I'm surprised by HN opinions on this. Astronomy misconception plus Kessler syndrome worries are two biggest faulty views on SpaceX and now Amazon.
As one deleted comment stated:
"Stacking images and object detection can pretty much nullify this problem. Worst case scenario you throw out a couple minutes of data. It might add an extra step to data processing which is unfortunate but in the vast majority of cases won't be a problem."
Pretty much sums it up. This is a problem that has been blown out of proportions by media. Sure, amateur astronomy will take a slight hit, but it is nowhere the issue being presented.
Kessler syndrome doesn't apply at altitude so low and all of the satellites are brought by gravity in few months, they need constant readjustments to stay in low orbit.
it's a problem now, yet it will only get worse at the entire Starlink fleet is fully deployed. There's only a few hundred of the thousands from Starlink alone. It will be impossible to get a single clean image. It's not the small problem you seem to suggest
We are talking about (at most - including other future companies) roughly 50,000 satellites in LEO, each about the size of a car, and they burn up in the atmosphere in a few years.
Given LEO is at a higher altitude, the "surface area" at that orbit is larger, but lets pretend its only 510 million km^2 (i.e. Earth's surface area).
If I evenly distributed 50,000 cars across 510 million km^2, you would need to search 10,200 km^2 to find 1 car.
Even 1 satellite per 1 km^2 in LEO would not impede astronomy, and that future requires 500+ million such satellites.
Amazon and SpaceX operating roughly 0.01 million satellites each is inconsequential.
Pros: competition with Starlink, more Internet connectivity for the world.
Cons: this + Starlink + OneWeb make wide-field Earth-based astronomy much harder, making it less likely that we'll notice new astronomic phenomena or inbound city-killer near earth asteroids.
SpaceX is testing a sunshield on one of their newest Starlink satellites. I hope we'll see Kuiper launch with those and other reflectivity mitigations from the beginning instead of being surprised by the whole problem like SpaceX (claims to be).
I believe the antenna's + gear you will need will be larger than you'll want to haul around. Starlink is mainly for permanent rural installations where cable+fiber sees no profits.
5G will also help some but it's become pretty clear that there isn't the public interest to generally bring broadband to rural areas the way telephone and electricity was (in the US among other places). The only real option today is conventional satellites, which for a lot of people are unacceptable because of latency/data limits/cost especially as video is increasingly not really optional.
Of course, we'll have to see how good these efforts of relative to normal broadband but they do offer hope that you won't have to choose where to live based on the broadband options.
I see this view a lot. May i ask you a question that comes to my mind when I consider it: do you worry about access to modern medicine, living out in the middle of nowhere?
Having an ambulance take 2 hours to get to you in case of a heart attack would be a death sentence, for example.
All of SpaceX's new starlink satellites have the new sun visor, per musk. I believe the last launch (or maybe two?) of starlink satellites had them. The one coming up this weekend also will have them.
And I still don't get the financial benefit for commercial use. Getting stuff to orbit is expensive, satellites are expensive, maintaining stuff in orbit is expensive.
Laying fibre and putting up 5G towers is cheaper, they can be serviced and upgraded.
Satellites make sense for governments, as it is harder to screw with them for adversaries. But for commercial use, what's exactly the benefit?
According to Elon Musk, Starship will be able to launch 400 Starlink satellites in one go[0]. He also says a Starship launch will cost ~$2 million[1] per launch.
Given that this is Elon we're talking about, we'll call it 300 sats at $20 million per launch.
Per their FCC application, SpaceX were allowed an upper eventual limit of 30,000 sats.[2] Let's assume that upper limit is what's required for a global comms network.
(30,000 / 300) * 20,000,000) = $2 Billion in launch costs. Assuming a lifetime of 5 years[3], that's $4 Billion per decade.
30,000 sats at $250K per[4] gives us $7.5 Billion in hardware costs. Twice per decade is $15 Billion.
That's 19 Billion per decade. Round and double it, just to be safe. 40 Billion per decade, so 4 Billion per year.
Could you build and maintain a global fiber network for $4 Billion per year?
> Handley’s simulation suggests that the project will be most appealing to high-frequency traders at big banks, who might be willing to fork out large sums for dedicated, faster connections.[1]
So even if LEO is more expensive, which it will not be, the expense will be covered by large financial firms.
Also companies like AWS pay a lot of money for bandwidth between their datacenters. Once Amazon's satellites are up and running, AWS will continue to need government permissions to build new datacenters (including ground stations) but will not need to interact with any other company for bandwidth. Improving AWS' profit margin for existing datacenters.
Finally, today AWS cannot build a datacenter in low cost areas because they need great internet connectivity. However, a LEO constellation enables them to build in significantly cheaper locations (think about the land/construction costs in Moldova vs Germany i.e. 6x reduction[2]).
These alone are huge benefits that outweigh the costs, but adding general purpose internet traffic will only improve cost effectiveness.
