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Airbus to build giant satellite network
- aerovistae 11y agoI love how in like 2 months we've gone from nobody doing this to three separate entities trying to launch an internet of satellites. Gonna get crowded up there.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI'd like to see a server ON a satellite, beyond the reach of governments and regulation. Sell encryption keys and route your ground-based services through a cache up there.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoGonna be hard to replace a faulty hard drive, though. And arguably if you put a server on a satellite, governments will be the only entities capable of reaching it.
- barkingcat 11y agoYes - the automated X-37 can get to it no problem.
- vidarh 11y agoSee, there's a way to motivate another space race: Get a bunch of nanosats up there broadcasting material that's offensive to as many governments as possible.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI think that would eventually motivate people to clean up space junk, once China, India, US and Russia blow up a few pirate satellites and everyone realizes we can't get to orbit for awhile.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoAnybody with a dish and a key can reach it, right?
- noselasd 11y agoProbably. Then again anyone with a transmitting dish can be triangulated by the government body that doesn't like people doing that.
- kuschku 11y agoBut satellite TV is used in tons of places, with most systems of the past decade also being able to transmit. People having a satellite dish pointed at a satellite there would be in the range of hundreds of millions alone in europe.
- noselasd 11y agoYour TV dish is not transmitting. But the point is, that if some country decides the new internet via satellite to be illegal, it is _very_ easy for them to find people using it.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoNot true. Could be in of a van. Or hidden on a roof. Iraq had once forbidden TV satellite dishes; thousands were in use. A dish leaks very little energy except in the direction of the satellite. It could be astronomically unlikely anyone could detect its use unless they were line-of-sight between the dish and the satellite. And pointed in the right direction.
- noselasd 11y agoAnd the reason they could hide those TV dishes under roofs is that they are not transmitting. If you want internet via satellite, they are transmitting, and while they are directional towards the satellite, there's enough signal going off in other direction sides making it not that hard to detect from the ground.
- a3n 11y agoPeriodically shotgun a bunch of RPIs (or their sensible equivalent) on just big enough satellites. The "servers" are distributed across the little nodes. Assume they'll fail and burn up, or just burn up, and keep on shotgunning them up there as long as subscriber fees are profitable enough. Maybe they don't even need to be profitable if they also serve some sort of propaganda/free speech function for regions of the world that the developed West wants to poke at.
- a3n 11y agoEdit: or shoot big satellites up there, containing the little satellite/server swarms. Spit some more out when necessary.
- civilian 11y agoYou better be ready to handle solar storms! :)
- bakhy 11y agoa new theorem in the making - CAS: consistency, availability, solar storm tolerance.
- anigbrowl 11y agoWe already have satellite-killing technology, so I think your idea of 'beyond the reach of governments' is fanciful.
- jevinskie 11y agoIndeed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaKpJ7i-JXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaKpJ7i-JXA Ballistic missile defense is a very interesting field. It actually seems uncannily defensive given the rest of the "Defense" Industry, ignoring potentially destabilizing MAD. =P
- kenrikm 11y agoI'm not sure they would be able to hit something as small as a nano sat with a missile. The X-37 could do it but that's expensive unless you really, really don't want whatever the satellite is doing to continue.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoNano satellites would be cheaper, by orders of magnitude, than the facilities needed to 'shoot them down'. Anyway the idea was, out of reach of regulation.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoWow, they could complete their objective more quickly by taking a billion dollars in small denomination bills and putting it into a pile and lighting it on fire :-) Only slightly more seriously, it would be very impressive if they could pull it off, but having seen the deployment of Iridium (66), GPS (32), GLONASS (24) , and Galileo (30) it doesn't seem like we have a non-nation state that is up to the challenge of putting 600(!) satellites into orbit all at once. If we assume the reporters got random factoids mixed up, 600 satellites? in 20 "planes" ? (lets assume they are somehow station keeping in the same orbital plane so 30 satellites each trying to stay 12 degrees away from the next satellite in the same plane, while trying to avoid the other 19 planes? One gets destroyed by space junk and you practically guarantee another 29 join it over the next 120 minutes or so? That is going to be quite the dance. And what spectrum are they using for uplink/downlink? .5 Thz? Something they can get a license for all over the world presumably. That alone cost a billion dollars for Iridium. I just can't imagine a scenario where this even works. Perhaps if they start with the old TeleDesic design or something.
- seany 11y agoKu band. They already own the spectrum.
- kbenson 11y agoUpon reading, I'm not sure if "planes" refers to aircraft, or surface, as in strata. I'm not sure how feasible that is, but in general the story itself seems light on technical details overall.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoMy guess was orbital plane (inclination with respect to the orientation of the earth. So everything in the same orbital plane is going round the same direction at the same speed and distance.
- yoha 11y agoIn this context, it refers to orbital plane. In this particular case, you can just substitute "orbit".
- seany 11y agoI had a feeling this would be something Greg was involved in. Interesting that he's actually involved in two of these projects at once. Though for different markets.
- sharpercoder 11y agoAssuming at least 40KM distance from the earth, (40/300) * 2 means a roundtrip time of 267ms. That's without processing time, but that's probably in the ballpark of <5 ms. This excludes many types of internet use cases.
- dasmoth 11y agoI assume you mean 40,000 kilometres here. That'll definitely be lower than that (at that kind of height, you wouldn't need hundreds of satellites for global coverage). Wiki page talks about 800km and 950km orbits.
- andor 11y ago800km is not so far, it's much closer than Europe to North America, US East Coast to West Coast, etc. A round-trip at speed of light should take about 5.3ms.
- lmm 11y agoThe speed of light is 300 Mm/s, not 300 Km/s.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 11y agoIt's very interesting that the reported price was ~ 1/2 million $ per 150kg sat. SpaceX's launch price to LEO is ~ $4.6k/kg, or ~ $700k per 150kg. While the price to launch these guys would be a bit higher (they need something to aggregate a bunch of sats into a single payload), normally the cost to build the sat is a lot bigger than SpaceX's launch price.
- mapt 11y agoVolume, volume, volume. Few unmanned spacecraft flown to date are in principle more complex than a Toyota. If you did 1-unit automotive production runs, and 1-unit production runs for most of the parts rather than using standardized templates, things would be expensive there too.
- ris 11y ago"...OneWeb, a British Channel Islands-registered concern..." If they're so british why don't they think they should pay tax like the rest of us?
- joosters 11y agoI don't think the phrasing was trying to play up the Britishness of the company, it was merely saying that the Channel Islands are British. Of course, it's still a tax dodge and the company should pay tax like the rest of most of the world!
- ris 11y agoNo, I know, I was just taking a cheap stab.
- dharma1 11y agoAh, Branson vs Musk. This is one of the things where investing in a fast moving technology reminds me of deflationary economy - we are putting a lot of satellites up there and spending billions doing it when tech is accelerating at such a fast rate that in 10 years the electronics will be quite dated, so it might be worth a wait. There is no easy way to update electronics on these once they're up. Suppose billionaires wants to have a legacy in space before their time on earth is done! Personally can't wait until this is cheap enough for normal individuals/startups. Low orbit nanosats can be done for $20k-ish already - www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603240-small-satellites-taking-advantage-smartphones-and-other-consumer-technologies Going to get crowded up there!
- ksec 11y agoI thought one world was something new it turns out that it's actually been announced since February this year. My main question is how fast is it going to be? Can I expect 10Mbps to each terminal / user?