Project Kuiper is so far behind Starlink at this point that this kind of regulatory maneuvering is pretty laughable. (As compared to regulating the brightness of LEO satellites, which is very much needed. In this regard, allowing SpaceX to lower the orbit of these satellites is actually good for astronomy. We talk about this stuff pretty frequently in Orbital Index [https://orbitalindex.com].)
The head of Kuiper and most of the senior team led Starlink until Musk allegedly fired them for moving too slow and being too cautious. So Amazon being operationally behind isn't exactly surprising.
>Musk had fired at least seven members of the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to the two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.
Maybe, but my sense as an outsider was that Starlink was moving at a snail's pace and was essentially PR vaporware prior to these firings. Granted, there's a lot of engineering going on behind the scenes, but the timing is perhaps suggestive...
I know that SpaceX has historically had a abnormally high development and deployment cadence, but I think that your second point about behind-the-scenes development is probably closest to the mark.
To me, it seems more plausible that they were taking a solid-not-polished design that's been mostly worked through for a few years, doing some team re-org and removing people who aren't working out, and then finished tweaking the design and got ready for scaling to higher production over the next few months than it does they were scraping by on the skin of their teeth for almost four years and suddenly managed to catch up on everything (and have it work!) in those same last few months.
It's absolutely possible I'm wrong, but if the Starklink team truly managed a timeline of 6 months from "vaporware" to functionally the world's first mega-constellation, I'd be absolutely floored.
You have it exactly backwards. Starlink is attempting to block competition by moving into orbits not assigned to it but which have been targeted by competitors. Starlink had the option of using the lower orbit when it designed its system, and chose not to even consider that orbit until Kuiper was announced.
Every other company in the space is opposed to this move, because Starlink's unilateral reconfiguration would interfere with nearly every other company's operations. Part of the FCC's mandate is to prevent that from occurring, and SpaceX absolutely deserves to be slapped down for its anticompetitive behavior.
Not exactly sure about the RF details here (probably very few people are), but, as a theoretical exercise, should we really allow the first mover to just grab what's available? Why?
When new satellite services emerged previously, the FCC had a policy of requiring two competitors (DirecTV vs. Dish and XM vs. Sirius). It would be nice to continue that with Starlink vs. Kuiper but as a layman the wranglings are too obscure for me to follow. Both companies are accusing each other of the exact same things and apparently nobody in the press is qualified to have an opinion so they just teach the controversy.
This isn't a fair characterization. In order to have knowledge of something, you need more than theory: you need to validate your idea with observed experience. The first person to actually achieve something, demonstrated by an existence proof, can in most cases be said to have gone through both steps.
The second part of this is that individual rights guarantees that innovators are free to achieve ("the sky's the limit" is out of date"). Innovators do this for their own benefit, as they should. As a side effect, the rest of us also benefit enormously! There are a lot of people in rural areas stuck with incredibly poor internet service, via HughesNet or DSL, and Starlink is a massive boon to us. It's amazing to pull 150 Mbps on the side of a mountain or on the open ocean...
Why is it just that Bezos take a backseat here? Without the pioneering achievements from SpaceX, Bezos wouldn't have the certainty that such a network is even possible. Over the past two decades, many, many ventures have gone bankrupt trying to achieve what SpaceX has done.
SpaceX has earned its success, and Bezos shouldn't be allowed to run to the government to kneecap his competitor.
> Why is it just that Bezos take a backseat here? Without the pioneering achievements from SpaceX, Bezos wouldn't have the certainty that such a network is even possible. Over the past two decades, many, many ventures have gone bankrupt trying to achieve what SpaceX has done.
That's all irrelevant to the consumer, 20 years down the line.
What I see: Two tycoons battling it out. It doesn't really matter that one of them is a (very clear) follower in this field; competition is crucial in the long term.
> SpaceX has earned its success
That's not how this works. The frequency spectrum is a common good. The FCC exists for a reason.
Because everyone else who has tried has gone bankrupt or has to limit the service in utterly crappy ways? Starlink is only economically and technically viable because SpaceX can build and launch high numbers of satellites cheaply enough to bootstrap a sustainable and desirable product. Limiting the scalability of Starlink to make room for a competitor would in the long run make both suck. Now, sclerotic and poor performing monopolies also suck, but for now at least, Starlink is the rapidly improving disruptor.
In the long run, we're all dead. So let's say we hold back the scaling of Starlink to make sure there is room for future competition. That might make for a somewhat better future. It also might just stifle the whole project in it's cradle.
> So let's say we hold back the scaling of Starlink to make sure there is room for future competition. That might make for a somewhat better future. It also might just stifle the whole project in it's cradle.
