Elon Musk's Proposed Internet-by-Satellite System Could Link With Mars Colonies 105
MojoKid writes You have to hand it to Elon Musk, who has occasionally been referred to as a real life "Tony Stark." The man helped to co-found PayPal and Tesla Motors. Musk also helms SpaceX, which just recently made its fifth successful trip the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver supplies via the Dragon capsule. The secondary mission of the latest ISS launch resulted in the "successful failure" of the Falcon 9 rocket, which Musk described as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) event. In addition to his Hyperloop transit side project, Musk is eyeing a space-based Internet network that would be comprised of hundred of micro satellites orbiting roughly 750 miles above Earth. The so-called "Space Internet" would provide faster data speeds than traditional communications satellites that have a geosynchronous orbit of roughly 22,000 miles. Musk hopes that the service will eventually grow to become "a giant global Internet service provider," reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections. And this wouldn't be a Musk venture without reaching for some overly ambitious goal. The satellite network would truly become a "Space Internet" platform, as it would form the basis for a direct communications link between Earth and Mars. It's the coming thing.
Yikes! (Score:1)
Talk about Lag Time!
But, I bet the Ads would make it through.
Re: Yikes! (Score:2)
To Mars.
Fuck. Screwed that post up. Time for more beer.
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So it's a slight change to a famous quote: "Get your Ads to Mars!"
Beyond borders (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, the idea that satellite Internet could replace land based connections is silly, as the idea that satellites in LEO could beam data to Mars.
The real thing about cheap satellite Internet is censorship.
In an fantasy world, a transmitter should be cheap, small and unlocalisable from ground.
In the real world, some goverment would kill people for merely possessing an antenna.
And hundreds of microsatellites is more space junk, making even more dangerous orbital tourism.
Re:Beyond borders (Score:5, Insightful)
A few hundred satellites at 750 miles altitude are not really that much of a problem, unless you're orbiting at the same altitude. Space is big. Even LEO is big.
I think we do need an international agreement on orbital bands. Human spaceflight OK in some bands, others reserved for cheap junk, others reserved for expensive junk, so the cheap junk doesn't take out the expensive junk or the humans.
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It is actually calling for a few thousand satellites, but you are correct.... not that big of an issue considering the area that they are spread out over
I have to wonder, considering the Branson announcement, which billionaire is trying to distract from which billionaires actual commitment
Musk has the lead in the form of an actual, demonstrated, launch capability, but Branson made it to press a few days earlier
Re:Beyond borders (Score:5, Interesting)
Orbits are many, valuable orbits not so much. The first few hundred kms are unusable due to atmospheric drag. Then comes LEO and the optimal solution is usually as close as possible, greater bandwidth/resolution, lower latency, shorter orbital period and more payload, less fuel. Then a lot of empty space before GEO, which is obviously quite narrow because otherwise it wouldn't be geo-synchronous and everyone who wants to receive signals need a much more expensive and complicated tracking antenna and multiple satellites to keep 24x7 coverage. True there's certain differences with frequency bands as well, but not anything like in space.
I'd rather just invest in cell phone towers (you can daisy chain these with point-to-point beams if cables are unfeasible/too expensive) and smartphones. Some 92% of the world's population is already covered by a cell phone signal, more people in India have cell phones than running water. They just don't use it for the Internet, yet. Because I really doubt the world's poor is going to have satellite reception equipment, this will be a fixed thing for schools and such. But then you'd probably do just as well using the cell phone network as the "last mile" and have a few big Internet gateways to the sky.
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"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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Space is infinite, it is dark
Space is neutral, it is cold
Stars occupy minute areas of space
They are clustered a few billion here
And a few billion there
As if seeking consolation in numbers
Space does not care, space does not threaten
Space does not comfort
It does not speak, it does not wake
It does not dream
It does not know, it does not fear
It does not love, it does not hate
It does not encourage any of these qualities
Space cannot be measured, it cannot be
Angered, it cannot be placated
It cannot be summed up, spa
This idea failed in the 1990s (Score:1, Interesting)
Is this the Teledesic [wikipedia.org] saga all over again (early funding by Bill Gates & others)?
