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Samsung Researchers Propose 4,600 Micro-Satellite Space Network
Bismillah writes: Samsung Electronics has proposed a network consisting of 4,600 micro-satellites that could act as backhaul for terrestrial cellular networks and take low-cost internet access worldwide. They project that by 2028, cellular and Wi-Fi traffic will exceed 1 zettabyte/month, and their goal is to design a system with equivalent capacity (PDF). "With the satellite-based backhaul, cellular and wi-fi deployments become practical in remote regions of the earth where there is no wired Internet infrastructure." The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
You are all tiny space cows. In space, nobody can hear you moo. ""! ""! "" tiny space cows ""! "" say the tiny space cows. YOU TINY SPACE COWS!!
Why not up that number over 9000?
I watched the Horizon programme about space junk the other week - it was good - and one of the points raised in it was concern about cubesats not having any movement capability and being cheap and considered "disposable" and thus much more likely to become part of the junk problem that other, expensive, satellites.
4600 micro sats sounds to me like even more junk waiting to happen. Keep it up and we'll not be able to have any nice things in orbit soon.
It could, but it won't.
There's far too much corporate interest in making sure we pay through the nose for cellular and internet access.
They're not going to allow low-cost anything. They might lower their costs, and increase their profits. But they will actively resist ever lowering our costs.
Low cost? Affordable? That sounds like communism right there, there's shareholder value and executive bonuses to maintain.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
pilot: ladies and gentlemen we've turned on the fasten seatbelt sign in preparation for entry into earths orbit and the inevitable turbulence from the legendary orbital garbage layer that surrounds the planet.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Will there also be an array of cleaner upper robots to collect these things things into bundles when they break down so they can be ejected from orbit and burned up in the atmosphere (or disposed of in some other way) or do we just keep rocketing micro satellites up there by the pallet as the old ones break down and try not to think about the space junk problem?
Even better question - who is gonna clean up all that space junk once the satellites die, or track it all while it's active? That's a lot of pieces that can potentially puncture a rocket, satellite, or crew capsule on it's way up, and we've got a lot of hazardous crap up there as it is.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"I recommend a full planetary frontal assault with 4,600 assault laser micro-satellites!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
can anyone indicate that we're dealing with this shit, yet?
it's as important as the environment and climate, files under both, really...
aside from the obvious solution of turning them all into confetti deliberately, to make an umbrella, should we fail to fix the warming problem sensibly...
is there anything practical being done, to limit the amount of crap we send up?
Even better question - who is gonna clean up all that space junk once the satellites die, or track it all while it's active? That's a lot of pieces that can potentially puncture a rocket, satellite, or crew capsule on it's way up, and we've got a lot of hazardous crap up there as it is.
This concern cannot be heard over the thunderous roar of Capitalism.
Neither can common sense.
Don't worry though. The irony will hit humanity like a fucking brick to the face once we find we have the technology to get off this rock, and yet cannot figure out a way to safely navigate through the cesspool of debris we've put in orbit.
In order to deal with latency, I doubt they are talking about using the geosynchronous ring. These are probably low earth orbit and need a steady stream of replacing as they deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. The size target is probably small enough not to even leave a pebble left after reentry.
And the impact on radio astronomy would be considerable as well.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The major problem is clearly stated in the article:
The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Where we could build the satellites, what doesn't exist is the wireless spectrum. This is basically going to suffer the same fate as Light Squared did when they attempted to get some spectrum reassigned for high power terrestrial use. All of this about spectrum space.. Well, most of it is.
This basically amounts to putting up 5K cell towers sans the towers using satellites. The Cellular spectrum is very crowded and expensive to obtain in the industrialized world. It's not going to happen, it's way too expensive and will be very difficult to internationally manage the legal aspects of such a system.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If the EM drive does turn out to be a usable reactionless thruster then an automated debris cleaning satellite is very possible.
