If you look at their marketing material, you find that they are marketing Kuiper almost exactly the way that SpaceX markets Starlink. Except for specialty markets, and what are literally edge cases, they both face a shrinking TAM due to the expansion of terrestrial wireless.
I also can't find any compelling synergies with AWS, which seems like the obvious place to look for an advantage if you are Amazon.
> I also can't find any compelling synergies with AWS, which seems like the obvious place to look for an advantage if you are Amazon.
I think it's more like Bezos vs Musk. Musk has a launch capability and then satellite internet; now Bezos is getting a launch capability and so will want satellite internet.
I guess you could have edge servers on satellite in the Canadian north or Siberia or Mongolia. The problem is there aren’t very many consumers out there for such things and those who are don’t mind a extra 50ms probably
Emerging markets with next to nill infrastructure and high practical barriers to terrestrial infrastructure due to no roads / legal protection or presence of easements / people will rip fiber right out of the ditch to sell for $0.10 -- I've seen people in developing nations spend their entire month's paycheck on a cell-phone top off.
That's good in terms of delivering utility to people, perhaps also a geopolitical thing if there is competition from China in developing countries. But it doesn't sound very profitable.
The costs are all at US prices (engineers, hardware etc) and selling to the developing world. It's "buy high, sell low".
As far as I know US prices are the lowest ones available to Africans for satellite internet. Is it cheaper to launch in Africa?
If you think it's cheaper to launch rockets and use engineers in Sudan or something you have outsmarted Bezos. He is such a greedy bastard, I have 0 doubt whatsoever that if it were possible and cheaper he would do it instead.
Even though this may seem backwards, it is buy low sell high. They are getting engineering and telecom services far cheaper than they can provide in their own country, and the cost to provide terrestrial in their own (OP's stated alternative) would be phenomenal.
I think you've missed the point here. The question isn't whether the prices can be beaten. The question is whether the prices are low enough that enough people would want to/be able to buy.
Every "beautiful developing country" I've been in has been able to make prices arbitrarily low to the end user while still paying the full telecom prices by use of some sort of sharing like a cafe.
It doesn't matter so much that the nominal price is low, only that it is cheaper to buy bandwith from the satellite provider than their alternatives. If the local populace can't afford it as an individual subscription an internet cafe will buy it, and as the economy develops it slowly disperses into individual subscriptions rather than by the town internet cafe.
If you wait until everyone in developing nation has individual subscriptions you've already lost the game to someone else. Ground zero isn't selling internet to a goat farmer who can't afford it, it's selling one subscription to 100 goat farmers and one to the rich corrupt policeman and then capturing additional subscriptions as their wealth increases as their nation develops.
What about for cars and any other transport like ships, etc? If they have a simple system that makes integration as simple as AWS sdk while being cheaper and faster that would be cool.
Being an ISP, CDN, Cloud Provider and Content Provider gives serious advantages. That's a great way to out competitors and get hefty fines at some point.
Serving from space CDN means at least 2x better ping than Starlink (for content directly served by CDN). Then you upgrade to space Cloud and provide even more content with fewer hops.
If you're on the younger side, you may not remember how we've been here before. In the 1990s there was a glut of satellite companies (eg Teledesic, Iridium, Worldsat) [1].
SpaceX's strategy here is quite brilliant: they induce demand for launches and prove Falon 9 reuse while deploying satellites at relatively low cost (because of the reuse) at a price level absolutely nobody can compete with. They're doing well over 100 launches a year at this point.
Bezos seems to want to repeat this with Amazon, Blue Origin and Kuiper but I think they've lost before they've even started. Blue Origin simply doesn't have the orbital launch capability that SpaceX does and certainly not anywhere near the price point. BO has underdelivered on BE-$ and New Glenn. SpaceX did too to be fair but that's in the past (ignoring Starship).
Starlink is a relatively simple design: it's surface-to-surface through a single hop. I think satellite Internet is likely already a saturated market given you're competing with 4G/5G wireless and fixed line. There's only so many remote locations and people on the move to sell to.
What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it. They've already slogged through most of New Glenn's development with hardly any revenue, and that's after skipping over small lift completely.
