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- cross-posted to:
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The German tech company KLEO Connect aims to establish its own network of satellites in low Earth orbit that can provide internet to remote locations, hoping to rival Starlink.
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Great. Even more internet satellites.
The universe is our trash can
The universe is big enough to be able to handle that. Earth’s orbit less so.
Even so, it seems counterproductive to abandon tons of really expensive materials in space, presumably until supply of these materials on Earth is depleted.
Don’t worry, in the long-term anything in LEO will end up on Earth again.
If sending these materials up there helps you secure more supply of them on earth it is a win. For humanity it is a loss, but we still think in nation states until we are all fucked.
The universe is our trash can
LEO satellites, like the ones being discussed, are pretty much guaranteed to deorbit within a limited timeframe, as atmospheric drag constantly causes their orbit to decay.
That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t colossally mess up the existing LEO satellites, but that mess would clean itself up within a few years. And you have to put new LEO satellites up every few years anyway, so it’d translate to a relatively-short-term – if significant – disruption.
The real problems are higher-altitude satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
More than half of the tracked debris orbits the Earth with a mean altitude above 850 kilometres (530 mi), so they would likely remain in orbit for decades or centuries.
Everything is our trashcan.
Am I the only one around here who thinks that it’s a bad idea to let anyone launch thousands of satellites into space and control them privately?
I think it’s time for international satellite treaty regulating use of this technology and the amount of them in space to the benefit of everyone. Either those satellites serve everyone or no one.
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Gosh darnit, people. You’re all thinking of this as civilian tech. Just as we all know every military needs a satellite navigation system a la GPS to guide rockets and what not, with the Ukraine war it’s become painfully obvious that every military needs a satellite communications system a la Starlink. China and India are inevitably going to launch their own systems soon. Russia too, if it has any money left after this war. That’s how you have to think of this system.
China already have their own system in orbit
Constellation based systems are not a good system.
The only benefit they bring is low latency, and they have severe downsides to get that latency. Their orbits are so low that they need to account for atmospheric drag, and many satellites simply burn up in the upper atmosphere before their lifespan is complete.
Geosynchronous or other high altitude satellites also offer global coverage without costing billions in maintenance launches, and are only a few dozen milliseconds slower for connections. High altitude satellites are also less vulnerable to physical attack, and only need to be replaced when they run out of station keeping fuel.
only a few dozen milliseconds slower
Have you ever been on geostationary satellite internet? Pings of 1,000 - 2,000 are common.
The minimum additional ping is 240ms purely due to the time it takes light to move 13,816 km and back. That is ping added on top of all the standard network latencies. It’s fundamentally a high-latency system.
Honestly they should stop wasting their time, it’s pointless to compete with Starlink at this point. Who are they going to launch with? Falcon 9? SpaceX will always launch cheaper on that. Someone else? Good luck competing with SpaceX on the cost front.
Not even getting started on the whole space trash issue, which will just get worse with a second constellation.
Starlink has 4500 satellites in orbit and is launching more every week. A LEO constellation only makes sense if you can achieve global coverage (over populated areas).
Good luck competing with SpaceX on the cost front.
This is not an economic issue but rather one on human rights and democracy. I don’t think it’s a good idea to become dependent on a single company and/or a single government (Elon Musk has agreed to sell a portion of Starlink assets to the U.S. Department of Defense as you may know)
Not even getting started on the whole space trash issue. Starlink has 4500 satellites in orbit and is launching more every week.
Space debris is a real issue which threatens humanity even in the short term. And it is another reason for international collaboration as we should not allow a single company “launching more satellites every week” without reaching an irrevocable and immutable agreement that it is for the good of all the people on earth (see my other comment in this thread).
[Edited for a typo.]
About the space trash issue, that’s a really hard one but low orbit satelites don’t really contribute because they fall and burn down if they ever stop moving. There is a awesome clip online where a bunch of them go down and look like a metrior shower, kind of beatiful and nice to watch Musks money burn!
That’s how you get space trash like GLONASS and beidou. Their only purpose is being “not GPS”.
