I would like to know how this technology will affect the great firewall of China, does anyone have any ideas?
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-con...
Do you have more info on this? Or anyone?
That's so crass. It's plain indefensible. I really want to know more.
edit: Thanks for the links.
I’m sure lots of North Americans wouldn’t want Chinese satellites overhead for concern of privacy.
I mean, generating tons of space junk is not cool. But what else are you going to do if others are lurking on your airspace?
It is going to be shift is policy though. We are going to need to update space law.
If there is a willingness to do it once, it tests the barrier of what's acceptable.
It's bad for everyone—present, and future.
Umm, there are of course Chinese satellites overhead and they have excellent imagery of all of our military bases. As we do for theirs (and every other country!). Orbits aren't very friendly to avoiding airspace.
accidental example:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=iri...
no nation-state wants to start the game of shooting down another's satellite, either military or commercial, because everything up there is so vulnerable. it would open china to retaliatory strikes taking down their own polar orbit LEO, inclined LEO (35-45 degree) molnia, MEO and GEO satellites. satellites are fragile things and can be killed with one 200g chunk of tungsten at a closing velocity of 18,000 km/h.
Your defining 'space' as airspace is odd also
These are not government satellites and china owns the airwaves over their nation. I highly doubt the US government would retaliate whatsoever against China if they shot down a satellite that illegally interacted with their airspace.
> China wouldn’t risk it. This is a great opportunity to break the great firewall and finally give the Chinese people access to unfiltered information.
Take this with a grain of salt since this is mostly based on what I have heard hearsay, but they can jam the signals and/or monitor who transmits back and go after the citizens using said signal (and china is not a country where you want to poke the government). I doubt this will have any effect on the great firewall.
It's less expensive than launching satellites, and the Chinese goverment has enough money to do it if they want.
Are you sure? If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs. We’ll also likely implement a suite of sanctions. Shooting down a satellite is an act of war.
No, we won’t. We’ll impose several decades of meaningless tariffs and embargoes with tons of loopholes so it looks like we’re doing something until everyone forgets what everyone was mad about in the first place.
Wars kill lots of people. You knew that, right?
I doubt it, since a single Falcon Heavy launch would carry dozens of Starlink satellites but the existing anti-satellite technology can only hit one at a time. Keep in mind they have said the final constellation will be 12,000 satellites!
edit: and BFR could theoretically carry 300 when it is operational. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/25525/how-many-spa...
Moving something to the same altitude as Leo requires much less energy than moving something to Leo. Rockets don't fire straight up because the need their momentum to be at an angle. In addition, the payload of a communication satellite is more expensive than the payload required to throw it either disable the satellite or put it into a declining orbit.
Maybe Elon's rockets are just so cheap he can make it up in margin, but we are really talking about we aren't talking about marginal amount of difficulty difference, but an entire order of magnitude.
I'm not sure how efficient China's military industrial complex is, but I wouldn't trust the US's military to be able to build a weapon system that could destroy SpaceX satellite's more efficiently than SpaceX can launch them, haha.
However, I suspect SpaceX will however allow China to monitor/limit connections. Further, China has a lot more power to crack down on purely internal operations would deter many.
a) the rooftop CPE needs to be reasonably large and have high gain to be used effectively, and needs clear unobstructed line of sight to as much of the sky and horizon as possible.
and
b) It needs to transmit, it will transmit in very known frequency ranges, and the chinese authorities have plenty of budget to buy portable spectrum analyzers, horn antennas and to reach people how to use them. It only takes a couple of hours maximum to reach somebody how to use a portable spectrum analyzer to physically locate and identify transmitters in almost any band.
B) These things need to transmit up, so you can reasonably block most signals in other directions. Aircraft would work, but again not cheap.
The real issue is more on the human side and network monitoring. Lots of encrypted network traffic to a ransom location would be suspect.
PS: For once tinfoil might actually be useful vs government spying :)
B) not just up but to the sides and toward the horizon as well. This will be a non moving phased array antenna that can talk to two LEO satellites moving across the sky at the same time. I predict that any reasonable amount of blockage to the sides will not be a good idea for their network architecture.
C) all Tx have some sort of sidelobes and nothing has a perfect f/b ratio. Will still be detectable by spectrum analyzers from the side.
B) Depends on how many satellites are in the constellation. Ideally you want a lot of them as there is vastly more atmosphere the lower your angle to the horizon.
C) detectable at say 50 feet sure, but a signal you can detect from 10+ miles in a van doing 60mph without a lot of false positives is another story.
With the resources of China, spending $15,000 per spectrum analyzer kit x 8 kits, plus training, is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money and effort they are currently spending on IP cameras that feed into facial recognition systems, etc.
However, if you want to catch individual usage in urban areas, with guys on for that's going to easily be into the 10's of of billions as users don't need to keep them on 24/7. AKA within the capability of nation states, but not without significant effort.
s/Aircraft/Drone/. Now it's cheap.
Bring in a few from where? Where do you think these devices will be manufactured anyway? ;)
Also, even if they were manufactured in the US, China is literally the best country to reverse-engineer electronics and produce knockoffs ;).
That said, AFAIK those satellites aren't meant to be dumb routers/repeaters - so China might just politically/economically pressure US to tell SpaceX to pretty-please don't service connections to/from China.