As for the market being saturated, I think Blue Origin could plenty of business in the "anybody but SpaceX" market. They're up against Rocket Lab (who is still stuck in small lift.)
>What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it.
Infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group, and Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
But Starlink needs to get the traffic to/from the ground eventually, right? And those ground links having their capacity. So I think it is nice to have laser crosslinks, but they will not eliminate the base stations capacity requirements.
Why does Bezos always feel like he needs to be everything for everyone. He is almost as bad at focusing on core businesses and strengths as Zuckerberg.
I think Amazon (not Bezos) is relatively conservative in the space of "trying new things", but I'd argue when they have done it, they have a higher success rate than the other mega caps (excluding Apple I'd say). Somehow though, big tech can't seem to spend most of their cash doing it (insert that Thiel quote here).
Bezos has had aspirations in space for decades, this is nothing new. According to one version of the story which I know was being told to new Amazon employees at one point, Bezos founded Amazon to make money so that he could do space stuff. Not sure I believe it, but that narrative was being tossed around about 15 years ago.
Mega constellations are a new focus, obviously inspired by Starlink, but it's entirely rational given the context of Bezos already owning a rocket company. Operating a fleet of communication satellites has been proven as a working strategy for paying for a lot of rocket launches. At this point, any rocket company that doesn't have similar plans in the works is asking to be out of business.
What is Amazons core business these days? Is it the "everything store" or is it AWS? Because I think it's AWS and then being able to provide internet connectivity aligns sort of okay with pushing for more traffic to AWS.
Do get the sentiment when looking at where Amazon's performance is going, but maybe mistargeted. There's definitely always something grey about what chairmen do, but given he doesn't run Amazon anymore (nothing grey when comparing to Zuckerberg/Meta) he can be free to work on things he wants to right?
The difference is AWS is the backbone of the modern Internet and Amazon is a dominant force in retail, which gives him a cash-printing machine.
Zuck has one website that's been a has-been enshittified hellscape for going on almost 10 years now, another he very well might be forced to sell, and a pivot to a "metaverse" that's nothing but one big bonfire of cash. Meta may be R&Ding the shit out of VR/AR, but there's no guarantee they're going to be able to cash in.
In the 2000s the American Government released GPS to everyone. This prevented unnecessary constellations of commercial satellites from companies like TomTom and Garmin which would have polluted orbit and complicated future space missions.
The US Government should nationalize Starlink and provide all Americans with internet service. It's the only way satellite internet makes sense.
> The US Government should nationalize Starlink and provide all Americans with internet service.
This is a repeated trope and more ridiculous each time I hear it. Starlink is a private company that is in the business of selling the US Government as well as consumers its services. You can't just "nationalize" it on a whim; after all, the US isn't Cuba.
GPS was always owned and operated by the US military so it's an apples and oranges comparison at best.
I keep seeing people saying what the government can and can not do. Most of the things that I've been told it "cannot do" it clearly "has been doing".
You seem so alarmed by my proposition to nationalize a private company. Would you have been so alarmed if the government were punishing people for crimes without due process?
I already knew, but rapid downvotes on HN which is relatively rational surprised me.
There was a lovely radio interview of Neil Kinnock (former leader of the British Labour Party) many years ago in which he described the reactions of some Americans to him being a socialist (and not the British equivalent of the Democrats). One woman said "You can't be socialists, you're too nice".
I’m not sure that comparision makes sense. The magic of GPS is that it is one way. The satelites send signals and the ground receivers receive them. There space and control segment doesn’t know and doesn’t care how many users there are. Their job remained the exact same even after GPS was allowed to be used for civilian applications.
In other words GPS scales very flat. Launching the constellation costs X, control activities cost Y per month. And those prices don’t change if there is only a single receiver, a thousand, or a billion. Basically allowing GPS to be used by civilians didn’t cost them any extra on top of what they were already paying to keep it operational for the military. Plus there is no natural limit on how many gps receivers there can be.
