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.

Comments

Kessler Syndrome Alert

[jaa101]

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.

Re:Kessler Syndrome Alert

[Kjella]

Low earth orbit (LEO) is not a big threat, even a major clusterfuck would be resolved in a couple decades as the debris burns up in the athmosphere. The only way ISS stays in the sky is because of constant boosts by visiting space ships. satellites similarly have built in thrusters for their design life. In GEO on the other hand the orbit is stable for centuries and fucking up bad there would plague us for a very long time.

Impractical at Virgin's launch prices

[Guspaz]

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.

on what frequency?

[BradMajors]

Is there an available frequency(ies) for him to use?

Line of sight?

[FireFury03]

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.