SpaceX is set to launch its first two test satellites on Sunday | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX is set to launch its first two test satellites on Sunday

cnbc.com

54 pointsSirLJ46 comments

Consider:

- SpaceX, the company building the network, is the same company who can deliver the payloads.

- SpaceX is the only company who has re-usable rockets.

It's hard to argue that from an economics perspective this isn't an insane leapfrog type of event, assuming they can gather the necessary in-house chops to deliver good telecom service. Talk about an economic moat -- to compete on margin you'd first have to become a rocket company. And not just a rocket company but one who has technology to re-use rockets, which likely is a ways away from becoming replicated, nevermind commoditized to the point where it evaporates from costs.

And of course, presumably running a satellite network that is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitor in space right now is going to throw off a ton of opportunities to develop the know-how and technology to do so, that will further deepen the moat. It may turn out that the rocket program itself needs to develop specific capabilities to support the needs of the telecom network, which would further cement payload delivery to space as a necessary in-house service for a telecom network.

An an analogy, once Amazon starts delivering your packages and owns the entire delivery chain, I think we'll see a similar dynamic. Their service will be optimized off of the general case and holistically integrated into the entire supply chain, and to compete with Amazon on margin will mean you have to create UPS first.

Everything they do has an impact on their end goal/master plan, Mars.

They need to send thousands of ships to colonize Mars. This global sat internet service will require them to deploy tens of thousands of micro-sats to provide global internet. The revenue generated by said service will provide them the funding to build the said ships for Mars.

Oh and of course, the eventual solar system internet.

> solar system internet

What exactly are you picturing here? Because of light-speed considerations you'd have semi-isolated networks at each major body, and bodies connected with special high-power high-latency links. And those links might as well be direct, only needing a handful of dishes.

Is there a reason to scatter little relay satellites all over the middle of nowhere? Or do anything else that needs many many rocket launches?

http://ipnsig.org/

What exactly are you picturing here? Because of light-speed considerations you'd have semi-isolated networks at each major body, and bodies connected with special high-power high-latency links.

Late 21st century FidoNet. Late 21st century USENET?

And mirroring of sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and social media. Interplanetary email (with video attachments too).

Yeah one can definitely imagine a future where SpaceX kills their payload-to-orbit delivery business in order to streamline operations and free up resources to focus on a) revenue generation from the sat network and b) the "get your ass to Mars" program. It'd be a risk from a diversification perspective but I could see them doing it once the sat network hits escape velocity wrt projected revenues landing them to cash flow positivity in the Mars program.

They won’t have to. The larger rockets planned for mars (bfr) will make payload to orbit even cheaper as it is fully reusable, so only fuel costs.

Colonizing Mars must not happen until we have a definitive answer as to whether there is or was native life there. The answer "there was life until Musk landed" is not going to be acceptable.

There will be no practical way to determine that until we've colonized it.

Proving the existence of life is relatively easy: we just have to find some. Proving that Mars is lifeless is flat impossible. We can't even be sure our definition of life is sufficient.

It's even steeper than that. SpaceX could arrange to send up some payloads piggybacked on their commercial payloads. Their competitors could effectively be paying to put part of their fleet up.

>> It's even steeper than that. SpaceX could arrange to send up some payloads piggybacked on their commercial payloads. Their competitors could effectively be paying to put part of their fleet up.

A friend of mine in the telecom business claimed that's how Level3 grew. They were laying fiber for others, but the largest cost of that is in logistics, permitting, digging, etc... So they just laid down their own fiber along with their customers at a fraction of the cost.

No. Any company can use existing satellite launch companies to launch their constellation. You don't need to be a "rocket company" first. There are plenty that can do this on the cheap - ISRO for example.

My argument is about margin and replication costs not about if there are alternative routes towards replicating SpaceX's network, given enough money. Of course if you had infinite money you could burn up hundreds of rockets to get your network in place using existing providers. But my guess is that money is going to flow literally anywhere else if, for example, you will be spending 10x money as SpaceX just for table stakes of getting your satellites in orbit.

