Airbus to build giant satellite network

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33136362

by _airh • 11 years ago

91 60 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

aerovistae• 11 years ago

I love how in like 2 months we've gone from nobody doing this to three separate entities trying to launch an internet of satellites. Gonna get crowded up there.

JoeAltmaier4• 11 years ago

I'd like to see a server ON a satellite, beyond the reach of governments and regulation. Sell encryption keys and route your ground-based services through a cache up there.

pavel_lishin3• 11 years ago

Gonna be hard to replace a faulty hard drive, though.

And arguably if you put a server on a satellite, governments will be the only entities capable of reaching it.

barkingcat• 11 years ago

Yes - the automated X-37 can get to it no problem.

vidarh• 11 years ago

See, there's a way to motivate another space race: Get a bunch of nanosats up there broadcasting material that's offensive to as many governments as possible.

JoeAltmaier4• 11 years ago

Anybody with a dish and a key can reach it, right?

a3n2• 11 years ago

Periodically shotgun a bunch of RPIs (or their sensible equivalent) on just big enough satellites. The "servers" are distributed across the little nodes. Assume they'll fail and burn up, or just burn up, and keep on shotgunning them up there as long as subscriber fees are profitable enough.

Maybe they don't even need to be profitable if they also serve some sort of propaganda/free speech function for regions of the world that the developed West wants to poke at.

civilian• 11 years ago

You better be ready to handle solar storms! :)

bakhy• 11 years ago

a new theorem in the making - CAS: consistency, availability, solar storm tolerance.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

We already have satellite-killing technology, so I think your idea of 'beyond the reach of governments' is fanciful.

jevinskie• 11 years ago

Indeed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaKpJ7i-JXA

Ballistic missile defense is a very interesting field. It actually seems uncannily defensive given the rest of the "Defense" Industry, ignoring potentially destabilizing MAD. =P

kenrikm• 11 years ago

I'm not sure they would be able to hit something as small as a nano sat with a missile. The X-37 could do it but that's expensive unless you really, really don't want whatever the satellite is doing to continue.

JoeAltmaier4• 11 years ago

Nano satellites would be cheaper, by orders of magnitude, than the facilities needed to 'shoot them down'. Anyway the idea was, out of reach of regulation.

ChuckMcM5• 11 years ago

Wow, they could complete their objective more quickly by taking a billion dollars in small denomination bills and putting it into a pile and lighting it on fire :-) Only slightly more seriously, it would be very impressive if they could pull it off, but having seen the deployment of Iridium (66), GPS (32), GLONASS (24) , and Galileo (30) it doesn't seem like we have a non-nation state that is up to the challenge of putting 600(!) satellites into orbit all at once.

If we assume the reporters got random factoids mixed up, 600 satellites? in 20 "planes" ? (lets assume they are somehow station keeping in the same orbital plane so 30 satellites each trying to stay 12 degrees away from the next satellite in the same plane, while trying to avoid the other 19 planes? One gets destroyed by space junk and you practically guarantee another 29 join it over the next 120 minutes or so? That is going to be quite the dance.

And what spectrum are they using for uplink/downlink? .5 Thz? Something they can get a license for all over the world presumably. That alone cost a billion dollars for Iridium.

I just can't imagine a scenario where this even works. Perhaps if they start with the old TeleDesic design or something.

kbenson• 11 years ago

Upon reading, I'm not sure if "planes" refers to aircraft, or surface, as in strata. I'm not sure how feasible that is, but in general the story itself seems light on technical details overall.

ChuckMcM5• 11 years ago

My guess was orbital plane (inclination with respect to the orientation of the earth. So everything in the same orbital plane is going round the same direction at the same speed and distance.

yoha• 11 years ago

In this context, it refers to orbital plane. In this particular case, you can just substitute "orbit".

stcredzero• 11 years ago

Isn't SpaceX's plan to build a satellite Internet service essentially the same thing?

dasmoth2• 11 years ago

Yes (although with five or six times as many satellites).

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

Some answers here: http://www.oneweb.world/

(It's very promotional though, not very technical)

ChuckMcM5• 11 years ago

Thanks, so they are going to use Ku band and dodge and weave around the equator to avoid satellites in geosynchronous orbits. And from the animation on their technology page it really does look like they are going to have 30 satellites all in the same orbital plane following one after the other.

