
Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites - jakarta
http://online.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-internet-satellites-1415390062?mod=djemalertTECH
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gedmark
Click-bait headline. The article is actually about Greg Wyler's WorldVu
company. If you haven't gotten around the paywall yet, here's the key quote...

"The people familiar with the matter cautioned the project is in a formative
stage, and it isn’t certain Mr. Musk will participate."

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dogma1138
Internet satellites meh, not technology where the round trip is counted in
seconds is good for the internet, and that's a physical limitation just as the
speed of light limits the latency you have to about 5MS per 1K/KM..

The round trip from a base station on the same longitude as the satellite is
250-300MS, under best case scenarios you will to pass trough about 2-3
satellites to get what you want from the other side of the world.

If you do not need to go outside of your intimidate geographical area and say
only need to pull data from a server within a 5K radius than atmospheric high
altitude platforms are far superior both in cost and maintainability. You
can't upgrade satellites not since the space shuttle is out of the picture and
even that was only borderline cost effective on high end surveillance stations
like the KH series which were the size of a school bus.

Using tethered high altitude balloons or extreme-long endurance self
sustaining drones seems like a much better solution for that than spending
100's of millions of dollars per launch.

Even if what he's planning is an auto arranging auto healing mesh/cellular
network of micro satellites doesn't seem to be feasible either. Micro
satellites have an extremely short life span and have huge energy source
issues, cant launch them with a nuclear power source(too heavy, and too short
lived of a platform to be both safe and cost affective) and cant have expanded
solar cell arrays on them due to atmospheric drag. What you are left with is a
small nice cube which doesn't have enough power to transmit communications at
any bandwidth that will be sufficient for internet traffic.

Other than sounding cool and potentially farming quite a bit for work for
SpaceX i don't see this venture of being of any value.

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JoeAltmaier
Hm. Geosynchronous? Or low-orbit satellites at say 90 miles. 1ns/foot means
half a millisecond to the nearest satellite passing overhead.

And little sats cost $50,000 per launch piggybacked on some other launch.

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dogma1138
I think you are confusing LEO satellites with micro satellites. The problem of
LEO's is that they got an orbit of about 90M which means they stay over a base
station say a small city in Africa for a very short time. In order to provide
a constant internet coverage you will need a heck of a allot of them.

This both increases the costs and worse pollute the higher atmosphere with
even more orbiting bodies(and derby as they have a life span of < 10 years).

The current launch costs even under best conditions (piggy backing on an
existing launch) are between 7000 and 10000 dollars per KG.

There is a reason why no one is currently doing LEO communication satellites
and although some projects do exist like the Persistent Communication Network
the Pentagon wants to put in they never actually out grew out grew their
drafting/project proposal stages.

In fact the biggest opponents of these satellites are the launch providers
them selves and NASA even tho these missions are much much more profitable to
them.

Using small (100-200KG) LEO communication satellites means 100's of launches
over a decade and unlike GEO's the constellation will have to be constantly
refreshed due to their short life span.

However they also know that putting so much junk in space without any feasible
way of getting (all of it) back to earth is detrimental to the long term space
program.

So yeah while universities and even hobbyist groups can launch those cube
micro's to space for under 100K it doesn't mean that one of those platforms
can be used for a communication satellite they are too small to have any
decent power source and don't even have enough space for sufficient
transceivers that can provide the amount of bandwidth needed for internet
coverage.

LEO also has a very big issue with bandwidth which relates to the fact that
the satellite is moving away / towards you at very high speed which means that
quite a big chunk of your bandwidth is eaten by the phase correction and
tolerance of the signal.

Not to mention having to jump to another bird every couple of minutes will
probably also put additional bandwidth, latency and reliability limitations on
such network. But lets say that Elon's new company does managed to some how
overcome all these issues and he launches his constellation and now there are
150 cube sats in LEO.

Google then one ups him and launches their constellation, Apple says SIRI now
needs to be space born does theirs, Verizion, Comcast/TW, then the US military
wakes up and puts their networks, China, Russia, India, EU.

Now you have 1000's of new objects in low earth orbits, with a short time
life, almost impossible to track.

Sorry ISS we can't have you up here any more since Africa needs to watch cat
videos and we thought it will be cooler if they stream it via OpenHardware
cube sats than just putting down fiber optic cables, improving long range
terrestrial radio, or using weather balloons or solar drones to give them
internet.

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natosaichek
One small nitpick - the satellites mentioned are much larger than cubesats -
they're talking about a 250 kg satellite - or about 50 times larger than a
large 3u cubesat. We're talking mini-fridge sized satellites here, which are
much more capable beasts.

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dogma1138
"Using small (100-200KG) LEO communication satellites means 100's of launches
over a decade and unlike GEO's the constellation will have to be constantly
refreshed due to their short life span."