I guess here is where credible EE/RF journalism would be desirable. You don't know (and I don't know) but you want to stop this because it might maybe hurt Starlink too much.
If it's a problem in 10, 20 or 40 years, we can deal with it then. The anti-trust tools are there. Also the current LEO satellites de-orbit in 5-10 years, so the concern is moot if Amazon actually gets their stuff together.
If you assume SpaceX tech gets copied and reuse becomes the norm for rockets then Starlink would face competition. Over time the costs would fall both with regards to launches but also in the satellite part of it, meaning Starlink competitors would be able to do it for less.
Slowing Spacex/Starlink now would only serve the help their competitors and punish a first mover.
But on the EE/RF side of it i have no idea what arguments are legit and so forth tbh.
If the Starlink business model depends on them having a monopoly of this kind of service - it shouldn't be a privately owned service. Hopefully it can stay private though - that typically allows for much greater development velocities. Maybe we just need to trust the FCC to do the right thing? :/
I want to know more about the RF issues involved here though.
That's not that they are doing. That is what Amazon claims they are doing with no prove. SpaceX is slightly changing it system (non of its hardware).
Amazon reserving an a huge orbit and without real data claiming anybody else that want to operate there is only trying to prevent their system. That is unreasonable.
Amazon is trying to artificial hobble Starlink, not the other way around. If Amazon really designed it system in a way where Starlink hinders it, then why would Amazon be allowed to operate such a system? Such a system would mean nobody else can operate in such an orbit.
Based on similar claims SpaceX could have attempted to prevent Amazon system but they didn't because they knew it wouldn't, and did want to make false claims about it.
> Amazon reserving an a huge orbit and without real data claiming anybody else that want to operate there is only trying to prevent their system. That is unreasonable.
Spacelink reserved a similar huge orbit and said they didn't want the orbit that Amazon wants. Now they changed their mind.
> SpaceX is slightly changing it system (non of its hardware).
Sorry. Not changed their mind, changed their system. Precisely into the system they said they didn't want and Amazon subsequently chose.
Why would we want to have 3-5 competitors for same thing tho? That would just make 10x more expensive for everyone.
Same with cellular networks. There's some theoretical sharing, but in practice we're covering same area 3x times at 3x slower total bandwidth...
Some governments are starting to realise this is huge ripoff and start their own networks with MVNO's, similar how copper/fibre telco's and power companies are have been sorted for decades. Unsure why space should be different. Sat tech is reasonably simple, it's just launch cost where competition is at. Same way the only competitior between cell network operators is tower installation (third party) and support (abhorrent).
Fair distribution of limited resources works perfectly in countries with best quality of life. Land, space and radio spectrum is a limited resource. Starlink wouldn't even exist if USA would regulated telco's same as power companies.
Nobody is preventing anything. Starlink went threw all the process to get regulated and now wants to slightly lower in the range they can operate in.
It does not inherently prevent anybody else from operating. In every orbit their are many different sats and sat providers operating.
Amazon claims are entirely based on their inability to run their theoretical system when SpaceX is there. If their system is that fragile, then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to launch it in the first place.
SpaceX could have equally claimed the planned Amazon system was interfering with them, but they didn't.
Goldman highlighted that Amazon representatives have had “30 meetings to oppose SpaceX” but “no meetings to authorize its own system,” which he interpreted as an attempt to stifle competition.
SpaceX have demonstrated an orbital launch capability, satellite operation capability, satellite de-orbit capability, and scheduled launches in the near term. Amazon have none of these capabilities and barely even a plan to get there by the deadline in 6 years time.
I'm sure both sides are as bad as each other on the competition aspect, after all it's Elon Musk and Amazon/Bezos, I can't imagine two worse people for that. But it does seem a little unfair that Amazon have barely any proven track record and could prevent SpaceX from furthering their very proven track record.
Edit: as much as Blue Origin may play into the plans for this, they have not reached orbit, and do not have an operational rocket suitable for this (yet). Maybe Amazon have signed a deal for launches, but otherwise just being owned by the same eccentric billionaire shouldn't really suggest the ability for the company to pull it off.
How likely is it that Starlink and whatever amazon is planning will end up polluting space with satellite garbage that will make future missions difficult/impossible due to high velocity collisions?
My answer as an interested layman but not an expert:
Yes this is a huge concern, which is why attention is being paid to how these satellites will de-orbit.
Up to maybe 10 years ago satellites were just put up there and at best would move out of the way a bit when they reached end of life, but most would just stay. Plus lots of things were just discarded from mission, or lost accidentally, creating more junk. All of this made space junk a big and growing concern...
