EU signs $11B deal for sovereign satellite constellation to rival Starlink | Hacker News Reader

EU signs $11B deal for sovereign satellite constellation to rival Starlink

techcrunch.com

61 pointsgniting35 comments

Here's the orbital stuff if anyone was wondering:

- "That funding will go towards the development and launch of satellites in three orbits. Eighteen satellites will operate in medium Earth orbit (MEO) at an altitude of 8,000 kilometers, providing Ka-band services. A “LEO High” shell at about 1,200 kilometers will include 264 satellites with Ku- and Ka-band services. The system will also include 10 or more satellites in a “LEO Low” shell between 400 and 750 kilometers intended to support incubation of future technologies. "

and

- "The next step for IRIS² is a one-year design phase that will also include “consolidation” of the supply chain of contractors for the satellites. A critical design review is planned for early 2028, with launch of the satellites projected to take place in 2029 and 2030. The constellation will require 13 Ariane 64 launches, 10 for the LEO High shell and 3 for the MEO shell."

https://spacenews.com/europe-signs-contracts-for-iris%C2%B2-... ("Europe signs contracts for IRIS² constellation")

(Put together, you can constrain the mass of the satellites as <820 kg: for the LEO-High shell, 10 launches of A64, at a maximum of 21,650 kg each, divided by 264 units. That'd be intermediate between v1 and v2 Starlinks).

11B to launch 300 sats. Starlink costs SpaceX about $1M on the highest end for construction and launch per sat. True cost is likely lower by 20-30% for SpaceX and Starship will drop this further. Given the history of the EU, I think it's likely the environmental laws in will end up killing this before they can build a proper constellation, regardless of cost.

I think they got a bad deal.

I looked it up - Starlink plan s to eventually have 42,000 satellites. These are small and cheap, that's why so many are needed.

It seems likely that the EU is planning for a smaller number - perhaps much smaller - of more powerful satellites. So comparing costs like the probably doesn't make sense.

I think a better comparison would be the US department of defense starshield constellation, for which SpaceX was awarded approximately 1.8 billion to build.

I could not find much detail on the number and capabilities of the satellites, but they do launch alongside starlink.

However, it looks like the big money is in additional communication contract services, with up to 13 billion for the next 10 years [1]

https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2024/11/2...

Starlink satellites are not small.

> Starlink satellite is roughly 260 kilograms. Iridium System satellite is 680 kilograms.

The current generation is v2 mini, which is ~740 kg. It's no smaller than Europe's IRIS2 concept (which are unknown, but can't be heavier than 820 kg—see my sibling comment).

(And just in case anyone's lost track: SpaceX has already launched over ten times more v2's than the entire (proposed) IRIS2. This is not a case of EU opting to do "fewer, but larger" satellites; they're simply just not competing in the same league).

Well, that brings up two questions:

1. Does the weight of the satellite mean much? The bandwidth/concurrent users etc. is what matters. I know I started this by using the word "small", but I wasn't actually thinking about weight when I wrote that, but rather, capacity.

2. Did the EU itself say anywhere that this is supposed to be competitive with Starlink? Or did the article just frame it that way to gets clicks?

I think 260kg is small for a satellite. For comparison, GPS satellites weigh around 1000kg. Google's AI results told me that there are standard classifications for satellites, with 10-100kg being "micro" and 100-500kg being "small". I wasn't able to verify that elsewhere though.

But in any case, what I really meant was lower capacity per satellite. Until we can get numbers to compare the capabilities of each satellite, comparing launch costs doesn't mean anything. It's almost certain that Starlink will have lower costs, but probably not as much lower as people are trying to imply here, given that I also found some claims that the entire Starlink fleet of satellites is expected to run 100-200 billion USD.

> EU does nothing

HN: aha look at these losers they never do anything

> EU does thing

HN: aha look at these losers they're doing something we already did

Nobody has ever argued in the history of Hacker News that the government of the European Union does nothing.

The article also indicates this is for secure government comms rather than than public internet use; so it’s not exactly a competitor to Starlink. The interesting part is that it’s a small constellation numbering in the hundreds, which is an arrangement similar to Starlink, but not nearly at their existing scale or future ambition.

