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Elon Musk's Proposed Internet-by-Satellite System Could Link With Mars Colonies
MojoKid writes You have to hand it to Elon Musk, who has occasionally been referred to as a real life "Tony Stark." The man helped to co-found PayPal and Tesla Motors. Musk also helms SpaceX, which just recently made its fifth successful trip the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver supplies via the Dragon capsule. The secondary mission of the latest ISS launch resulted in the "successful failure" of the Falcon 9 rocket, which Musk described as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) event. In addition to his Hyperloop transit side project, Musk is eyeing a space-based Internet network that would be comprised of hundred of micro satellites orbiting roughly 750 miles above Earth. The so-called "Space Internet" would provide faster data speeds than traditional communications satellites that have a geosynchronous orbit of roughly 22,000 miles. Musk hopes that the service will eventually grow to become "a giant global Internet service provider," reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections. And this wouldn't be a Musk venture without reaching for some overly ambitious goal. The satellite network would truly become a "Space Internet" platform, as it would form the basis for a direct communications link between Earth and Mars. It's the coming thing.
Of course, the idea that satellite Internet could replace land based connections is silly, as the idea that satellites in LEO could beam data to Mars.
The real thing about cheap satellite Internet is censorship.
In an fantasy world, a transmitter should be cheap, small and unlocalisable from ground.
In the real world, some goverment would kill people for merely possessing an antenna.
And hundreds of microsatellites is more space junk, making even more dangerous orbital tourism.
To Mars.
Fuck. Screwed that post up. Time for more beer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Is this the Teledesic saga all over again (early funding by Bill Gates & others)?
Good thing too. Wouldn't want it going up there bareheaded.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So it's a slight change to a famous quote: "Get your Ads to Mars!"
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
that does not exist is hidden within the system somewhere.
I guess it could be a backhaul for slow low priority internet traffic, but no customer in the 1st world would put up with the latency and lag given the current "centralized service" architecture of all internet services from Google, Facebook, WebMail, YouTube, "The Cloud" etc.
It could be great for bandwidth expansion with a more distributed network model than what we have now for Internet services. Email and file transfers that don't need instantaneous speed compared to interactive web pages would be natural uses for such a high latency service that would also need to be cheaper than faster terrestrial options.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
Oh good, he got the hard part done. Now let's get started colonizing, smooooooth solar sailing from here on out!
. . . and ZMODEM, and other latency-friendly protocols. . . .
reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections ....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
All of these articles have that tinge of 1950's science fiction: we'll all be living in magnificent under-water cities in 10 years, and everyone'll have a jetpack!
All we need to do is build an underwater city...and jetpacks. But in reality it's that our cities will be under water in 10 years.
This Sig does not Exist.
Variety?
If all of your eggs are in one basket, i.e. fiber optics, then last mile, remote location, some jackass dragging an anchor or a recalcitrant local government can cut you off from access
Satellite communication is the more expensive option, but it can be worth it if there is no other means of connection
The real question is whether that market is enough to support their cost structure
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Doesn't matter how far away it is if it is cheap and my cell phone can receive the signals.
I'd like to stream Netflix right now but I've already used the 3GB my cell phone provider allows me to use at 3G/4G speeds for the month. So for the next 12 days I am stuck on 2G speeds (enough to play 1 minute then buffer fill for 3, then play for about 1 minute and buffer fill for another 3 minutes).
Streaming doesn't need low latency. Heck it doesn't even need lots of bandwidth. Give me 1 Mbps download rates and I'm streaming well enough to not skip a frame on the 480p video I want to display on my phone.
You might not like it for 3D FPS gaming and in fact I wouldn't either. But when I get home I have a cable modem connection that is low latency and high bandwidth and doesn't even bother to throttle my speed no matter how much I use it (yeah you could probably go over a limit, I just haven't yet).
So don't fret about it being slow. So long as it's cheap enough to not have monthly data caps and fast enough to stream low def Netflix it'd be a godsend to 99% of the users on the planet for email, Facebook, Netflix, etcetera.
Well I was thinking Taylor Swift
So we can have Internet content beamed at us to consume.
Yo can get satellite Internet right now, it is available everywhere. And is perfectly fine if you view the Internet as a sort of alternative TV where distributors provide content for your consumption.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Teledesic: Launched on Pegasus rockets which cost your firstborn child. SpaceX: Launched on Falcon rockets which are cheaper than the Russians and Chinese even without reuse. Teledescic: 90s computer and communications tech (this was the era where playing the original Doom game took a high end computer and nerds envied those with ISDN connections). SpaceX: 10 iterations of Moore's Law later. Teledescic: Communcation sats have to be large objects with heavy hydrazine thrusters for stationkeeping. SpaceX: Much smaller satellites available (all the way down to cubesats), with a wide variety of ion thrusters for stationkeeping available.
