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.
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....
You don't transmit information back up to a GPS satellite. They broadcast and our devices receive and triangulate. It's also a fairly slow protocol. 2-way communication with that many endpoints is significantly more complicated.
Probably lower orbits. GPS are in medium orbit, which is still pretty expensive compared to LEO. Also Consider they might be able to use their own launch systems, which would only be able to make LEO in the near future. If you are using lower orbits, you need many more satellites to ensure coverage.
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
They are using the WhiteKnightTwo with a unmanned rocket payload for orbital launches.
So far the responses to this post indicate that Slasdot should change it's name to Slashdolt because of the shear stupidity of what's being said. The first post is by Frosty Piss, and he is living up (or more accurately down) to his name. It seems like the nerds have been displaced by drooling fools.
I'm starting to wonder if I should waste my time on the likes of you.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
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
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'
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
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Two test pilots died flying Branson's last spacecraft, and people commented that it was a waste of life that all they were pioneering was a roller-coaster for rich people. As Virgin Galactic gears up to restart test flights, they need to build up a media narrative that suggests some progress and benefit to humanity as a whole. Plus the fact that Branson does genuinely want to make a better world. Like most rich philanthropists, he rationalises his wealth as a reward for all the good work he's done, thus avoiding ever having to recognise his own hyposcrisy.
Oh, and as for competing with Elon Musk -- Richard Branson was doing publicity stunts long before anyone knew the name Elon Musk. In the 80s he was commissioning massive high altitude hot air balloons for round-the-world record attempts. In the 80s he rode through New York on top of a tank. Elon Musk is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately in comparison to Branson, and Musk doesn't get anywhere near as involved in his own publicity machine as Branson.
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 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 $10M per satellite of the WhiteKnight.
The problem wasn't the need. Everyone wants that. The problem was it had to be an absolute need, because it was so damn expensive. The handsets started at about 5000$ (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.