6 ms·

Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites

36 points by jakarta 12y ago

larrys 12y ago
If the paywall comes up google "Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites" and click that link.
larrys 12y ago
Musk is spread to thin. Period. Any one of his ventures is a full time job. Hard to understand what type of personality needs to branch out on in different areas as he has. And how can you make good decision, no matter who you are, or what capabilities you have when you only have so many hours in a day?
- tw04 12y ago
  A good leader delegates to trusted associates. There's plenty of time in the day once you have put the right people in place to do the heavy lifting. If he's spread too thin, which I highly doubt he is, he's micromanaging.
- josefresco 12y ago
  He could just be really good at delegating - which if course requires really good people. I too will often think "why is Elon talking about THAT" as it is seemingly out of his expertise but after witnessing many examples, it seems Elon ponders many more subjects than are reflected in his existing businesses.
  - larrys 12y ago
    I'm sure he's good at delegating. But in order to go to meetings and make good decisions there is still a ton of info to keep on top of. And people to talk to. Now multiple that by three. We're not talking about running a restaurant chain here or a discount store. We're talking about three businesses that require the type of high level knowledge and attention that is difficult for any single person to do. No matter who they are.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  How many things is Google trying to do, and in how many fields? How is that effectively different? Also, this comment supports my thesis that any comment using "Period." or "End of story." is overstated at best, and wrong at worst.
  - leeber 12y ago
    You have a great thesis. Period.
  - larrys 12y ago
    Not a fair comparison to google which is a company Musk is a person and the story isn't framed as "Musk Company branching into xyz" but "Elon Musk" branching into different companies. Separately google is highly profitable and can afford to take fliers in many areas and needs to do so in order to diversify, different situation. A "Musk Company" branching into different areas might be compared to GE having different divisions all managed in a way with the corporate structure centralized but in that case the head of GE isn't a tech visionary and isn't involved in anything within the particular company like it at least appears to be with Musk. Likewise with Berkshire Hathaway for that matter. Gotta tell you that in a sense it's almost like, get this, a ponzi scheme you keep spinning up new hope and investor money to keep things going and think you'll figure it out later down the road.
josu 12y ago
Aren't satellite communications a bit limited by the uplink connection? When are we going to have a small enough antenna that's able to communicate with a satellite while fitting inside a cell phone?
- natosaichek 12y ago
  For 1-way communications link to be viable, you can adjust a variety of parameters. There is the transmitter and receiver antenna gains (which are usually proportionate to antenna size), there's the datarate, and the transmit power. If you want a voice link, that means your datarate will be ion the order of ~10kbps If you want a cell phone as your transmitter, that means your antenna gain is very low, and your transmit power is also very low. The remaining free variable is the receive antenna gain. So if you put up a satellite with a large receiver antenna, then this sort of thing can work. For an example, take a look at terrestar networks' phone and satellite (http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/ http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/) . They've gone bankrupt (I think over spectrum allocation issues?) but the did functional demonstrations of their technology before going under. They had the worlds largest space-based phased array antenna system deployed.
  - josu 12y ago
    Interesting. Did any other company buy their satellite infrastructure?
cmsmith 12y ago
A couple things stuck out to me about the numbers: 700 satellites weighing 250 pounds and costing $1M each. 1. Is this being considered because it is the best way to make use of the excess capacity on paid Falcon launches? If you have, say, 50 CRS launches to the ISS planned, can you tack on one internet satellite to each and get a constellation, or would they all end up redundantly in the same orbit? 2. $1M / 250lbs is $250/ounce. That number seems high to me which just goes to show how optimized these things are - very little structural material is needed to hold together a pile of electrical components in space.
- dogma1138 12y ago
  Atmospheric drag is actually quite an issue for satellites in low orbits. Space is not empty there are tons of dust and ice particles out there especially in the intended orbit. An exaggerated analogy will be dragging it in the sand but it's not that far off. But most importantly satellites are not built to survive in space they are built to survive launch (and into-orbit maneuvering) which is by far the most violent maneuvering any man made objects go through especially when you don't have a human cargo to care about. 250$ an ounce for a satellite with sufficiently enough advanced equipment to serve as a high bandwidth internet relay is actually extremely cheap to the point of being almost a fraud unless they cut out the R&D costs from the calculation and spread the buy-in and manufacturing costs across 1000's of units over several decades.