I worry this is really going to mess up astronomy. Lots of the pictures we see of space are long exposure. Even now astronomers are having a hard time of doing a long term exposure and then it getting washed out by a bright close orbiting device.
These satellites are temporary. Internet connectivity is a vital service these days and global connectivity will do a lot to lift a lot of people out of poverty.
The ability for people to take pictures being diminished is unfortunate, but if I had to choose between the two options I'll choose the one that significantly increases a lot on people's standard of living
Maybe in the future when we aren't ruled by capitalist overlords that make expanding traditional internet infeasible we can stop launching and replacing these satellites and can take pretty pictures again
This feels a bit like "we'll all drown in horse manure by year 2000" kind of issue. Given the way SpaceX is going, we'll probably end up with a wide range of space-based observatories that offer much better tools than current ground-based observatories that are limited by Earth's atmosphere, noise from radio local transmissions, overflying satellites, etc.
The reason why the largest telescope observatories are on earth is because it's I feasible to get them into orbit.
And it's not a theoretical problem - there's plenty of people who have already had their work impacted
Software to remove the satellites would be great, given that the satellites are already interfering with astrophotography, can someone point me to the software to remove the starlink satellites from my images?
That was true in the 90s, now ground-based telescopes outpace most potential space telescopes. Adaptive optics mean the atmosphere is no longer the wobbly lens it once was.
I'll add that my main hope is that the scale required for launching large satellite constellations will also make it cheaper to launch space-based telescopes, but it's far from clear that would be a major benefit (after all, launch costs will probably be on the order of 1% of the JWST's total ~$10B cost).
Many of you will be too young to remember this but there was a glut of these companies/constellations in the 1990s. For example, Teledesic [1]. For awhile 20 years ago we had Internet access of international flights. We have it again but there was 10-15 years in the middle where we didn't.
The reason was that there just wasn't that much demand for LEO satellite Internet and the capacity way exceeded demand.
We're at the beginning of another cycle like this. Not all these companies will survive. My money is on Starlink being one of the survivors because SpaceX, of any of these companies, is vertically integrated with the biggest cost: launches. Even better, their launch costs are the lowest.
Maybe Amazon can do this since Bezos also is throwing big money at Blue Origin but, at best, I think Blue Origin is years behind SpaceX.
Oh I get there are different economics now. To be clear, my point isn't that there isn't demand for things like Starlink. My point is merely that even with that demand, we'll end up building more capacity than we need and some won't survive, just like 20 years ago.
I like the simplicity of the Starlink design, in that it's simply ground-to-satellite-to-ground. There are no satellite relays. I wonder if this will limit access in more remote places (eg Alaska, on the ocean, Antarctica). I guess SpaceX has decided this limitation is worth the cost-savings.
I'm curious to know what the effective range is from subscriber to access point (via satellite). And also what if you can talk to multiple Starlink satellites but only some of them are within range of an access point? I'm sure they've thought about this. I'm just curious on the technical details.
The economics of getting satellites into orbit are drastically better now. The RF technology and thus bandwidth available between ground and satellite is drastically improved now. Pricing of these services should make them feasible for everyday use by something resembling an "average" rural user, whereas past services were really just a luxury for narrow circumstances.
I can't wait to switch to either spacex or amazon's satellite internet, especially if there is a price war.
And be free of cox's monopoly price gouging as the sole provider of speeds over 5mb/s for my neighborhood, which is part of the second largest metropolitan area in the nation.
If cox and the rest had provided decent service and decent prices instead of gouging and underinvesting, they wouldn't be faced with competition from satellite clouds anywhere near as soon as they are going to be.
Great news to have a viable competitor to Starlink. Most places on Earth still don't have internet access available, and these constellations are going to make it possible to bring everybody left behind online.
It's easy to make snark about this or that, but inexpensive, global, high bandwidth internet access seems like one of the most consequential technologies of the 21st century so far.
(Also, I wonder who will get the launch contract.)
Readit News
As one deleted comment stated: "Stacking images and object detection can pretty much nullify this problem. Worst case scenario you throw out a couple minutes of data. It might add an extra step to data processing which is unfortunate but in the vast majority of cases won't be a problem." Pretty much sums it up. This is a problem that has been blown out of proportions by media. Sure, amateur astronomy will take a slight hit, but it is nowhere the issue being presented.
Kessler syndrome doesn't apply at altitude so low and all of the satellites are brought by gravity in few months, they need constant readjustments to stay in low orbit.
We are talking about (at most - including other future companies) roughly 50,000 satellites in LEO, each about the size of a car, and they burn up in the atmosphere in a few years.
Given LEO is at a higher altitude, the "surface area" at that orbit is larger, but lets pretend its only 510 million km^2 (i.e. Earth's surface area).
If I evenly distributed 50,000 cars across 510 million km^2, you would need to search 10,200 km^2 to find 1 car.
Even 1 satellite per 1 km^2 in LEO would not impede astronomy, and that future requires 500+ million such satellites.
