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Virgin Galactic To Launch 2,400 Comm. Satellites To Offer Ubiquitous Broadband
coondoggie writes Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson this week said he wants to launch as many as 2,400 small satellites in an effort to set up a constellation capable of bringing broadband communications through a company called OneWeb to millions of people who do not have it. He said he plans to initially launch a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation of 648 satellites to get the project rolling.
"2,400 small satellites ought to be enough for anybody" - Kirby Puckett (Minnesota Twins, 1989)
Branson sounds for all the World like a man all hat, no cattle.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In further news various governments have dropped all attempts at regulating the internet after the 15th successful kicker starter campaign has created yet another global network outside of their control....
Wouldn't towers be more cost effective? Granting satellites get past the political boundaries.
Put a big orange ball full of 802.11 gear on third world radio towers. Let the third world techs aim cantennas at it for free internet. Skip the nations that don't allow free net access.
Make sure they can't get spoofed IP addresses past the routers. We're going to need to be able to block some of these.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There is probably more paper work and regulation be a telecommunication company in x country than launching satellites. He also want to tap difficult market where physical tower could be hard to build, link and maintained. A tower need both power and a fiber communication. In remote regions those 2 are not present.
Good thing he built the Virgin Space Elevator. Otherwise he'd have to find a way to finance billions of dollars of launches.
O,o
I feel the same way about names.
Damn, if only there was some retort that could be twisted from your nom de plume.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Why in the world would you need so many of them? The entire US GPS network only consists of about 30 satellites and that allows a particular location visibility of at least four satellites across most of earths surface at any one time. I would think it would be easier, safer and cheaper to equip a hundred or so larger, better equipped satellites with multiple communications systems.
I remember back in the 2000's, some company was talking about putting up a ton of low-earth-orbit satellites to provide 2-way satellite Internet (I think at the time, you could get satellite via Dish network, but you still needed a phone line to transmit and it was way overpriced)
And before that irridium was launched and succeeded in every way but financially.
Got to assume that with so many satellites they all have death lasers mounted on them and are really an attempt to control the world.
But they are so cool frankly, I don't care. Satellites Up!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Good luck to Branson - I hope he actually gets this off the ground, or at least makes major advances in practical rocket design while he's trying.
But the last few projects like this - Teledesic, Iridium, a couple of other important ones I forget - all ran into problems with markets, with costs, with technology, and with government regulation (both censorship and spectrum-control.) One of the cool things about satellite phones and data was that you could access them from anywhere in the world, even places without much infrastructure, but the problem was that they cost a lot more than terrestrial infrastructure in densely populated areas (so you couldn't make much money where there were lots of people), and sparsely populated areas are mostly poor farmers (so you couldn't make much money there), so what you really had was a niche market that cost you billions in upfront infrastructure. It's also hard to get high bandwidth from solutions like this (though lots of applications don't need to be that fast.)
Governments were also a problem, because many of them didn't want unregulated speech, not subject to wiretap, competing with monopoly or ex-monopoly local telecom providers. Remember when Blackberry was only allowed to sell their phones in India if they provided a nexus for wiretapping?
There have also been half a dozen announcements over the last decade or two about balloon-based projects, with blimps or weather balloons or tethered balloons or whatever providing low-altitude radio towers, which can deliver a lot more bandwidth (because they're close and can carry a lot more power), but somehow none of them ever turn into reality. (Good luck to Google and Facebook on those.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
All I can think about is the thousands of pieces of space junk that's installing. I hope they're designed to fall when they're done.
I'm not in a metro area and the best I can get right now is 3 Meg DSL. I'd gladly sign up for a home connection if I could get a low ping, higher bandwidth solution that was reasonably priced. Plenty of people in underserved 1st world that would be customers.
Ha ha.
With crude oil price per barrel price Plummeting to $30 and the Swiss Franc Re-valuation, i.e. Euro wont buy 83 cents in August 2015, Branson's Virgin Galactic Empire is UP IN SMOKE!
Huh? I thought Virgin's money came from their airline business. Costs for airline operation are down (because fuel is cheap).
The oil price drop should be benefitting him.
That should make the lives of anyone planning the math launches for missions quite a bit more interesting.