dogma1138 12y ago
Internet satellites meh, not technology where the round trip is counted in seconds is good for the internet, and that's a physical limitation just as the speed of light limits the latency you have to about 5MS per 1K/KM.. The round trip from a base station on the same longitude as the satellite is 250-300MS, under best case scenarios you will to pass trough about 2-3 satellites to get what you want from the other side of the world. If you do not need to go outside of your intimidate geographical area and say only need to pull data from a server within a 5K radius than atmospheric high altitude platforms are far superior both in cost and maintainability. You can't upgrade satellites not since the space shuttle is out of the picture and even that was only borderline cost effective on high end surveillance stations like the KH series which were the size of a school bus. Using tethered high altitude balloons or extreme-long endurance self sustaining drones seems like a much better solution for that than spending 100's of millions of dollars per launch. Even if what he's planning is an auto arranging auto healing mesh/cellular network of micro satellites doesn't seem to be feasible either. Micro satellites have an extremely short life span and have huge energy source issues, cant launch them with a nuclear power source(too heavy, and too short lived of a platform to be both safe and cost affective) and cant have expanded solar cell arrays on them due to atmospheric drag. What you are left with is a small nice cube which doesn't have enough power to transmit communications at any bandwidth that will be sufficient for internet traffic. Other than sounding cool and potentially farming quite a bit for work for SpaceX i don't see this venture of being of any value.
- terravion 12y ago
  Do any of you have experience with O3b connectivity? What is the pricing like? Our company has a couple applications where high bandwidth but higher latency connections would great. Obviously if you can get fiber where your data's coming in that's always the best, but we go a lot of places where that's hard.
  - dogma1138 12y ago
    O3B uses Astrium's KA-SAT platform these are 6000+ KG with enough power to power up a whole block birds this isn't what gets you affordable internet to the 3rd world no matter how much PR they trying to spit out. Also their network so far cost over 1bln $ and it's not even nearly complete. I'm not saying that there are no viable applications for data over SATCOM, I'm saying it's not a viable solution for providing internet to emerging markets on more than just the financial aspect. I think i misread your post as a statement rather than a question sorry about that. To answer your question, O3B's pricing is meant to be competitive in TOC in cases when it's not a question of which high speed fiber optic provider i choose from, but when it's a question of which of these huge contractor firms do i need to hire to lay my own fiber across half of Africa. As far as i know their only major costumers currently(out side of governments) are the big shipping companies and maybe a couple of telecoms. Not to sound offensive but if you are asking a question about O3B or any similar network on H/N you probably can't afford it. Also since we are talking about multi-million dollars per year contracts asking for pricing is not really possible it's not like they have data plans :) The final price will depend on who you are, where you need to send it too, and where are you sending it. Also networks like O3B don't really work with off-the-shelf CPE, so you also have a huge buy in cost in as you will pretty much operate a base station that probably costs mid six figures alone even if it's a small one like they put on container ships.. Just a comparison Irridum (a satcom network a consumer can actually contract from) charges over 1$ per KB for data, and they can only provide data transmission in short-data-bursts with very very limited bandwidth mostly used for SMS and maybe maybe WAP. So yeah at current prices watching the latest Miley Cyrus music video from YouTube in HD will cost you about 300,000(tho most likely their entire network combined doesn't have enough bandwidth to stream it)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gedmark 12y ago
Click-bait headline. The article is actually about Greg Wyler's WorldVu company. If you haven't gotten around the paywall yet, here's the key quote... "The people familiar with the matter cautioned the project is in a formative stage, and it isn’t certain Mr. Musk will participate."
JSno 12y ago
stay away from satellite industry.
FiatLuxDave 12y ago
This sounds like an obvious vertical integration move. When you own a rocket company, the best thing for your company is a big market for launching satellites. When you own a satellite company, you want to get sweetheart deals on launches. Musk isn't spreading himself too thin; this is what is called Business Development. Despite having Musk's name on it for clickbait, the article seemed to me to be more about Wyler and WorldVu. The article calls it a "venture" and says they are "working with" each other, but I don't see any details about whether this is a joint venture, a new company, a deal between SpaceX and WorldVu, or what. I don't know whether to qualify this article as PR or industry gossip.