However, now everyone is very aware, so satellites have de-orbiting built in (and I think this might be a legal requirement now), orbits may be chosen with ease of de-orbiting in mind, more care is taken to letting junk accumulate, several companies are working on clearup mechanisms, etc. All this may mean that the worst-case scenario doesn't ever actually play out, and it's not that big a deal in the long run.
We'll have to wait and see, but there will be a lot of money behind making this as little of an issue as possible so that the space industry can really take off.
Not at all for Starlink. The orbits are low enough to decay within 5-10 years if they are left without station keeping. Remember, "space" does not start at the karman line, it is a continuous transition. Although, they have a license for satellites at ~1100 km altitude. Those would need active deorbiting.
The Starlink satellites are also designed to completely burn up in the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why the first generation does not have laser-links, that was supposedly the hardest part to design fulfilling that criteria.
That's actually one of the advantages of their proposed lowering of the orbits, they need to think even less about end of life questions and redundancy.
Edit: See here for the continuous sweeping happening at lower orbits.
OK, asking from total ignorance here, shouldnt the companies putting these things in orbit (and benefiting from it) be responsible for safely decommissioning the satellites after their useful life is over? Shouldnt they be liable if their "space garbage" fuck other people/nation equipment?
For most conventional satellites (and let's not forget second stages), the cost of deorbiting it if it fails is immense because it essentially requires launching a "tug" which didn't even exist until recently. Because it was so exepensive, people were allowed to ignore it. We'll probably eventually look back on this attitude the same way we view 1970s cars that didn't use known safety features.
SpaceX is being forced to innovate in this area because everybody realized the YOLO attitude towards space junk doesn't scale to thousands of satellites.
They are. Every sat launched needs to have a plan for decommissioning. You need to have enough fuel at to de-orbit the sat at the end of life.
The problem is what happens if your sat breaks and you can't de-orbit it.
I'm not sure if a company could held liable or get fined unless they ignored the rules. I don't think currently you are held liable if its an accident.
Thankfully once we have Starship, the cost of taking space garage should start to be reasonable.
Despite the strong responses already it's only been a recent development that Starlink requested all orbital shells be the 5 year decay orbit or lower (and that change still not approved yet). Assuming they go forward with that plan though even the worst case scenario is a relatively temporary problem - they've shown the satellites can move and de-orbit on command and when they don't the newly proposed highest shell is about a 5 year natural decay.
Also it's not so much the concern about hitting a satellite on your way up (easy to track and space is spacey) rather the concern that over many years any 2 satellites in the shell will collide creating a lot of debris that could collide with more satellites in the shell and so on. That's why there are requirements about being able to move your satellites actively as part of these proposals, to prevent such a scenario from happening or growing if it did.
> they've shown the satellites can move and de-orbit on command
Are there cost weight savings if they can remove the fuel or equipment needed to force a deoribit? So if a sat dies on day one they can just shrug and say it will burn up in 5 years.
Technically yes, as long as it will de-orbit in less than 25 years you don't need to. That being said not being able to de-orbit on command or maneuver out of a collision course is going to make getting tens of thousands of such satellites approved much less likely.
Also they are used as part of the normal operation of the satellites anyways, ~60 are launched together in one big clump and then the ion thrusters get them into the individual target orbits and keep them there over time (until fuel runs out trying to keep the orbit on track or the satellite stops being operationally useful), so getting rid of it does make it lighter but not necessarily better suited.
I don't see how this addresses any of the concerns brought up in the article. This entire spat is because SpaceX got approval from the FCC to deploy their system in a specific way, and Amazon acknowledged that and designed their system in a way to not interfere with SpaceX. Now SpaceX is coming and saying they want to change their system in a way to interfere with Amazon.
Forget the names of the companies and their leaders for a second. We have a shared public resource, like a pond. Company A showed up and says "I am going to set up shop on this side of the pond, and we will leave the rest of the pond open for other people to use." Company B then says "okay, we are going to set up shop on the other side of the pond so we don't interfere with each other." Company A then says "no, we actually want to use that side of the pond, too. too bad for you".
In what universe is Company A in the right here, and why does it matter who gets there first? It's clearly anti-competitive practice on the part of Company A trying to shut out Company B, and the only people who will suffer from it are the general public.
How long is an appropriate window for Amazon to lock down orbital slots without a solid plan to use it?
I can understand a year or two, especially if they have orbital capacity ready. But six years?
The space could provisionally be granted to SpaceX with a 15 year renewal period or something. Locking down options for a decade on wishful thinking does not seem particularly competitive for me.
