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Space Businesses Transportation

SpaceX Kicks Off a Busy Year With Launch of 60 More Starlink Satellites Into Space (cnn.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the up,-up,-and-away dept.
SpaceX launched its third batch of internet-beaming satellites Monday evening, kicking off what is expected to be a remarkably busy year for the company as it readies its new broadband business. From a report: About 60 small satellites were fired into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff occurred at 9:19 pm ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This batch of satellites will join more than 100 others that SpaceX deployed last year. And -- if all goes as planned -- there will be 23 more launches by the end of this year, growing SpaceX's Starlink constellation to more than 1,500 satellites. Starlink is already the largest telecom satellite constellation in existence, and SpaceX has regulatory approval to launch a total of more than 10,000 satellites. The company is also seeking approval to deploy another 30,000 on top of that. The goal is to offer affordable internet service to parts of the United States and Canada by mid-2020, and eventually to beam cheap high-speed broadband across the globe. When Starlink service launches, SpaceX says it plans to go directly to market. That means the space-based internet service will compete directly with ground-based providers that dominate the industry with services like U-Verse, Fios and others.
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SpaceX Kicks Off a Busy Year With Launch of 60 More Starlink Satellites Into Space More

SpaceX Kicks Off a Busy Year With Launch of 60 More Starlink Satellites Into Space

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  • Suck it Comcast, Verizon (Score:4, Interesting)

    by samwichse ( 1056268 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @10:51AM (#59595274)

    This cannot come quickly enough. If the price is even within spitting distance of my current service, I'll jump in a heartbeat just not to deal with those leaches.

    I wonder what the terms will be and what the data caps will be like.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      If they can truly keep pings around 25-35ms they may just be viable as a replacement. A lot of the gaming streaming services (which I have used and enjoy and I believe will be very popular in the future) require 20ms or less for optimum performance, but sub 50ms is acceptable for all but fast-twitch type games; which is fine for me as i'm an old dude that twitches, but not fast.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by clive27 ( 889511 )
        May be those game server can be put on satellites and travel alongside the Starlink. Then we would have 5msec latency (1 msec for a trip to the Starlink VLEO SVs and 2 msec RTT from Starlink to the game server (and processing) and another 1 msec from the Starlink to the base station) Most FPS game ends in 10 minutes, so it can pick whatever the game server that will be closest for the next half hour, ensuring short latency between Starlink to the gaming server. It will get a little longer latency as time pr

      • That's terrestrial speeds. I'd love to see anything under 300ms latency reported on satellite connections. You can still game, just not latency sensitive gaming.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Megane ( 129182 )

          You know that 300ms is for GEO sats, right? Starlink is a LEO sat, and will actually have better latency than even a perfectly straight ground fiber. One of its expected markets will be high-speed traders.

          https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY [youtu.be]

          • Starlink is a LEO sat, and will actually have better latency than even a perfectly straight ground fiber.
            Nope:
            a) the way is longer - so it is already completely impossible
            b) you always have a router, repeating the packages, which costs about 1ms

            • Completely impossible only if you don't realise that:
              a) the speed of light in a fiber optic cable is only about 2c / 3. In LEO it's pretty damn close to c.
              b) you'll most likely actually have less routers and/or repeaters along the way.

              • You most likely have a copper wire, and there the information is transmitted close to vacuum light speed.
                But you are right, I oversaw "fibre".

                Nevertheless via satellite you have more than 2x the way ... supposing one satellite makes a point to point connection for you to a close nearby ground based backbone.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by torkus ( 1133985 )

                  Outside of FIOS, FTTH is pretty rare. But you're absolutely going over fiber once you get past the last mile hop so the large majority of your data round trip is via fiber.

                  Also, it depends on what datacenters get starlink uplinks but you could potentially skip quite a few hops which easily balance out the (arguably but unlikely) longer hop to LEO and back.

      • A ping like that is impossible ... unless you are only connecting to very local services.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by torkus ( 1133985 )

          We maintain a sub-20ms ping to AWS from one of our offices. It's an idealized situation, sure, but it's very possible.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Tesla isn't ethically superior to Comcast, but additional competition is precisely what is needed.

