There are people who have it now, and they seem to be getting pretty good bandwidth off of it. As the benefit of it is that it would serve low density areas, the concern over larger population is not as large.
It would certainly not serve very well in New York City, if everyone wanted to use it.
My understanding is that fiber or broadband capable cable requires more infrastructure than electricity or phone lines. You need repeaters or amplifiers. My knowledge is more on the DSL side of things, and for that I know that you need to be fairly close to a SLIC hut or CO in order to make it work. Far closer than you need for POTS.
And that’s for places that already have robust systems that just need to be expanded. If you are talking about a developing nations, where there is no existing infrastructure to build off of, you are starting from an even earlier point.
I mean, that’s more or less what we have with terrestrial broadband services now.
There have been attempts at making universal broadband legislation. They usually don’t get too far.
And that’s for countries that already have broadband in the majority of population areas.
Kinda the whole point of them being inexpensive is that they are cheap to replace. When it costs hundreds of millions to put a satellite into orbit, you need to make damn sure it’s going to keep functioning as long as possible. These guys cost far less, and so it makes more sense to engineer to the lowest cost that gets the job done.
Counties can be pretty big. I’m sure that the areas that are well populated have good terrestrial service. You said that he lives in a more rural part of it.
Most geosynchronous satellites are not in true geostationary orbit, but rather, do wander north and south a bit. This describes not a line, but a figure 8 in the sky. The do do station keeping in order to minimize this, but they don’t usually keep it at exactly 0 inclination.
Further, the debris that would threaten such a satellite is not confined to the plane of geostationary.
An eight? I didn’t know that, nice to know. Still it should be a rather small 8, otherwise it would leave the range a dish can capture, so I still guess it would be a smaller band around the equator with a total capacity with regards to the number of sats it can carry smaller than LEO. But I did not calculate that, just guessed.
Yes indeed, but there is little useful to be done outside that plane at that precise and quite expensive distance, so that would be negligible in practical terms. I guess (again).
Yes, but my point there is that if you have an explosion or collision in geosynchronous orbit, then the debris will not be confined to that plane, and will spread out across a far wider range of inclinations, as well as orbital distances.
Conceded, but it is much less likely to go full Kessler Syndrome as there is much space left to fill in those inclinations. And the speed of the hypothetical collisions should be smaller, so hopefully less debris.
But coming back to the OP: Starlink is bad and will perhaps become horrible some day. I think a “danger to humanity” is exagerated, but it will be a pain in the neck. But Mr. Musk and the other oligarchs that want to do this will do so, because they can. What I don’t get is that they have actual fans. Groupies. People who are willing to donate to them. So if this Starlink business is a “danger to humanity” and it gets built and then hurts us, then humanity deserves no better. So many people saw it coming that it even got a thread in the SDMB, but it went ahead anyway.
Starlink is a danger only to astronomy and to the utilization of space.
If the utilization of space is not a benefit to humanity, then loss of access to space is no big deal. If the utilization of space is a benefit to humanity, then it actually does make sense that people cheer on those who are making that access easier.
Well I think that utilization of space is a benefit to humanity and that what Mr. Musk et al are doing is not making that access easier, not on the medium to long term, but rather that their vanity experiment will be remembered in future like Project West Ford is remembered today (insofer as it is remembered at all… yeah, I think it will be remembered more).
As I wrote before: a high altitude balloon would be better. Or lay ground connections, they will last much longer.
Reducing the cost of getting to space by an order of magnitude or better is not making that access easier?
One of the reasons that that is not a part of the general memory of space endeavours is that that was ended fairly soon, as it was determined to be detrimental, and not really serve its intended function. I mean, they weren’t putting up satellites that could potentially create space debris, they were just putting up space debris.
I don’t know that this is really comparable.
You mean hundreds of thousands of high altitude balloons. Lots of helium needed for that. Also, when they degrade, they litter the land and sea with plenty of noxious materials.
Eh, ground connections don’t really last all that long. I was a cable tech, and the majority of my job was fixing those ground connections when something went wrong. I was one of a couple hundred maintaining an area with a few hundred thousand people.
Mr. Musk wants to re-use rockets, re-using ballons is trivial in comparison. Fill them up again, send then high, use the opportunity to make repairs and maintenance.
You would not need hundreds of thousands, btw. Thousands, perhaps.
You need controls anyway if you want each balloon to stay in place over the area they serve. If you can control where they stay you need less of them. And you don’t need to cover the whole world: what’s the point of providing that coverage in the South Pacific, Antarctica, the Goby and Sahara Deserts and so on? 70% of Mr. Musk’s sats would be over water, 15% over unhabited terrain at any given moment, and he sells this waste as a service for the people in remote zones he does not care for to get permission to cover the lucrative parts of the world he is interested in. You can aim balloons to the places they are needed and useful, sats are a scattershot.