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Yeah, it's the same thing almost exactly, only 20 years later. That significantly reduces the cost of the hardware, I suppose, but there's also less market-not-being-served now than there was then so both the cost and the revenue arguments are significantly impacted.
Re:This idea failed in the 1990s (Score:4, Insightful)
It really depends on how many sats SpaceX can jam into one launch and how much of their capacity is already committed to other contracts
Teledesic was dependent on other companies for launch, the one demo sat they put up was using Orbital's Pegasus
Re:This idea failed in the 1990s (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I'm a bit worried about what this means for SpaceX, having worked for Boeing when they were trying to push for more communications satellites to help fill up their launch schedules.
A lot of these services (Iridium, or even Metricom Ricochet) might be considered business failures but technological successes. The networks still operate and serve their primary customers (I believe the Ricochet is used by law enforcement)... it's just the shell companies that tried to sell excess bandwidth to the public that failed financially.
Huh actually, the wikipedia page for Iridium mentions that SpaceX is launching the Iridium NEXT satellites this year to be more data-focsed than voice-focused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org] :P
Not sure if this SpaceX constellation is being launched to augment this, or if it's just a business ploy to negotiate more favorable prices with their customer by pretending to go into competition with them
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Just so everyone knows, Ricochet was not satellite based. I still have their modem, but no longer live in an area they covered, so I'm not sure if they even still exist.
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Yeah it had a somewhat similar mesh network, though. I still see the little shoeboxes hanging down from the occasional streetlight in most metro areas, so I assume the richochet network is still being used for its stuff... even though a lot of municipalities have been working to upgrade their communications networks since 9/11
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Don't forget that SpaceX has also significantly reduced the cost of launches (with expectations that they will manage to reduce costs by another large margin yet). Between the two this is actually possible. Still a big, expensive, ambitious, project, but no longer impossible.
Re:This idea failed in the 1990s (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd wager there's more demand for Internet access in Africa now than 20 years ago, or in other places remote or deprived of infrastructure. The cost back then of getting a 486SX computer (or in 1997, a Pentium laptop), satellite transmission equipment, a way to power and maintain them would have been fantastical if you consider the market might be people without access to sanitation.
Re:This idea failed in the 1990s (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX need something to launch to generate the economies of scale required in the launch market to really slash launch costs (i.e by mass-producing reusable rockets and flying them a lot). This isn't a bad one, and it could be much cheaper than previous attempts.
Lordy (Score:2)
Good thing too. Wouldn't want it going up there bareheaded.
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Variety?
If all of your eggs are in one basket, i.e. fiber optics, then last mile, remote location, some jackass dragging an anchor or a recalcitrant local government can cut you off from access
Satellite communication is the more expensive option, but it can be worth it if there is no other means of connection
The real question is whether that market is enough to support their cost structure
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I would say put your eggs into many baskets, this endeavor represents another basket
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To use the infamous slashdot car analogy, that is like saying we need another set of roads in case the roads fail or as happens now in the US bridges collapse. Fibre optic is more that one route, just like roads so it can work around failures, it just slows down as concentrated traffic clogs remaining routes. Better to make a solid investment in fibre optic and build high performance, high reliability network, rather than fitter away capital on multiple poorly executed solutions. Those satellites will be t
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Stop the insanity!
True but if sending people to the Moon is the goal, then funding and work on things like a earth departure stage, lunar lander, and God knows what else will have to be done. NASA is not doing it because they don't have fundng for these items. Musk doesn't talk about it because he will have to allocate money and engineers to work on this stuff (right now their busy with developing a reusable rocket).
Mars as a goal cannot be readily challenged because it is so far into the future. There is no land rush to
SUPER SLOW unless a faster than light system (Score:1)
that does not exist is hidden within the system somewhere.
I guess it could be a backhaul for slow low priority internet traffic, but no customer in the 1st world would put up with the latency and lag given the current "centralized service" architecture of all internet services from Google, Facebook, WebMail, YouTube, "The Cloud" etc.
