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The 10-Year Satellite Forecast
coondoggie writes "When it comes to satellites sometimes less is more. In the next ten years the government expects to see fewer but ever larger satellites flung into space. Specifically, the folks who monitor such things, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), said in a draft report today that an average 20.8 satellites could be launched from 2009 through 2018, a decrease of one satellite when compared to the 2008 forecast of 21.8 and the 2007 forecast of 21.0 satellites per year. Actual launches per year were above 20 for the first time since 2002 and the highest total since 2000, with 23 satellites launched in 2008.
As for the weight, the group said there has been steady growth in satellite mass since 1993 and the trend will continues as satellite mass is expected to remain near or slightly above 100,000 kilograms (220,400 lbs) forecast for the coming years with an all-time high of nearly 116,500 kg (257,000lbs) in 2009, the COMSTAC report stated."
So the prediction is for bigger satellites, and more tacos! Who can argue with a forecast that?
John
OK, I know there's a lot of room up there but surely some of the most desirable real estate (geosychronous orbits etc) must be getting a bit crowded by now. How long till someone realises we need to start removing some of the 'clutter' (old, defunct satellites) to make way for the new. Or do they assume that they will just fall to Earth, or drift off into space?
Smivs on the intertubes!
It's interesting to see the trend of sizes of commercial and governmental satellites. The commercial sats are getting larger and outfitted with better hardware that can support more simultaneous users. The governmental sats are getting smaller and work in tandem to do their work.
Given that satellites can't last forever, I wonder which model pays off better in the long run. Does having many smaller satellites work better than having fewer larger sats? If so, could we find an optimal size or configuration of these small fries?
Or is having this many small things whizzing about going to cause trouble later on as we decide we need to add more birds to our skies? A few big birds are easier to spot and avoid than many little ones.
We don't put many 100,000kg mass payloads into orbit anymore... if we ever have. Unless the entire shuttle counts.
How were 21.8 satellites launched in 2008? How do you launch eight tenths of a satellite?
The satellites in our orbit resemble our software. We reinvent the wheel and create a new program for each small task every time we want something done, instead of spending time on some research and find out how to reuse what we have. Most capitalists call this competition, which is fine to an extent, I guess. It is the lack of balance in applying this strategy that is the problem. Competition or not, most existing sattelites/software can be scrapped as such and its task done by combination of other sattelites/software.
How about fusing the satellite functions into a smaller set of functions, like using 12 satellites with multiple functionality like very wide range spectrometers (sound, image, infra-red, ultra-violet, radio, etc) or a set of narrow purpose spectrometers so that instead of launching a new piece of hitech junk into space, the satellite operation time is outsources/leased out to those interested. Just like a cloud computer, we can have a satellite cloud. Ok, we can have several, since some countries are not on speaking terms, and/or value total autonomy, but we do not have to have 20 different variations of GPS-like supporting satellites out there now. I mean Google does not have to launch its own Earth-mapping sat just because it has the money to do so, it can instead invest on replacing lens/mirror/firmware on something already in orbit, although I may be eating my hat saying this, given how costly repairs in space are. Well anyways, if 10 bodies invest in a space-repair, it MAY be cheaper than to launch 10 sats.
Granted, satellite orbit space is getting crowded faster than namespace for software, but I think we can agree that also in software things are getting a bit out of hand.
Anyways, just an analogy.
But then again, maybe we are exaggerating this? Orbit space is pretty damn big, no?
Given that the Shuttle can launch 24 tons to LEO, and Arianne V 21 tons to LEO, one has to wonder how, if
the expected satellite mass is expected to remain near or slightly above 100,000 kilograms ,
these satellites will be launched ? Of course, no one is launching 100 metric ton satellites. That is presumably satellite mass launched per year.
Both the slashdot post and the original article seemed to have munged this totally.
Which one brings SkyNet online?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
One big satellite = One big target with no redundancy. What am I missing here?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I never really though of it like that, interesting. Over the past many years that functional commercial, government, and other types of satellites have been put into orbit, there has been a huge network of underutilized satellites. That is, in the sense that many operational satellites are backups or can handle additional traffic within their bandwidth. The multi-GHz bands (such as the high L-band and Ku-Band up through Ka-Band) are inundated with lots and lots of satellites. As companies change services, fold, get acquired, or sell or lease their satellites, services can be changed easily instead of launching new satellites. However, many of these satellites too, are going out of service for various reasons. Some were rendered useless the day they were launched, lending to the piles of useless stuff up there. I do not believe that creating a few large satellites to cover many services is a great idea. Of course, it depends on who is controlling the satellites, but my concern is the vulnerability of fewer satellites.
The COMSTAC report linked in this article is the GSO (Geosynchronous Orbit) Forecast. Useful and available GSO slots are a scarce resource. Of course the trend will be toward fewer, more capable geosynchronous satellites.
Meanwhile, the smaller and cheaper satellites continue to make sense for low earth orbit (LEO) missions.
Without this distinction, the article pretty much misses the entire point.
Most satellites are still simple "bent-pipe" kind, send data up in one frequency, translate, send it down in another frequency.
Boeing SDC (formerly Hughes Space and Comm) was (and probably still is) the leading company in DSP payloads and only one with the expertise to space qualify an IBM ASIC, but they have a broken business model and a hard time selling it to their customers. That and they have a very out-dated bus led to market deterioration over the years.
That aside, bigger satellites are just like bigger processors: it will become prohibitively expensive to develop and produce at some point. DARPA has been funding research in microsats with absolutely no redundancy and minimal radiation shielding, so you can build a Beowulf cluster with graceful degradation and a giant transmission relay (like TDRSS)
How do you launch four-fifths of a satellite? Or do you launch a whole one and the four-fifths is the fraction of the debris that stay in orbit after a collision?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The advanced FEC in DVB-S2 has now allowed satellite transponder users to get about 10-20% more data through the satellite at the same downlink signal-to-noise ratio.
Thus many folks who have previously used DVB-S QPSK modulation are now moving to DVB-S2 8PSK modulation while retaining the same size dishes.
Of course, the other way to go is stay DVB-S2 QPSK but use smaller dishes...
Either way, DVB-S2 is making satellite transponder use more efficient, so perhaps this is marginally reducing the need for more satellites. There is a very slow move from MPEG-2 to H.264 encoding for video traffic, which is also marginally reducing the need for more satellites (actually there are a number of full-transponder analog video feeds that have not even gone to MPEG-2, but they are getting rare).
The other big force is that fiber is dominating most point-to-point applications, and satellite is being left for point-to-multipoint communications (over 100 receive sites, for example).