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Comment by tectonic | Hacker News Reader

Pros: competition with Starlink, more Internet connectivity for the world.

Cons: this + Starlink + OneWeb make wide-field Earth-based astronomy much harder, making it less likely that we'll notice new astronomic phenomena or inbound city-killer near earth asteroids.

SpaceX is testing a sunshield on one of their newest Starlink satellites. I hope we'll see Kuiper launch with those and other reflectivity mitigations from the beginning instead of being surprised by the whole problem like SpaceX (claims to be).

Here's some coverage that we did in Orbital Index about the issue: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-02-20-Issue-52/#starli...

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Solution: 10% tax on all satellite internet revenues to fund space based telescopes. Could really improve astronomy.

nearly all space companies operate on government money. we would be taxing ourselves

The people collectively provide the initial funding when stuff is still too high risk for private investors but they rarely sees any of the upside when it hits explosive growth except in a hand wavy "high tide raises all boats" or "cheaper widgets means more buying power" kind of way. In extreme cases it means we fund technologies that generate wealth that is immediately extracted by foreign entities but even in the best of cases, it creates a moral hazard that is best exemplified by the military industrial complex.

It's a resource allocation efficiency issue, through and through. The government is always going to pick "winners and losers" in high value industries like defense, resource extraction, and aerospace but all of those investments have very rough feedback loops that are disconnected from the decision making process. If government investments/grants came at least with profit/revenue sharing arrangements, there would be a positive feedback loop and an opportunity for the system to evolve and improve even if the net income change after administration overhead is zero or even slightly negative.

Obviously this isn't tenable for basic scientific research but our industries do very little of that anyway, even with government funding available.

Naw. Tax the profit. It's wild that the tax payer base doesn't seen ANY upside with grants and what not like this.

You don't think satellite internet is break even without government funding? I have a hard time seeing it either, but I just can't see much market outside of military use. Maybe they're assuming 90% of their income will come from that.

Military + industrial + aviation.

The target market is not elderly people retired to cabins in the woods. The antenna costs for individual users would be prohibitive (10s of thousands). SpaceX is aiming for military/government first, then fixed-point industrial (oil rigs, mining camps, large ships) and then aviation (internet onboard airliners). That's the priority structure.

Another angle is to look at the orbital inclinations to see which customers Musk is targeting. At the moment he isn't sending sats further north than London (+/-51*). That suggests their first/primary/target market doesn't exist north of London. It looks like they are going after either the military drone or luxury aviation consumers. I don't see communities in Canada's north getting connected anytime soon.

So it'd be a reallocation of the budget? Like the same dollar funds space based internet and also space based satellites. That sounds pretty efficient.

> making it less likely that we'll notice new astronomic phenomena or inbound city-killer near earth asteroids.

That is such a ridiculous claim.

This + remote work is a boon from gods, i will happily go enjoy life in the wilds.

I believe the antenna's + gear you will need will be larger than you'll want to haul around. Starlink is mainly for permanent rural installations where cable+fiber sees no profits.

5G will also help some but it's become pretty clear that there isn't the public interest to generally bring broadband to rural areas the way telephone and electricity was (in the US among other places). The only real option today is conventional satellites, which for a lot of people are unacceptable because of latency/data limits/cost especially as video is increasingly not really optional.

Of course, we'll have to see how good these efforts of relative to normal broadband but they do offer hope that you won't have to choose where to live based on the broadband options.

I suppose by 5G helping you mean non-mmWave having more bandwidth to go around per tower? (If that’s true, I’m just guessing it is.)

Which I suppose does help, but only for people who probably already have 4G. So, not very rural.

Yes, primarily bandwidth--so that 5G will likely be a legitimate alternative to wired in some areas. And there's a pretty big build-out in general going on around 5G so maybe coverage gets better.

But you're right. A lot of places that are pretty patchy or non-existent today for cell service, especially 4G, will likely have the same problem even after 5G rolls out.

