The title says it all.
They would be up by the satellites anyways.
Just a random thought.
Cell phones don’t operate via satellites, they use terrestrial towers.
Cell phones don’t use satellites, they use towers.
I’ve heard that towers would need to be redesigned for cell phone on aircraft use.
In space, no one can hear you now.
I think they use towers not satellites, but I could be wrong.
Orbital altitude for the space shuttle is about 150-240 miles - which would put them at least 150 miles from the nearest terrestrial cell phone tower. With a clear line of sight, a cell tower can receive transmissions from a cell phone up to 45 miles away. That’s not nearly enough range, so the answer to your question is no.
A sat-phone should work just fine.
Cell phones work on aircraft.
Now I’ve got this image in my head of an astronaut slowly drifting further and further away from his capsule, babbling on his cellphone, completely oblivious.
Here am I, floating in my tincan…
I thought the issue with cellphones and airplanes had to do with the rapid tower-jumping required as the plane passed over at several hundred miles an hour, especially if lots of people are using their phones at the same time.
Or head-down, texting as his craft plummets into the sun.
The edge of space is (somewhat arbitarily) defined as 62 miles up, so you might be able to get reception from there. The astronaut will need a hands-free kit, or operating their phone is going to be somewhat hazardous…
Under some conditions yes. But they aren’t designed to transmit to/receive from above the tower. So most airspace tends to be a dead zone, with some signal leaking up. Add in the problem that you will likely be rapidly switching towers and connectivity is spotty and unreliable.
You mean there’s no app for talking from space?
Big Bang theory (paraphrased): Since there’s only about 12 people who would use this app, we have to charge a million dollars to make money on it.
In my experience using cell phones in little airplanes, service drops off quickly once you get more than about 3000 feet above the ground, and sometime before that. I can’t say I’ve ever had service more than about 6000 feet above the ground.
Just did a bit of searching around, and here’s an excellent resource:
http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/cell-air.htm
Based on my experience and the data provided above, I’d say there’s pretty much no way that somebody 150 miles above a tower would be able to acquire a signal using a stock cell phone. Add the doppler shift induced by orbital speed and there’s absolutely no chance of it.
For the win!
I suspect even those will not work that well. I’m most familiar with the Iridium system, but I suspect the issues are the same for Globalstar, Orbcomm, and any other Low Earth Orbit systems. Those issues are specifically that the difference in orbital period between the satellites and an astronaut in LEO is significant, which would require periodic handoff between satellites, except the satellites themselves are designed to calculate and perform handoffs based upon a low rate of change in position relative to the geodetic reference frame. (Some users have reported dropoffs even during aircraft flight, which the satellites should be fully capable of tracking and maintaining suitable link margin.) An astronaut orbiting below the orbit of an Iridium satellite might be able to acquire signal, but due to the rapid rate of movement across the satellite field of coverage would not be able to maintain satellite uplink.
Communication and tracking of LEO objects and missions for NASA, US DoD missions, and American and friendly commercial users is primarily performed by the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS, pronounced “tee-dress”) as part of the NASA Space Network (also includes some ground stations that are maintained by NASA or shared between NASA and DoD), and occasionally supplemented by shipboard or airborne tracking and data relay systems. These systems are significantly more complex than commercial communications and data relay satellite networks and provide dedicated channels with higher bandwidth and redundancy for designated space and suborbital missions.
Stranger
This is correct. Cell phones use towers, and the antennas on those towers are directional. They send and receive best in the plane along the surface of the earth. The farther up the signal is tilted (as it would be if you are in an aircraft) the more the signals are attenuated, so the cell phone tower gets less and less able to send and receive the higher you are in relationship to it.
You’d have to change out the antennas to make them less directional if you want them to work in the “up” direction. You’d also have to add a lot more towers, since you’ve only got so much signal to work with, and if you are radiating it out in all directions that means there’s less available to go in the “flat” direction when you start sending some of the signal “up”. You’d reduce the range of all of the existing towers and end up with gaps in coverage that would need to be filled with more towers.
Yes, but only up to about 5,000 feet or so. After that, your ability to connect drops off fairly quickly. Between 5,000 and 10,000 feet you might get a signal, and might not, with your chances decreasing the higher you go. Above 10,000 feet getting a connection is going to be almost impossible.
Most spacecraft go above 10,000 feet (and the ones that don’t usually have bigger problems than whether or not their cell phones work), so cell phones are going to be a problem for them.
Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do…
Rapid switching between towers has never really been much of a problem. The problem with early systems was that you could reach not only multiple towers, but multiple systems when you were up higher. This really wreaked havoc with the early cell phone systems. Cell phone users are incredibly obnoxious though. It often seems like the best way to guarantee that someone will use a cell phone in a particular location is to put a sign there saying cell phones can’t be used. Tell people that cell phones will cause their plane to crash and they still insist on using them. I think there’s some sort of Darwinian lesson in there somewhere. Anyway, because cell phone users are so obnoxious, the cell phone companies have just had to cope with it, and now the systems are all robust enough to handle cell phones in planes.
If all of the problems are fixed, then why don’t we allow them on planes now? It’s not just a holdover from an earlier time. The FCC still doesn’t allow them mostly for two reasons. The first is that an airborne cell phone will contact multiple towers, which means it will tie up communication channels in several towers simultaneously, reducing the number of channels available for other people to use, and the FCC doesn’t like wasting bandwidth. The second reason is that cell phones absolutely do interfere with airplane equipment, mostly communication equipment. In some cases they have interfered with the pilot’s ability to contact the tower and have also occasionally caused problems with navigation equipment. According to the pilots I have talked to, cell phones mostly show up as noise in their headsets, which is mostly just an annoyance, but can make it harder for them to hear instructions from the tower. The FAA doesn’t allow cell phones on planes either, for the same reason.
Am I the only one who remembers the cell phone calls made from American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11?
According to Wikipedia:
My interpretation of this is that they descended through 2200 feet only a minute or so before the crash. That means those calls must have been made at a much higher altitude, though I can’t say how much.
That same Wikipedia page shows one call made at 9:12 AM, and the other between 9:16 and 9:26. The crash occurred at 9:37, so it is quite possible that they were still pretty high up.
Calls from aircraft is one thing but from space quite another. One poster did touch on it when he mentioned the max range of about 45 miles for cell tower. Not only signal strength but time delay because of distance is important. A GSM or CDMA or W-CDMA call has a maximum delay it can handle for the path to and from the phone before it would lose synchronisation and drop out.