This is not the same for Starlink. There user stations have a two way connection with the satelites. The system have very real limits on how many users it can serve. And every new user cost something to the provider. Because of this the government would need to manage who can have access and how much they can use the constellation. That would be a nightmare to manage for a government and everyone would be unhappy with them. In short: not a good idea.
Is there really even a risk of orbit pollution from multiple GPS satellite companies?
GPS has only 31 satellites and they orbit at a far distance of like 12,550 miles from earth.
Starlink alone has over 7000 satellites and plans for 12,000 by 2026 and possibly 30,000 beyond that. And they orbit at a distance of 340-382 miles.
You could have thousands of GPS satellite companies before even matching the orbit pollution of Starlink alone.
I am not saying that satellite internet shouldn't be done by a singular governmental org. But to say the reason they did it was to prevent un-necessary orbit pollution doesn't seem like a very strong reason.
I think that it was done because it doesn't really cost anything to allow the GPS signals to be used by everyone, and because it costs a lot to launch satellites.
Internet satellites are a whole different story because they deal with signal bandwidth limits in both directions, so there is a cost per user added to use them.
As I understand it, these constellations are all low enough in orbit that stuff deorbits from atmospheric drag relatively quickly. I think you get a few years at most for these sorts of satellites.
The "Kessler syndrome" worst case scenario - I'm just recalling stuff from Scott Manley videos here - I think is a 'really bad decade' where a cascade of collisions makes launching in to LEO impossible until everything settles down in 10ish years. Bad, yeah, terrible even, but possibly worth it in some sense? I mean, it makes about as much sense to me as growing subsidized corn for ethanol gas, I suppose. I'm sure someone is making money.
No. The problem is their development has been super slow and expensive (compared to Starlink) and also they picked fairly expensive launch providers compared to their main competitor (SpaceX).
Space junk is not in the top 5 reasons, and with better tracking and using low altitudes (like Starlink does, where debris deorbits very quickly), we can probably fit a factor of 100 times more satellites in LEO safely.
(People underestimate how much of a difference better tracking makes to this issue. Space is huge, and the real isn’t actual conjunctions, but the fact that the uncertainty range for objects is so large that you end up getting hundreds of times more false alarms and probably-unneeded avoidance maneuvers than you’d have if you had much better tracking.)
Space junk is real but much less of an issue at the low altitudes at which these newer constellations usually operate (very low in low Earth orbit). Without expending propellant to boost orbits, atmospheric drag causes them to naturally deorbit in months or a few years at most. Space junk and orbital debris are much bigger issues for higher altitudes where atmospheric drag is much weaker, but none of these satellites are that high.
Yeah, the debris removes itself with time. But there is still some uncertainty around how deorbiting harms the atmosphere [1]. Immediate effects of a single deorbit seem to be quite low but having such deorbiting scenarios at a higher frequency could have some negative effects.
> Indeed, even in the worst-case scenario, the average annual global mean ozone loss is found to be between 0.17×10–4 % and 8×10–4 %, while the Antarctic local ozone concentration change can reach about 0.05%. Those impacts are negligible when compared to the impact of anthropogenic activities, in particular emissions of industrial halogen-containing substances such as CFCs, that caused a global ozone loss of 3-4% (since 1970).
If it is like Starlink then it is not really a problem because the orbit is so low that it de-orbits quickly should they become inactive and vaporizes in the atmosphere. It's preferrable for them to put them in very low orbits because they are cheaper to get to and the reduced altitude improves latency.
The terms of their FCC license require them to have half their presently licensed constellation, roughly 1600 satellites, in orbit by July of 2026. They're almost certainly not going to make it, but I would be very surprised if the FCC doesn't grant them an extension if they can show they're making serious progress and aren't just squatting on that spectrum.
The curveball is Trump/Musk influencing the FCC's decision making processes, which is definitely possible. On the other hand, the FCC must know that they will be accused of being corrupt if they don't grant an extension.
> A station authorization shall be automatically terminated in whole or in part without further notice to the licensee upon:
> …
> (d) The failure to maintain 50 percent of the maximum number of NGSO space stations authorized for service following the 9-year milestone period as functional space stations in authorized orbits, which failure will result in the termination of authority for the space stations not in orbit as of the date of noncompliance, but allow for technically identical replacements.
