Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
"The people familiar with the matter cautioned the project is in a formative stage, and it isn’t certain Mr. Musk will participate."
The round trip from a base station on the same longitude as the satellite is 250-300MS, under best case scenarios you will to pass trough about 2-3 satellites to get what you want from the other side of the world.
If you do not need to go outside of your intimidate geographical area and say only need to pull data from a server within a 5K radius than atmospheric high altitude platforms are far superior both in cost and maintainability. You can't upgrade satellites not since the space shuttle is out of the picture and even that was only borderline cost effective on high end surveillance stations like the KH series which were the size of a school bus.
Using tethered high altitude balloons or extreme-long endurance self sustaining drones seems like a much better solution for that than spending 100's of millions of dollars per launch.
Even if what he's planning is an auto arranging auto healing mesh/cellular network of micro satellites doesn't seem to be feasible either. Micro satellites have an extremely short life span and have huge energy source issues, cant launch them with a nuclear power source(too heavy, and too short lived of a platform to be both safe and cost affective) and cant have expanded solar cell arrays on them due to atmospheric drag. What you are left with is a small nice cube which doesn't have enough power to transmit communications at any bandwidth that will be sufficient for internet traffic.
Other than sounding cool and potentially farming quite a bit for work for SpaceX i don't see this venture of being of any value.
And little sats cost $50,000 per launch piggybacked on some other launch.
This both increases the costs and worse pollute the higher atmosphere with even more orbiting bodies(and derby as they have a life span of < 10 years).
The current launch costs even under best conditions (piggy backing on an existing launch) are between 7000 and 10000 dollars per KG.
There is a reason why no one is currently doing LEO communication satellites and although some projects do exist like the Persistent Communication Network the Pentagon wants to put in they never actually out grew out grew their drafting/project proposal stages.
In fact the biggest opponents of these satellites are the launch providers them selves and NASA even tho these missions are much much more profitable to them.
Using small (100-200KG) LEO communication satellites means 100's of launches over a decade and unlike GEO's the constellation will have to be constantly refreshed due to their short life span.
However they also know that putting so much junk in space without any feasible way of getting (all of it) back to earth is detrimental to the long term space program.
So yeah while universities and even hobbyist groups can launch those cube micro's to space for under 100K it doesn't mean that one of those platforms can be used for a communication satellite they are too small to have any decent power source and don't even have enough space for sufficient transceivers that can provide the amount of bandwidth needed for internet coverage.
LEO also has a very big issue with bandwidth which relates to the fact that the satellite is moving away / towards you at very high speed which means that quite a big chunk of your bandwidth is eaten by the phase correction and tolerance of the signal.
Not to mention having to jump to another bird every couple of minutes will probably also put additional bandwidth, latency and reliability limitations on such network. But lets say that Elon's new company does managed to some how overcome all these issues and he launches his constellation and now there are 150 cube sats in LEO.
Google then one ups him and launches their constellation, Apple says SIRI now needs to be space born does theirs, Verizion, Comcast/TW, then the US military wakes up and puts their networks, China, Russia, India, EU.
Now you have 1000's of new objects in low earth orbits, with a short time life, almost impossible to track.
Sorry ISS we can't have you up here any more since Africa needs to watch cat videos and we thought it will be cooler if they stream it via OpenHardware cube sats than just putting down fiber optic cables, improving long range terrestrial radio, or using weather balloons or solar drones to give them internet.
I understand that cube sats are not a candidate, i some how doubt that 100KG sats are even a candidate. The closest we have so far to non GEO orbit satellites are MEO's like the KA-SAT's and other Ka-Band satellites these orbit at 7500-9000 KM orbits which is about 4 times higher than LEO and they weight 6 tonnes of about half is fuel intended to keep them in orbit for about 15-20 years. Out of those 4 remaining tonnes 3 are used by satellite bus it self which includes the power plant and all "space" components. The payload is under 1000KG and that is barely sufficient to house enough communication equipment to provide about 400Mbit bandwidth. How are they planning on doing the same with something that weight as much as keg i don't know.