They have set for themselves quite the challenge.

throwaway_yy2Di• 11 years ago

    "Only slightly more seriously, it would be very impressive
    if they could pull it off, but having seen the deployment of
    Iridium (66), GPS (32), GLONASS (24) , and Galileo (30) it
    doesn't seem like we have a non-nation state that is up to
    the challenge of putting 600(!) satellites into orbit all at
    once."

It looks like these satellites will be a lot smaller than Iridium ones -- from the BBC article, about 150 kg each, vs. ~689 kg [0] for Iridiums. The total orbiting mass is only twice that of the Iridium constellation.

600 * 150 kg = 90,000 kg

66 * 689 kg = 45,474 kg

Naively, they could lift everything in maybe five Ariane V (ECA) launches, for ~$1 billion at market pricing [1]. That'd mean packing over a hundred microsats in one payload fairing. I'm not sure how close this is to reality: I'd guess there'd need to be a lot of structure overhead too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...

[1] http://www.spaceflight101.com/ariane-5-eca.html

($200 MM/launch, 21,000 kg payload to LEO)

ChuckMcM5• 11 years ago

Well for one the satellites wouldn't have enough fuel on board to do orbital plane changes, to at a minimum its going to be 20 launches if they want to hit 20 different orbital planes. I have yet to find out how they expect to do station keeping with that low mass.

mapt6• 11 years ago

I would like to inform you that the events of _Gravity_ were highly dramatized. Space is not so crowded, and most particles from a collision rapidly drift away.

They chose a very high section of LEO, though, 1200km, where debris lasts millennia. Further populating high orbits like this without a solid plan for deorbit is problematic - not for OneWeb, but for the rest of us who don't want to see a Kessler Syndrome cascade thirty years down the road.

jonah• 11 years ago

From their site[1]:

"End of Life Disposal When a OneWeb satellite nears the end of its intended service life, it will de-orbit automatically, ensuring that the space around our planet remains free and clear for future generations."

So at least they've thought about that.

[1] http://www.oneweb.world/#technologies

sharpercoder• 11 years ago

Assuming at least 40KM distance from the earth, (40/300) * 2 means a roundtrip time of 267ms. That's without processing time, but that's probably in the ballpark of <5 ms.

This excludes many types of internet use cases.

dasmoth2• 11 years ago

I assume you mean 40,000 kilometres here.

That'll definitely be lower than that (at that kind of height, you wouldn't need hundreds of satellites for global coverage). Wiki page talks about 800km and 950km orbits.

andor• 11 years ago

800km is not so far, it's much closer than Europe to North America, US East Coast to West Coast, etc. A round-trip at speed of light should take about 5.3ms.

lmm• 11 years ago

The speed of light is 300 Mm/s, not 300 Km/s.

greglindahl• 11 years ago

It's very interesting that the reported price was ~ 1/2 million $ per 150kg sat. SpaceX's launch price to LEO is ~ $4.6k/kg, or ~ $700k per 150kg. While the price to launch these guys would be a bit higher (they need something to aggregate a bunch of sats into a single payload), normally the cost to build the sat is a lot bigger than SpaceX's launch price.

mapt6• 11 years ago

Volume, volume, volume.

Few unmanned spacecraft flown to date are in principle more complex than a Toyota. If you did 1-unit automotive production runs, and 1-unit production runs for most of the parts rather than using standardized templates, things would be expensive there too.

ris2• 11 years ago

"...OneWeb, a British Channel Islands-registered concern..."

If they're so british why don't they think they should pay tax like the rest of us?

joosters• 11 years ago

I don't think the phrasing was trying to play up the Britishness of the company, it was merely saying that the Channel Islands are British.

Of course, it's still a tax dodge and the company should pay tax like the rest of most of the world!

ris2• 11 years ago

No, I know, I was just taking a cheap stab.

dharma1• 11 years ago

Ah, Branson vs Musk.

This is one of the things where investing in a fast moving technology reminds me of deflationary economy - we are putting a lot of satellites up there and spending billions doing it when tech is accelerating at such a fast rate that in 10 years the electronics will be quite dated, so it might be worth a wait. There is no easy way to update electronics on these once they're up.

Suppose billionaires wants to have a legacy in space before their time on earth is done!

Personally can't wait until this is cheap enough for normal individuals/startups. Low orbit nanosats can be done for $20k-ish already - www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603240-small-satellites-taking-advantage-smartphones-and-other-consumer-technologies

Going to get crowded up there!

ksec• 11 years ago

I thought one world was something new it turns out that it's actually been announced since February this year.

My main question is how fast is it going to be? Can I expect 10Mbps to each terminal / user?

Airbus to build giant satellite network

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