It could be great for bandwidth expansion with a more distributed network model than what we have now for Internet services. Email and file transfers that don't need instan
Re:SUPER SLOW unless a faster than light system (Score:5, Informative)
People get confused between because the current satellite data providers (like HughesNet) are in geosynchronous orbit, which does suffer latency issues
Iridium is a LEO system that does not currently provided data services, and which has a relatively sparse constellation which requires a wide visible horizon to use
Re: SUPER SLOW unless a faster than light system (Score:1)
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At one time I was semi considering a satellite internet system because of problems getting decent broadband where I lived but I was put off by the horrific latencies (500-1000ms) and the equally horrific costs of using the system. It all looked quite Heath Robinson with the upload being via ISDN / ADSL and the download via a satellite and some kind of kludge in the middle to reconcile the two halves. I bet anyone using satellite internet has to tw
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Round trip to a satellite, 3ms. Hell, call it 15 if the angle is high. Then the satellite hops, which would take place at c with a microwave link, compared to .66c with fiber. Not to mention there are many fiber links that are anything but direct line. I could easily see such a system outperforming ground networks when it comes to latency. Now, congestion could be a problem obviously. It will have to be seen if they can put enough links into orbit cheaply enough to prevent issues.
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Re:latency does not equal bandwidth (Score:1)
Doesn't matter how far away it is if it is cheap and my cell phone can receive the signals.
I'd like to stream Netflix right now but I've already used the 3GB my cell phone provider allows me to use at 3G/4G speeds for the month. So for the next 12 days I am stuck on 2G speeds (enough to play 1 minute then buffer fill for 3, then play for about 1 minute and buffer fill for another 3 minutes).
Streaming doesn't need low latency. Heck it doesn't even need lots of bandwidth. Give me 1 Mbps download rates and I'm
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If you read the summary, they mention that this will be a low earth orbit constellation, and that it will be much faster than traditional geostationary satellite networks. If you read anything more than the summary, you'd see references to how data transmission through a vacuum is 40% faster than through a fibre optic cable.
This will be competitive with terrestrial networks for most uses, and superior for long distances (such as anything that's currently on submarine cables)
If you're referring to the Mars c
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having more of them and on low altitude, they cold route it back to earth closer.
much better than bouncing to the satellites that stay stationary(in regards of you) in space far, far away.
basically the ping wouldn't be so bad.
if it would be cheaper than building 3g connectivity on earth though, that's another thing.. and why the fuck even bring the mars trip to the issue at this point is beyond me.. putting a dedicated sat or two to support that trip would be pretty damn cheap compared to the total bill of
Re:Internet by satellite: non-news (Score:5, Insightful)
Teledesic: Launched on Pegasus rockets which cost your firstborn child. SpaceX: Launched on Falcon rockets which are cheaper than the Russians and Chinese even without reuse. Teledescic: 90s computer and communications tech (this was the era where playing the original Doom game took a high end computer and nerds envied those with ISDN connections). SpaceX: 10 iterations of Moore's Law later. Teledescic: Communcation sats have to be large objects with heavy hydrazine thrusters for stationkeeping. SpaceX: Much smaller satellites available (all the way down to cubesats), with a wide variety of ion thrusters for stationkeeping available.
Yeah, totally the same situation.
Goddard and sci-fi: vaccuum tube. Hyperloop: tube full of thin air. Goddard and sci-fi: maglev. Hyperloop: ground-effect aerofoils. Compressor on each craft. Goddard and sci-fi: massive trains holding huge numbers of passengers. Hyperloop: small computer-timed trains to spread out the load on the track and thus reduce construction costs. Goddard and sci-fi: Trains implausibly deep underground. Hyperloop: built like a monorail. Goddard and sci-fi: tubes take the shortest route to their destination. Hyperloop: Trains go primarily over already-built and permitted infrastructure to reduce right of way and environmental costs / challenges.
Yeah, totally the same situation.