Thus far, SpaceX has not demonstrated “order of magnitude or better” in cost reduction into sending payloads into space. Although they have an advertised bare manifest cost in the US$60M to US$85M range, that just gets you a slot on a rocket and you pay additional fees and premiums for other costs like cleanroom payload processing, health & status monitoring, additional dynamic load cycles, or multi-payload adapters those increased costs can easily push a launch well above US$100M for a F9 and above US$150M for a Falcon Heavy, notwithstanding any mission assurance or launch activity surveillance costs that a billion dollar telecom bird will require. This does run to about 2/3 to 1/2 of what a ULA or commercial Delta launch will cost, which is unsurprising because I worked on a study that showed that ULA launch costs could be reduced by 40% without compromising any significant quality or mission assurance provisions. SpaceX is offering a small discount for launching on a reused booster–last I checked it was 15% of the manifest price, and while taking of US$9M to US$12M off of the launch cost is not nothing, it is not the orders of magnitude reductions that Musk and Shotwell were advertising early on, nor is there any real expectation that stage reuse alone could ever realize that kind of savings without significant streamlining and automation of the labor-intensive vehicle and payload integration. SpaceX has actually made some significant strides in that area but, as Musk found out with Tesla, automation is easy to talk about and hard to implement, and the same is true here, even moreso with payloads with unique requirements and mission parameters that push the vehicle to the limits of its capability.
It’s actually an open question as to whether SpaceX is actually making a profit in launches. There are a number of aerospace financial analysts who assert–based upon models, as the privately-owned SpaceX has no obligation to provide its financials and has been cagy about costs and overruns except to promote claims of efficiency that are questionable at best–that SpaceX continues to run at a loss based upon investor cash and is depending on the profitability of Starlink to provide it with the necessary income to sustain it indefinitely. This is far enough from my area of experience that I can’t really say whether this is valid or not, but nothing publicly available about SpaceX operations or the Falcon launch vehicle design indicates a potential for orders-of-magnitude reductions in cost, and the business case for the Super Heavy is specious at best.
This has long been a concern even aside from Kessler Syndrome, because as noted above we just don’t have any practical way to remove debris–especially small pieces or those with low RCS–from orbit. Orbital space is a common resource, and filling it full of junk is paying forward a debt that future generation will be encumbered with.
Laying cable may be difficult and fixing ground connections may be frustrating, but it is literally astronomically easier and cheaper than fixing problems in space. And a terrestrial fiber optic network is essentially immune to interference and space weather; on the other hand, an occurrence like the 1859 Carrigton Event could wipe out an entire satellite network, lock, stock, and barrel, especially in lower Earth orbit where the existing or transient geomagnetic radiation concentrations (e.g. the Van Allen Belts and the South Atlantic Anomaly) could persist for an extended duration. Starlink is a nice idea for supplying Internet access to rural areas and underdeveloped countries, but whether it actually functions as reliably and with enough bandwidth as advertised remains to be seen. Rather than engage in a battle of jousting cites I’ll leave it to the reader to do their own research but you can find assessments by numerous people in the field of satellite telecommunications pouring cold water of hard numerical analysis on the claims regarding Starlink. Again, it is far enough from my field that I can’t express a qualified opinion except to note that for Elon Musk, making bombastic claims and hopelessly optimistic schedules is the rule rather than the norm.
This all on top of what I have written already. I hope I have not given the impression I believe any of Mr. Musk’s claims. He is Trump-level good with twitter, but is just as unreliable (I typed unreliabla, how Freudian!).
I didn’t mean to imply that you had; I just quoted you because you are exactly right that, aside from concerns about Kessler Syndrome, orbital space is a shared precious resource that should not be occupied by any amount of junk someone has the money to put up there. The smallsat revolution (CubeSats and so forth) sent up to the sub-200 km orbital space are okay because most of them aren’t going to last more than a year in orbit (many of them only months), and aside from contamination concerns about dispersing of toxic heavy metals as they burn up in the atmosphere they don’t really pose a long term hazard and are generally kept out of azimuths necessary to access the ISS or send up big birds to GSO and GEO. Even an impact in that really low orbit isn’t a concern because small, lightweight debris will probably fall down due to drag in weeks or a few months at most. Starlink satellites, on the other hand, could potentially persist for decades across numerous azimuths, and a series of collisions could disperse fragments widely across orbital space at and below that altitude.
Once again, Stranger, I thank you for taking the time to craft considered and cerebral replies. I feel I’ve learned a little and I appreciate your estimation of several figures as well. Since “space law” seems to lack substance, a “tragedy of the commons” may be hard to avoid given lack of regulatory concern. But the magnitude may depend on the quantity of proposed satellites. What is a minimal number which would allow test of concept? What minimum criteria should exist before broad expansion in terms of removing debris?
Those are expansive questions to which I would not pretend to have answers to. I think you’d have to run well-validated simulations with the particulars of the satellite configuration along with other expected growth in satellites running out to a century or more to get an idea of the risks, which is a vast task to not only perform but having thoroughly peer-reviewed and independently verified. I don’t see any of that being done other than some fairly superficial analysis of launch variation or failure to satisfy FAA and FCC licensing requirements. And regardless, if a country like China or Russia decides to launch a constellation or put military weapon platforms in space, there is essentially nothing the ICAO or any nation can do about it, so the argument could be made that what will happen will occur regardless. I don’t think that is a good argument but then you don’t need a good argument to bolster up an idea you can just push ahead with anyway by making grandiose promises and using political influence to avoid problematic regulation.
I’m going to reread this thread and the links before I feel qualified to engage in any serious discussion, but in the meantime, I’ll throw out the fact that my first reaction to the thread title is “Yes, because it was Elon Musk’s idea.” Which means it’s innovative but flawed.