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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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...

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.

This

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.

SpaceX was launching large batches of satellites by 2019, two years later! And even in 2017, they had proven mass launch capacity.

Yes, sure, give Amazon the same treatment. Start orbiting large numbers of satellites in 2022 or you lose it.

It's six years to deploy half of the planned satellites, which would assuredly imply the first satellites go significantly before that.

Also, it's not like the FCC should be allowed to take it back, even if 6 years is unreasonable.

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.

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

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.

What makes "I want to launch rockets and am obsessed with doing it" a particularly virtuous assessment?

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.

Just because Bezos didn’t tweet publicly doesn’t mean that he too is not a man with a mission.

Everything he has achieved with Amazon very much seems to imply otherwise.

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.

Genuine question, related but not by a lot.

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?

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ld4vlq/gabbard_diagr...

The Starlink sats are also specifically designed to be forcibly de-orbited at end-of-life, rather than remain as space junk for however long.[1]

1. starlink.com

They want to lower those satellites to ~550km which seems to me to be significantly less likely to leave space junk around.

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.

Or can they induce drag without extra equipment?

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.

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.

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.

> eccentric billionaire

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.

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