In 2017 SpaceX was granted a window to "lock down" its proposed slots for 9 years to prevent others from taking those slots, and that was years before they even had a single satellite flying. I don't see why Amazon shouldn't be given the same treatment.
Six years is not that long. You need to have the frequency to finalize the design of your payload, if not your satellite. And for big constellations you need the frequency to talk seriously with your investors. So 6 years to design a platform, a ground segment and launch half your constellation is not an easy task.
Secondary comment: SpaceX's behavior in this instance is not unlike every other ISP in America engaging in anti-competitive behavior to keep newcomers out. Remember when Google Fiber was rolling out and tried to use fiber/utility poles in a way that allowed ISPs to share public utility poles? But then ATT pitched a fit [1, 2] saying "actually we don't want Google Fiber to do that because it could possibly harm our business in some unspecified and vague way", basically killing the expansion of Fiber [3]? And who suffered? All of us unlucky Americans who are now stuck with exorbitant prices for ridiculous internet plans from ATT because we don't have any other options.
We already have an absolutely terrible oligopoly of wired ISPs, do we really want to start down this path of allowing the same to happen for space-based internet, too?
And then there is the little detail that this is being decided for the whole world but actually just benefits one, possibly two companies from the United States. Space belongs to all of us, not just to the USA.
Yeah, it's not clear to me why the FCC (and not ITU or some multinational body) has jurisdiction here. What remedy would Musk have if Russia decided to launch CosmosNet or whatever that was interfering?
The ITU does have jurisdiction. Since SpaceX (and Amazon) are US companies, they work with the FCC, who then works with the ITU on behalf of SpaceX/Amazon.
This is tangential, but you seem like you know a lot about this :).
How come I can't easily find a registry of the UP/DL/Beacon transmission frequencies for every satellite. Am I just not looking in the right place? I can find various hobbyist's catalogs, but nothing that looks remotely official. Any satellite with downlinks between 30 MHz and 1.2 GHz is potentially useful for helping to calibrate one or more of the radio neutrino experiments I work on.
For partially historic and partially current reasons, detailed satellite catalogs are considered militarily sensitive to some degree... not to a huge extent, but to such an extent that it's prevented the formation of an open, international coordinating system for satellites, keeping most of the coordination work done behind closed doors. The closest thing to an "official" international satellite catalog would probably be that maintained by USSTRATCOM but it's post-facto. UN Space Affairs facilitates coordination and has a catalog but it does not pretend to be complete and has only limited information.
A good source of downlink information is the FCC International Bureau records of satellite ground stations in the US.
Yeah I can find TLE catalogs easily enough (celestrack and space-track) and it seems NORAD IDs are an almost standard. The FCC ground station list that I can find has some of them, but lacks a lot of notable ones (NOAA satellites, MUOS, Gonets...).
It is available on the ITU website. You will have satellite names (which should be similar to what you'll see in space-track, most of the time). I believe you need to pay to have access to those, but when you have a direct link to a specific satellite anybody can read it.
Also note that this shows licences, not actual use. You can have a satellite licenced to a particular frequency but not using it.
I've written this before: Jeff Bezos has a hobby, Elon Musk is a man on a mission. Bezos doesn't live or die depending on how his space venture pans out, he's not hungry for it.
To Elon Musk everything he's done in his life so far has been so that he could eventually do this space thing and that is what defines him. The two couldn't be more different. For Elon failure is not an option, for Bezos it very much is.
Is that actually true? Because if I were Elon Musk that is the image I would want people to think of me - I'm sure he is ideologically motivated in where be builds his businesses but it seems to be popular to ascribe considerable virtue to someone who can be rather unvirtuous when pushed.
Because no hackernews thread about an Elon company is complete with either straight up religious worship of Elon or brushing away potentially legitimate concerns about his businesses - and this isn't even including the inevitable "Tesla isn't a car company" in any thread where Tesla is compared to any other company that sells cars
As far as reality distortion fields go, I don't think it's that bad, but with these kinds of things I am firmly in the "don't trust; verify twice" camp.
And no Hacker News comment about a Musk company is not filled with wild accusation accusing Musk of playing 4D Chess in 3D dimension, lying about literally everything and generally being a Bond villain.
The guy literally invested huge amount of his money into a scientific mission to mars and when he realized it wouldn't work he dedicated the next 20 years trying to build a company that could do it.
And he did all of this so he could have a good 'image' a small part of the population? That is just beyond stupid.
