ESA advances its plan for satellites around the Moon
moondaily.com
moondaily.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUI4YtG0xY
Which links back to:
https://www.sstl.co.uk/what-we-do/lunar-mission-services
Looks like this is a better article:
https://spacenews.com/esa-awards-study-contracts-for-lunar-c...
The European Space Agency has issued contracts to two European industry groups to begin concept studies of lunar satellite systems that would provide communications and navigation services.
"to begin concept studies" ... afaict they have no satellite hardware built and no rocket launches booked. The NASA HLS Starship selection really has thrown the entire Artemis program and associated space pork into limbo. If you're landing 100 tons of payload on the Moon on a reusable/rapid launch rocket stack this entire sort of proposal "let's put together a working consortium to study launching one pathfinder lunar comms sat in 2023 and then study perhaps launching up to a handful more undefined years later [at a cost of $100 million per launch]" is just going to become "SpaceX dumped 100 spare Starlinks into lunar orbit as a rideshare on this week's mission, so now we have Moon internet"
[1] https://ipfs.io/
Too bad that the actual implementation rarely follows. The can-doers mostly leave our shores with their diplomas still wet. I am not very optimistic about the future of tech here, even though the Common Market is pretty big.
And as far as space goes, we are stuck with an obsolete technology which sorta makes sense for 6 launches a year, but cannot manage 60 or 600 launches without bankrupting the ESA. To be fair, the Russians are not much better off. The future of spaceflight will be a China vs. US competition.
Let's not turn enthusiasm for starlink into poo poo-ing all over any other plan for something in space. The ESA just wants concept studies on what might work. That's perfectly reasonable.
Feel free to ask if there is still something unclear after reading it more closely.
That said the logical place to put your relay would be L1, which is still some 60,000 km from the moon. It's not at all clear that off the shelf Starlink sats would be capable of communicating that distance from their orbit over the moon. You'd also need the earth side of the relay, which also clearly cannot be the existing Starlink cluster.
They'd be foolish to not consider a Starlink derived design or SpaceX as a vender, but I don't think this can be done as inexpensively and quickly as your comment suggests.
I had also briefly considered a relay at the closest Lagrange point but came to the same conclusion as you did. Namely that off-the-shelf Starlink satellites might not be able to communicate with it which just means: it's not the solution.
So let us consider a (few) separate relay satellite(s) [*] after quickly dismissing lunar ground stations: a lunar relay ground station might have the advantage of always being in sight of Earth but has the considerable disadvantage of having to live through lunar nights. This is highly impractical and would incur considerable complexity by requiring e.g. a RTG power source instead of using solar power as sats would do.
So on-shell non-Starlink satellite relays it is for now. If there is more than one relay, any orbit might be fine [**].
If it really had to be a single relay satellite for some reason, a polar lunar orbit might be a possible solution that does not suffer from regular communications blackouts. Another solution might be to relax the requirement of having a continuous connection between the single relay satellite and Earth and to accept to be offline for a fraction of the orbit (at an orbital height of ~500km above Moon('s equator) a satellite would disappear behind Moon for a bit over a quarter of its orbital period), so if approximately 73% availability is fine, this would also work. Higher inclinations improve this value.
One more thing because this also seemed unclear: at no point are Earth's Starlink satellites involved. All moving of data between Earth and Moon happens between the dedicated relay satellite(s) and a ground station on Earth, as this is the setup that NASA used for its laser optical communications test that I linked to from my other posting.
All in all, that means that (under the assumption that Starlink satellites can operate under the conditions around Moon (it lacks Earth's protective magnetic field!)), that a few dedicated and custom-made relay satellites would all that is needed to use (my opinion:) dirt-cheap run-of-the-mill Starlink satellites for a constellation around Moon.
Any thoughts on this?
[*] Maybe even a few of them as material is cheap but engineers are expensive. If you can build one thing, you can usually build a second/third/n-th of it for less per-unit costs than the previous (with diminishing savings between each).
[**] As stated in another post, I would rather expect the constellation to be in higher than in lower orbits so that fewer satellites would be needed to cover the same area on ground. This means that lunar mascons should not be of concern and even if they were, the satellites would still have ion thrusters to compensate for that.
So the EU is a pretty good spot for translators.
Britan is not part of the EU, but outside of the official stuff, English is used in a lot of practical areas for technical work.
I was shocked to find RDF-era ontology "research" - already rightly a joke in my US-based undergraduate AI courses in 2003 - going on en masse when I moved to the EU in 2011. I've gotten four job applications so far this year from people with MSc in whatever ontology trash their local university was doing.
Of course every gram of fuel you add to the satellite makes it that much harder to get it to the Moon in the first place. It's a difficult problem. And that's before you start talking about communications latency.
Not only is the requirement highly unlike LEO satellites, but members of both consortiums have satellite tech of their own (which is arguably both more mature and more relevant to the requirements than Starlink)
Just as well nobody decided it wasn't worth NASA wasting money evaluating the PayPal guy's ideas when off the shelf space tech existed, though...
Europe loves to come out with these white papers and industry studies and collaborations. It's basically an exercise to hoover up govt funding. The commercial side is very weak in most cases.
They've been pushing Galileo as taking over the market AND making a ton of money in the GPS space. No way. "Due to be fully operational by 2008, Galileo would have “a four-year monopoly on the improved technology before Americans can catch up,” making the 4 billion system a profit center for the EU."