Nobody can do it as cheap as a used rocket. Since the they will be (relatively) mass producing their internet satellites, losing one on a highly reused rocket won't be much of a financial hit. SpaceX could test rockets to failure with their own sats for a tiny fraction of the cost anyone else would face.

I think we'll soon have a better idea of how this plan might pan out. OneWeb is trying to do this first, and the first of many satellites are already built[1][2]. They'll start launching later this year. [3]

I'm very curious to see a real-world use of their system when it's fully up and running.

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

[2] https://twitter.com/SpaceTechAsia/status/959300225394339841

[3] https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/01/22/testbed-for-canadian-d...

"Talk about an economic moat -- to compete on margin you'd first have to become a rocket company. And not just a rocket company but one who has technology to re-use rockets, which likely is a ways away from becoming replicated, nevermind commoditized to the point where it evaporates from costs."

It's even worse than that. SpaceX is using micro satellites for its network; they can launch them for "free" (just the cost of extra fuel) as a secondary payload on any of their launches where there is excess cargo capacity.

But in the specific case of launch padding, another microsat company could just as easily buy that same extra capacity from SpaceX. Sure, that's assuming SpaceX doesn't cram every launch to the max. There's also the opportunity to cross-shop a bit with other launch systems.

They'll need to predominantly do them on polar missions, in 2017 SpaceX had only 5 polar missions. Also, for missions that are already launching large numbers of satellites (like Iridium flights; 4 of the 5 polar missions in 2017 were for Iridium) this may be harder as it will require more fuel and a relight after an extended mission in its primary payload orbit.

EDIT: grammar fix

I don't think they're going to launch anywhere close to even 1/10 their network this way; there are too few scheduled launches and too many satellites in their planned network, even if they were able to overcome the technical obstacles you mention. Depending on the margins they earn, the few (if any) they launch this way may be a meaningful cost savings.

How much telecom traffic goes via satellite vs. ground towers and fiberoptic cable? What percentage of capex cost for a telecom is rocket launches? I have absolutely no clue, but I feel it would affect this analysis greatly.

I don't know either, but considering the complete lack of existence of the kind of network SpaceX is proposing, or anything close to it, if it's not deployment costs it would have to be some other factor coupled with operating a ~1000 sat network.

It's similar to, although much larger than, Iridium. Building it is one thing but making it profitable is another, as it making people accept the latency tradeoffs of satellite.

Ars says the latency is 25ms. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space...

They say it's due to lower orbits. Iridium is fewer satellites so they have to be higher. More w/ lower orbits means lower latency. Do you know if this is too good to be true?

Most terrestrial systems are now using fiber optics ... the speed of photons in a fiber is about 2/3rds the speed of light. The transmission of radio signals in the vacuum of space is theoretically at the speed of light so:

40000 / pi / 2 = 6366 40000 / 2 * 3 = 60000 60000 / pi / 2 = 9550 9550 - 6366 = 3184

Per the above, any satellite Internet system below about 3000 km above the earth will have latency that's competitive with fiber optics on earth (note that I haven't done the simultaneous solution to account for the uplink/downlink distance so it's actually a bit less). For the SpaceX system, there should be better latency than the terrestrial Internet. Please ignore the rounding ... this is a back-of-the-envelope exercise.

Fiber optics are great and far less susceptible to interference than radio - but if you Google articles on how high-frequency trading companies are installing line-of-sight microwave for their networks you'll see that fiber isn't our fastest technology.

There network will have minimal (30-40ms) latency hit vs ground based systems because there satellites are 300-1000 miles up vs the 20k miles that the current geostationary ones are at.

Not to mention the competitor will most likely have to do without the subsidies SpaceX received from the government.

You mean the competitive contract that SpaceX won to deliver supplies to the ISS? I've seen a few people claim that was a subsidy, but that's a bit far-fetched.

Unlikely, all rocket companies get government assistance, usually in the form of launch contracts. SpaceX has launched several USGC payloads already for example.

They just announced it's being pushed back to Wednesday.