_Congress_ can change this, but as written, Federal law compels the FCC to automatically terminate the authorization for failing to deploy half the satellites under 47 CFR § 25.161(d), just as they must automatically terminate the authorization when the license expires under 47 CFR § 25.161(b).
Bureaucrats write what falls under the CFR. Congress writes the US Code. Unless there is something in the US Code which specifies the period in which the licensee must have 50% of the satellites in place, the bureaucrats can change the rules in the CFR. Somehow I doubt Congress was that detailed. They likely just passed the buck to let the bureaucrats specify the details.
> The terms of their FCC license require them to have half their presently licensed constellation, roughly 1600 satellites, in orbit by July of 2026. They're almost certainly not going to make it, but I would be very surprised if the FCC doesn't grant them an extension if they can show they're making serious progress and aren't just squatting on that spectrum.
I agree.
> On the other hand, the FCC must know that they will be accused of being corrupt if they don't grant an extension.
If you look at their marketing material, you find that they are marketing Kuiper almost exactly the way that SpaceX markets Starlink. Except for specialty markets, and what are literally edge cases, they both face a shrinking TAM due to the expansion of terrestrial wireless.
I also can't find any compelling synergies with AWS, which seems like the obvious place to look for an advantage if you are Amazon.
> I also can't find any compelling synergies with AWS, which seems like the obvious place to look for an advantage if you are Amazon.
I think it's more like Bezos vs Musk. Musk has a launch capability and then satellite internet; now Bezos is getting a launch capability and so will want satellite internet.
I guess you could have edge servers on satellite in the Canadian north or Siberia or Mongolia. The problem is there aren’t very many consumers out there for such things and those who are don’t mind a extra 50ms probably
Slightly faster DNS is the only thing I can think of
Musk at least has X platform for spreading the uncensored gospel
Emerging markets with next to nill infrastructure and high practical barriers to terrestrial infrastructure due to no roads / legal protection or presence of easements / people will rip fiber right out of the ditch to sell for $0.10 -- I've seen people in developing nations spend their entire month's paycheck on a cell-phone top off.
They might do the same for satellite internet.
That's good in terms of delivering utility to people, perhaps also a geopolitical thing if there is competition from China in developing countries. But it doesn't sound very profitable. The costs are all at US prices (engineers, hardware etc) and selling to the developing world. It's "buy high, sell low".
As far as I know US prices are the lowest ones available to Africans for satellite internet. Is it cheaper to launch in Africa?
If you think it's cheaper to launch rockets and use engineers in Sudan or something you have outsmarted Bezos. He is such a greedy bastard, I have 0 doubt whatsoever that if it were possible and cheaper he would do it instead.
Even though this may seem backwards, it is buy low sell high. They are getting engineering and telecom services far cheaper than they can provide in their own country, and the cost to provide terrestrial in their own (OP's stated alternative) would be phenomenal.
I think you've missed the point here. The question isn't whether the prices can be beaten. The question is whether the prices are low enough that enough people would want to/be able to buy.
Every "beautiful developing country" I've been in has been able to make prices arbitrarily low to the end user while still paying the full telecom prices by use of some sort of sharing like a cafe.
It doesn't matter so much that the nominal price is low, only that it is cheaper to buy bandwith from the satellite provider than their alternatives. If the local populace can't afford it as an individual subscription an internet cafe will buy it, and as the economy develops it slowly disperses into individual subscriptions rather than by the town internet cafe.
If you wait until everyone in developing nation has individual subscriptions you've already lost the game to someone else. Ground zero isn't selling internet to a goat farmer who can't afford it, it's selling one subscription to 100 goat farmers and one to the rich corrupt policeman and then capturing additional subscriptions as their wealth increases as their nation develops.
[flagged]
What about for cars and any other transport like ships, etc? If they have a simple system that makes integration as simple as AWS sdk while being cheaper and faster that would be cool.
Being an ISP, CDN, Cloud Provider and Content Provider gives serious advantages. That's a great way to out competitors and get hefty fines at some point.