Bezos has a very large amount of unallocated capital, which means that if he had a mission, he could move a lot faster on it. Musk has none, in fact, has heavily bet the farm more than once in pursuit of his stated mission. If Bezos has a mission I can not find what it is based on his actions. If I didn't know what Musk's mission was I could make a pretty good stab at it based on his actions so far.
Yeah I have no way to assess the credibility of Amazon vs. SpaceX claims. But Amazon has not 6 but less than 5.5 years to get 1600 sats into orbit and they don't have a rocket to put them on. Blue Origin still hasn't been able to build two flight-worthy BE-4 engines for ULA to launch a Vulcan. Then they need 7 more engines and finish up the rest of New Glenn, LC-36 and their barge and do their first ever successful orbital flight. There's almost zero chance that will happen within the next 12 months, and if anything goes wrong could easily be into 2023. Blue Origin will then have optimistically ~4.5 years to become the second-largest launch provider.
It's worth noting there's bad blood in the general space community already after Blue tried to stop SpaceX from doing barge landings, attempted to also take over pad 39A vs SpaceX even though Blue has nothing to launch, their $10 billion HLS "40 foot ladder" proposal and Bezos infamous "Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!" back 6 years ago gives a general gist of why Bezos' claims are being treated with skepticism by many. https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/679116636310360067
Regardless of these quarrels among competitors, Starlink is doing impressive things. From the website[1]:
Starlink is now delivering initial beta service both domestically
and internationally, and will continue expansion to near global coverage
of the populated world in 2021.
They're also going to minimize their contribution to space junk:
At end of life, the satellites will utilize their on-board propulsion system to
deorbit over the course of a few months. In the unlikely event the propulsion system
becomes inoperable, the satellites will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within 1-5
years, significantly less than the hundreds or thousands of years required at higher
altitudes.
Also interesting is that they're using "ion thrusters powered by krypton" and claim this is the first spacecraft to use this propulsion method.
If they can boost data transfer speed from 40-60Mb/s currently to N gigabits/second, perhaps will provide stiff competition to conventional cell carriers.
It probably won't provide competition to cell carriers for a few reasons. Starlink's equipment is large and needs a direct view of the sky. Their app needs to take photos of where you're positioning the receiver/transmitter to make sure there are no obstructions. The fact that they're using satellites means that they can get very broad coverage, but between the fact that it's satellite and the fact that they're using very high frequency spectrum means that it requires line-of-sight.
From what I can see, Starlink is using a lot more power to transmit than cell phones are really capable of given the battery constraints.
I think the more likely possibility is Starlink offering backhaul for rural cell sites where it might be cost prohibitive to run fiber. However, I'm not sure it would be more cost effective to use satellite backhaul than terrestrial microwave or fiber. Satellites aren't cheap, but who knows.
In terms of boosting the data transfer speed, that won't be simple. Terrestrial wireless (like cell carriers) can offer good speeds because each cell tower is covering a very limited area. If you're 20 miles away from me, we'll be connecting to different cell towers and therefore can use the same radio spectrum without interfering with each other. With satellites, a lot more people will be sharing the same radio spectrum. Now, I'm sure Starlink is operating under the idea that they can launch lots of satellites and get decent spectrum re-use. However, cell carriers have around 80,000 cell sites each. Starlink is only planning on launching 10,000-15,000 and hoping to get permission to get up to 30,000. That still means a lot more sharing of the same spectrum.
You can get higher speed by using more spectrum. However, that spectrum needs to be licensed, it isn't always cheap, and other people want to license it too. The way that the gigabit speeds from wireless carriers work is by using many hundreds of MHz of spectrum that can't go very far (because it gets disrupted by things like buildings, trees, etc.). Lower frequency spectrum can go further (since it penetrates objects better), but there's a pretty limited amount of it and most of it is already spoken for (whether that's TV, FM radio, current wireless service, etc.).
I think Starlink will provide a good option for many people who don't live in areas well-served by current internet options. It's a huge jump to believe that it will offer competition to cell carriers. It just isn't that type of technology and you run into limits that you can't really get around.
That's not to say that Starlink isn't important. It is important for many people who don't have access to good internet in the US and around the world, but it isn't going to provide competition for your cell phone provider.
That's a good point. Trucks would be a great use case. They have the space on the roof, they have plenty of power and are less cost sensitive.
Real time logistics is a big deal. I've driven across the US and even on major highways cellular coverage is spotty. There might be a self-driving or emergency response angle too.
As for costs, I suspect it will all get cost-reduced like their self-driving computer (or cellular or wifi, ...)
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread>Musk had fired at least seven members of the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to the two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-musk-shakes-up-spacex-in-r...