Personally, I hate Satellite Internet - after suffering under a fair use policy and having my bandwidth reduce to 1.2 k under Hughes, I don't see how even having 2400 small satellites in orbit can help, or envision the lag time if they made it work with a large population.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Will it have the same line of site limitations as current satellite Internet? I'm in Seattle, and with providers like HughsNet you need a very good line of sight to the south to get service. IIRC, where I used to work we had the dish pointed only 24 degrees above the horizon. That really limits the locations here in Seattle that have access to satellite Internet. This area desperately needs more options for Internet since Comcast doesn't offer service to much of the city, and Comcast DSL is so slow or doesn't work at all for much of downtown. CondoInternet is making a great effort at offering fast service in a few expensive residential buildings, but that doesn't help the huge problem for the rest of us.
That many satellites could tip us over the space junk critical mass threshold. If a spacecraft is hit by something it tends to send debris flying everywhere. Some of the pieces can then hit other spacecraft causing more debris. Once you have enough spacecraft in orbit -- critical mass -- the chain reaction sustains itself long enough to destroying many spacecraft in the same orbital region. It's called the Kessler syndrome.
You're allowed to make fun of any religion except Judaism. If you poke fun at Judaism, then you will be deemed an anti-Semite.
I've ran simulations of constellations before, even though small sats are cool, they should look at it from an economic stand point and not from a number of satellites standpoint. You don't need to have that many satellites to have global coverage. Iridium only has 70ish (if my memory serves me right) and they have global coverage. If you have the money to spend then you could get bigger satellites with a better orbit, and you'll need it because you need the power to keep the radios going all the time and to get the coverage. The biggest problem that this project faces is not satellites but comm, good luck on frequency allocation and getting a freqency band that works in all three major radio regions world wide. I think comm is the probably one of the hardest things challenges in a satellite project.
Motorola tried it a while ago:
http://www.airspacemag.com/ist/?next=/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-5615034/
Satellites are cool, but terrestrial towers are much easier to support.
They just announced today that the rocket that will be putting these things up will cost $10 million and have a LEO payload capacity of 225 kg... making it one of the most expensive launchers in the world, nearly ten times the cost per kilo of SpaceX. How they expect this to work with such insanely high costs is beyond me.
Why do so many of the posts that are critical of Comcast get moderated down so far? This astroturfing is getting out of control.
Grow ups talking here rim gobler.
This is a brilliant move. The ability to have unfettered net access (although with long ping rates) would be a world wide information source. Sure you'll get the newbie crazies, but you'll also expose millions to the web in whatever moral and ethical state it happens to be in at the time.
There should be a term for that - a term that describes or rates the ethical 'average' of the web at any given moment, perhaps on a continuum. If there isn't one at the moment then I have just coined "Nethical" or if that's too unbearable then maybe "Webethic" as in webethic state or degree.
Just sayin'
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Is there an available frequency(ies) for him to use?
Will it have the same line of site limitations as current satellite Internet? I'm in Seattle, and with providers like HughsNet you need a very good line of sight to the south to get service. IIRC, where I used to work we had the dish pointed only 24 degrees above the horizon.
These sats are going into LEO, not GEO, so their position in the sky won't be fixed. I imagine you'll used a phased array antenna to track them. The good points being: lower latency, no requirement to see the southern horizon specifically. The bad point being that you'll need a view of a bigger chunk of the sky to avoid signal dropouts as the satellites move - how big a chunk depends on how many satellites they have up there (and therefore how many are above the horizon at the same time). If they have enough satellites, it may work out better for you.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Is Richard Branson trying to compete with Elon Musk for media exposure? They both seem to be making dubious statements that seem to be designed to garner coverage.
Somebody throw a straitjacket on this guy before he surrounds the entire Earth with space junk.
E Proelio Veritas.
sitting in your mother's basement thinking you're smarter than Branson...
Ha ha.
With crude oil price per barrel price Plummeting to $30 and the Swiss Franc Re-valuation, i.e. Euro wont buy 83 cents in August 2015, Branson's Virgin Galactic Empire is UP IN SMOKE!
Hmmm... I would have thought that the oil crash would be good news for the Euro. None of the world's major fields is situated in Eurozone countries, and as your message indicates, global trade in petroleum is managed in dollars. A drop in the price of oil means a significant drop in the number of dollars being traded internationally and will reduce the cost of trade and other economic activity within Europe, so the Euro will probably buy a lot more than 83 cents in August if things keep going the way they are now.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Here's why this is stupid. It takes an immense amount of battery power to beam a signal back to a satellite. So if you're out in Argentina in the forest, you better have brought a car battery along to power that laptop's satellite transmitter.
