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Comment by CountSessine | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies and entrepreneurs have been pitching LEO satellites for internet delivery for a very long time. Even Bill Gates had a kick at this can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic

It's interesting to me that our cities and their governance are so awful - with their limited voter participation, poor cost control, class warfare politics, crazy fringe political advocacy, and unreasonable franchise agreements - that going into space is considered easy compared to working with city governments to get fibre in the ground.

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OneWeb will be putting their first LEO satellites into orbit this year. They raised another $1.2B from Softbank just a couple of months ago, and have the spectrum and launch contracts.

It looks like they will beat both SpaceX and Google to the task - which is unfortunate for them since the founder of OneWeb was involved with attempting to develop the same project with both companies.

http://spacenews.com/oneweb-gets-1-2-billion-in-softbank-led...

SpaceX is looking at much lower costs to LEO which very much changes this equation. They charge around $2,500 per pound right now, but with reusable rockets there internal costs may be under 1,000$/lb. Putting up ~1,400 * 600lb * 1,000$/lb is less than 1 billion dollars to get into space. Worst case they are looking at ~3 billion in launch costs which is hardly an issue for world wide infrastructure.

Now, the costs of these satellites and receiver's will make or break this idea. But, it's surprisingly viable even if they only cover the continental US to start.

PS: Iridium NEXT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...) is aiming for some data bandwidth. Though presumably at very high costs.

Now, the costs of these satellites and receiver's will make or break this idea. But, it's surprisingly viable even if they only cover the continental US to start

They also have to get radio spectrum for the uplink everywhere they operate. Have a good look through the history of Iridium (Iridium PREVIOUS?) and all of the unexpected costs Motorola ran into building and maintaining a satellite fleet.

I can see a situation where the USG would want this constellation to exist.

If you go to the middle east and many third world countries much of the Internet is still satellite. If a particular country wanted a way to insure that they still had access to most of the world's internet traffic (as economies grow and infrastructure is built) they might prefer a constellation of LEO sats capable of carrying the entire planet's traffic in a point to point fashion owned by a US based company who is very reliant on the USG for most of its other business.

I can see a situation where the USG would want this constellation to exist.

But would they want this to exist enough to pay for any of it or have a hand in maintaining it? Beyond how much they already are by awarding SpaceX government and NASA launch contracts?

And all because muni government sucks.

> It's interesting to me that our cities and their governance are so awful

Most people rarely, if ever, need to deal with municipal departments that regulate infrastructure, health, and safety. As soon as you do, you find out that they're pretty uniformly terrible places with terrible people dealing with terrible things.

A satellite constellation like this will actually be more efficient for long distance communication than fiber as hops will be more or less a straight line between a few sats whereas fiber on the ground often takes crazy paths due to terrain and politics.

If SpaceX can prove reusability, which is looking likely, putting up a constellation like this will become significantly cheaper. They also can just reuse first stages that their own customers already paid for (their customers pay for the flight, not the stage itself).

Efficient? Long haul fiber (DWDM) capacity is measures in Tbps....

I don't have SpaceX numbers. But, a constellation like this was supposed to provide ~200 Gbytes per month for 5 billion people, which works out to ~3000 terabytes per second or ~5 terabits per second per satellite at a minimum. (More if they are modeling the ocean.)

http://www.popsci.com/samsung-wants-launch-thousands-satelli...

ED: Here is the paper. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1508/1508.02383.pdf

In terms of latency, not raw capacity.

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