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Big Satellite Systems, Simulated On Your Desktop (sf.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Big systems of hundreds of satellites are under development to provide wireless Internet globally, with Richard Branson's OneWeb and Thales' LeoSat aiming at consumers and business markets respectively. It's like reliving the late 1990s, when Bill Gates' Teledesic and Motorola's Celestri were trying to do the same thing before merging their efforts and then giving up. And now you can simulate OneWeb and LeoSat for yourself, and compare them to older systems, in the new release of the vintage SaVi satellite simulation package, which was created in the 1990s during the first time around. Bear in mind Karl Marx's dictum of history: the first time is tragedy, and the second time is farce. Do these new systems stand a chance?
Not quite true, you can't sell CONTINUAL service until you're almost complete, however there is no reason why this kind of system would not be able to sell intermittent service, say for remote weather/sea stations, ships, etc until they're completely up and running. Also your $900 billion is a "bit" off, even at current launch rates SpaceX could launch around 18,000 Falcon 9s for that much. Even the most audacious plans only put a few thousand satellites in orbit and most of those are probably launched in batches of 6 or more per rocket (just look at OrbComm's 11 satellites launched on a single Falcon 9). Also geosynchronous communications satellites have several major drawbacks, first off they can only serve a limited number of customers due to bandwidth limitations and their latency is a bit high.