It could rendezvous with debris, close in on it as slowly as needed, and snag it with a magnetic front plate or something else. When enough debris is collected it enters a deorbit or moon collision trajectory, releases the stored debris, then burns itself back up to a stable orbit to target more debris.
Give the thing a grapple arm and it could double as a service transport to grab old satellites and bring them to a station that can deal with the satellite not having a standardized servicing design.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Every business plan based on making "remote regions" pay has failed. "Remote" regions that have the money have already installed infrastructure that will make this expensive and everyone else is too poor to make it worthwhile. Either a government steps in like the USG did for Iridium or this will disappear in short order.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Uh, the Earth's atomosphere?
I took the time to skim the paper for the LEO detains that the Australian ITNews article skimmed over. The ITNews article was (sadly) a good summary - discussion of LEO satellites was limited to the altitude (160 to 2000 kilometers) and why LEO is better for signal strength than synchronous orbits. No mention at all about the inclination of the orbits (or even if polar orbits were considered). No consideration was given in the paper to existing uses of LEO (such as the Hubble Telescope or the ISS - but they'd probably be out-of-commission by the time anything remotely like this proposal was attempted.) No thought was given to what it would take to replenish the satellites in orbit (i.e.: how many launches per. year) or how small satellites would de-orbit at the end of their useful life or any consideration at all about satellites that had failed and needed to de-orbit.
A particular point I'd like to consider is that the authors didn't seem to give any consideration of the coverage the satellites would offer based on the inclination of the orbits. It appears that the authors assumed equatorial orbits - which would certainly exclude coverage of polar regions (including coverage of trans-arctic flights.) I'd be curious if any consideration was given of coverage north (or south) of 45 degrees - such as Canada, all of Scandinavia, most of Russia, and so on.
The better question: where the fuck does the bandwidth come from? There simply isn't that much available and the last time some idiots tried to pass the regulations to allow something like this it literally almost brought down GPS and in turn the whole fucking military.
Those Asian and European mariners didn't expect to bring their entire continents with them when they found new land. Just some settlers.
And yet those providers probably have so much cash in reserve that they could conceive, manufacture and deploy a giant, sky-high faraday cage over all of Canada just to block this cheaper alternative.
Just chiming in on numbers. 1 zettabyte/month is:
440kbps unicast 24/7 for all humans
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
"The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum"
...which will go to some well funded organization to realize this dream, then when the inevitable happens and the project dies, they hang on to that valuable spectrum...
> who is gonna clean up all that space junk once the satellites die
Since 1993, all satellites are equipped with an "end of life" plan where they use up their final burst of fuel to deorbit and burn up, or are sent further out into space. Here's one link: http://space.io9.com/where-do-...
With 4,600 here and Airbus sending up 900.
Well, for one thing, I've seen the International Space Station (ISS) at least 20 times and also the Hubble Space Telescope an equal number of times. The majority of satellites travel from West to East. Some travel North to South or South to North in equal measure.
I use software that predicts their sightings. The software even accurately predicts when the satellite will turn dark due to the sun setting on it.
1. So if the earth is flat why do we not observe the ISS traveling East to West just as frequently as we observe it traveling West to East?
2. When it's dark, but still just after sunset, why can I sometimes observe a satellite turn dark in the Eastern half of the sky? What would explain that if the explanation is not "because the Earth is spherical"?
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Tracking a few thousand active satellites is trivial, especially as they are radio transmitters and are probably telling their base stations where they are pretty often to allow groundstations to aim their beams.
Since they are in LEO they will not last long once they are out of use. Even if they all failed catastrophically it would be a problem for a few years at most.
That is precisely what the paper linked in the article is about. They identify about 50 GHz of bandwidth (separately for uplink, downlink and interlink) at frequencies between 10 and 250 GHz. At those frequencies beams can easily be kept pretty narrow, so multiple beams will not interfere.
Most microsats are lower then LEO. But for this to work they will have to be in LEO.
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