Tesla - Okay, they're quite nice but electric cars aren't exactly a new idea
Aww, you didn't give me an example to compare it to! Let's just go with the EV-1, since that was probably the most modern commercially-produced EV before Tesla EV-1, range 60 miles (older version) to 100 miles (newer version). Tesla Roadster, range 230 miles, and Model S, up to 300. EV-1, 0-60=8 seconds. Tesla Roadster and Model S Performance, 4 seconds. EV-1 production: about 1100. Tesla: produces that many cars in *1 1/2 weeks*. EV-1: Loved by owners but panned by critics. Tesla Model S: not only loved by owners but has been getting some of the highest ratings for any kind of car period.
Your "analogies" are akin to saying "So what if he won the Indy 500 - I raced my go-cart down the street the other day and beat a soap-box racer!"
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This ^
Furthermore, Musk has gone beyond ideas or demos and delivered profitable companies delivering these technologies
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People don't praise Elon Musk for inventing, they praise him for doing. Doing against huge odds.
And for the most part, we aren't talking "incremental improvements", we are talking massive improvements.
The Falcon 9 recovery is nothing like the lunar module (that is just a stupid comparison), but it is like the Delta Clipper... only instead of flying for under three minutes to controlled altitudes (and being designed specifically to land again), the Falcon 9 first stage lifts a second stage and cargo module t
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Yeah, I had written a section about this but must have messed up my tags and Slashdot ate it.. Delta clipper highest achieved altitude: 1 kilometer. Falcon 9 first stage alone highest achieved altitude: 130km. Delta clipper furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300 meters. Falcon 9 first stage alone, furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300km. Delta clipper mass ratio, 2,5. Falcon 9 first stage alone, mass ratio 20 (and the boosters on the Falcon Heavy have a mass ratio of 30).
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Tesla: use lithium-ion batteries and price it like a large studio flat.
It is pretty successful and well executed, but it worked only because they specifically do not compete with regular cars. That makes it a lot like a luxury pre-WW1 electric car. The range is quite simply attained by brute-force use of batteries at enormous cost.
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If technology had jumped directly from the 1979 Impala to the 2014 Honda Accord, yes, that would have been really f*ing amazing and a huge technological innovation, and the company that did it worthy of every bit of praise thrown at it for doing so.
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Oh and legal reasons. Buying bandwidth, getting right of ways for cable etc is not just cheap, it is total cartel central in just about every country out there.
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Even in modern countries there are holes. I live in Iceland and we have one of the best rates of broadband connectivity and fiber deployment in the world. But my land is in a sparsely populated valley so it hasn't paid off to run a line out there, most people just use their cell phones for a net connection. If satellite could beat that (and wouldn't be too blocked by mountains), even in highly connected countries there's a real potential market here.
Heck, there's a lot of people who would get it if the pric
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Aww, Slashdot ate my whole paragraph comparing Falcon 9 to the Delta Clipper, that was the best one.... must have messed up my tagging :(
the hard part (Score:1)
Oh good, he got the hard part done. Now let's get started colonizing, smooooooth solar sailing from here on out!
The return of echomail . . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . . and ZMODEM, and other latency-friendly protocols. . . .
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lol - exactly what I thought. Where's my floppy with OMMM (opus matrix mail masher, fidonet's answer to sendmail!).
Min
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Latency isn't too bad from LEO. Existing satellite systems work from geosync, which is worse. Some of the advantage will be eaten up by routing, and bandwidth will probably be pretty limiting. I'm interested in seeing how they solve the routing problem.
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With Iridium the approach was to hand ff the transmission between satellites until it was within range of of a ground station to connect to a terrestrial network, or reach another satellite phone, usually one or two hops
They may use a similar approach, although Iridium initially involved the governments in the countries that they maintained gateways in as part of the corporate structure. See Wired story, "The United Nations of Iridium"
http://archive.wired.com/wired... [wired.com]
It would make a lot of sense to use the
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I still use Zmodem today through/via the Internet. ;)
We eoropeans all suffef with you americans (Score:2)
reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections ....
Jetpacks! (Score:3)
All of these articles have that tinge of 1950's science fiction: we'll all be living in magnificent under-water cities in 10 years, and everyone'll have a jetpack!
All we need to do is build an underwater city...and jetpacks. But in reality it's that our cities will be under water in 10 years.
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Be thankful you can escape using your jetpack, then!
