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FCC Grants OneWeb Approval To Launch Over 700 Satellites For 'Space Internet' (theverge.com)
OneWeb has been granted approval from the FCC to launch a network of internet-beaming satellites into orbit. FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement: "Humans have long sought inspiration from the stars, from the ancient Egyptians orienting the
pyramids toward certain stars to the Greeks using constellations to write their mythology. In modern
times, we've done the same, with over 1,000 active satellites currently in orbit. Today, the FCC harnesses
that inspiration as we seek to make the promise of high-speed internet access a reality for more Americans, partly through the skies..." The Verge reports: OneWeb plans to launch a constellation of 720 low-Earth orbit satellites using non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) technology in order to provide global, high-speed broadband. The company's goal has far-reaching implications, and would provide internet to rural and hard-to-reach areas that currently have little access to internet connectivity. Additionally, OneWeb has a targets of "connecting every unconnected school" by 2022, and "bridging the digital divide" by 2027. According to OneWeb, the company plans to launch an initial 10 production satellites in early 2018, which, pending tests, will then be followed by a full launch as early as 2019.
Just how low is low orbit? For geostationary I think you get around 250ms latency just to hit the satellite.
This is an interesting theory that warrants investigation but it's not viewed as fact by mainstream Egyptology. The arrangement of pyramids on the Giza plateau resemble Orion but so do all sort of other objects in arrangements of three
Don't we have Outernet already?
...cyberspace.
A "cheap" LEO communication satellite costs around $50 million, so 700 satellites would be $35 billion...
We are talking big money here. Somewhere between the GPS and the Apollo program. This kind of budget is usually reserved for international projects or large countries (i.e. US, China). So a private company...
I am sure there are economies of scale to be made but I don't believe in magic. I expect it to be government-scale money no matter what.
Should we be worried about the "Kessler Syndrome"? That's where the density of objects in a given orbital volume gets to the point where a single collision causes a large amount of debris which in turn causes more collisions which ...
The 700 new objects will be put into LEO where, in order to provide worldwide coverage they won't be in a single orbital plane (like the "Clarke belt" or geosynchronous orbit). Instead they, like GPS or Iridium will be crisscrossing with each other (no problem if properly designed) but more importantly with all the other "junk" there (like the space station!). In this most densely populated volume of space, encounters of the worst kind can/may/will happen.
Does anyone know how much this closer to the tipping point this will bring us? Is this system's effects negligible in comparison to the clouds of debris from various A-sat tests? What about Elon Musk's proposed system (which I think also got approval) which had several thousand (four thousand?) similarly LEO satellites?
I hope this doesn't come across as either critical or flaime-bait.
Having always been fascinated by space, I'm always keenly interested in any launches. The SpaceX approach to media, with live-streamed launches, has been mesmerising. But it occurs to me that, as a planet/species, we're now putting more and more into space than at any time since the launch of Sputnik. Of course, different countries have different governmental controls put in place to license companies for aerospace operations. This is entirely sensible, since a mis-fired rocket could easily cause an incident with an aircraft, or land near a populated area, or worse.
But at what point do we realise that we can't simply have endless, uncontrolled launches into space; that perhaps we need to have some form of [perhaps UN-backed] international framework to ensure that there is full coordination and collaboration on our use of local space, orbits and launch windows.
Or did that happen and I just didn't get the memo?
Because satellite based Internet is going to be cheap and affordable for small rural schools. The only way this is cheap is government subsidies. This whole plan smells like a plan to funnel government dollars to shareholders. Please, won't someone think of the children?
Please, don't proliferate satellites.
The satellites that go up will go down.
Then the satellites can kill you as if it is a meteorite.
Wait a minute, since when does FCC grant an approval to launch anything? I thought this was FAA's jurisdiction?
Ezekiel 23:20
SPAAAAAACE!
Several per launch for certain since so many are going to be in very similar orbits and probably won't be especially heavy. That kind of turns using prior examples into a very wild guess.
Good project or bad, who knows, like many other things in technology companies at the time they were fucked over by a bunch of bankers and never had a chance.
Also are you sure it wasn't going to be geostationary? With four satellites making it functional I can't really see it being anything else (but I'm no expert).
Oh good, we're going to use satellites so that the poor can have high latency. We're building a foot bridge to the information highway. And then you get to play Frogger at the end.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We've been dealing with latency since dial-up days just fine. I'm more concerned about the antennas, assuming they're steerable.
"seeking inspiration from the stars"?
Just sayin'. Pretty soon they'll start putting cameras in the middle of the wilderness so there'll be nowhere you can escape Big Brother and his goddamned 24/7/365 surveillance.
will be run by lighting bolt wielding alien called dark zucker.
Until this becomes a dedicated network for always on IoT devices. Now they don't even need your Wi-Fi password or the money it takes to carve out data in 3g/4g
Oddly enough, the FCC is the folks who approve it from an orbital debris standpoint - the thinking is that everyone in space has to have a radio license, so it's a convenient "gate" to enforce the "on orbit life" limit.
These things are up at 700km, so they'll be up a good long time, short of explicit deorbit.
I'm just curious as to whether anyone knows whether 750 miles is low enough to experience enough atmospheric drag to cause the junk from the inevitable collisions to come down in a reasonable time? I personally think it irresponsible to launch satellite swarms of this magnitude at a level above one guaranteed to come down within a couple of years after active station-keeping hardware fails. It seems like I recollect that 750 miles might be above that level.
As it happens, all those satellites need radios to be controlled and to do their job, so there is an international coordination, via the frequency allocation process. Ultimately, it's the International Telecommunications Union who sets the policies, but each country does their own regulation in accordance with the frequency allocation rules of the road. So far, "space is big" so nobody coordinates actual orbits.
Like the comic https://www.xkcd.com/713/ said, ISS can now get geoip'd, yieldeing ads to "meet local girls in LOW EARTH ORBIT." ;)
Progress is sad