> marketing Kuiper
Regarding this, I am dumbfounded why they keep calling it Project Kuiper.
The branding does not sound like something serious.
SpaceFront, the orbital CDN.
So a CDN with... higher latency for people on Earth?
Serving from space CDN means at least 2x better ping than Starlink (for content directly served by CDN). Then you upgrade to space Cloud and provide even more content with fewer hops.
If you're on the younger side, you may not remember how we've been here before. In the 1990s there was a glut of satellite companies (eg Teledesic, Iridium, Worldsat) [1].
SpaceX's strategy here is quite brilliant: they induce demand for launches and prove Falon 9 reuse while deploying satellites at relatively low cost (because of the reuse) at a price level absolutely nobody can compete with. They're doing well over 100 launches a year at this point.
Bezos seems to want to repeat this with Amazon, Blue Origin and Kuiper but I think they've lost before they've even started. Blue Origin simply doesn't have the orbital launch capability that SpaceX does and certainly not anywhere near the price point. BO has underdelivered on BE-$ and New Glenn. SpaceX did too to be fair but that's in the past (ignoring Starship).
Starlink is a relatively simple design: it's surface-to-surface through a single hop. I think satellite Internet is likely already a saturated market given you're competing with 4G/5G wireless and fixed line. There's only so many remote locations and people on the move to sell to.
[1]: https://interactive.satellitetoday.com/via-satellite-at-30-t...
What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it. They've already slogged through most of New Glenn's development with hardly any revenue, and that's after skipping over small lift completely.
As for the market being saturated, I think Blue Origin could plenty of business in the "anybody but SpaceX" market. They're up against Rocket Lab (who is still stuck in small lift.)
>What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it.
Infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group, and Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Starlink now has many laser crosslinks and no longer requires a base station to be in its line of sight.
But Starlink needs to get the traffic to/from the ground eventually, right? And those ground links having their capacity. So I think it is nice to have laser crosslinks, but they will not eliminate the base stations capacity requirements.
Why does Bezos always feel like he needs to be everything for everyone. He is almost as bad at focusing on core businesses and strengths as Zuckerberg.
I think Amazon (not Bezos) is relatively conservative in the space of "trying new things", but I'd argue when they have done it, they have a higher success rate than the other mega caps (excluding Apple I'd say). Somehow though, big tech can't seem to spend most of their cash doing it (insert that Thiel quote here).
Bezos has had aspirations in space for decades, this is nothing new. According to one version of the story which I know was being told to new Amazon employees at one point, Bezos founded Amazon to make money so that he could do space stuff. Not sure I believe it, but that narrative was being tossed around about 15 years ago.
Mega constellations are a new focus, obviously inspired by Starlink, but it's entirely rational given the context of Bezos already owning a rocket company. Operating a fleet of communication satellites has been proven as a working strategy for paying for a lot of rocket launches. At this point, any rocket company that doesn't have similar plans in the works is asking to be out of business.
What is Amazons core business these days? Is it the "everything store" or is it AWS? Because I think it's AWS and then being able to provide internet connectivity aligns sort of okay with pushing for more traffic to AWS.
Do get the sentiment when looking at where Amazon's performance is going, but maybe mistargeted. There's definitely always something grey about what chairmen do, but given he doesn't run Amazon anymore (nothing grey when comparing to Zuckerberg/Meta) he can be free to work on things he wants to right?
The difference is AWS is the backbone of the modern Internet and Amazon is a dominant force in retail, which gives him a cash-printing machine.
Zuck has one website that's been a has-been enshittified hellscape for going on almost 10 years now, another he very well might be forced to sell, and a pivot to a "metaverse" that's nothing but one big bonfire of cash. Meta may be R&Ding the shit out of VR/AR, but there's no guarantee they're going to be able to cash in.
In this case I think they want to own their backbone - much like owning fibre.
In the 2000s the American Government released GPS to everyone. This prevented unnecessary constellations of commercial satellites from companies like TomTom and Garmin which would have polluted orbit and complicated future space missions.
The US Government should nationalize Starlink and provide all Americans with internet service. It's the only way satellite internet makes sense.
