubt the government would go so far as to require SpaceX and Kuiper make their constellations interoperable in space, but even just requiring compatibility with the ground terminals is a pretty big hurdle. SpaceX has proprietary info in practically all of their comm layers, so interoperability is not easy. The government probably did not buy full rights to the protocols. So the first step to Kuiper getting a piece of the pie is convincing the government that it is worth paying to license SpaceX’s comm standards so Kuiper can use them. That is not an easy task. There are a dozen hypothetical ways that Kuiper might get a portion of government programs, but the fact is that SpaceX has been embedding themselves into the US government’s space infrastructure for years without competition, and has used that lack of competition to build up a bunch of technical hurdles to purchasing services from other contractors. For the past several years there has been no reason for the government to spend money and effort to prevent these hurdles because there was no other contractor that might be able to offer a similar service. So SpaceX has got a pretty sweet position right now, and Kuiper is going to have to invest heavily before the government changes course.
- nkrisc 2y ago> Say a couple perpetually quarrels about who's going to do the dishes. To prevent further squabbles they decide to split the chores on weekly, alternating basis. > > Everything works well, until one of the spouses falls ill. The dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, but the other spouse does not feel responsible for the mess. It’s not their turn. And yes, there's nobody to blame. And this is where accountability sinks distinguish two different kinds of people: some will (rightfully) realize that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, so they will do nothing. Others will see also see that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, but they will also see that it will become their problem regardless of responsibility or blame, and so they do something about it. Unfortunately the latter is often not rewarded or even actively discouraged or punished in corporate settings.
- parsimo2010 2y agoI think you’re posting in the wrong comments section
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Gud 2y agoYou are in the wrong comment section, but thanks for the thoughtful comment!
- nkrisc 2y agoI definitely am.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- notepad0x90 2y agoThe defense angle us civilians are probably not seeing is important. One big advantage for example is they're hard to take down. Let's say there's a war with China, one of the first things the PLA will do is take down any US government controlled satellites. The normal big ones you can shoot down but thousands of them that can be replaced within a day, not so much. The PLA would also be giving out their launch positions for retaliatory attacks. Let's presume the PLA has effective radio and GPS jamming tech, one solution is to use cameras on satellites for positioning and laser as well as frequency hopping satellite radio comms. Small, easily replaceable constellation satellites are ideal.
- fragmede 2y agoKessler syndrome seems to be the MAD solution there though.
- notepad0x90 2y agoin times of actual war, i doubt anyone in the military would care. The result is undesirable but there won't be any threat to life as a result, and there is always a chance the debris problem can be solved in the near future (just shoot it all down! lol)
- fragmede 2y agoThe US military was able to stop using the U2 because they had imaging satellites for remote reconnaissance, nevermind that whole GPS thing. It would be a severe hit to their capabilities if space around Earth was made unusable.
- notepad0x90 2y agoagain, you're right, in times of peace they care about capabilities. in times of war they care about victory.
- 2y ago