And why would it take 1000Kg to do 4Mbit? I do 4Mbit at home with a few ounces. Antennae? Improvements coming there. Fuel? Use a tether and electricity - that's overdue.
Anyway, this is the future, aiming at past solutions makes you pessimistic.
Our company has a couple applications where high bandwidth but higher latency connections would great. Obviously if you can get fiber where your data's coming in that's always the best, but we go a lot of places where that's hard.
I'm not saying that there are no viable applications for data over SATCOM, I'm saying it's not a viable solution for providing internet to emerging markets on more than just the financial aspect.
I think i misread your post as a statement rather than a question sorry about that.
To answer your question, O3B's pricing is meant to be competitive in TOC in cases when it's not a question of which high speed fiber optic provider i choose from, but when it's a question of which of these huge contractor firms do i need to hire to lay my own fiber across half of Africa.
As far as i know their only major costumers currently(out side of governments) are the big shipping companies and maybe a couple of telecoms. Not to sound offensive but if you are asking a question about O3B or any similar network on H/N you probably can't afford it. Also since we are talking about multi-million dollars per year contracts asking for pricing is not really possible it's not like they have data plans :) The final price will depend on who you are, where you need to send it too, and where are you sending it. Also networks like O3B don't really work with off-the-shelf CPE, so you also have a huge buy in cost in as you will pretty much operate a base station that probably costs mid six figures alone even if it's a small one like they put on container ships..
Just a comparison Irridum (a satcom network a consumer can actually contract from) charges over 1$ per KB for data, and they can only provide data transmission in short-data-bursts with very very limited bandwidth mostly used for SMS and maybe maybe WAP.
So yeah at current prices watching the latest Miley Cyrus music video from YouTube in HD will cost you about 300,000(tho most likely their entire network combined doesn't have enough bandwidth to stream it)
We're not talking about running a restaurant chain here or a discount store. We're talking about three businesses that require the type of high level knowledge and attention that is difficult for any single person to do. No matter who they are.
Also, this comment supports my thesis that any comment using "Period." or "End of story." is overstated at best, and wrong at worst.
A "Musk Company" branching into different areas might be compared to GE having different divisions all managed in a way with the corporate structure centralized but in that case the head of GE isn't a tech visionary and isn't involved in anything within the particular company like it at least appears to be with Musk. Likewise with Berkshire Hathaway for that matter.
Gotta tell you that in a sense it's almost like, get this, a ponzi scheme you keep spinning up new hope and investor money to keep things going and think you'll figure it out later down the road.
Musk isn't spreading himself too thin; this is what is called Business Development.
Despite having Musk's name on it for clickbait, the article seemed to me to be more about Wyler and WorldVu. The article calls it a "venture" and says they are "working with" each other, but I don't see any details about whether this is a joint venture, a new company, a deal between SpaceX and WorldVu, or what. I don't know whether to qualify this article as PR or industry gossip.
1. Is this being considered because it is the best way to make use of the excess capacity on paid Falcon launches? If you have, say, 50 CRS launches to the ISS planned, can you tack on one internet satellite to each and get a constellation, or would they all end up redundantly in the same orbit?
2. $1M / 250lbs is $250/ounce. That number seems high to me which just goes to show how optimized these things are - very little structural material is needed to hold together a pile of electrical components in space.
If you want a voice link, that means your datarate will be ion the order of ~10kbps
If you want a cell phone as your transmitter, that means your antenna gain is very low, and your transmit power is also very low. The remaining free variable is the receive antenna gain. So if you put up a satellite with a large receiver antenna, then this sort of thing can work.
For an example, take a look at terrestar networks' phone and satellite (http://www.terrestarnetworks.com/) . They've gone bankrupt (I think over spectrum allocation issues?) but the did functional demonstrations of their technology before going under.
They had the worlds largest space-based phased array antenna system deployed.