Once the gear is available for purchase, people who need 5G in particular places will install it themselves without interference from the Daughters Bell. (This won't just be rural users; more typically it might be industrial or commercial users who have lots of Io-Things.) Backhaul, where required, typically will be over fiber, as it should be. Eventually, since spending on radio equipment will be tied to how it's used rather than how ATTVZN would like to distort the market, 5G will be as normal as Wifi.

I see this view a lot. May i ask you a question that comes to my mind when I consider it: do you worry about access to modern medicine, living out in the middle of nowhere? Having an ambulance take 2 hours to get to you in case of a heart attack would be a death sentence, for example.

You don't need to get nearly that far out to be without reasonable internet.

I just looked at a property this week that's 15 minutes from a major regional hospital and has no access to reasonable wired internet.

My dad's property in Maine is similar. 15 minutes outside of a small city which has a perfectly good hospital etc. He gets about 1Mbit broadband--so you basically can't use for video--and very marginal cell service. And houses further down the road can't get broadband at all.

I think a lot of people here assume you're either in Manhattan/SF or in some remote section of Wyoming. But, as you say, you don't need to get far away from dense civilization for broadband to be problematic.

I live about 40 miles outside of a major city off a somewhat main road. While I do get Comcast, Verizon FIOS isn't available at my address (in site of the fact that they constantly send me mailings).

I guess we'll just have to put some telescopes on the Moon!

All of SpaceX's new starlink satellites have the new sun visor, per musk. I believe the last launch (or maybe two?) of starlink satellites had them. The one coming up this weekend also will have them.

And I still don't get the financial benefit for commercial use. Getting stuff to orbit is expensive, satellites are expensive, maintaining stuff in orbit is expensive.

Laying fibre and putting up 5G towers is cheaper, they can be serviced and upgraded.

Satellites make sense for governments, as it is harder to screw with them for adversaries. But for commercial use, what's exactly the benefit?

According to Elon Musk, Starship will be able to launch 400 Starlink satellites in one go[0]. He also says a Starship launch will cost ~$2 million[1] per launch.

Given that this is Elon we're talking about, we'll call it 300 sats at $20 million per launch.

Per their FCC application, SpaceX were allowed an upper eventual limit of 30,000 sats.[2] Let's assume that upper limit is what's required for a global comms network.

(30,000 / 300) * 20,000,000) = $2 Billion in launch costs. Assuming a lifetime of 5 years[3], that's $4 Billion per decade.

30,000 sats at $250K per[4] gives us $7.5 Billion in hardware costs. Twice per decade is $15 Billion.

That's 19 Billion per decade. Round and double it, just to be safe. 40 Billion per decade, so 4 Billion per year.

Could you build and maintain a global fiber network for $4 Billion per year?

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/27/spacex-president-we-will-lan... [1]https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/spacex-starship-rock... [2]https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html [3]https://phys.org/news/2020-05-costly-collateral-elonmusk-sta.... [4]https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...

> Handley’s simulation suggests that the project will be most appealing to high-frequency traders at big banks, who might be willing to fork out large sums for dedicated, faster connections.[1]

So even if LEO is more expensive, which it will not be, the expense will be covered by large financial firms.

Also companies like AWS pay a lot of money for bandwidth between their datacenters. Once Amazon's satellites are up and running, AWS will continue to need government permissions to build new datacenters (including ground stations) but will not need to interact with any other company for bandwidth. Improving AWS' profit margin for existing datacenters.

Finally, today AWS cannot build a datacenter in low cost areas because they need great internet connectivity. However, a LEO constellation enables them to build in significantly cheaper locations (think about the land/construction costs in Moldova vs Germany i.e. 6x reduction[2]).

These alone are huge benefits that outweigh the costs, but adding general purpose internet traffic will only improve cost effectiveness.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032033-300-the-firs... [2] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/country_result.js... vs https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/country_result.js...

coverage in remote areas too expensive/difficult to deploy fiber/towers

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