I don't see anything wrong here. here's what could also happen, but has not:

> EU does thing the US hasn't

HN: OH SHIT USA NEEDS TO HURRY UP AND DO THING TOO

EU just needs to stop being behind technologically.

EU constantly does things the US hasn't - such as consumer protection laws. But HN response to that is always "oh no EU is bullying US companies".

Why should they be more ahead?

It's too bad that we cannot do this as a single global shared and provably neutral type of system. In the spirit of the US-USSR cooperation with Apollo-Soyuz. Most of the rival geo-navigation constellations operate on more or less the same frequencies and coordinate their chip codes. It works but it also raises the noise floor for everybody.

If you can demodulate the signals, they're not noise! That technique is called SIC (successive interference cancellation). Basically, you start with the strongest one, demodulate it, subtract it from the source signal (which removes it as a noise component), rinse and repeat.

Besides that, the benefit of having more satellites available in difficult geometric arrangements (urban canyons, steep valleys etc.) most likely more than makes up for the slightly decreased SNR in situations where you can view "too many" satellites at once, to say nothing of the additional operational redundancy.

Why is the US so hostile against Europe lately?

Why wouldn't host be upset at a vassal or serf that gets too uppity?

Well.. Galileo was yelled at too for a very long time. But it got quite good in the end.

Why?

- Galileo HAS. Offers precision down to 30cm without additional correction data

- Also it offers crypto graphically signed navigation data (OSMNA) which basically eliminates spoofing attacks

Both for free.

Honest question, but how do we as a society culturally align on who has the right to space in low Earth orbit?

I understand there are treaties that prevent ownership of space in general, but it seems like at some point you could reach such density of satellites that at best, it impairs function, and at worst creates potential collisions.

It's gonna be a long while until we reach that point. For comparison, there are roughly 10000 airplanes in the air at any given time in a 5 mile band above the surface and the skies are pretty clear outside of some congested airports. In orbit you have the advantage of 3D, where satellites can be in a band a few hundred miles thick. Unless someone goes and intentionally creates vast quantities of uncontrolled space junk I think LEO won't have too many issues.

1. Governments sit together in a room and design rules. This isn't happening and isn't happening anytime soon.

2. Common sense, first come first serve with big organisation (SpaceX, Amazon, China) communicating directly.

> 1. Governments sit together in a room and design rules. This isn't happening and isn't happening anytime soon.

Huh? The ITU has been assigning slots in GEO for decades. There's defined minimum distances based on the application parameters (the more directed the ground-side antennas are, the less separation you need to hit a particular signal-to-interference target) etc.

While there are currently no physical "slots" in LEO to my knowledge, the frequency assignments used by LEO constellations are absolutely coordinated by the ITU, and implemented by participating countries, as well.

I was talking more about further iteration of things like the Outer Space Treaty. There is currently very little chance that this will be evolved to systemically handle things like space junk and so on.

The Artemis Accords are the closes, but that's sign up based, much more coalition building then global cooperation.

I wonder if Europeans view this as crony capitalism or getting fleeced?

As a European, I view this as preserving our strategic independence and wish we'd do more in more domains.

That's more or less what I suspected. I think it is fascinating to see the cultural differences on these topics. In the US, both parties of voters are extremely critical of such partnerships, claiming either corruption or waste.

Why do you think this is? Are the EU voters less price critical to spending? Are they simply more trusting?

I think it's related to our respective view of the State. As a French, I expect the State to do things for me and despite the State's too many failings, I have far more trust in the State than in corporations, so a States-led project in a strategic domain is a good thing. I don't wish the government (in its American meaning) to do less, I wish it to do better. It seems most people in the US view the State as a necessary evil and the worst entity to entrust their taxes with. Of course, things are more complicated and nuanced, but that's my bird's eye view.

It sounds like a big part of it is that despite the state handing huge sums of money to corporations, their is a belief in appropriate oversight.

what are you talking about? this is happening all the time in the US with Spacex+USGOV, Boeing+USGOV, etc.

The US government often takes the role of purchasing services and contracts, whereas the EU seems to favor more direct funding of corporate projects, like the one this article mentions, or the Airbus 380.

That said, I was talking about the sentiment around these activities, where much of the US is fairly hostile to the idea.

