Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 179 posts

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#81

Post by fpgaminer »

I was curious about the financials of this project. Here's my back of the napkin:

According to (https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la...) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443.

Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 million subscribers.

For the U.S. alone, that'll probably never happen. But worldwide? Maybe. Though worldwide the price per subscribe will be less, often times substantially less.

On the other hand, SpaceX will have lots of operational discounts because its their own rockets, and they already have all the supply channels for building space tech. And maybe they aren't looking to payback in 10 years for this initial run; maybe they only want to break even so payback in 15 is good enough.

Just some numbers for thought.

P.S. Businesses unlucky enough to be in "rural" areas, aka most commercial business parks outside of tech cities, are in the unfortunate position of paying the local telephone company/AT&T/TimeWarner thousands per month for roughly dial-up speeds. SpaceX could charge the same but offer broadband speeds and get a nice chunk of business, methinks.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#82

Post by mrinterweb »

fpgaminer wrote: post #81

I was curious about the financials of this project. Here's my back of the napkin: According to ( https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la... ) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443. Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 millio…

I doubt that the per/satellite cost would be anywhere close to $80-100 million. I remember hearing that the plan was for these satellites to have significantly less mass than other satellites and therefore, one orbital launch could deliver many satellites. With these satellites orbiting ~30-34x closer to Earth, the satellites would need to have significantly less mass if they were going to not have their orbital distance not degrade too quickly. I don't know what the expected lifespan of these satellites will be, but I assume they will eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#83

Post by greglindahl »

fpgaminer wrote: post #81

I was curious about the financials of this project. Here's my back of the napkin: According to ( https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la... ) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443. Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 millio…

This discussion is about much cheaper satellites, for example you can fit ~ 40 onto a single launch.

OneWeb has announced $$ numbers, and they're much cheaper than $100 million each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#84

Post by hughes »

hackuser wrote: post #60
noonespecial wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Space is huge. This is a little like asking if there's enough space left in earths oceans to float a few thousand pingpong balls. 2) Present internet satellites are all in mostly geostationary orbits that are much further away then the proposed leo's. Realistically the ones we have now introduce a whopping 650ms. This will be a huge improvement.

> Present internet satellites are all in mostly geostationary orbits that are much further away then the proposed leo What about the LEO systems such as Iridium, etc. (I forget which is owned by whom and what their statuses are)?

Iridium is in LEO, but the comms hardware itself is pretty slow (1 to 2+ seconds latency). The throughput is also very low (2 to 4 kbit/s).

Iridium is a great low-cost, low-bandwidth network though.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#85

Post by kirrent »

fpgaminer wrote: post #81

I was curious about the financials of this project. Here's my back of the napkin: According to ( https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la... ) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443. Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 millio…

This isn't a very useful comparison. For one, according to their FCC application SpaceX is planning on launching satellites with a mass of less than 400kg. For comparison, SES-10, a communications satellite SpaceX launched recently, had a mass of around 5300kg. Secondly, they're planning on deploying them to an altitude of 1000km. Again, for comparison, SES-10 went to geostationary orbit, which is a reasonably common communications satellite orbit, at 36000km altitude, though the Falcon 9 only had to push it into GTO, which still takes quite a lot of energy.

Finally, the plan is obviously contingent on bringing launch costs further down and realising economies of scale in the satellite manufacture. I'm not sure if they can do it, but being able to launch at least 10, and maybe even as many as 20 at once makes a large difference.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#86

Post by kirrent »

slinger wrote: post #34
Klasiaster wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, you still are limited to speed of light – so > ~100 ms roundtrips for half of the globe.

Sad.. Let's hope for breakthroughs on quantum entanglement research then

Only if you're looking to play the CHSH game with Bob.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#87

Post by kirrent »

slinger wrote: post #56
gknoy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed of transmission of Quantum entanglement would, I believe, be limited by the speed of light between the two points in space, without having to traverse a path that follows the curve of the surface of the earth. So, communicating from Australia to Norway would traverse the diameter of the earth, rather than half of the circumference (plus satellites of course)

> I don't think that it can be used to transmit information at all What if the "no-cloning theorem"[0] wasn't actually right? That would enable doing a bunch of copies of the same particle state, making it possible to predict the probability distribution of each particle. That way it would be possible to send information doing measurements[1] rather than forcing a particle state. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-…

> What if the "no-cloning theorem"[0] wasn't actually right?

So, quantum mechanics isn't linear in nature any more? And it gets to transmit information superluminally? It's probably more likely that we're all living in a simulation and the devs accept a pull request from us increasing the speed of light so we can play games better. The no-cloning theorem itself is actually pretty fundamental to quantum mechanics and it would be very unexpected if it was wrong.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#88

Post by dharma1 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #79
dharma1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, until some of the thousands of small satellites about to be launched (not just by SpaceX) star breaking down and creating space junk that will become a serious problem to the launch of new satellites and spacecraft http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/20/mega-constellatio...

My understanding is that all new satellites have plans for deorbiting when they reach the end of their lifespan.

That's the plan - but when you have thousands or tens of thousands of satellites malfunctions can happen. Also, lots of existing space debris orbiting the earth that can hit satellites

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#89

Post by wolfram74 »

mrinterweb wrote: post #82
fpgaminer wrote: post #81

I was curious about the financials of this project. Here's my back of the napkin: According to ( https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la... ) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443. Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 millio…

I doubt that the per/satellite cost would be anywhere close to $80-100 million. I remember hearing that the plan was for these satellites to have significantly less mass than other satellites and therefore, one orbital launch could deliver many satellites. With these satellites orbiting ~30-34x closer to Earth, the satellites would need to have significantly less mass if they were going to not have their orbital dist…

Saying their mass needs to be lower to reduce orbit degradation is the opposite of true. Assuming two spheres of equal size, their drag and thus change in momentum will be the same at the same altitude. But if one sphere was made of lead and the other made of styrofoam, the styrofoam one will decelerate much faster than the lead one. So: lighter satellite of the same shape means shorter life span. But drag dies down roughly exponentially in altitude, so if they're at 1000 km, rather than 100km, that's not a super big factor.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#90

Post by mabbo »

It's been said before, but what people need to understand is that the goal of this service isn't to make money- it's to balance demand.

SpaceX can plan to launch be 30% more launches than their actual customers need. All those extra rockets are used for internet satellites. If there's an accident (boom) or a sudden need for more rockets, the internet satellites get delayed, and the paying customer gets a rocket.

If customers are finicky about using re-flown rockets, that's fine, the internal customer doesn't care. If a customer backs out for any reason, the internal customer takes their place.

Rocket production gets a smooth flow going, which improves production efficiency.

Post reply on HN