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/964937069901447168

I've been hotspotting with Verizon for my primary internet connection since January 1. I'm currently paying $100/mo for their "unlimited" plan, which gets me 600kbps, or approximately the slowest viable tier of terrestrial DSL for which people usually pay in the neighborhood of $20 a month.

If I want to pay $10 more, I can get "beyond unlimited", with 4G hotspotting -- but only for the first 15GB, and then after that it's back to 600kbps again.

I'm canceling Netflix shortly because it's a miserable experience on this connection.

I'll be signing up the day Starlink becomes available and dropping Verizon to the cheapest plan they offer. Even if it's a little more expensive than what I'm currently paying, it'll be worth it just to give the middle finger to these bastards.

Heck, might even have a celebratory barbecue.

I've been using a hotspot from the Calyx Institute https://www.calyxinstitute.org/ as my sole internet connection for the past year and a half. It's a nonprofit which offers an "unlimited" hotspot on the Sprint network for $500/year. I get 16.3Mbps down and 3.96Mbps up (per Google) and streaming video works just fine. You might want to check that out instead.

This looks pretty fantastic, and the coverage map (https://coverage.sprint.com/IMPACT.jsp?#!/) looks like it handles most of the places I've been skulking about.

Thanks!

Maybe this will finally provide some competition for high speed in the US?

Or germany

Could this sort of network make it easier for other satellites to connect to a network? Does a space-to-space laser link that uses SpaceX's network to worm its way to some ground station use simpler/lighter/lower power hardware than a dedicated radio air-to-ground link?

I think that this will a glorious side-effect of effectively ensuring net neutrality without waiting for politicians to change the law.

And in general increasing the competition in a way that Comcast and others wont be able to block by buying politicians (see buying FCC or buying the laws that prohibit city-owned fiber).

I'll switch to Starlink just to stick it to Comcast.

Comcast magically dropped prices and upped service in areas where it had competition from Google Fiber but Google Fiber is too slow and too expensive to build.

I wonder how will Comcast react facing a competitor who can build out a competing network in 2 short years to serve all areas Comcast is available (and more).

Will they be crushed by massive defections or merely have to drastically lower the prices and improve the service?

Is it possible at the proposed orbital height that global latencies could end up being lower than fiber? Have they specifically mentioned satellite-to-satellite links?

For a worst case example, take New York City and Perth, Australia (rough antipodes). Would the orbital infrastructure allow for the only ground connections to be the end points? How many hops would be necessary?

Space comms are just so damn exciting to me. No atmosphere to mess with your lasers, no fiber optics to limit you to 2/3 light speed, no watery weather to contend with...

I doubt it. The problem is the ground stations. Even if the satellites have routing like Iridium they have to come back down to Earth in just a handful of locations, which are probably thousands of miles from your destination.

For a point of conparison Iridium also operates from relatively low orbits but has latency that is only barely usable for voice. Iridium only has one civilian ground station so your calls have to be relayed from there.

I just had a quick check on Google but no luck; has anyone calculated Starlink's intended cross section bandwidth?

I'm assuming SpaceX is building the satelites too? Haven't heard anything about that.

SpaceX seems to be pursuing their usual "let's bring stuff in-house as much as possible" strategy.

If you think about it, no existing supplier can produce enough gear for this satellite constellation, so either SpaceX is paying a supplier to build an assembly line, or SpaceX can pay the supplier for tech and build a SpaceX assembly line.

Plus existing suppliers manufacture under very different constraints than what SpaceX needs. They're launching many more satellites than typical and at greatly reduced payload cost than usual.

E.g. they're using cheaper terrestrial solar panels and cheaper redundant commodity electronic components. The economics change when you don't have to pay an arm and a leg for every ounce you send to space.

Yeah, you kinda got the impression that things were changing when Iridium was launching a 5 billion dollar satellite on a 50 million dollar rocket.

IridiumNEXT started with a budget of $2.1 billion for satellites and $800mm for launches.

http://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/iridium-next/

That's not that different of a ratio from a GEO comsat that costs $200mm and has a $65mm launch.

I haven't run the numbers for OneWeb.

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