Speed and latency measured with the Starlink beta/GA are unparalleled at the moment, yet to see if they worsen with an increase of userbase.
Look at the timeline:
Jan 2015 -- announce plans
Jan 2017 -- Starlink trademarked
Feb 2018 - test flight of two satellites
May 2019 - Launch 60 of the v0.9 model
June 2019 - fire 7 people
Oct 2019 - this article
Nov 2019 - Launch 60 of the v1.0 model
7 Jan 2020 - 60 satellites launched
29 Jan 2020 - 60 satellites launched
17 Feb 2020 - 60 satellites launched
18 Mar 2020 - 60 satellites launched
22 Apr 2020 - 60 satellites launched
04 Jun 2020 - 60 satellites launched
etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
To me, it seems more plausible that they were taking a solid-not-polished design that's been mostly worked through for a few years, doing some team re-org and removing people who aren't working out, and then finished tweaking the design and got ready for scaling to higher production over the next few months than it does they were scraping by on the skin of their teeth for almost four years and suddenly managed to catch up on everything (and have it work!) in those same last few months.
It's absolutely possible I'm wrong, but if the Starklink team truly managed a timeline of 6 months from "vaporware" to functionally the world's first mega-constellation, I'd be absolutely floored.
"Amazon representatives have had "30 meetings to oppose SpaceX" but "no meetings to authorize its own system""
... those 30 meetings fit into the timeline? :)
The article was published on Oct 31, 2018 (not 2019).
Every other company in the space is opposed to this move, because Starlink's unilateral reconfiguration would interfere with nearly every other company's operations. Part of the FCC's mandate is to prevent that from occurring, and SpaceX absolutely deserves to be slapped down for its anticompetitive behavior.
This isn't a fair characterization. In order to have knowledge of something, you need more than theory: you need to validate your idea with observed experience. The first person to actually achieve something, demonstrated by an existence proof, can in most cases be said to have gone through both steps.
The second part of this is that individual rights guarantees that innovators are free to achieve ("the sky's the limit" is out of date"). Innovators do this for their own benefit, as they should. As a side effect, the rest of us also benefit enormously! There are a lot of people in rural areas stuck with incredibly poor internet service, via HughesNet or DSL, and Starlink is a massive boon to us. It's amazing to pull 150 Mbps on the side of a mountain or on the open ocean...
Why is it just that Bezos take a backseat here? Without the pioneering achievements from SpaceX, Bezos wouldn't have the certainty that such a network is even possible. Over the past two decades, many, many ventures have gone bankrupt trying to achieve what SpaceX has done.
SpaceX has earned its success, and Bezos shouldn't be allowed to run to the government to kneecap his competitor.
That's all irrelevant to the consumer, 20 years down the line.
What I see: Two tycoons battling it out. It doesn't really matter that one of them is a (very clear) follower in this field; competition is crucial in the long term.
> SpaceX has earned its success
That's not how this works. The frequency spectrum is a common good. The FCC exists for a reason.
for now at least
Please think more long term.
Okay, so think 10, 20 and 40 years from now.
> So let's say we hold back the scaling of Starlink to make sure there is room for future competition. That might make for a somewhat better future. It also might just stifle the whole project in it's cradle.
I guess here is where credible EE/RF journalism would be desirable. You don't know (and I don't know) but you want to stop this because it might maybe hurt Starlink too much.
If you assume SpaceX tech gets copied and reuse becomes the norm for rockets then Starlink would face competition. Over time the costs would fall both with regards to launches but also in the satellite part of it, meaning Starlink competitors would be able to do it for less.
Slowing Spacex/Starlink now would only serve the help their competitors and punish a first mover.
But on the EE/RF side of it i have no idea what arguments are legit and so forth tbh.
I want to know more about the RF issues involved here though.
Amazon reserving an a huge orbit and without real data claiming anybody else that want to operate there is only trying to prevent their system. That is unreasonable.
Amazon is trying to artificial hobble Starlink, not the other way around. If Amazon really designed it system in a way where Starlink hinders it, then why would Amazon be allowed to operate such a system? Such a system would mean nobody else can operate in such an orbit.
Based on similar claims SpaceX could have attempted to prevent Amazon system but they didn't because they knew it wouldn't, and did want to make false claims about it.
Spacelink reserved a similar huge orbit and said they didn't want the orbit that Amazon wants. Now they changed their mind.
> SpaceX is slightly changing it system (non of its hardware).
Sorry. Not changed their mind, changed their system. Precisely into the system they said they didn't want and Amazon subsequently chose.
