

Airbus to build giant satellite network - tpatke
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33136362

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ChuckMcM
Wow, they could complete their objective more quickly by taking a billion
dollars in small denomination bills and putting it into a pile and lighting it
on fire :-) Only slightly more seriously, it would be very impressive if they
could pull it off, but having seen the deployment of Iridium (66), GPS (32),
GLONASS (24) , and Galileo (30) it doesn't seem like we have a non-nation
state that is up to the challenge of putting 600(!) satellites into orbit all
at once.

If we assume the reporters got random factoids mixed up, 600 satellites? in 20
"planes" ? (lets assume they are somehow station keeping in the same orbital
plane so 30 satellites each trying to stay 12 degrees away from the next
satellite in the same plane, while trying to avoid the other 19 planes? One
gets destroyed by space junk and you practically guarantee another 29 join it
over the next 120 minutes or so? That is going to be quite the dance.

And what spectrum are they using for uplink/downlink? .5 Thz? Something they
can get a license for all over the world presumably. That alone cost a billion
dollars for Iridium.

I just can't imagine a scenario where this even works. Perhaps if they start
with the old TeleDesic design or something.

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stcredzero
Isn't SpaceX's plan to build a satellite Internet service essentially the same
thing?

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dasmoth
Yes (although with five or six times as many satellites).

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higherpurpose
And it will likely do it with reusable rockets.

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aerovistae
I love how in like 2 months we've gone from nobody doing this to three
separate entities trying to launch an internet of satellites. Gonna get
crowded up there.

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dharma1
Ah, Branson vs Musk.

This is one of the things where investing in a fast moving technology reminds
me of deflationary economy - we are putting a lot of satellites up there and
spending billions doing it when tech is accelerating at such a fast rate that
in 10 years the electronics will be quite dated, so it might be worth a wait.
There is no easy way to update electronics on these once they're up.

Suppose billionaires wants to have a legacy in space before their time on
earth is done!

Personally can't wait until this is cheap enough for normal
individuals/startups. Low orbit nanosats can be done for $20k-ish already -
www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603240-small-satellites-taking-
advantage-smartphones-and-other-consumer-technologies

Going to get crowded up there!

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JoeAltmaier
I'd like to see a server ON a satellite, beyond the reach of governments and
regulation. Sell encryption keys and route your ground-based services through
a cache up there.

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pavel_lishin
Gonna be hard to replace a faulty hard drive, though.

And arguably if you put a server on a satellite, governments will be the
_only_ entities capable of reaching it.

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JoeAltmaier
Anybody with a dish and a key can reach it, right?

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noselasd
Probably. Then again anyone with a transmitting dish can be triangulated by
the government body that doesn't like people doing that.

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kuschku
But satellite TV is used in tons of places, with most systems of the past
decade also being able to transmit.

People having a satellite dish pointed at a satellite there would be in the
range of hundreds of millions alone in europe.

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noselasd
Your TV dish is not transmitting.

But the point is, that if some country decides the new internet via satellite
to be illegal, it is _very_ easy for them to find people using it.

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JoeAltmaier
Not true. Could be in of a van. Or hidden on a roof. Iraq had once forbidden
TV satellite dishes; thousands were in use.

A dish leaks very little energy except in the direction of the satellite. It
could be astronomically unlikely anyone could detect its use unless they were
line-of-sight between the dish and the satellite. And pointed in the right
direction.

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noselasd
And the reason they could hide those TV dishes under roofs is that they are
not transmitting.

If you want internet via satellite, they are transmitting, and while they are
directional towards the satellite, there's enough signal going off in other
direction sides making it not that hard to detect from the ground.

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greglindahl
It's very interesting that the reported price was ~ 1/2 million $ per 150kg
sat. SpaceX's launch price to LEO is ~ $4.6k/kg, or ~ $700k per 150kg. While
the price to launch these guys would be a bit higher (they need something to
aggregate a bunch of sats into a single payload), normally the cost to build
the sat is a lot bigger than SpaceX's launch price.

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mapt
Volume, volume, volume.

Few unmanned spacecraft flown to date are in principle more complex than a
Toyota. If you did 1-unit automotive production runs, and 1-unit production
runs for most of the parts rather than using standardized templates, things
would be expensive there too.

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ksec
I thought one world was something new it turns out that it's actually been
announced since February this year.

My main question is how fast is it going to be? Can I expect 10Mbps to each
terminal / user?

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ris
"...OneWeb, a British Channel Islands-registered concern..."

If they're so british why don't they think they should pay tax like the rest
of us?

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joosters
I don't think the phrasing was trying to play up the Britishness of the
company, it was merely saying that the Channel Islands are British.

Of course, it's still a tax dodge and the company should pay tax like the rest
of most of the world!

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ris
No, I know, I was just taking a cheap stab.

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sharpercoder
Assuming at least 40KM distance from the earth, (40/300) * 2 means a roundtrip
time of 267ms. That's without processing time, but that's probably in the
ballpark of <5 ms.

This excludes many types of internet use cases.

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dasmoth
I assume you mean 40,000 kilometres here.

That'll definitely be lower than that (at that kind of height, you wouldn't
need hundreds of satellites for global coverage). Wiki page talks about 800km
and 950km orbits.

