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

Re:Why so many?

[SumDog]

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.

The next Teledesic/Iridium/Etc.

[billstewart]

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.)

Re:The next Teledesic/Iridium/Etc.

[garyisabusyguy]

Iridium formed a corporation that included directors from all of the countries that they maintained major downlink gateways in
These routed traffic off of the satellite network after a hop or two and then delivered the call over terrestrial networks

This corporate structure proved frail and was abandoned during bankruptcy restructuring
The bankruptcy started in 1999 and received a judgement from the 2nd circuit court under appeal in 2007 that left ownership with Motorola and recovered a couple of hundred million dollars to the lenders (from the $1.55 billion that was invested)

The technology that Iridium used provided a very narrow upstream/downstream data capability to handsets, something like a 2400 baud modem.
Motorola has developed an upgrade to start launching in 2015 that provides greater data transmission and more flexibility for locations of data downlink gateway locations
The spacing of the Iridium satellites requires a very wide horizon to avoid dropped calls. The precludes use in inhabited areas where there are tall buildings as well as areas that have a varied geography with deep canyons and valleys

On the good to great side, Motorola developed a first of its kind production line for satellite manufacture, used a wide variety of launch partners (Russia, China, EU, Orbital Sciences and what is now called United Launch Alliance)

If Branson is going to be competitive he will need to beat the planned data link bandwidth of Iridium NEXT (1.8MB and 8MB data links), have a much denser constellation (to prevent the need for wide horizons in order to use the system) and strong control over the terrestrial gateways and networks

It would sure be cool, but the primary problem with Iridium was that there were not enough users who absolutely, positively had to maintain voice communications no matter where they were located. You may also wonder who Branson will contract to build and launch this system, since his competitors probably are the most capable of doing the work and probably have all of the launch windows locked up into the foreseeable future

Re:Why so many?

[Required Snark]

RTFA, moron.

They are using the WhiteKnightTwo with a unmanned rocket payload for orbital launches.

Branson wrote in his blog that the company is working to build a two-stage rocket, known as LauncherOne that would air-launch launch from the companies existing WhiteKnightTwo aircraft at about 45,000 to 50,000ft.

“LauncherOne will be built using advanced composite structures, and powered by our new family of LOX/RP-1 liquid rocket engines. Each LauncherOne mission will be capable of delivering as much as 225 kilograms (500 pounds) to a low inclination Low Earth Orbit or 120 kilograms (265 pounds) to a high-altitude Sun-Synchronous Orbit, for a price of less than $10M,” Branson wrote.

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.

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?

Re:on what frequency?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I'll ask Kenneth.

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.

Re: 2400 towers?

[Gavagai80]

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).