Yeah, totally the same situation.
Goddard and sci-fi: vaccuum tube. Hyperloop: tube full of thin air. Goddard and sci-fi: maglev. Hyperloop: ground-effect aerofoils. Compressor on each craft. Goddard and sci-fi: massive trains holding huge numbers of passengers. Hyperloop: small computer-timed trains to spread out the load on the track and thus reduce construction costs. Goddard and sci-fi: Trains implausibly deep underground. Hyperloop: built like a monorail. Goddard and sci-fi: tubes take the shortest route to their destination. Hyperloop: Trains go primarily over already-built and permitted infrastructure to reduce right of way and environmental costs / challenges.
Yeah, totally the same situation.
Tesla - Okay, they're quite nice but electric cars aren't exactly a new idea
Aww, you didn't give me an example to compare it to! Let's just go with the EV-1, since that was probably the most modern commercially-produced EV before Tesla EV-1, range 60 miles (older version) to 100 miles (newer version). Tesla Roadster, range 230 miles, and Model S, up to 300. EV-1, 0-60=8 seconds. Tesla Roadster and Model S Performance, 4 seconds. EV-1 production: about 1100. Tesla: produces that many cars in *1 1/2 weeks*. EV-1: Loved by owners but panned by critics. Tesla Model S: not only loved by owners but has been getting some of the highest ratings for any kind of car period.
Your "analogies" are akin to saying "So what if he won the Indy 500 - I raced my go-cart down the street the other day and beat a soap-box racer!"
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I would say put your eggs into many baskets, this endeavor represents another basket
Wherever You Go, There You Are
This ^
Furthermore, Musk has gone beyond ideas or demos and delivered profitable companies delivering these technologies
Wherever You Go, There You Are
To use the infamous slashdot car analogy, that is like saying we need another set of roads in case the roads fail or as happens now in the US bridges collapse. Fibre optic is more that one route, just like roads so it can work around failures, it just slows down as concentrated traffic clogs remaining routes. Better to make a solid investment in fibre optic and build high performance, high reliability network, rather than fitter away capital on multiple poorly executed solutions. Those satellites will be taken out by a major solar flare one day, it is just a matter of when and not just once but repeatedly. So not only is space big but it is pretty harsh. I did not mention impacts because of course they are likely only to take out a few at a time rather than everything on that side of the world at that time in the case of a major solar flare. A well designed, high reliability global fibre optic solution is the only sensible choice at this time.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Tesla: use lithium-ion batteries and price it like a large studio flat.
It is pretty successful and well executed, but it worked only because they specifically do not compete with regular cars. That makes it a lot like a luxury pre-WW1 electric car. The range is quite simply attained by brute-force use of batteries at enormous cost.
Can't do much about that speed of light thing. Web browsing becomes an email-like experience. Wow, finally everybody gets to experience the internet just like RMS!
TCP become a hugely inappropriate protocol. Something like Rsync over UDP would be way better. Slow start... give me a break. Ditto, most of TCP.
Twitter stops being relevant at all, who cares about tweeting old news, or hearing it. Refining a web search... just don't bother, instead SCP Earth's entire web archive once a year and incrementally update it as bandwidth allows. Not much internet left after all the latency hacks, it hardly seems worth even trying to think of it that way. Basically, you will have Marsnet and Earthnet and data oozing in excruciating non-real time back and forth between them.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Stop the insanity!
True but if sending people to the Moon is the goal, then funding and work on things like a earth departure stage, lunar lander, and God knows what else will have to be done. NASA is not doing it because they don't have fundng for these items. Musk doesn't talk about it because he will have to allocate money and engineers to work on this stuff (right now their busy with developing a reusable rocket).
Mars as a goal cannot be readily challenged because it is so far into the future. There is no land rush to the Gobi desert because it is plonkingly obvious it is inhospitable to live. And it's thousand times easier to settle than on Mars. We romantize of colonies on Mars because it is so far out of touch.
mfwright@batnet.com
This maybe a potential game changer for Telcos/ISPs. There is still a lot of money made in this business.
If SpaceX internet is capable of high bandwidth, no data-limit or a reasonable limit, not too crappy latency and allows me to use it everywhere, then it maybe very interesting.
Except for gaming, this offers what most people need AND you can take it with you (if the equipment to connect is reasonably mobile)!
If I can get an internet connection, that I can 'take with me' on my holidays abroad, which allows me to watch netflix and other IP TV, there is hardly a reason left for me to keep my cable subscription.
Not to mention what this will do for countries where internet access is highly monitored or otherwise hardly available. I'm guessing China is not too thrilled about this initiative.
The latency issue is an issue which will largely solve itself if the latency is not too bad. It can be worked around for most purposes. Maybe not for gaming, but the big websites will quickly adapt.