> The US Government should nationalize Starlink and provide all Americans with internet service.
This is a repeated trope and more ridiculous each time I hear it. Starlink is a private company that is in the business of selling the US Government as well as consumers its services. You can't just "nationalize" it on a whim; after all, the US isn't Cuba.
GPS was always owned and operated by the US military so it's an apples and oranges comparison at best.
I keep seeing people saying what the government can and can not do. Most of the things that I've been told it "cannot do" it clearly "has been doing".
You seem so alarmed by my proposition to nationalize a private company. Would you have been so alarmed if the government were punishing people for crimes without due process?
> You can't just "nationalize" it on a whim;
Governments can do exactly that. The legislature can change the law to enable it if necessary.
> the US isn't Cuba.
it is not just communist countries that nationalised things. Much of Europe did up to the 1970s, lots of Asian democracies did.
> it is not just communist countries that nationalised things. Much of Europe did up to the 1970s, lots of Asian democracies did.
I suspect you're about to have your eyes opened to just how the american right feels about pre-neoliberal europe and asia.
I already knew, but rapid downvotes on HN which is relatively rational surprised me.
There was a lovely radio interview of Neil Kinnock (former leader of the British Labour Party) many years ago in which he described the reactions of some Americans to him being a socialist (and not the British equivalent of the Democrats). One woman said "You can't be socialists, you're too nice".
I’m not sure that comparision makes sense. The magic of GPS is that it is one way. The satelites send signals and the ground receivers receive them. There space and control segment doesn’t know and doesn’t care how many users there are. Their job remained the exact same even after GPS was allowed to be used for civilian applications.
In other words GPS scales very flat. Launching the constellation costs X, control activities cost Y per month. And those prices don’t change if there is only a single receiver, a thousand, or a billion. Basically allowing GPS to be used by civilians didn’t cost them any extra on top of what they were already paying to keep it operational for the military. Plus there is no natural limit on how many gps receivers there can be.
This is not the same for Starlink. There user stations have a two way connection with the satelites. The system have very real limits on how many users it can serve. And every new user cost something to the provider. Because of this the government would need to manage who can have access and how much they can use the constellation. That would be a nightmare to manage for a government and everyone would be unhappy with them. In short: not a good idea.
Is there really even a risk of orbit pollution from multiple GPS satellite companies?
GPS has only 31 satellites and they orbit at a far distance of like 12,550 miles from earth.
Starlink alone has over 7000 satellites and plans for 12,000 by 2026 and possibly 30,000 beyond that. And they orbit at a distance of 340-382 miles.
You could have thousands of GPS satellite companies before even matching the orbit pollution of Starlink alone.
I am not saying that satellite internet shouldn't be done by a singular governmental org. But to say the reason they did it was to prevent un-necessary orbit pollution doesn't seem like a very strong reason.
I think that it was done because it doesn't really cost anything to allow the GPS signals to be used by everyone, and because it costs a lot to launch satellites.
Internet satellites are a whole different story because they deal with signal bandwidth limits in both directions, so there is a cost per user added to use them.
This, but comes with X/Twitter & democracy pre-installed.
So is the problem of too much space junk real? If yes then how much can satellite Internet really grow?
As I understand it, these constellations are all low enough in orbit that stuff deorbits from atmospheric drag relatively quickly. I think you get a few years at most for these sorts of satellites.
The "Kessler syndrome" worst case scenario - I'm just recalling stuff from Scott Manley videos here - I think is a 'really bad decade' where a cascade of collisions makes launching in to LEO impossible until everything settles down in 10ish years. Bad, yeah, terrible even, but possibly worth it in some sense? I mean, it makes about as much sense to me as growing subsidized corn for ethanol gas, I suppose. I'm sure someone is making money.
Starlink: Yes. Kuiper: Not so much.
No. The problem is their development has been super slow and expensive (compared to Starlink) and also they picked fairly expensive launch providers compared to their main competitor (SpaceX).
Space junk is not in the top 5 reasons, and with better tracking and using low altitudes (like Starlink does, where debris deorbits very quickly), we can probably fit a factor of 100 times more satellites in LEO safely.