Arianspace is supposed to be launched Ariene 6 at half the price of SpaceX. "“Ariane 6 will have twice the mass and twice the volume of the Falcon 9, at less than twice the price,” Bonguet said. SpaceX is at $50M retail launch price, and cost like likely < $30M per launch internally. So this means Ariene 6 pricing is going to be in $25M range?
It can get a bit tiring to hear these things.
The one thing Europe is good at is putting attorneys and lawyers to take down US companies rather than actually competing with them.
These were govt / large industry class products. They had a market because of carriage requirement and govt contract. ie, large container ships could only use certified products and these guys were only products out there. This all may have changed (I'm 6+ years away from details).
And no - these large players generally have not needed to use optical space links - they are much higher orbit so can downlink on land in almost all cases.
It’s only the super low orbits that the masscons screw up.
Before COVID I worked for a European lunar exploration startup and access to a constellation like this would have changed everything. The plan was to provide an end-to-end payload transportation service to the lunar surface and we wanted to fly our own two rovers as a demo mission.
While you can accomplish all communications (TM/TC, HD video) and navigation (orbit determination, surface nav) tasks with terrestrial ground stations, it is hellishly expensive.
Just as an example, the good thing about the Moon (in contrast to Mars) is that it is very close and you can drive a rover almost in real time due to the comparatively low latency (that's what the Russians did with the Lunokhods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme). That means you can cover more ground than on Mars which was also very important to us because the plan was to drive to one of the Apollo landing sites (where you must land outside the exclusion zone) and we would have had only 10-12 days of daylight for our operations until the lunar night would have killed our electronics. For that you need good video feeds from the rover's cameras which again required downlink via X band antennas due to the Moon's distance from Earth. There are not that many X band ground stations and all the interplanetary missions are constantly fighting for the limited capacity.
We would have then needed even more ground station time for ranging operations, i.e. performing orbit determination during the transfer and prior to landing and determining the rovers' exact positions on the surface. In the end, we would have needed to pay several million EUR for ground station time alone. A reasonably priced Project Moonlight constellation would have been a godsend and significantly reduced the complexity of our operations. Cash-strapped startups are not the best customers, though...
I can only assume that all the companies in the NASA CLPS program are facing the same issues. The problem is that they are planning their missions and are designing their spacecraft now. If this constellation becomes a reality, it will certainly be too late for the first batch.
As for the ideas about Starlink, satellites are designed around their payloads, i.e. all subsystems (power, thermal, comms, on-board computer, propulsion) are designed to fulfil the requirements of a specific payload and its mission with some margins. Very rarely can you swap or add additional payloads without redesigning the whole system especially if your starting point is as streamlined a design as Starlink's is. I am a huge fan of all things SpaceX but they are not miracle workers. Also Starship has not reached orbit (yet) and Super Heavy has not flown (yet).
Finally, the costs. As some others have commented, this is a paper study right now which is comparatively cheap (no idea how much exactly but my educated guess would be single digit millions). Whether this will be funded for real and becomes an actual program will be decided at ESA's next ministerial. In the grand scheme of things this is not a lot. Compared to of ESA's annual budget of ~6 billion EUR it is almost negligible. That again is a joke compared to NASA's annual budget of ~22 billion USD. Which still pales in comparison to the up to 1.3 trillion EUR that the German federal and state governments alone spent on the mitigation of the pandemic (https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/corona-novemberhilfen...) or the economic cost of climate change which is also in the trillions. Yes, space hardware is too expensive, there is too much red tape, and frankly too much nepotism in OldSpace. But taking the few billions spend on space every year away and spending them on the "big problems of our time" would accomplish very little.
TL;DR: The technical benefits are real whether it becomes a reality and is commercially viable remains to be seen. SpaceX is great, Starship is great, Starlink is great, but it is also not magic. Space sounds expensive but really isn't when you do the math.
In any case pretty excited about this. Having it run by the EU will hopefully make it more of an equal access than if it was run by the US or China.
NASA tested optical communication to Moon in 2013 already [0], so the technological readiness level of some highspeed transmission technology should be quite high already.
If such an optical communications module were installed on a sat that could also talk to off-the-shelf Starlink sats, this satellite could serve as relay that connects Earth to a (very?) small constellation of Starlink satellites. Beside the bespoke relay satellite, this might be a rather inexpensive solution (Starlink satellites are cheaper than $500k per piece already, as far as I know).
A counterargument I can think of is that Starlink satellites might not be hardened enough to work outside of Earth's protective magnetic field.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LADEE#Lunar_Laser_Communicatio...
“ Commercial bodies could use innovative technologies developed for the Moon to create new services and products on Earth, which would create new jobs and boost prosperity.”
You know what the engineers working on this project could have been doing instead? Work on projects that directly benefit earth even more. Instead of this pork barrel project without a direct use.
The biggest factor by far in making lunar exploration and development cheaper is mastering in-orbit refueling. That enables hundreds of tons of cargo to be cheaply delivered to the lunar surface.
That means easily building lunar satellite constellations when needed. It also means we won’t need the bloody sores of the Gateway to Nowhere and SLS bleeding exploration programs dry.
The improvised relay system we have around Mars has been important to fast relay of data from the rovers. It has also allowed us to more closely observe EDL sequences so that if something goes wrong, we will learn what it was so we can fix it.
you know, there are more than 1 people on earth