
OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit - Sami_Lehtinen
https://www.oneweb.world/media-center/oneweb-successfully-launches-34-more-satellites-into-orbit-in-second-launch-of-2020
======
dreamlayers
On Saturday March 21st I was at the tip of Canada's Point Pelee National Park,
approximately 41.909055, -82.509154. At 9:12 EDT (1:12 AM UTC on the next
day), I saw a an approximate disordered line of satellites passing above
Orion. They were all going at the same speed and in a very similar direction,
west to east close to parallel with the belt of Orion. But they were all on
slightly different almost parallel tracks. The spacing was more regular,
though also a bit irregular.

~~~
greglindahl
There are a couple of websites out there that give you future and past
locations of "Starlink trains", which is what you probably saw.

This site [https://findstarlink.com/](https://findstarlink.com/) does
arbitrary locations but not times in the past. As does this one
[https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink](https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink)
... presumably if you looked around a bit more than I just did you could find
one that does historical viewings.

------
chkaloon
I just spent a week at a remote Alaska village 120 miles from Nome to help
with the Iditarod. The villages there rely on rural broadband, which is
essentially a single satellite-fed community receiver which pushes signal out
to access points at each house. Very expensive, slow, high latency, and nasty
data caps. It will be interesting to see how these efforts change that
monopoly and as a result those communities.

~~~
greglindahl
Good news, there are several satellite constellations on the way to break that
monopoly, including some small ones that just address Alaska.

------
benbristow
When will this be available to the general public? I've heard of so many
different "internet from space/the sky" schemes from Google Loon to SpaceX to
this but I've never once been able to connect to a node to give it a whirl.
I'm sure it's a difficult technical challenge but it does seem to be taking a
long time!

~~~
dforrestwilson
Likely never.

OneWeb is about to go bankrupt. Launching is a way for SoftBank to still claim
spectrum rights.

~~~
axaxs
As an additional data point, I live in the area and they just furloughed a lot
of employees last week. Not sure the exact percentage, though.

------
dmitrygr
between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy
or safely launch anything into space?

~~~
dmurray
Most astronomy is done with computers. It should be easy for a computer to
ignore or subtract all known satellites. If you only get 900 exposures of some
new comet instead of 1000, that's still plenty. And we'd need many orders of
magnitude more satellites to make 10% of astronomical photos unusable.

I hear the astronomy argument all the time, but I just don't believe it. If
satellites are ever cheap and plentiful enough to make that kind of
difference, the astronomers can launch a thousand Hubble-style space
telescopes and timeshare on those.

~~~
stareatgoats
I believe GP was talking about the ever growing space debris.

[https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Space_debri...](https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Space_debris_by_the_numbers)

~~~
Mountain_Skies
These satellites should be in low enough orbits that any junk from them burns
up in the atmosphere as their orbits decay. Maybe there could be an issue from
collisions in low orbit pushing objects into higher orbits but those likely
would be erratic orbits with low points that still subject it to decay.

~~~
greglindahl
OneWeb's constellation is high enough that it'll take a lot more than 25 years
for any satellite that fails to deorbit itself to decay. On the way down,
these debris will cross the ISS orbit and the most popular sun-synchronous
orbits.

Starlink is lower, but still above the ISS and the SSO at 282km.

------
scandum
OneWeb will be worse than fiberoptics while Starlink will be better than
fiberoptics.

This suggests OneWeb is pretty much doomed to fail.

~~~
new_realist
There’s no way Starlink will be better than fiber. You have to pay a 25 ms
penalty just to play, and then you have the cost of each hop, of which there
are many.

~~~
cagenut
highly recommend you watch these two latency modelings:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY)

~~~
new_realist
I should also note that many of the simulated Starlink paths between NYC and
London are actually higher latency than the best fiber path, which is less
than 60 ms ([https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/first-
nyclondon-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/first-nyclondon-
cable-in-a-decade-promises-sub-60ms-latency/)). The author ignores routing and
RF delays in the space network, but compares RTT to the _public_ Internet. A
joke.