36 points by jakarta 12y ago

If the paywall comes up google "Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites" and click that link.

Musk is spread to thin. Period. Any one of his ventures is a full time job. Hard to understand what type of personality needs to branch out on in different areas as he has. And how can you make good decision, no matter who you are, or what capabilities you have when you only have so many hours in a day?

tw04 12y ago
A good leader delegates to trusted associates. There's plenty of time in the day once you have put the right people in place to do the heavy lifting. If he's spread too thin, which I highly doubt he is, he's micromanaging.
josefresco 12y ago
He could just be really good at delegating - which if course requires really good people. I too will often think "why is Elon talking about THAT" as it is seemingly out of his expertise but after witnessing many examples, it seems Elon ponders many more subjects than are reflected in his existing businesses.
- larrys 12y ago
  I'm sure he's good at delegating. But in order to go to meetings and make good decisions there is still a ton of info to keep on top of. And people to talk to. Now multiple that by three. We're not talking about running a restaurant chain here or a discount store. We're talking about three businesses that require the type of high level knowledge and attention that is difficult for any single person to do. No matter who they are.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
How many things is Google trying to do, and in how many fields? How is that effectively different? Also, this comment supports my thesis that any comment using "Period." or "End of story." is overstated at best, and wrong at worst.
- leeber 12y ago
  You have a great thesis. Period.
- larrys 12y ago
  Not a fair comparison to google which is a company Musk is a person and the story isn't framed as "Musk Company branching into xyz" but "Elon Musk" branching into different companies. Separately google is highly profitable and can afford to take fliers in many areas and needs to do so in order to diversify, different situation. A "Musk Company" branching into different areas might be compared to GE having different divisions all managed in a way with the corporate structure centralized but in that case the head of GE isn't a tech visionary and isn't involved in anything within the particular company like it at least appears to be with Musk. Likewise with Berkshire Hathaway for that matter. Gotta tell you that in a sense it's almost like, get this, a ponzi scheme you keep spinning up new hope and investor money to keep things going and think you'll figure it out later down the road.

josu 12y ago

Aren't satellite communications a bit limited by the uplink connection? When are we going to have a small enough antenna that's able to communicate with a satellite while fitting inside a cell phone?

natosaichek 12y ago
For 1-way communications link to be viable, you can adjust a variety of parameters. There is the transmitter and receiver antenna gains (which are usually proportionate to antenna size), there's the datarate, and the transmit power. If you want a voice link, that means your datarate will be ion the order of ~10kbps If you want a cell phone as your transmitter, that means your antenna gain is very low, and your transmit power is also very low. The remaining free variable is the receive antenna gain. So if you put up a satellite with a large receiver antenna, then this sort of thing can work. For an example, take a look at terrestar networks' phone and satellite (http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/ http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/) . They've gone bankrupt (I think over spectrum allocation issues?) but the did functional demonstrations of their technology before going under. They had the worlds largest space-based phased array antenna system deployed.
- josu 12y ago
  Interesting. Did any other company buy their satellite infrastructure?

cmsmith 12y ago

A couple things stuck out to me about the numbers: 700 satellites weighing 250 pounds and costing $1M each. 1. Is this being considered because it is the best way to make use of the excess capacity on paid Falcon launches? If you have, say, 50 CRS launches to the ISS planned, can you tack on one internet satellite to each and get a constellation, or would they all end up redundantly in the same orbit? 2. $1M / 250lbs is $250/ounce. That number seems high to me which just goes to show how optimized these things are - very little structural material is needed to hold together a pile of electrical components in space.

dogma1138 12y ago
Atmospheric drag is actually quite an issue for satellites in low orbits. Space is not empty there are tons of dust and ice particles out there especially in the intended orbit. An exaggerated analogy will be dragging it in the sand but it's not that far off. But most importantly satellites are not built to survive in space they are built to survive launch (and into-orbit maneuvering) which is by far the most violent maneuvering any man made objects go through especially when you don't have a human cargo to care about. 250$ an ounce for a satellite with sufficiently enough advanced equipment to serve as a high bandwidth internet relay is actually extremely cheap to the point of being almost a fraud unless they cut out the R&D costs from the calculation and spread the buy-in and manufacturing costs across 1000's of units over several decades.

