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The European Space Agency has already demonstrated on-the-edge processing with Phi-Sat-1. They use AI to detect clouds and only downlink images below a certain cloud cover threshold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi-Sat-1
> Intel Movidius board with a Myriad II chip (VPU) So, is this cubesat 99% thermal control radiators or what?
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You are offering a pretty narrow worldview here, and a blatant simplification of geopolitics. Ignoring the elephant USA in the room here who’s militarization dwarfs any competition, then escalation (or even answers in kind) is not the only option on the table. There is also international agreements. International agreements has proven much more effective as a grand strategy then escalation. The nuclear non-proliferat…
> if USA was really concerned about militarization of space, then they would have pushed for international agreements long ago Like the Outer Space Treaty [1]? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
If the USA would be concerned about foreign powers using satellites to spy about their military activity, or otherwise plot and command an invading armies and weapon systems, they wouldn’t try to one-up these foreign powers with their own spying and communications infrastructure, they would push for strict international regulation for what you can do with data collected from space, as well as for what kind of information and commands you can upload to which kind of vehicles on or near the ground.
There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…
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It’s a dual-use technology, and while my job is to focus the commercial half of the equation, I’m not ashamed to support the US military and intelligence communities, either.
... Did you see what happened in Afganistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, South America? ... Did you hear about the torture, black sites, global surveillance, drone assassinations, and censorship? ... Did you see what happened to the people who blew the whistle on this stuff? And you're not ashamed to play a part in this? Is there some line they haven't crossed yet that would do it for you?
With greater network of more powerful imaging systems and an even greater computational power and statistical methods which can interpret this massive data in any way you want, this indeed becomes really dangerous. We have seen that states are still willing to lie grossly in order to justify terrible human tragedies (e.g. the Russian invasion into Ukraine had an equally false premise). So we should probably be increasingly wary of how governments use these systems.
In contrast when space infrastructure first became viable, one of the first thing the international community did was to sign an agreement promising not to use it to carry weapons[1]. I would like us to do something similar now as we enter this new era of space communication and unmanned semi-autonomous weapons systems.
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.
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…
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!
When Mike Griffin started the Space Development Agency under Trump in 2019, he said we need LEO constellations to track hypersonic missiles and be proliferated to be robust against anti-satellite tech. However, existing MEO satellites have proven capable of tracking hypersonics just fine. Meanwhile LEO satellites are way more vulnerable to ASAT, they can be directly hit. No... LEO only makes sense when you look at Mi…
While MEO satellites are able to do the job, they pose a greater “systemic risk” than LEO satellites do.
If a war goes hot with long range use of prompt global strike style hypersonic weapons against the USA or its closely allied military alliance partners like UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc… we’re talking about a scenario where the potential adversaries are going to be precipitously close to the use of anti satellite weapons, and potentially even nukes but let’s ignore them and focus on the satellites.
If you have a smaller number of larger MEO platforms (and they need to be larger to accommodate instruments that can to do their job from further away) your much more vulnerable to having large parts of your system knocked out. These larger platforms will also cost more, so you have less redundancy, higher costs, and are more vulnerable when your system will be needed most. The final systemic risk element is the post action debris risk… if a war goes hot and someone starts chucking ASAT weapons around, then we’re going to have a pile of debris, the sort of debris left behind by a kinetic kill ASAT in medium earth orbit is easily an order of magnitude more of an issue to other satellites for decades to centuries, it’s further away from all the existing space surveillance radar and optical systems on the ground making it harder to track the kind of small high velocity shrapnel that will have spread furthest away from the original orbit, which complicates the replacement of any destroyed space based assets as it will take longer to work out new safe orbits. LEO assets on the other hand have much shorter debris risk lifetimes, decades is usually the case as opposed to centuries, and LEO is much easier to track higher risk shrapnel debris down below 10cm, leading to better operational safety before and after a potentially satellite destroying hot war, meaning they are more likely to have a working system when needed and be able to replace it faster when damaged.
It’s a logical and reasonable argument on several fronts. However I do still agree with the assessment that eventually if the military has a sophistication LEO fleet of hundreds or thousands of Starlink style satellites, they are basically half way to the Star Wars “Brilliant Pebbles” architecture and it won’t be long until someone tries to build the other half of the architecture assuming they aren’t already planning this.
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With what sounds like the industry moving to something more like high throughput real time mapping, does that mean that there's a chance we'll see an open source imagery dataset/tile server sometime afterwards, when the current dated offerings become less competitive?
if only. archive satellite imagery pricing schemes are absurd.
So that satellite imagery providers could chuck them a copy with contractual guarantees about how and when the information can become public access, that satisfy the imagery providers and make the process streamlined enough to keep up with the increasingly volume of imagery being produced.
It would be a shame to see valuable archives of imagery that catalogs the history of our planet, lost due to someone losing track of the either the data itself or the copyright ownership (and thus are legally unable to keep the data) between now and the absurdly long time in the future that such images become public domain over a hundred years from now. Most companies don’t last a hundred years so this kind if stewardship feels like an important thing to start working on now rather than later.
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?
I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?).
And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers.
I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out.
> And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?
Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert.
What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).
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> 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 an…
An order of magnitude lower launch costs to LEO (about $1K/kg now for Falcon 9) and another two magnitudes with Starship.. is a blocking advantage. Constellations don't make sense otherwise, see history: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background Keep in mind lasers don't work to the ground unless there are no clouds and stable atmosphere. RF 10-30 GHz work fine to ground and are directional enough that spectrum…
Modern laser communication ground stations are designed or bring designed incorporating adaptive optics to significantly improve their resilience to atmospheric turbulence. Clouds remain an issue but most laser communications networks are designed with multiple ground stations to ensure sufficient good weather to provide continuous communications. Also several laser communications providers are designing their systems using relay satellites either MEO or GEO to serve as the space to ground really, centralising the higher power space to ground laser link and more expensive optics, and simultaneously placing them higher up enabling better ability to switch between multiple ground stations in the event of cloud disruption.
The laser communication industry is very small still but it’s growing as ground stations get more standard and economical, with commercial units available for both space and ground sides, for a couple of years now.