        I wonder though, is the Starlink Terminal going to be affordable for installation on individual homes? I thought phased array antenna systems were the domain of tactical aircraft radar systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

        • The user terminals only need one beam; pretty sure that's not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hell, the entire satellites are probably only in the hundreds-of-thousands price range, given the numbers that people have mentioned.

          I've seen (I forget where) suggestions that the user terminals will be a few hundred dollars each, with the usual "buy it up front, or lease for the duration of your service" options. That may just have been speculation, though. Either way, I'm quite sure Musk & co. have conside

        • A phased array antenna for the home consists of about 100 or 1000 small spikes of metal ... nothing fancy.

          Radar systems, need to send and receive their own signal, and large phased array systems, used for weather radar and to detect stealth bombers, cough cough, need several acres of land.

  • I know space is big. like really big, but... (Score:3)

    by clickclickdrone ( 964164 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:00AM (#59595294)
    Launching new satellites has to be getting quite risky these days with so many up there now plus sundry bits of debris etc.
    • Space isn't just big - it's humongous. The "surface" of a single orbital altitude is a lot bigger that of the entire earth. Low earth orbit has about half a million bits of 1-10 cm sized trash. Even if we landed all the trash equally in a single line around the equator, there would be 12.5 km between each little piece. The risk is quite low, but the consequences of a collision quite high, since the bits move at relative speeds that are a lot higher than the fastest bullet. We want exactly 0 collisions.

      • Low earth orbit has about half a million bits of 1-10 cm sized trash. Even if we landed all the trash equally in a single line around the equator, there would be 12.5 km between each little piece

        Umm, no.

        Half a million bits of trash, laid out in a line ~40 megameters long (the circumference of the planet we're sitting on), leaves 80 meters between pieces, not 12.5 km (12.5 km per piece is correct for 3200 pieces of debris, by the by).

    • Do the math on the cubic kilometers per satellite - it's an enlightening exercise in remembering high-school geometry.

  • Launch Cadence (Score:4, Informative)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:14AM (#59595364) Journal
    For more information about how many, and what kind, of launches SpaceX intends in 2020, see this write:
    spaceflightnow.com [spaceflightnow.com]

    In short: yes, it'll be a busy year of rocketry. Lots of Starlink, a number of commercial payloads, some gov't, and Crew Dragon.
  • So does this mean that in countries where sites on the open internet are blocked,
    anyone with an antenna dish can access internet?
    How big would the antenna for this need to be anyway?
    Does the satellites fly over China for instance?

    • I would imagine SpaceX needs permission to offer service in countries, but physically there's no reason why people in China couldn't get on the network.

      The initial "shell" is orbiting at a 53 degree inclination so you, basically, get coverage from around 53 degrees north to 53 degrees south. A little more than that but, roughly around there. The International Space Station orbits at 51.6 degrees, so if you look at the area of the world that passes over Starlink is close to that, slightly more expansive.

      Oth

      • Re:Circumvent internet blockades? (Score:4, Informative)

        by r2kordmaa ( 1163933 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @01:31PM (#59596004)
        The 81 shell is planned to have a higher altitude so it'll easily cover poles too. They will be visible decent 45 over the horizon from poles.

        Incidentally communications capability from south pole was a problem when they did the black hole picture last year, one of the radio telescopes is there and they had to wait quite some time on weather to fly out a crate of hard drives. There are sat coms available at poles, but they can't handle that much data.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          That's actually a very common way for the telescopes in the Chilean Andes to transfer data to be analyzed in the Northern Hemisphere. As the old saying went, "Never underestimate the data transfer rate of a station wagon full of backup tapes." Just change that to DHL boxes and SSDs.

    • They won't provide service in a country where it is banned.

      • Buuuuut how would local governments stop you? Theoretically all you need is a power supply. Unless the transceiver has a GPS type unit in it, with explicit and updated black lists... I suppose you could always jam / spoof the GPS locally?

