>> Starlink is also going to be seeing competition in the coming years thanks to companies like OneWeb and Telesat, which plans to create smaller constellations that will offer service by 2021. Tech giants like Amazon and Samsung have also announced plans to deploy their own constellations, which would consist of 3,236 to 4600 broadband satellites, respectively.
SpaceX has a huge advantage in launch costs here. Mass produced satellites will be lower cost per unit than most others, and launching on used rockets will give them the cheapest deployment costs ever. And they are the only company that can reuse rockets today. I don't see the competitors really having a chance.
Is anyone worried about space pollution and Kessler effect? There's currently around 5000 satellites up there, and each of these companies alone wants to put that much more in space.
But snark aside, having Bezos (and others) do the same thing is a good thing and will increase launch demand and lower prices and provide competition for satellite internet.
The true power of such systems is that they might eventually help overthrow hegemony of the BigTelco, who have been in bed with governments for as long as they have been in existence.
I'm excited to see what this would mean not just for the internet but mobile communication systems that are so much dependant on a few vendors and MNOs that have time and again proven to breach on privacy repeatedly [0][1]. For instance, there's no viable open source baseband alternative for 4G+ mobile devices [2][3][4][5], and acquiring frequency and setting up base stations is mired neck deep in regulations and patents [6], so there is not much room for a startup to disrupt the incumbent.
Given the advent of eSIMs and increase in embedded SecureElements [7] in smartphones, the traditional way of going mobile might soon be gone for good. I, for one, can't wait.
Does anyone work on building satellites like the ones mentioned here? what is a normal day in the life at a job like that? Are you pulling 40+ hrs/week ?
At some point SpaceX is going to start flying the Superheavy, which will be able to carry hundreds of satellites at once, and cost less per launch than Falcon 9 because the second stage will be reusable. That will give it a huge cost advantage.
At some point they'll also start regularly flying the heavy. It's about 3 years behind schedule now, and their satellite constellation has much shorter timespans.
Doesn't distribution in space become an issue if you release several hundred satellites from the same rocket and need to get them into position without any collision risk?
SpaceX has released dozens from a single launcher. They have get released in a staggered fashion and use onboard thrusters to modify their orbits a bit after release.
Not for the Starlink system at least. If you look at the orbits simulation linked in the article there will lots of satellites on a train the same orbit. The rocket could set orbit and drop off a satellite every X minutes.
If they do actually beat microwave towers, HFTs will be their first and most enthusiastic customers. SpaceX would not even need any specific strategy for the money to come from HFT. For biggest revenues, add steeply tiered pricing for the best latency, maybe even a bidding process.
If they tried to keep those gains in-house and did their own HFT I would not be surprised if exchanges then found ways to define rules that weaken HFT as a whole. Just a gut feeling that you need to be part of the culture surrounding the exchanges to be in that game and keep winning.
You don't even need to beat microwave. NYC-Tokyo or London-Tokyo don't have microwave links (and won't have anytime soon) so using it for these very long distances could be worth it.
Hybernia from NYC to London is about 55ms whereas I remember reading somewhere these satellites would have a 30ms ping. So probably not for cross-Atlantic propagation once you add all the switching and hops, but maybe cross-Pacific might be doable since propagation delay in space is lower than in fiber.
Realistically, no. High frequency trading is a niche and not hugely profitable market. Not really worth disrupting when there is a much bigger opportunity in delivering internet access to billions of people and many billions of devices.
Interesting point. However, I believe frequency trading relies on connections with extremely low latency, while satellite links are characterized by high Round Trip Time.
Geostationary satellites have high latency because they're so far up (36000 km). But dense low earth orbit satellite constellations can give lower latency than fibre over longer distances if you relay from satellite to satellite, because the speed of light in a vacuum is 1.5 times faster than in glass.
I wonder how this will affect Iridium in the long term. They target applications that provide critical services with low bandwidth requirements, and a need for small lightweight antennas with low power use.
Starlink's design doesn't fit those requirements for now. But I'm not sure whether Starlink will stay out of that market if they will be continuously upgrading their swarm.
