Amazon is getting ready to launch a lot of broadband satellites
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Can we have a law passed that would mandate to lease the last mile to others (kind of like phone companies were required phone lines for DSL) so once again we can have competition?
It is just dumb to require every ISP to run a dedicated line to your house.
The fiber itself is owned and maintained by the public and any number of private ISP's can offer service over it. Changing ISP provider is a software decision and as such the average cost is 42 euro/mo
Checked on a map and it's actually near a place called Zeeland, which is also in The Netherlands. Wow "Noordeloos" also sounds Dutch. I guess they just have many Dutch-named towns over there.
Anyway the real reason they are doing it is that is extremely hard to enter the ISP space. It's not even the cost of fiber to run to every home, it is the cost of laying it and all the hoops the existing monopoly will use it.
Google has tried and failed. What often happened is that when they enter market with its 1Gbps offering, suddenly the 30Mbps ISP had 1Gbps and even at a cheaper price. They could sell it at a loss, because they were making a killing in other regions. They also created all kind of obstacles when Google tried to run a wire.
It is ridiculous and we really need a law to force competition.
I spent a few days in Leticia and the Internet connection was really shaky, sometimes they can't even work at the migration office because the connection is so bad. 50 000 people live there and 67 000 in the neighboring city Tabatinga. And there's a lot of islands in the world too.
If your point is that it's not an act of charity.. so what?
- Someone at NASA.
> 39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.
I wish we had laws that made sure a fix of future problems (ie. with debris, astronomy, etc.) had to be guaranteed before a launch was allowed. A bit of insight of how new technology often end up causing unintended problems later (or in the case of astronomy, sometimes right away).
That's a simplification to the point of no sense.
The "West" (as someone who grew in "the East" with "the West" being the others, it's weird to me to talk about "the West" with regards to the EU, since my home country is an EU member) doesn't get "snippy" because someone else is doing what they used to do. It's because we have collectively, mostly, realised that those things that were done were terrible, and our morals of today condemn attempts at replicating it. If a Western company was dumping pollution in a river like they used to up until 1960s, you'd get outcry, of course. Germany gets rightfully criticised all the time about their stupid coal policy.
Of course there are the people who still have a colonial outlook (those savages polluting my vacation spots!), but that's not the prevailing attitude. It's our planet, of all of us, and it's understandable that developing countries want to develop further; they should be assisted so that development is as sustainable as possible, for their own sake, but also for humanity and the planet as a whole.
I wholeheartedly agree, but more often than not these countries do not have the technology available or it costs more than older tech. Either they should be allowed to pollute with the old tech and "we" must pollute less to make it up or "we" must pay for/give the technology for free to countries that doesn't have access to it. We could even build it (with no strings attached of course).
Pointing fingers at -for example- China or India because of coal power plants while they are struggling to lift millions out of poverty is not helping anyone. In my opinion it is shut up or pay the bill. That includes North Korea, Iran, etc. and as long as we don't do this we have zero rights to criticise.
This claim makes zero sense. Western environmental movements have predominantly focused on reform in western countries and stay relatively mum about others.
As long as we don’t overcommit LEO satellites we can keep putting things in GEO orbit for probably a very long time.
Kessler as in a catastrophic loss of satellites. In LEO, it wouldn’t be a denial of space programme, nor even a systemic issue—there aren’t high enough orbital energies.
Satellites don't have so many degrees of freedom.
A bad way to extend the cars analogy is to compare with people. There are 8 billion of us and we walk around all the time but almost never get damaged by running into each other.
There is more to worry about than just tracking satellites following "extremely well known paths". You could have a situation like Intelsat 29e [1] where a satellite is torn to pieces, creating a debris field with parts too small to track. You can't avoid what you can't see.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/new-video-of-intelsa...
Of course, each additional orbital plane is basically another set of roads but for all the internet sat constellations being planned extra distance = lag, hence we’re going to see the most growth in that LEO category
LEO = <2000km altitude, and
rEarth = ~6300m, so
surface area of a sphere with r=6300km => ~500,000,000 km^2
surface area of a sphere with r=8300km => ~860,000,000 km^2
so roughly 1.5x the surface area at max LEO compared to earth's surface
(feel free to correct me if my arithmetic is off :)
Two cars sitting still in a car park won't collide with each other, but there's no way to sit still in orbit.
Any two circular orbits at the same altitude will intersect at two points. You have to be very careful to make sure objects in such orbits will not collide with each other. It's far easier to make the orbits slightly different sizes or shapes, so that they don't intersect at all.
In any case, the need to be in an orbit to stay in orbit severely restricts your free choices for where to put your objects, so there is not as much free space as you might expect.
Kuiper isn't in VLEO, but any larger constellations likely will be.
Collision avoidance at spaceX is largely automated but for most operators there is a wide variety of response capability
These LEO satellite internet companies need to pay a tax to fund more space telescopes!
Also may be not 500 billions, but how about 100 millions? So 5000 times fewer.
For example, we travel 1600kmph due to the Earth's rotation.
The Earth has about 5.15x10^18 kg of atmosphere. 5,130,000,000,000,000,000 kg of gas. If each satellite aerosolized completely (which it wouldn't, metals would rapidly precipitate out of the air) then they would make up a couple parts per trillion of the atmosphere. Way lower concentrations than cloud seeding.
In contrast, routine operations of Air Force One emit around 41,000,000 kg of CO2 per year. (They fly not just the president, but his security detail, and the presidential limo to every foreign visit)
> All told, Amazon has purchased 77 launches: 38 Vulcan launches, plus nine flights on ULA's soon-to-retire Atlas V, 18 Ariane 6 rockets, and 12 New Glenn missions, with a contract option for 15 more.
All three of the new launch vehicles have seen repeated delays. Also note that Vulcan and New Glenn both use Blue Origin's BE-4 engine.
One of those engines destined for Vulcan's maiden flight exploded during qualification testing recently.
I think a lot will have to go right going forward for Amazon to reach the July 2026 deadline for half deployment.
No doubt this will irritate Jeff to no end. I hear he’s not a big SpaceX fan.
Frankly, the whole satellite deal always smelled like self-dealing to me in the first place.
As far as I can tell, there is no regular consumer access planned for it. It seems like a missed opportunity on their part.
And I gotta say that "Lightspeed" is a hell of a misnomer given the rate that this program is plodding along. The longer it slides, the more that StarLink etc eat their lunch.