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Anybody who can live in Manhattan or Beijing could be perfectly happy living on Mars. Probably, half the population of Lahore would be much happier.
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Instead of jetpacks, everybody ended up with personal RPGs. Instead of underwater cities we have underwater suburbs. [discoverhi...travel.com].
Anyway, getting groceries on Mars would arguably be easier that at the top of Everest or the bottom of the Marianas trench. There is something to be said for having a large, non-moving flat spot to live on, even if it means never going outside. Sure, there remains lots of uninhabited space on earth, but start by writing off pretty much all the oceans... a little matter of the occasional 10 me
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LEO traffic control (Score:1)
All these things make me worry about Kessler Syndrome. Maybe we need some kind of international LEO traffic control body, to regulate and assign safe orbits, track junk, and whatnot.
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Re: Showing my age... (Score:1)
Well I was thinking Taylor Swift
Great (Score:2)
Yo can get satellite Internet right now, it is available everywhere. And is perfectly fine if you view the Internet as a sort of alternative TV where distributors provide content for your consumption.
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What do you mean? Is the lag on satellite Internet connections too high to do anything interactive? Low-orbit satellites would avoid that. Or is the uplink capacity too low to do anything other than request downloads? I'm not sure that there'd be any technical reason for such a limitation.
Personally, I'd love to have more options in Internet connectivity. Not every location in the world is supplied by the perfect ISP at a low cost.
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Well, lets see, if we've got a couple thousand of satellites, and we've got 510 million square miles of land area on Earth, that's an average of less than 250,000 square miles per satellites, or a 282 mile radius each. And of course there will be fair amount of overlap between satellites, since you're 750 miles up and you're going to have at least that ground radius with excellent line-of-sight and only moderate signal falloff. That will also mean most overseas satellites will have LOS with the coast, givi
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Internet at email speed (Score:2)
Can't do much about that speed of light thing. Web browsing becomes an email-like experience. Wow, finally everybody gets to experience the internet just like RMS!
TCP become a hugely inappropriate protocol. Something like Rsync over UDP would be way better. Slow start... give me a break. Ditto, most of TCP.
Twitter stops being relevant at all, who cares about tweeting old news, or hearing it. Refining a web search... just don't bother, instead SCP Earth's entire web archive once a year and incrementally upda
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Eh, obviously rcp, not scp....
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You would want redundancy (send two or more packets)
No way! You want as much bandwidth as you possibly can... the more bandwidth, the less latency to update your Google search index for example, or upload the latest Hollywood sellout. You send along significant error correction, not just error detection. Somewhere in there is an optimum that can only be found by sophisticated mathematics - tempered with actual experience, and sensitive to changing conditions like distance and solar activity. Probably, the optimum would end up being somewhere with 1-2% of ban
Potential game changer? (Score:2)
This maybe a potential game changer for Telcos/ISPs. There is still a lot of money made in this business.
If SpaceX internet is capable of high bandwidth, no data-limit or a reasonable limit, not too crappy latency and allows me to use it everywhere, then it maybe very interesting.
Except for gaming, this offers what most people need AND you can take it with you (if the equipment to connect is reasonably mobile)!
If I can get an internet connection, that I can 'take with me' on my holidays abroad, which allows
Delay-tolerant networking (Score:2)
Effort has been underway for quite some time - by folks such as Vint Cerf, no less - to facilitate Internet over long delays. Surprisingly, there has been terrestrial (or aquatic) applications in the research as well, for example solar-powered sensor networks that can only transmit during daylight hours.
There's a nice overview architecture draft from 2003, especially interesting bits are in the routing section (12.3-12.4), see https://tools.ietf.org/html/dr... [ietf.org] - the eventually published RFC https://tools.ie [ietf.org]
For the love of god.. (Score:1)
Please stop with the Elon Musk circle jerk.
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Please stop with the Elon Musk circle jerk.
Elon Musk attracts interest because he does interesting things. That, IMHO, is one of the better ways to attract interest.
The Hard Part (Score:2)
The hard part of communicating with and between Mars colonies over a network of micro-satellites is setting up the Mars colonies.