(People underestimate how much of a difference better tracking makes to this issue. Space is huge, and the real isn’t actual conjunctions, but the fact that the uncertainty range for objects is so large that you end up getting hundreds of times more false alarms and probably-unneeded avoidance maneuvers than you’d have if you had much better tracking.)
Space junk is real but much less of an issue at the low altitudes at which these newer constellations usually operate (very low in low Earth orbit). Without expending propellant to boost orbits, atmospheric drag causes them to naturally deorbit in months or a few years at most. Space junk and orbital debris are much bigger issues for higher altitudes where atmospheric drag is much weaker, but none of these satellites are that high.
Yeah, the debris removes itself with time. But there is still some uncertainty around how deorbiting harms the atmosphere [1]. Immediate effects of a single deorbit seem to be quite low but having such deorbiting scenarios at a higher frequency could have some negative effects.
[1] https://blogs.esa.int/cleanspace/2022/08/11/on-the-atmospher...
> Indeed, even in the worst-case scenario, the average annual global mean ozone loss is found to be between 0.17×10–4 % and 8×10–4 %, while the Antarctic local ozone concentration change can reach about 0.05%. Those impacts are negligible when compared to the impact of anthropogenic activities, in particular emissions of industrial halogen-containing substances such as CFCs, that caused a global ozone loss of 3-4% (since 1970).
Some of the Kuiper groups are going to be put at 600+ km which does make me a bit nervous regarding potential debris.
If it is like Starlink then it is not really a problem because the orbit is so low that it de-orbits quickly should they become inactive and vaporizes in the atmosphere. It's preferrable for them to put them in very low orbits because they are cheaper to get to and the reduced altitude improves latency.
Think of how many ships are out there in the ocean. Now imagine how much bigger space is.
Of course speed and debris is a factor, but fact is - space is huge and we don't have that many satellites.
https://archive.ph/brZmg
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827083
If it’s convenient like Prime then sure. I like the 5% back on the entire ecosystem plus watching Fallout and other cool shows.
The terms of their FCC license require them to have half their presently licensed constellation, roughly 1600 satellites, in orbit by July of 2026. They're almost certainly not going to make it, but I would be very surprised if the FCC doesn't grant them an extension if they can show they're making serious progress and aren't just squatting on that spectrum.
The curveball is Trump/Musk influencing the FCC's decision making processes, which is definitely possible. On the other hand, the FCC must know that they will be accused of being corrupt if they don't grant an extension.
This is not discretionary for the FCC:
> A station authorization shall be automatically terminated in whole or in part without further notice to the licensee upon:
> …
> (d) The failure to maintain 50 percent of the maximum number of NGSO space stations authorized for service following the 9-year milestone period as functional space stations in authorized orbits, which failure will result in the termination of authority for the space stations not in orbit as of the date of noncompliance, but allow for technically identical replacements.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
_Congress_ can change this, but as written, Federal law compels the FCC to automatically terminate the authorization for failing to deploy half the satellites under 47 CFR § 25.161(d), just as they must automatically terminate the authorization when the license expires under 47 CFR § 25.161(b).
Bureaucrats write what falls under the CFR. Congress writes the US Code. Unless there is something in the US Code which specifies the period in which the licensee must have 50% of the satellites in place, the bureaucrats can change the rules in the CFR. Somehow I doubt Congress was that detailed. They likely just passed the buck to let the bureaucrats specify the details.
There could be a lawsuit because now the courts get to decide the details, instead of the bureaucrats.
Is this another case where it could be overridden in case of "national emergency"? That seems to be how the administration does things nowadays.
> The terms of their FCC license require them to have half their presently licensed constellation, roughly 1600 satellites, in orbit by July of 2026. They're almost certainly not going to make it, but I would be very surprised if the FCC doesn't grant them an extension if they can show they're making serious progress and aren't just squatting on that spectrum.
I agree.
> On the other hand, the FCC must know that they will be accused of being corrupt if they don't grant an extension.
Score:5, Funny
No Paywall: http://archive.today/brZmg