If I can choose nearly similar options, where one has a bit worse latency, but is available for me wherever I go...
Some time ago I checked the latency of websites I visit a lot. My cable connection has low latency, but obviously there many websites have high latency regardless as they are hosted on a different continent.
I'm sure the latency you get from GEO (> 240ms) is really changing your experience a bit too much. But the latency of LEO is about 40ms (says Wikipedia). That seems a lot, but if I were to visit a website on a different continent over the proposed network, some of that would be mitigated since the signal would travel via this network as well in stead of over multiple routers and connections. That part may be faster. So my overall experience may not be worse. Only sites hosted close by would have a significantly better performance.
A lot depends on the equipment needed to connect. If it is reasonably mobile they could also partner with a lot of companies, such as Amazon (whispernet globally and just one party to deal with), Netflix (Netflix boxes that don't require your own connection) etc.
If they manage to really compete, 10 billion USD is nothing. Local ISPs get bought for that amount.
There are a lot of ifs. But if they offer high bandwidth with high data limits for a competing price, this will mean for a lot of ISPs that there is a new player in town. And one that is global. If he were to sell shares in this initiative, I'd buy some.
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Effort has been underway for quite some time - by folks such as Vint Cerf, no less - to facilitate Internet over long delays. Surprisingly, there has been terrestrial (or aquatic) applications in the research as well, for example solar-powered sensor networks that can only transmit during daylight hours.
There's a nice overview architecture draft from 2003, especially interesting bits are in the routing section (12.3-12.4), see https://tools.ietf.org/html/dr... - the eventually published RFC https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf... has nowhere such interesting figures about routing between Earth and Mars :)
Anyway, the underlying arch is relying on putting a "bundle layer" between applications and transport, a layer 5 if you will - and the bundling will attempt to hide the long latencies. Naturally, for interactive applications this won't work, but for everything else why not...There are some implementations at http://www.dtnrg.org/wiki/Code.
People don't praise Elon Musk for inventing, they praise him for doing. Doing against huge odds.
And for the most part, we aren't talking "incremental improvements", we are talking massive improvements.
The Falcon 9 recovery is nothing like the lunar module (that is just a stupid comparison), but it is like the Delta Clipper... only instead of flying for under three minutes to controlled altitudes (and being designed specifically to land again), the Falcon 9 first stage lifts a second stage and cargo module to the edge of space and then returns to earth (to land on a fucking autonomous robotic barge in the ocean).
If that doesn't excite you, and if you just consider that rehashing old ideas and incrementally improving on them, then enjoy your boring arse life.
Probably the biggest difference between 1990s and now, is the *amazing* progress with transceivers. The SNR ratio and gain, noise rejection and everything is just incredible. Just the bitstream on modern USB is plain godlike compared to what we could do back then. This makes the whole system far more viable.
Oh and legal reasons. Buying bandwidth, getting right of ways for cable etc is not just cheap, it is total cartel central in just about every country out there.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Aww, Slashdot ate my whole paragraph comparing Falcon 9 to the Delta Clipper, that was the best one.... must have messed up my tagging :(
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Yeah, I had written a section about this but must have messed up my tags and Slashdot ate it.. Delta clipper highest achieved altitude: 1 kilometer. Falcon 9 first stage alone highest achieved altitude: 130km. Delta clipper furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300 meters. Falcon 9 first stage alone, furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300km. Delta clipper mass ratio, 2,5. Falcon 9 first stage alone, mass ratio 20 (and the boosters on the Falcon Heavy have a mass ratio of 30). And on and on and on. Not to mention that they're built utterly differently.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
If technology had jumped directly from the 1979 Impala to the 2014 Honda Accord, yes, that would have been really f*ing amazing and a huge technological innovation, and the company that did it worthy of every bit of praise thrown at it for doing so.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Even in modern countries there are holes. I live in Iceland and we have one of the best rates of broadband connectivity and fiber deployment in the world. But my land is in a sparsely populated valley so it hasn't paid off to run a line out there, most people just use their cell phones for a net connection. If satellite could beat that (and wouldn't be too blocked by mountains), even in highly connected countries there's a real potential market here.
Heck, there's a lot of people who would get it if the price and stats were right even if they had ground-based broadband. Everyone here has bandwidth caps on international net traffic, only domestic is unlimited. So people who want to do a lot of downloads of foreign content might well choose that instead of or inaddition to regular broadband.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
The hard part of communicating with and between Mars colonies over a network of micro-satellites is setting up the Mars colonies.
Please stop with the Elon Musk circle jerk.
Elon Musk attracts interest because he does interesting things. That, IMHO, is one of the better ways to attract interest.
Nah leave it to the Free Market. there's nothing that the Free Market can't do. That's why no one has died of cancer or starvation since Adam Smith invented it in 1760.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"