Amazon and SpaceX operating roughly 0.01 million satellites each is inconsequential.
Cons: this + Starlink + OneWeb make wide-field Earth-based astronomy much harder, making it less likely that we'll notice new astronomic phenomena or inbound city-killer near earth asteroids.
SpaceX is testing a sunshield on one of their newest Starlink satellites. I hope we'll see Kuiper launch with those and other reflectivity mitigations from the beginning instead of being surprised by the whole problem like SpaceX (claims to be).
Here's some coverage that we did in Orbital Index about the issue: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-02-20-Issue-52/#starli...
Dead Comment
That is such a ridiculous claim.
Of course, we'll have to see how good these efforts of relative to normal broadband but they do offer hope that you won't have to choose where to live based on the broadband options.
Laying fibre and putting up 5G towers is cheaper, they can be serviced and upgraded.
Satellites make sense for governments, as it is harder to screw with them for adversaries. But for commercial use, what's exactly the benefit?
Given that this is Elon we're talking about, we'll call it 300 sats at $20 million per launch.
Per their FCC application, SpaceX were allowed an upper eventual limit of 30,000 sats.[2] Let's assume that upper limit is what's required for a global comms network.
(30,000 / 300) * 20,000,000) = $2 Billion in launch costs. Assuming a lifetime of 5 years[3], that's $4 Billion per decade.
30,000 sats at $250K per[4] gives us $7.5 Billion in hardware costs. Twice per decade is $15 Billion.
That's 19 Billion per decade. Round and double it, just to be safe. 40 Billion per decade, so 4 Billion per year.
Could you build and maintain a global fiber network for $4 Billion per year?
[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/27/spacex-president-we-will-lan... [1]https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/spacex-starship-rock... [2]https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html [3]https://phys.org/news/2020-05-costly-collateral-elonmusk-sta.... [4]https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...
So even if LEO is more expensive, which it will not be, the expense will be covered by large financial firms.
Also companies like AWS pay a lot of money for bandwidth between their datacenters. Once Amazon's satellites are up and running, AWS will continue to need government permissions to build new datacenters (including ground stations) but will not need to interact with any other company for bandwidth. Improving AWS' profit margin for existing datacenters.
Finally, today AWS cannot build a datacenter in low cost areas because they need great internet connectivity. However, a LEO constellation enables them to build in significantly cheaper locations (think about the land/construction costs in Moldova vs Germany i.e. 6x reduction[2]).
These alone are huge benefits that outweigh the costs, but adding general purpose internet traffic will only improve cost effectiveness.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032033-300-the-firs... [2] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/country_result.js... vs https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/country_result.js...
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomers...
The ability for people to take pictures being diminished is unfortunate, but if I had to choose between the two options I'll choose the one that significantly increases a lot on people's standard of living
Maybe in the future when we aren't ruled by capitalist overlords that make expanding traditional internet infeasible we can stop launching and replacing these satellites and can take pretty pictures again
And it's not a theoretical problem - there's plenty of people who have already had their work impacted
Software to remove the satellites would be great, given that the satellites are already interfering with astrophotography, can someone point me to the software to remove the starlink satellites from my images?
Dead Comment
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3702/1
Many of you will be too young to remember this but there was a glut of these companies/constellations in the 1990s. For example, Teledesic [1]. For awhile 20 years ago we had Internet access of international flights. We have it again but there was 10-15 years in the middle where we didn't.
The reason was that there just wasn't that much demand for LEO satellite Internet and the capacity way exceeded demand.
We're at the beginning of another cycle like this. Not all these companies will survive. My money is on Starlink being one of the survivors because SpaceX, of any of these companies, is vertically integrated with the biggest cost: launches. Even better, their launch costs are the lowest.
Maybe Amazon can do this since Bezos also is throwing big money at Blue Origin but, at best, I think Blue Origin is years behind SpaceX.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
I think you have to factor is the access cost though. There wasn't much demand at that cost.
I like the simplicity of the Starlink design, in that it's simply ground-to-satellite-to-ground. There are no satellite relays. I wonder if this will limit access in more remote places (eg Alaska, on the ocean, Antarctica). I guess SpaceX has decided this limitation is worth the cost-savings.
I'm curious to know what the effective range is from subscriber to access point (via satellite). And also what if you can talk to multiple Starlink satellites but only some of them are within range of an access point? I'm sure they've thought about this. I'm just curious on the technical details.
All in all, this time seems very different.
And be free of cox's monopoly price gouging as the sole provider of speeds over 5mb/s for my neighborhood, which is part of the second largest metropolitan area in the nation.
If cox and the rest had provided decent service and decent prices instead of gouging and underinvesting, they wouldn't be faced with competition from satellite clouds anywhere near as soon as they are going to be.
It's easy to make snark about this or that, but inexpensive, global, high bandwidth internet access seems like one of the most consequential technologies of the 21st century so far.
(Also, I wonder who will get the launch contract.)
Deleted Comment