I understand that cube sats are not a candidate, i some how doubt that 100KG
sats are even a candidate. The closest we have so far to non GEO orbit
satellites are MEO's like the KA-SAT's and other Ka-Band satellites these
orbit at 7500-9000 KM orbits which is about 4 times higher than LEO and they
weight 6 tonnes of about half is fuel intended to keep them in orbit for about
15-20 years. Out of those 4 remaining tonnes 3 are used by satellite bus it
self which includes the power plant and all "space" components. The payload is
under 1000KG and that is barely sufficient to house enough communication
equipment to provide about 400Mbit bandwidth. How are they planning on doing
the same with something that weight as much as keg i don't know.

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larrys
Musk is spread to thin. Period. Any one of his ventures is a full time job.
Hard to understand what type of personality needs to branch out on in
different areas as he has. And how can you make good decision, no matter who
you are, or what capabilities you have when you only have so many hours in a
day?

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waterlesscloud
How many things is Google trying to do, and in how many fields? How is that
effectively different?

Also, this comment supports my thesis that any comment using "Period." or "End
of story." is overstated at best, and wrong at worst.

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larrys
Not a fair comparison to google which is a company Musk is a person and the
story isn't framed as "Musk Company branching into xyz" but "Elon Musk"
branching into different companies. Separately google is highly profitable and
can afford to take fliers in many areas and needs to do so in order to
diversify, different situation.

A "Musk Company" branching into different areas might be compared to GE having
different divisions all managed in a way with the corporate structure
centralized but in that case the head of GE isn't a tech visionary and isn't
involved in anything within the particular company like it at least appears to
be with Musk. Likewise with Berkshire Hathaway for that matter.

Gotta tell you that in a sense it's almost like, get this, a ponzi scheme you
keep spinning up new hope and investor money to keep things going and think
you'll figure it out later down the road.

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larrys
If the paywall comes up google "Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites"
and click that link.

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FiatLuxDave
This sounds like an obvious vertical integration move. When you own a rocket
company, the best thing for your company is a big market for launching
satellites. When you own a satellite company, you want to get sweetheart deals
on launches.

Musk isn't spreading himself too thin; this is what is called Business
Development.

Despite having Musk's name on it for clickbait, the article seemed to me to be
more about Wyler and WorldVu. The article calls it a "venture" and says they
are "working with" each other, but I don't see any details about whether this
is a joint venture, a new company, a deal between SpaceX and WorldVu, or what.
I don't know whether to qualify this article as PR or industry gossip.

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cmsmith
A couple things stuck out to me about the numbers: 700 satellites weighing 250
pounds and costing $1M each.

1\. Is this being considered because it is the best way to make use of the
excess capacity on paid Falcon launches? If you have, say, 50 CRS launches to
the ISS planned, can you tack on one internet satellite to each and get a
constellation, or would they all end up redundantly in the same orbit?

2\. $1M / 250lbs is $250/ounce. That number seems high to me which just goes
to show how optimized these things are - very little structural material is
needed to hold together a pile of electrical components in space.

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dogma1138
Atmospheric drag is actually quite an issue for satellites in low orbits.
Space is not empty there are tons of dust and ice particles out there
especially in the intended orbit. An exaggerated analogy will be dragging it
in the sand but it's not that far off. But most importantly satellites are not
built to survive in space they are built to survive launch (and into-orbit
maneuvering) which is by far the most violent maneuvering any man made objects
go through especially when you don't have a human cargo to care about. 250$ an
ounce for a satellite with sufficiently enough advanced equipment to serve as
a high bandwidth internet relay is actually extremely cheap to the point of
being almost a fraud unless they cut out the R&D costs from the calculation
and spread the buy-in and manufacturing costs across 1000's of units over
several decades.

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josu
Aren't satellite communications a bit limited by the uplink connection? When
are we going to have a small enough antenna that's able to communicate with a
satellite while fitting inside a cell phone?

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natosaichek
For 1-way communications link to be viable, you can adjust a variety of
parameters. There is the transmitter and receiver antenna gains (which are
usually proportionate to antenna size), there's the datarate, and the transmit
power.

If you want a voice link, that means your datarate will be ion the order of
~10kbps

If you want a cell phone as your transmitter, that means your antenna gain is
very low, and your transmit power is also very low. The remaining free
variable is the receive antenna gain. So if you put up a satellite with a
large receiver antenna, then this sort of thing can work.

For an example, take a look at terrestar networks' phone and satellite
([http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/](http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/)) .
They've gone bankrupt (I think over spectrum allocation issues?) but the did
functional demonstrations of their technology before going under.

They had the worlds largest space-based phased array antenna system deployed.

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josu
Interesting. Did any other company buy their satellite infrastructure?

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JSno
stay away from satellite industry.

