Slashdot Mirror
China Gets on the Bandwagon To Provide Global Satellite Internet (qz.com)
Over the weekend, China launched a satellite into low-earth orbit, the first step of a plan to provide global satellite internet to people who still don't have reliable access. From a report: Nearly 3.8 billion people are unconnected to the internet, and women and rural poor are particularly affected. The satellite, called Hongyun-1, took off at China's national launching site Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Saturday (Dec. 22). Hongyun-1, or "rainbow cloud," is the first of 156 satellites of the same name developed by state-owned spacecraft maker China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). CASIC intends to launch all the Hongyun satellites by around 2022 to form a constellation that will improve internet access in remote parts of China, and eventually in developing countries, a plan first announced in 2016. Most of the satellites will operate 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) above the earth, far lower than satellites are typically placed. The project is "moving the internet currently on the ground into the sky," said Hou Xiufeng, a spokesperson for CASIC, "It's China's first true low-orbit communication satellite... The launch will greatly boost commercial space."
Hard fucking pass.
will there be any room left ?
Should we just plan on building a ring of these around the Earth?
They will just start running into each other. Survival of the fittest.
155 more by 2022.
Almost 1/week, I believe that.
Propaganda needs to be plausible, this isn't.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I look forward to well-reasoned arguments that are totally not Sinophobic and dog whistle racism, just like all the other threads that mention China.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Will the great firewall be built in, or will traffic have to be routed via a ground station? God forbid users be able to communicate directly with one another via the network.
Look at it this way - right now there are more than 52,000 merchant ships sailing the seas. Have we run out of space in the ocean? And then add in the fact that space is 3d, so adding in vertical stacks, the number of satellites that can be safely fit in LEO is huge. Or for harder numbers, the earth has a surface area of 510 million km^2. Figure 1 km^2 area per satellite, and 1 km between orbital levels, and LEO orbits from say 600 km to 1000 km, and you get 204 billion satellites.
I would wager on Space X being up and running first with their Starlink service.
They just want to make sure everyone is under total surveillance. China is a disgusting country that fears the flow of information and does everthing possible to stop it. The spiritual opposite of Internet and freedom.
Nobody wants any kind of service from these foul commie slopes.
http://www.filmsforfreedom.com...
You've mistaken "FEEdom" for freedom. There is no freedom in stupid america.
Because the human eye is pathetic at seeing things that have vastly different brightness. As long as part of the surface is brightly lit, your eye perceives the rest as dark. See this illustration, If you use a camera and overexpose the bright side, you see that the dark side is indeed red: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Look at it this way - right now there are more than 52,000 merchant ships sailing the seas. Have we run out of space in the ocean? And then add in the fact that space is 3d, so adding in vertical stacks, the number of satellites that can be safely fit in LEO is huge.
Or for harder numbers, the earth has a surface area of 510 million km^2. Figure 1 km^2 area per satellite, and 1 km between orbital levels, and LEO orbits from say 600 km to 1000 km, and you get 204 billion satellites.
Sorry, this analysis totally misses
1) most ships and airplanes travel coordinated, non-intersecting, paths.
2) ships and airplanes also maneuver to avoid each other
3) while you have low density you also have very high sweep-rates
Neither is the case with satellites (although #1 might be possible), and we will soon see a need for such. The actual statistics on oritiabl collision with either other satellites or misc launch debris is already getting pretty grim.
World domination of course.
Corporatism != Free Market
Here we are live from [censored] and we're having a [censored] time! Come see [censored] at the [censored]!
That's called Earthshine, and it is very much brighter than the total eclipsed part of the Moon, plus the Moon is much dimmer since it is only partially lit. The full Earth is very large and bright as seen from the Moon. The tiny bit of sunlight that is refracted by the Earth's atmosphere during a lunar eclipse is nothing in comparison.
Spies deep in rural America will finally have a trusted network to send information collected out with.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Of course this makes sense, both Russia and China figured out how to manipulate the people through misinformation, it’s cheaper then shipping them off to gulags
One thing I worried about when learning of other LEO Satellite Internet was the satellites being shot down as they pass over China. So, China putting up their own constellation that could be shot down in retaliation sounds like motivation for them not to throw stones. Plus, it will be amusing when they achieve commercial competitiveness by putting up internet for the rest of the world that is less censored than the internet that they provide domestically.
Space is big but it's more complicated than that. One kilometer between satellites is only a little over 0.1 seconds in the direction they travel since LEO is ~7.8 km/s. You also can't just lay them in parallel like lanes on a freeway, the orbits looks like a sinusoidal so the orbits intersect and get squished together at maximum inclination. Finally any satellites you're discarding must pass through the other orbital layers despite orbits intersection as you can't keep the exact same orbit from a different altitude. You can see a simulation with the orbital planes here. A few back-of-the-napkin estimates suggest to me that to keep all satellites an an offset and at >1 second from each other you'll probably not want more than ~1000 in a LEO orbital plane. That would put the total at something more like half a million. There is currently about 500 operating LEO satellites...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So make a GNSS reciever that ignores any data from GPS satelites iand instead bases its calculationd on Galileo etc instead, presto no chance for the US to directly controll the input dara unless ofc the por in a call to ESa GSA and tell thrm to transmit bad data or else, but that is a different question and allso way ot. Have a nice day
Chinese can make fun of your leaders just as freely as you. We have freedom to make fun of our leaders, no so in China, unless you want your organs donated.
No doubt starlink will be in place before China, but I wonder if 1-web will be first? There are several others, but I think that starlink or 1-web will be up first.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
World space agencies have studied the issues and have written "guidelines" (see sect. 4) and self-policing policies, which tend to trickle down to the commercial sector. With government approvals in mind, there seems to be the equivalent of a "land rush" of commercial providers securing orbital real estate.