The EU needs to directly fund these project because otherwise they just don't happen. When the US produces many of these things just happen.

Starlink basically just fell from the clear blue sky into DoD lap. Leapfroging their own plans by about 4 generations.

This is because the US has more dynamic companies, a bigger internal market, that can access far greater level of funding, all the way from startup to grand investments.

> where much of the US is fairly hostile to the idea.

I'm not sure this is universally true. When it comes to military its the opposite. The US has broad support for the militarily, and in the military budget financed projects like GPS, like F22, F35 and so on. The Us military right now is planning multiple constellations in addition to extending Starshield.

In the US many of these things just happen out of the public view, internal to the govenrment. When in the EU this is all negotiated as part of bilateral agreements that are far more public.

Pff bit of this bit of that. Trying to compete in the private market against SpaceX is questionable. The system isn't cutting edge and at best will be in the private market with massive subsidies.

Doing a huge constellation is 'in' but doing so when you can't even figure out how to design decent rocket doesn't make sense. We end up spending much more government money then the US ever did on Starlink, and we don't even get a decent rocket out of it.

In fact, Europe is massively subsidising Amazon, just so the Ariane 6 can pretend it has costumers. And then we will launch this constellation with Ariane 6 and then everybody will pat themselves on the back declaring their 'vision' as a great success.

Creating some LEO constellation for government and military maybe not a terrible idea.

But 10 billion is less then SpaceX paid for the complete Falcon 9 development and the initial version of the constellation. And the government maybe paid a few billion at best.

So we are paying 10x is more, for getting about 10% the value. And we will give a huge subsidy to Amazon as well. That just not really a great use of strategic resources.

I would prefer to first figure out some basic, change the structures, start small and use contractors that can actually deliver. I don't actually see an urgent need for a 10 billion $ LEO constellation right now. Maybe get the rockets right and iterate on the technology for a while.

Its like, Germany for example can't get the trains to run on time, the military is a complete basket case with many much bigger needs then secure LEO constellations, but LEO constellation is what every 'great' power must have. Sending old military equipment to Ukraine is to hard, lets slow ball that, but copying Starlink so we can also have secure unhackable LEO constellation that is a huge priority.

I do think investing in critical infrastructure makes sense, but I don't have to be happy about how its actually done. So I don't really care about spending 10 billion. But the process of how decisions are made and how they are executed, is something I do care about.

For example, it was utterly embracing watching Arianespace bumble along looking like complete and utter buffoons for 10 years, embracing Europe on a global stage. And did anybody get taken to account for a complete and systematic mismanagement? Have those contractors suffered any consequences? Of course not, here is another 500 million $ go and do a research project about the basics of reusable rockets.

> The system isn't cutting edge and at best will be in the private market with massive subsidies.

It's intended for governmental use (which includes the military). As such, there's no need for it to be competitive with any private marketing offering.

> So we are paying 10x is more, for getting about 10% the value.

Such is the price of strategic independence.

Or would you really feel better if the EU were completely dependent on staying on good terms not only with the US (whose soon-to-be leader is publicly considering to let some of its adversaries "do whatever the hell they want" with Europe), but also US-based companies essentially being able to charge the EU whatever they want for space launches due to a lack of alternatives?

Its explicitly designed to also see private use, and sold to governments as such. They want to claim that this can subsidize the government operation.

This is the exact same playbook that they use with the Ariane 6. Don't worry, its operation will be subsidized by commercial contracts. And then the actual commercial contract is a billion+ $ for Amazon.

> Such is the price of strategic independence.

If you only get 1% of value for every project, then its simply 100% impossible to actually have broad strategic independence. This is just basic math. There are 1000s of things that you could talk about in regards to strategic independence, if you have to spend 10-100x for each one, then you will simply fail to achieve it in 95-99% of them.

And if you are in a position where you can't even get close to the goal of overall strategic independence you need to prioritize. Is a LEO constellation really the most important of those things? If your goal is not consumers streaming Netflix, but resistant military communication, what would a constellation look like that was focused only on that.

Strategic thinking is about priorities and using resources in the most efficient way possible to the greatest possible effect. This is specially true in Europe where the money for such things are incredibly limited.

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