Good bye. As you will soon be bankrupt. No use in following your activity any longer.
The rise of the Dollar has had a hand in lowering oil prices.
You miss the point. You are allowed to be an anti Semite.
You can say an things about other people, and they can say bad things about you.
Sounds like what you want is to be an a**hole and not be critiqued for it. That's not really what the whole free speech thing is about.
The difference is that larger rockets, while having a lower dollar per kilogram cost, can only put up a couple of satellites at a time. So while a $60M Falcon 9 for example can put much larger payloads into orbit at an order of magnitude lower $/kg, in reality, you'd only be able to put a couple satellites at most into orbit with a single vehicle. So therefore, you're really paying about $30M per satellite versus the $10M per satellite of the WhiteKnight.
perhaps now is a good time to discuss cleaning up the existing dead junk orbiting the earth in order to make space for all these new toys
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Sounds like the Pope is saying you should expect to be assaulted or even murdered for your speech, and that's both expected and tolerable, which is not what free speech is about.
Nor is it what Christianity is all about. Is the Pope in fact Catholic? Is Catholicism Christianity by another name?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
SpaceX is putting six Orbcomm G2 satellites in orbit per F9 launch, and they're putting ten Iridium NEXT satellites in orbit per F9 launch. Neither set of launches seem to be anywhere close to mass limited, which would indicate possible cost saving measures when building the satellites (you can build them a bit heavier if it saves money or increases on-orbit endurance).
What the actual limit per launch is, I don't know, but it's demonstrably much higher than two satellites. I suspect it would be more limited by the number of times the second stage can reliably relight, or how much delta v each satellite is capable of after release.
Well we could 'try to launch' another satellite, but with 200 million of them in low-earth orbit I'm surprised the sunlight can still reach the surface of the planet...
so basically... It would look like this
The problem wasn't the need. Everyone wants that. The problem was it had to be an absolute need, because it was so damn expensive. The handsets started at about 5000$ (and this was quite a long time ago), and the packages you had to buy were exorbitant to say the least, for very little capacity. The Iridium satellites were very expensive to launch, and as a result they needed to change a lot of money to make it worthwhile, couple that with the fact they didn't launch as many as they were going to (I think?), and the fact that the bandwidth was so low that it reduces the number of possible uses/users which also inflate the price.
Branson is likely counting on two things to make this profitable.
1) That due to recent changes in space competition particularly private companies, that launches will be MUCH cheaper. Couple that with the advent of miniaturization of components and microsats, even more bang for the buck launchwise.
2) Advances in technology that will allow for much higher bandwidth. While still maybe not comparable to being able to watch YouTube on your satellite phone, probably more than enough to have a much larger user base for relatively simple things now like voice and text type services. (Though they mention things like LTE, who knows)
Note: I didn't notice a lot of dates being thrown around, so this is likely a very longer term project (or it will be despite any words contrary).
Yeah, I remember this when it was called "Teledesic", from the mid-90s, when Craig McCaw, Bill Gates & Prince Bin Alawaleed threw $9 billion in a hat to create a Low Earth Orbit satellite internet company.
So, we have yet to solve some of the staggering problems behind this concept.
1, Cost.
2, Cost
3, Cost
4, Semi-acceptible downstream speeds, latency-choked laggy dialup upstream speeds making video/audio streaming, uploading to cloud services, etc wholly impractical. The only workable solution is to use traditional terrestrial last-mile technology (cable, dsl, etc.) for the upstream. Which wholly defeats the point of satellite internet.
I thought Sir Richard was smarter than this.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Branson's money was inherited. He invested in Virgin records, which made him a billionaire.
Virgin airlines break even in the long run, same as all airlines.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Comment necessary..you are the one who thought to make a bizarre paranoid anti Semite reference so...if the dog shit sticks to your shoe you smell of it. If you have a problem with differing cultures..tis your problem, buddy so Fuck You! You are clearly one such Anto Semite..must be hard surrounded in the high tech world with folks of differing cultures when you would prefer everyone from Arkansas or Iowa.
Wrong. Branson's family is upper class but never was super wealthy and he started Virgin in a church basement while still in his teens.