So, you see, these projects are primarily for warfare. Civilian applications are often permitted but that’s not the point of those projects.
I get your point, but seeing how not even the Russian military uses GLONASS…
Wait what? Shouldn’t that enable the US to end this war relatively easily? They could instantly break a lot of the advanced weaponry of Russians by disabling GPS for them.
You can’t disable GPS for individual devices, what they can do is disable the civilian signals and only send out the military ones which are both scrambled and way more accurate. GPS is one-way communication, from satellites to ground devices, no backlink.
And I bet they absolutely would, but Ukraine is also using civilian devices and asked the US not to.
No they couldn’t. GPS works by sending the time stamps and position of the satellite. By measuering the difference between when the signals reach the gps device it can triangulate its position.
There is the civillian coarse and an encrypted fine version for the military. I think the US will not allow the Ukrainians access to the second and their tech is probably not suitable for it.
If they cut GPS it cuts for everyone in that area.
That’s just a consequence of classic Russian corruption. That’s not the system working as designed 😄
I would love to see these communications networks owned by some public entity rather than private companies, securing universal and irrevocable access to these networks for all individuals. But for this we needed a trustless and immutable agreement between all global nations. Given the current state of world politics and their governments this isn’t what we can call ‘a realistic scenario’ imho.
Have you ever heard o Ariane rockets and ESA?
E.g. upcoming Ariane 6: Up to 21.6 tons per launch, up to 11 launches per year.
Yes, I have. Do you know how much these rockets cost in comparison to reusable rockets? To give you a ballpark, it’s about 20 million cheaper for external customers. If SpaceX is launching on their own rocket, the difference is significantly bigger. Estimates are that a Starlink launch costs SpaceX about 15 million. Compare that to 80 million for launching on an Ariane 6, a rocket that has not seen a single successful launch.
It’s nowhere near competitive. In fact, it’s so bad, that Arianespace has been losing contract over contract to SpaceX. Also attributable to the fact that they are still clinging onto the delay-fraught, single-use Ariane 6.
I’m European, I want the European space industry to succeed. But the odds are stacked against us at this point. Arianespace has blissfully ignored the competition for way too long by resting on government money and discrediting successful competitors.
Until Europe has reusable rockets, there’s no point in developing a LEO constellation. It’s like trying to build a car when you haven’t built the wheel.
OneWeb is already in LEO, and is due to merge with Eutelsat this year.
It’s not like the ESA hasn’t considered reusable spacecraft, it’s that they judged them uneconomical. Reusable engines are in the pipeline, though, this time they did the maths and decided that salvaging those could indeed be more economical.
It’s plain simple engineering: Before you send a rocket to space a second time you have to make sure that it’s still up to snuff, and inspection of a complicated composite thing can easily be more expensive than new construction.
As to costs: Also as per ESA, SpaceX is practically given free money from NASA in the form of them severely over-paying for launches, and they subsidise the rest of their activities with it.
At some point Arianespace have to realize they’re wrong. SpaceX has been reusing the same hardware 10 times or more. They have a flawless success record in recent years, despite the reuse. Wouldn’t you say that straight up defies that argument?
And regarding subsidies, sure, SpaceX has received government contracts. So has Arianespace. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/spacex-to-european-competitors-were-not-subsidized-you-are/
At the end of the day it simply doesn’t matter: SpaceX is able to offer the same service at a fraction of the cost. I’m a capitalistic world order, that will always result in one company succeeding, while the other goes bankrupt. The only reason Arianespace still exists is that Europe needs independent access to space and is willing to pay for that. Not because they’re successfully selling a ton of launches to other countries.
Just to cement this point, Ariane V launched less than 5 times in 2022. Falcon 9 more than 60 times.
Are there even unpopulated areas that aren’t covered by one of the orbits required for populated areas? It is not as if you can have geostationary LEO satellites.
It is not as if you can have geostationary LEO satellites.
considers
You could have part of a geostationary satellite at LEO altitude. That’s what a space elevator entails.
That’s obviously not what they’re talking about doing here, though.
