Slashdot Mirror
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.
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....
Quick response for a complicated question.
People thought cell phones would be sat phones once.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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)
'More paper work and regulation' should not be where this decision is made.
Weather Branson is working as a businessman or humanitarian cost effectiveness is key.
Clients with access/$ of cost perhaps. Using off the shelf hardware for the client makes it cheap. Then again how much bandwidth? How is this different then just capitalizing the local telco to upgrade their towers?
Isn't version 2.0 of sat phones digital? That covers ubiquitous for rich people on camera safari.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Granting satellites get past the political boundaries."
Yes, but it is much more Dr. Evil-esque.
Is it "Virgin" or "Virtucon"?
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Satellites also provide better for the back haul connection - with towers you still need to visit all locations and get the back haul sorted (be it physical, microwave or indeed satellite). Visiting certain locations can be very dangerous. Also, towers wouldn't last in certain locations.
Well, you can't get global coverage with towers. Those towers would be vulnerable to scrap merchants. The towers would also make local infrastructure companies uncompetitive, and would kill local entrepreneurship, hence the economy.
If Branson genuinely wishes to make life better for people, satellites are a brilliant way of doing it without squelching local economic development. It will get people access to the internet cheaply and relatively easily, but as satellite communications typically suffer horrendous lag, Skype won't be a viable alternative to a mobile phone (en_US: cell phone), and the local infrastructure can continue to develop on the back of voice calls. It also means a reduced bottleneck for the cell phone companies -- in many parts of the world, copper theft is such a problem that the backbone is wireless too, and that means loss of bandwidth. There will also be a market for premium internet services that give better response time than waiting from an answer from heaven. OK, maybe it'll reduce the incentive to develop some of the infrastructure further from urban areas, but there will always be areas that suffer because of that.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Maybe this is a PR exercise so people don't panic when he restarts test flights for Virgin Galactic -- remember, a lot of people felt the loss of two lives was unacceptable because it was in pioneering joy-rides for rich people. If Virgin Galactic's next round of test flights are marketed as "learning how 2 get free interwebz to the wurld!!!" then he won't be in for quite so much criticism. And then any tourist flights will be raising money for said free interwebz.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Maybe he is doing a Sheldon Cooper impersonation.
but as satellite communications typically suffer horrendous lag, Skype won't be a viable alternative to a mobile phone (en_US: cell phone), and the local infrastructure can continue to develop on the back of voice calls.
The notorious lag is geosynchronous satellites, whereas this is low earth orbit satellites (which you need a lot more of to make it work, but will give you much better ping times).
This space intentionally left blank
Sub-orbital satellite flights with 5 minutes of weightlessness aren't going to bring much internet, so it's safe to say the satellites are not going up on Virgin's vehicle.
This space intentionally left blank
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.
Hell, your average cell phone user thinks they *are* sat phones.
*shrug* That doesn't change its value as a marketing line....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The rise of the Dollar has had a hand in lowering oil prices.
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 $10M per satellite of the WhiteKnight.
perhaps now is a good time to discuss cleaning up the existing dead junk orbiting the earth in order to make space for all these new toys
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
SpaceX is putting six Orbcomm G2 satellites in orbit per F9 launch, and they're putting ten Iridium NEXT satellites in orbit per F9 launch. Neither set of launches seem to be anywhere close to mass limited, which would indicate possible cost saving measures when building the satellites (you can build them a bit heavier if it saves money or increases on-orbit endurance).
What the actual limit per launch is, I don't know, but it's demonstrably much higher than two satellites. I suspect it would be more limited by the number of times the second stage can reliably relight, or how much delta v each satellite is capable of after release.
so basically... It would look like this
The problem wasn't the need. Everyone wants that. The problem was it had to be an absolute need, because it was so damn expensive. The handsets started at about 5000$ (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.
Which is a feature. They were only running scams with their access anyhow.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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'