On the other hand, it would be strange if SpaceX destroyed Iridium's business model after launching their latest generation satellites for them...
I could see a market where you put up a Starlink base station, which communicates to regular phones via LTE or WiFi. That could cover the use case of many Iridium deployments, where you are always within range of a camp or vehicle.
> What happens to inactive satellites? Do they de-orbit themselves in safe locations? Or just stay as space junk?
I believe they plan to use the last bit of their propellant to lower the perigee into the atmosphere, which will then naturally deorbit. They recently submitted documents to the FCC stating a change to materials to ensure everything burns up and wont impact the earth. [1]
IANASJ (I am not a space junkie) but this makes those ones sound unusually tiny and brings me back to the first question - are the Starlink birds similarly sized?
They're only a few hundred pounds each. Falcon 9 can launch 50,000 lbs to LEO in expandable mode, so probably about 30,000 lbs when reusable, meaning they could launch close to 100 if they weighed 300lbs (there'd also be a deployment structure etc).
44 seems very doable, and they'd just burn up like any other satellite.
Each Starlink satellite is likely to be in the range of 200–300 kg. Roughly the size of ~220L fridge when panels are folded.
The plan for active decommissioning is to drop perigee into “atmosphere” but there are also plans for passively deorbiting satellites that fail while in higher orbits which would otherwise take Millenia to de orbit on their own.
Readit News
SpaceX has a huge advantage in launch costs here. Mass produced satellites will be lower cost per unit than most others, and launching on used rockets will give them the cheapest deployment costs ever. And they are the only company that can reuse rockets today. I don't see the competitors really having a chance.
Arianespace: http://www.arianespace.com/client/oneweb/
https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
But snark aside, having Bezos (and others) do the same thing is a good thing and will increase launch demand and lower prices and provide competition for satellite internet.
I'm excited to see what this would mean not just for the internet but mobile communication systems that are so much dependant on a few vendors and MNOs that have time and again proven to breach on privacy repeatedly [0][1]. For instance, there's no viable open source baseband alternative for 4G+ mobile devices [2][3][4][5], and acquiring frequency and setting up base stations is mired neck deep in regulations and patents [6], so there is not much room for a startup to disrupt the incumbent.
Given the advent of eSIMs and increase in embedded SecureElements [7] in smartphones, the traditional way of going mobile might soon be gone for good. I, for one, can't wait.
---
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722292
[2] https://github.com/srsLTE/srsLTE
[3] https://telecominfraproject.com
[4] https://www.opennetworking.org
[5] https://osmocom.org
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11931072
[7] https://www.nfcworld.com/2018/08/07/357810/android-9-nfc-sec...
If they tried to keep those gains in-house and did their own HFT I would not be surprised if exchanges then found ways to define rules that weaken HFT as a whole. Just a gut feeling that you need to be part of the culture surrounding the exchanges to be in that game and keep winning.
Starlink's design doesn't fit those requirements for now. But I'm not sure whether Starlink will stay out of that market if they will be continuously upgrading their swarm.
On the other hand, it would be strange if SpaceX destroyed Iridium's business model after launching their latest generation satellites for them...
>> ... averaging 44 satellites per launch.
How big are these things and how many can _actually_ be put up in a single launch?
>> However, SpaceX intends to use this to their advantage by gradually replacing inactive satellites ...
What happens to inactive satellites? Do they de-orbit themselves in safe locations? Or just stay as space junk?
I believe they plan to use the last bit of their propellant to lower the perigee into the atmosphere, which will then naturally deorbit. They recently submitted documents to the FCC stating a change to materials to ensure everything burns up and wont impact the earth. [1]
[1] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/03/spacex-higher-necess...
44 in one launch is very doable. They’ve done 64 in a launch before: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-spacex-sa...
IANASJ (I am not a space junkie) but this makes those ones sound unusually tiny and brings me back to the first question - are the Starlink birds similarly sized?
44 seems very doable, and they'd just burn up like any other satellite.
The plan for active decommissioning is to drop perigee into “atmosphere” but there are also plans for passively deorbiting satellites that fail while in higher orbits which would otherwise take Millenia to de orbit on their own.