Same with cellular networks. There's some theoretical sharing, but in practice we're covering same area 3x times at 3x slower total bandwidth...
Some governments are starting to realise this is huge ripoff and start their own networks with MVNO's, similar how copper/fibre telco's and power companies are have been sorted for decades. Unsure why space should be different. Sat tech is reasonably simple, it's just launch cost where competition is at. Same way the only competitior between cell network operators is tower installation (third party) and support (abhorrent).
It does not inherently prevent anybody else from operating. In every orbit their are many different sats and sat providers operating.
Amazon claims are entirely based on their inability to run their theoretical system when SpaceX is there. If their system is that fragile, then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to launch it in the first place.
SpaceX could have equally claimed the planned Amazon system was interfering with them, but they didn't.
I'm sure both sides are as bad as each other on the competition aspect, after all it's Elon Musk and Amazon/Bezos, I can't imagine two worse people for that. But it does seem a little unfair that Amazon have barely any proven track record and could prevent SpaceX from furthering their very proven track record.
Edit: as much as Blue Origin may play into the plans for this, they have not reached orbit, and do not have an operational rocket suitable for this (yet). Maybe Amazon have signed a deal for launches, but otherwise just being owned by the same eccentric billionaire shouldn't really suggest the ability for the company to pull it off.
How likely is it that Starlink and whatever amazon is planning will end up polluting space with satellite garbage that will make future missions difficult/impossible due to high velocity collisions?
Yes this is a huge concern, which is why attention is being paid to how these satellites will de-orbit.
Up to maybe 10 years ago satellites were just put up there and at best would move out of the way a bit when they reached end of life, but most would just stay. Plus lots of things were just discarded from mission, or lost accidentally, creating more junk. All of this made space junk a big and growing concern...
However, now everyone is very aware, so satellites have de-orbiting built in (and I think this might be a legal requirement now), orbits may be chosen with ease of de-orbiting in mind, more care is taken to letting junk accumulate, several companies are working on clearup mechanisms, etc. All this may mean that the worst-case scenario doesn't ever actually play out, and it's not that big a deal in the long run.
We'll have to wait and see, but there will be a lot of money behind making this as little of an issue as possible so that the space industry can really take off.
The Starlink satellites are also designed to completely burn up in the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why the first generation does not have laser-links, that was supposedly the hardest part to design fulfilling that criteria.
That's actually one of the advantages of their proposed lowering of the orbits, they need to think even less about end of life questions and redundancy.
Edit: See here for the continuous sweeping happening at lower orbits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ld4vlq/gabbard_diagr...
1. starlink.com
SpaceX is being forced to innovate in this area because everybody realized the YOLO attitude towards space junk doesn't scale to thousands of satellites.
The problem is what happens if your sat breaks and you can't de-orbit it.
I'm not sure if a company could held liable or get fined unless they ignored the rules. I don't think currently you are held liable if its an accident.
Thankfully once we have Starship, the cost of taking space garage should start to be reasonable.
Also it's not so much the concern about hitting a satellite on your way up (easy to track and space is spacey) rather the concern that over many years any 2 satellites in the shell will collide creating a lot of debris that could collide with more satellites in the shell and so on. That's why there are requirements about being able to move your satellites actively as part of these proposals, to prevent such a scenario from happening or growing if it did.
Are there cost weight savings if they can remove the fuel or equipment needed to force a deoribit? So if a sat dies on day one they can just shrug and say it will burn up in 5 years.
Or can they induce drag without extra equipment?
Also they are used as part of the normal operation of the satellites anyways, ~60 are launched together in one big clump and then the ion thrusters get them into the individual target orbits and keep them there over time (until fuel runs out trying to keep the orbit on track or the satellite stops being operationally useful), so getting rid of it does make it lighter but not necessarily better suited.
Forget the names of the companies and their leaders for a second. We have a shared public resource, like a pond. Company A showed up and says "I am going to set up shop on this side of the pond, and we will leave the rest of the pond open for other people to use." Company B then says "okay, we are going to set up shop on the other side of the pond so we don't interfere with each other." Company A then says "no, we actually want to use that side of the pond, too. too bad for you".
In what universe is Company A in the right here, and why does it matter who gets there first? It's clearly anti-competitive practice on the part of Company A trying to shut out Company B, and the only people who will suffer from it are the general public.
I can understand a year or two, especially if they have orbital capacity ready. But six years?
The space could provisionally be granted to SpaceX with a 15 year renewal period or something. Locking down options for a decade on wishful thinking does not seem particularly competitive for me.
Yes, sure, give Amazon the same treatment. Start orbiting large numbers of satellites in 2022 or you lose it.
