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“Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#61

Post by kidme5 »

keewee7 wrote: post #57
georgeg23 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you do that, you might want to understand the other side, and how ignorance contributes to an unnecessary arms race. We in the US have driven most provocation in space. The military budget is more than the next nine countries combined (including China). Whether it be the Strategic Defense Initiative, unilaterally leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Prompt Global Strike, hypersonic missiles, the US is de…

Russia and China have been weponizing space for decades and they already have working hypersonic missiles.

If you know the history China/Russia are doing smaller-scale R&D type development mainly to respond to to US ditching arms control treaties and building offensive tech first (usually happening when Republicans in power).

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#62

Post by punnerud »

campchase wrote: post #32

My name is Joe Morrison, and I’m ready to be roasted on here again. Please feel free to ask me anything or challenge any of what I’ve written!

First thank you for the article. Looking forward to Part II. Two questions:

How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?

And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#63

Post by astrange »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46
bagels wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planet Labs captures ~30 megapixel images (usually though, these are quoted in terms of pixel size, eg. 5 meters per pixel) and has hundreds of satellites on orbit. I don't know about Digital Globe's capabilities, but they are also in this business as are others. Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability?

> Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)

If you do need highres images, it’s cheaper to get someone like Vexcel to take them from a plane, and it’s much more flexible wrt cloud cover too.

(That’s where the good “satellite” images in online maps come from.)

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#64

Post by coredog64 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46
bagels wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planet Labs captures ~30 megapixel images (usually though, these are quoted in terms of pixel size, eg. 5 meters per pixel) and has hundreds of satellites on orbit. I don't know about Digital Globe's capabilities, but they are also in this business as are others. Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability?

> Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)

I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ.

Even if the vessel can’t be boarded, high-res photographic evidence could be used to pursue legal action against the vessel’s owners.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#65

Post by rrrix1 »

phkahler wrote: post #33

I figure the market for "low" resolution imagery will be destroyed when Starlink decides to add something like a fixed wide angle 100 megapixel cameras to every satellite. There are a lot of options for what to do from there, but getting continuous global imagery would suddenly be possible.

You are vastly oversimplifying the problem here. One of the most obvious being, cameras don't really work without light on the subject being captured, and currently Starlink doesn't have a sun synchronous orbit like most (non-SAR) remote sensing birds do. Starlink would need to be completely reengineered from scratch to add even mediocre remote sensing capabilities without degrading the original mission of the Starlink platform (something akin to space mesh networking).

Put simply, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build one type of satellite that does one task very well than it is to do two tasks poorly.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#66

Post by m2fkxy »

coredog64 wrote: post #64
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)

I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ. Even if the vessel…

in maritime environments, I would argue you are better off tracking vessels with SAR + passive radiofrequency.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#67

Post by JumpCrisscross »

punnerud wrote: post #62
campchase wrote: post #32

My name is Joe Morrison, and I’m ready to be roasted on here again. Please feel free to ask me anything or challenge any of what I’ve written!

First thank you for the article. Looking forward to Part II. Two questions: How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink? And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?

> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?

Not the author, but Starlink’s parallel competitive threats are usually exaggerated. They have cheap capital and they own their own trucks. That helps. But it’s not a blocking advantage. Their existing fleet is only a marginal competitive advantage to a new sensor suite; there is little evidence they build better birds than anyone else (versus their rockets, which are in a class of their own).

> congestested frequency spectrum

Lasers.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#68

Post by JumpCrisscross »

coredog64 wrote: post #64
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)

I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ. Even if the vessel…

> fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean

This is the dorm delivery idea for space businesses. Everyone is working on it, including folks with no commercial ambitions, and the number of people willing to pay for it is small, and they’re cheap.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#69

Post by geysersam »

michaelnoguera wrote: post #11
theptip wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. It’s a good idea, and I bet folks like Cloudflare that already operate Edge Compute platforms will have a head-start here.

This makes me imagine a space station like data center in orbit that acts like a public cloud on earth, communicating directly with satellites and renting out processing time. I'm not sure how well economies of scale work when you have to pay for every kg you send up there, but it would be an interesting business model.

Is is cheaper for a satelite to transfer data to a space based datacenter than to a ground based one? If not, what's the benefit of locating the data center in orbit? (Except, of course, that it's awesome.)

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#70

Post by m2fkxy »

rrrix1 wrote: post #65
phkahler wrote: post #33

I figure the market for "low" resolution imagery will be destroyed when Starlink decides to add something like a fixed wide angle 100 megapixel cameras to every satellite. There are a lot of options for what to do from there, but getting continuous global imagery would suddenly be possible.

You are vastly oversimplifying the problem here. One of the most obvious being, cameras don't really work without light on the subject being captured, and currently Starlink doesn't have a sun synchronous orbit like most (non-SAR) remote sensing birds do. Starlink would need to be completely reengineered from scratch to add even mediocre remote sensing capabilities without degrading the original mission of the Starli…

SAR typically are in sun-synchronous orbits too, but mostly for power management reasons. difference is, of course, that they do not need to have their ascending node in daylight.

the only SAR constellations I know aren't in SSO are Israeli (due to launch geometry constraints) and NRO's birds (LACROS/ONYX/TOPAZ, whatever their names are) [1]. some of them have exotic retrograde orbits [2].

[1] see e.g. https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/onyx.htm

[2] see e.g. https://spaceflight101.com/delta-iv-nrol-47/nrol-47/

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