Elon Musk and ex-Google man mull flinging 700 internet satellites into orbit Space rocket baron Elon Musk is reportedly in tentative talks with industry players and regulatory bods to build 700 internet satellites weighing less than 250 pounds each. The billionaire is discussing the plans with Greg Wyler, according to the Wall Street Journal. Until very recently, Wyler was leading Google's efforts to …
Sigh... No. Internet Access Points, not spy satellites. Not all satellites have cameras on them. And a 250 lb satellite isn't going to have room for a spy camera.
That said, they should include a tiny (mobile phone, 1cc) camera in each one, and send live h.265 video down for all to enjoy. It would obviously be a wide view. More County View than Street View.
They're are some system advantages to using as low an orbit as possible. Lower latency, lower path loss, higher performance. And they'll be obsolete in a decade anyway.
So it might be good policy to assign them a really low orbit altitude where they'll fall down within about 15 years.
How about a low drag shape, and then deploy a drag chute at end of life? Something to force it down within a year or two. Changing ionosphere height and density might be too variable. But there might be some applications for a deployable drag device...
I found the movie Gravity to be very entertaining, inspiring, and totally lacking in virtually any semblance of reality with regard to space technology, science, or reality. The idea that the explosion of a satellite would send a shrapnel cloud around earth at much higher velocity (yet in the exact same orbit?) as the Hubble, the ISS (when did it move to the Hubble's orbit?), and the Chinese space station (which exists only in Hollywood's fevered imagination) is pure dramatic license.
Basing actual space policy advocacy on a movie is rather frightening, actually.
Iridium uses a clever system where the network is in the sky. Each satellite links to the neighbours. Only need one or two ground stations. Yet covers 100% of the Earth. All good, but the data rate is slow. It's difficult to squeeze all the data into one up/down link. Extend this to hundreds of satellites, and the numbers may fall apart.
Other system use local ground stations for each connection. So coverage is limited to areas around each ground station. Not "Global" coverage, nor a "Star" in performance; so not sure how they arrived at the name...
A hybrid of these two could directly off-load the heavy data from crowded areas with local ground stations, and use satellite to satellite cross links to provide coverage in locations where few people are located. E.g. North Pole.
If the satellites use fricken lasers for the cross links, then we need an acronym that ends up SHARK.
Space / High Altitude Relay networK
Specialist Highly Available Remote Connections (okay, Sharc. But still sounds cool)
Super Hot At Re-entry Kelvins (probably more descriptive of it coming down again... Wonder if we could get NASA to refer to this as the SHARK period? :D)
Out of all of the IT billionaires, Elon Musk is surely the most creative and proactive.
He doesn't sit on his arse for long before he is on to the next thing. I can see a multi-industry empire on its way, Pay pal must have the financial clout of a large bank in some respects, Tesla I am sure will become a Ford of the future, SpaceX in spite of the latest setback is looking pretty good and now a new venture that may net him a few bob connecting the world in a much less irritating way than Farcebook. Also the idea has somewhat more credibility than balloons and drones, plus as mentioned above fitted with a small real time camera may be quite an income generator if it was for all to use.
He's not afraid of diversifying a little either which is not a bad thing.
Nope! I'm too old and have the wrong skill set but Musk does have more interesting ideas than the others, even Bill gates has some really weird half baked ideas that he pursues with his foundation, such as the key to overpopulation being to provide the world with super thin condoms.
Kind of gives you a clue why he is no longer fully at the helm of Micro shaft.
"even Bill gates has some really weird half baked ideas that he pursues with his foundation, such as the key to overpopulation being to provide the world with super thin condoms."
And what's wrong with that? Along with the contraceptive pill that they give out to women is a great idea.
You may want to look up the Bill and Melissa talk on TED, it may enlighten you a bit. Many African women don't want to have 10 kids, but are so scared of their husbands they have little choice. If you can get a) the men to wear condoms, or b) the women get access to contraception, then of course the birth rates will drop.
Unless you have a better plan? Please I'd love to hear it.....
I'm with Chris G, Elon definitely wears is underpants on top of his tights :-)
Lets face it his projects always seem to start by him asking the question 'What is really f%^&ing hard and could benefit the whole world?' and off he goes and does damnedest to make it happen, rather than 'how can I make another fast buck'
Nothing wrong with a bit of admiration for a man like that, if we just had few politicians with that attitude the world world would be a better place IMHO.
Orbital is one of the old bulls., so more likely Branson with the Virgin Galactic incident. You know how everybody always gets Branson confuse with Musk. I mean, they both started in the same line of business, they always appear on the same shows, why even their names have the same number of letters.
If you look at the SpaceX Falcon/Dragon launch system, you will find two very spectacular advances that pout SpaceX 20-40 years ahead of anything the Russians, ESA, China, Japan, India, or the ULA have. The first is that the second stage of the Falcon is multi-restartable without special protocols that are dicey at best. SpaceX has already launch as many as six satellites into different orbits with the restartable second stage. The other spectacular thing is that SpaceX is poised to recover its booster stage to a barge on Dec 9th. Eventually the boosters would be recovered back to the launch pad where they would be refurbished and reused.
If you look at these two characteristics in tandem, it gives SpaceX the unique capability to launch these satellites as many as 20 per launch or so. The limit will probably be the second stage fuel load and even that could be expanded greatly with the Dragon heavy rockets. But the ability to reuse the boosters alone would reduce launch costs by as much as 70%. I would also point out that the current Dragon capsule could be used to recover malfunctioning satellites to be returned to Earth for repair and if Musk is as smart as I think, he will make the satellites refuelable.
This is a project currently being widely panned, but in light of SpaceX's recent accomplishments, it makes a great deal of sense.
I wonder if any of these systems will make it to launch and be operational?
To give an idea of cost, Teledesic originally forecast a $9 billion cost (in 1995!), this was then scaled back to 288 satellites, scaled back another time, then ultimately scrapped (because Iridium and Globalstar had already made it to market, and gone bankrupt due to lower than expected demand.) Oh, regarding weight? After they were bought out, their purchaser launched one 120kg test satellite (~262 pounds). I don't know if that 1995 cost assumed ~262 pound satellites or not.
Iridium reduced from 77 satellites planned (7 planes of 11 satellites), to 66 satellites (6 11-satellite planes). The original Iridium went bankrupt, and a firm bought Iridium's assets (including spare satellites) at a good clearance rate.
Globalstar, 48 satellites (plus originally 4 spares). I don't know the details of Globalstar's bankruptcy, if they were purchased or restructured their debts. They ran into premature failure of satellites S-band amplifiers, so for a while they did not have a full constellation, a "call time calculator" would let you know when satellites would be visible; they recently launched enough second generation satellites to have full coverage again.
Orbcomm originally had 35 satellites, and has 29 now. This system is limited to giving a given device two 450ms time slots every 15 minutes, it's strictly for M2M messaging use and not conventional data or voice (with 29 sats there's also occasional coverage gaps, so it may have to queue the message for several minutes waiting for a satellite to come overhead.)
thanks Henry. I thought this was so familiar and you rattled off the details. And results. OTOH, Musk has a track record, so it may come off. If so, it might mean the telcos will begin to be nice to their customers a bit more, especially on data charges.
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