Also, it's not like the FCC should be allowed to take it back, even if 6 years is unreasonable.
We already have an absolutely terrible oligopoly of wired ISPs, do we really want to start down this path of allowing the same to happen for space-based internet, too?
1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160923/06590635601/att-s...
2: https://www.slashgear.com/att-files-lawsuit-to-hinder-google...
3: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215743/google-fiber-leav...
How come I can't easily find a registry of the UP/DL/Beacon transmission frequencies for every satellite. Am I just not looking in the right place? I can find various hobbyist's catalogs, but nothing that looks remotely official. Any satellite with downlinks between 30 MHz and 1.2 GHz is potentially useful for helping to calibrate one or more of the radio neutrino experiments I work on.
A good source of downlink information is the FCC International Bureau records of satellite ground stations in the US.
Also note that this shows licences, not actual use. You can have a satellite licenced to a particular frequency but not using it.
To Elon Musk everything he's done in his life so far has been so that he could eventually do this space thing and that is what defines him. The two couldn't be more different. For Elon failure is not an option, for Bezos it very much is.
As far as reality distortion fields go, I don't think it's that bad, but with these kinds of things I am firmly in the "don't trust; verify twice" camp.
The guy literally invested huge amount of his money into a scientific mission to mars and when he realized it wouldn't work he dedicated the next 20 years trying to build a company that could do it.
And he did all of this so he could have a good 'image' a small part of the population? That is just beyond stupid.
Everything he has achieved with Amazon very much seems to imply otherwise.
It's worth noting there's bad blood in the general space community already after Blue tried to stop SpaceX from doing barge landings, attempted to also take over pad 39A vs SpaceX even though Blue has nothing to launch, their $10 billion HLS "40 foot ladder" proposal and Bezos infamous "Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!" back 6 years ago gives a general gist of why Bezos' claims are being treated with skepticism by many. https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/679116636310360067
Looking at richest people of the world right now, none of them strike as eccentric.
Average plumber or musician is order of magnitude more eccentric or radical.
If they can boost data transfer speed from 40-60Mb/s currently to N gigabits/second, perhaps will provide stiff competition to conventional cell carriers.
These are exciting times.
1. https://www.starlink.com/
From what I can see, Starlink is using a lot more power to transmit than cell phones are really capable of given the battery constraints.
I think the more likely possibility is Starlink offering backhaul for rural cell sites where it might be cost prohibitive to run fiber. However, I'm not sure it would be more cost effective to use satellite backhaul than terrestrial microwave or fiber. Satellites aren't cheap, but who knows.
In terms of boosting the data transfer speed, that won't be simple. Terrestrial wireless (like cell carriers) can offer good speeds because each cell tower is covering a very limited area. If you're 20 miles away from me, we'll be connecting to different cell towers and therefore can use the same radio spectrum without interfering with each other. With satellites, a lot more people will be sharing the same radio spectrum. Now, I'm sure Starlink is operating under the idea that they can launch lots of satellites and get decent spectrum re-use. However, cell carriers have around 80,000 cell sites each. Starlink is only planning on launching 10,000-15,000 and hoping to get permission to get up to 30,000. That still means a lot more sharing of the same spectrum.
You can get higher speed by using more spectrum. However, that spectrum needs to be licensed, it isn't always cheap, and other people want to license it too. The way that the gigabit speeds from wireless carriers work is by using many hundreds of MHz of spectrum that can't go very far (because it gets disrupted by things like buildings, trees, etc.). Lower frequency spectrum can go further (since it penetrates objects better), but there's a pretty limited amount of it and most of it is already spoken for (whether that's TV, FM radio, current wireless service, etc.).
I think Starlink will provide a good option for many people who don't live in areas well-served by current internet options. It's a huge jump to believe that it will offer competition to cell carriers. It just isn't that type of technology and you run into limits that you can't really get around.
That's not to say that Starlink isn't important. It is important for many people who don't have access to good internet in the US and around the world, but it isn't going to provide competition for your cell phone provider.
I'm just waiting for tesla cars to all have starlink instead of (or in addition to LTE).
Or put another way, they don't pay global telecom providers, and instead they pay themselves, which helps fund space travel.
It's also possible they could do some fancy multicast updates of software/maps or some other fancy thing.
Real time logistics is a big deal. I've driven across the US and even on major highways cellular coverage is spotty. There might be a self-driving or emergency response angle too.
As for costs, I suspect it will all get cost-reduced like their self-driving computer (or cellular or wifi, ...)
So short answer, is no, it's impractical for cell phones.