        • They don't even need to ban Starlink, all they need is to deny SpaceX licence and they will not operate in the country. SpaceX is not about to operate outside the law, it's not only about local legislation this kind of shite also goes against ITU regulations which are international treaties ratified by bloody everyone in the world excluding Cook Islands, Niue, Palau, and Palestine. Unless you operate out of these four places, breaking radio regulations to mess with another country is going to get you in tro

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by gmack ( 197796 )

            Currently in practice that means that no one sells to a country they aren't registered to. There is a huge grey market for cross border satellite receiver shipping. Some of the more restrictive countries have been hunting down the grey market dishes and dealing with the owners. I'm not sure Starlink is going to play things much differently here since they are marketing to transportation companies who would always be on the move and would be very annoyed if they lost internet access because they traveled

            • If your transmitter can pretend it's mounted on an international airline or a ship in international waters it will probably work, but I'm thinking the service fee will not be the same as for a home user.
            • Antennas for starlink are probably going to be small and not dishes = much easier to conceal or even DIY. The satellites are numerous, close and moving, so a less directional antenna should be better, even with the lesser gain.

              • The SpaceX antennas are phased arrays so that the satellite can be electronically tracked by steering the RF beam (main lobe). These antenna's are not traditional dishes that are used for geo-stationary satellites.

            • Starlink uses highly directional beams from phased array antennas. The footprint from each beam is very small; there's not going to be meaningful bleed. They can target what areas do (and do not) get service quite precisely.

              In fact, one of the reasons they need so many satellites is that each one can only put out so many beams at once, and each beam can only serve a tiny area, so they need a lot of satellites just to get full coverage of, say, any given large city. These are highly directional beams.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

          Most likely they will just make it illegal. Radio equipment is regulated in every country so that wouldn't be a stretch.
          Technically, it won't stop you, but if you get caught, prison definitely will. And I don't think these things will be hard to detect.

          For a more technical solution, I suppose Starlink could pinpoint the location of a transmitter very precisely. Because it is made of many satellites, it could work like GPS in reverse. If the transmission is caught by several satellites, I believe that with g

        • Each satellite has a limited number of beams, and each beam can be pointed at a wide range of angles but has a tiny footprint (something like a few city blocks? they're extremely narrow and directional). There aren't anywhere near enough beams on each satellite to blanket the entire area that the satellite could theoretically cover. Additionally, running the radios takes power that could be used for orbital maneuvers (ion engines are power-hungry beasts) or charging / conserving power for night. Why would S

    • Yes to all, unless SpaceX bows to political pressure. Technologically, everybody in every place on Earth will be able to speak to each other freely. The social ramifications of this are hard to understate.

      The antenna is "pizza-box" sized (NY Large) so these are for fixed installations at this point.

      One would expect portable units in a few years and antennas integrated into Tesla roofs a few years after that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      There is a very good reason why not, and it has to do with where the other end of the link is. At least at first it will be all simple (but fast) bounces from the user to a ground station. That means that a "friendly" ground station has to be in range of a bounce, whether or not it detects your location and refuses service due to political boundaries. The laser links will probably only be between adjacent statellites in the same orbit, but by that time you can be sure they've worked out the political bounda

    • Does the satellites fly over China for instance?
      The earth is a ball.
      China is on the earth.
      Satellites fly in circles around a ball that happens to contain China.

      Does that answer your question, or do I need to explain that such circles are always around the earth center?

      You could craft nicely choreographed orbits that never go over China, e.g. as in a GSO satellite ... but those are useless for internet.

  • Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (Score:4, Funny)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @12:25PM (#59595664)
    All those people who are allergic to wifi are really in trouble now.
  • Will it be possible to route traffic between two end-user nodes on the Starlink network in a decentralized fashion without the data traffic traversing ground-based infrastructure? e.g.: would Tor usage be further anonymized?

    • Re:Will it be possible (Score:4, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @03:40PM (#59596488) Homepage Journal

      > Will it be possible to route traffic between two end-user nodes on the Starlink network in a decentralized fashion without the data traffic traversing ground-based infrastructure?

      Yes, this is a selling point for nodes at far ends of the Earth - the speed of light in vacuum is much greater than the speed of light in optical fiber, so the cost to ~200km orbit quickly evaporates with distance. "Freakin lasers in Space" and all that.

      Metro Ethernet and the like still make sense for local connections, but maybe not VPN's on different providers with a distant peering point.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      The ground stations should be able to bounce back up to another satellite. That would only need to be a simple forwarding without going through "infrastructure".

      https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY [youtu.be]

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