dogma1138 12y ago

Internet satellites meh, not technology where the round trip is counted in seconds is good for the internet, and that's a physical limitation just as the speed of light limits the latency you have to about 5MS per 1K/KM.. The round trip from a base station on the same longitude as the satellite is 250-300MS, under best case scenarios you will to pass trough about 2-3 satellites to get what you want from the other side of the world. If you do not need to go outside of your intimidate geographical area and say only need to pull data from a server within a 5K radius than atmospheric high altitude platforms are far superior both in cost and maintainability. You can't upgrade satellites not since the space shuttle is out of the picture and even that was only borderline cost effective on high end surveillance stations like the KH series which were the size of a school bus. Using tethered high altitude balloons or extreme-long endurance self sustaining drones seems like a much better solution for that than spending 100's of millions of dollars per launch. Even if what he's planning is an auto arranging auto healing mesh/cellular network of micro satellites doesn't seem to be feasible either. Micro satellites have an extremely short life span and have huge energy source issues, cant launch them with a nuclear power source(too heavy, and too short lived of a platform to be both safe and cost affective) and cant have expanded solar cell arrays on them due to atmospheric drag. What you are left with is a small nice cube which doesn't have enough power to transmit communications at any bandwidth that will be sufficient for internet traffic. Other than sounding cool and potentially farming quite a bit for work for SpaceX i don't see this venture of being of any value.

terravion 12y ago
Do any of you have experience with O3b connectivity? What is the pricing like? Our company has a couple applications where high bandwidth but higher latency connections would great. Obviously if you can get fiber where your data's coming in that's always the best, but we go a lot of places where that's hard.
- dogma1138 12y ago
  O3B uses Astrium's KA-SAT platform these are 6000+ KG with enough power to power up a whole block birds this isn't what gets you affordable internet to the 3rd world no matter how much PR they trying to spit out. Also their network so far cost over 1bln $ and it's not even nearly complete. I'm not saying that there are no viable applications for data over SATCOM, I'm saying it's not a viable solution for providing internet to emerging markets on more than just the financial aspect. I think i misread your post as a statement rather than a question sorry about that. To answer your question, O3B's pricing is meant to be competitive in TOC in cases when it's not a question of which high speed fiber optic provider i choose from, but when it's a question of which of these huge contractor firms do i need to hire to lay my own fiber across half of Africa. As far as i know their only major costumers currently(out side of governments) are the big shipping companies and maybe a couple of telecoms. Not to sound offensive but if you are asking a question about O3B or any similar network on H/N you probably can't afford it. Also since we are talking about multi-million dollars per year contracts asking for pricing is not really possible it's not like they have data plans :) The final price will depend on who you are, where you need to send it too, and where are you sending it. Also networks like O3B don't really work with off-the-shelf CPE, so you also have a huge buy in cost in as you will pretty much operate a base station that probably costs mid six figures alone even if it's a small one like they put on container ships.. Just a comparison Irridum (a satcom network a consumer can actually contract from) charges over 1$ per KB for data, and they can only provide data transmission in short-data-bursts with very very limited bandwidth mostly used for SMS and maybe maybe WAP. So yeah at current prices watching the latest Miley Cyrus music video from YouTube in HD will cost you about 300,000(tho most likely their entire network combined doesn't have enough bandwidth to stream it)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gedmark 12y ago

Click-bait headline. The article is actually about Greg Wyler's WorldVu company. If you haven't gotten around the paywall yet, here's the key quote... "The people familiar with the matter cautioned the project is in a formative stage, and it isn’t certain Mr. Musk will participate."

JSno 12y ago

stay away from satellite industry.

FiatLuxDave 12y ago

This sounds like an obvious vertical integration move. When you own a rocket company, the best thing for your company is a big market for launching satellites. When you own a satellite company, you want to get sweetheart deals on launches. Musk isn't spreading himself too thin; this is what is called Business Development. Despite having Musk's name on it for clickbait, the article seemed to me to be more about Wyler and WorldVu. The article calls it a "venture" and says they are "working with" each other, but I don't see any details about whether this is a joint venture, a new company, a deal between SpaceX and WorldVu, or what. I don't know whether to qualify this article as PR or industry gossip.