41–50 of 55 posts
The original effort was all the way back in 1997 by a company called Teledesic. But it was essentially abandoned after other satcom constellations like Iridium when bankrupt. Loon was an interesting attempt. I'm surprised we don't see any one trying to make HAPS (high altitude solar powered drones, essentially) work for communications. In principle they can do the same as satellites but more effectively and at better…
The original effort was all the way back in 1997 by a company called Teledesic. But it was essentially abandoned after other satcom constellations like Iridium when bankrupt. Loon was an interesting attempt. I'm surprised we don't see any one trying to make HAPS (high altitude solar powered drones, essentially) work for communications. In principle they can do the same as satellites but more effectively and at better…
What a huge waste of energy, orbital space and pollution of the upper atmosphere when these eventually come back down, Elon needs to stop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Project Loon was futuristic. It did not achieve the scale of Starlink because it failed, not because it wasn’t futuristic. Google also invested early into self-driving cars and remains well ahead of Musk in that area.
According to you balloons with radio transmitters are futuristic technology. It didn't achieve scale because the benefits that it offered were too small, and it was too impractical. There was literally nothing futuristic about it at all. You have to understand that starlink itself is only quasi-futuristic and it's the idea of SpaceX that is futuristic. Starlink is just a spin-off. Bringing faster satellite internet a…
Lofting up balloons, an technology from the 3rd century, carrying radios, a technology developed a century ago, and having the whole thing fail because it was a stupid idea, that's some real futuristic stuff right there.
Rockets are just really expensive. It's hard to get stuff into orbit cheaply, and even now I wouldn't be surprised if Starlink is a net-loss product for SpaceX still. Google's business strategy for the longest time has revolved around selling software services. AdSense, YouTube, Google Drive - all of these are services they can scale up by turning a knob and waiting for servers to spin up. Rocket science is a whole d…
The original effort was all the way back in 1997 by a company called Teledesic. But it was essentially abandoned after other satcom constellations like Iridium when bankrupt. Loon was an interesting attempt. I'm surprised we don't see any one trying to make HAPS (high altitude solar powered drones, essentially) work for communications. In principle they can do the same as satellites but more effectively and at better…
Facebook's Aquila was a HAPS drone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila
The bottleneck was always getting satellites up in space. SpaceX has an effective monopoly on launches at this point, so it isn't a surprise that they were the first ones to establish themselves in the satellite internet market.
That SpaceX was able to launch 60 satellites per launch vs competitor's 6 and was able to build them for $1/4 million per satellite vs a competitors $10M made a lot more difference in terms of constellation viability than the launch cost.
We shouldn't be filling low or it with all this junk that's going to be obsolete in 10 years. What a huge waste of energy, orbital space and pollution of the upper atmosphere when these eventually come back down, Elon needs to stop.
Starlink's cannot stay in their low Earth orbit for 10 years even if they wanted to. They have a limited amount of fuel to counteract the air drag.
Yes, they essentially did. Project Loon used balloons rather than satellites, but is otherwise surprisingly similar to Starlink, technically. And as far as I've heard, a lot of Project Loon personnel ended up at SpaceX. Also, the synergy may be a good part of the reason why Google was a large early investor in SpaceX. https://x.company/projects/loon/
Loon balloons were more like floating cell towers. Starlink is a broadband first platform that will also do some cellular sort of eventually (just beginning to roll out now).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook's Aquila was a HAPS drone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila
Do you know why they haven't taken it further? The page talks about Zephyr drones as a follow-up, but I can't find much about them actually doing any further tests.
My understanding is that FB hired lots of smart people who were very good at building research prototypes but not as experienced in building low cost products. Eventually the company refocused on the "metaverse" and many of the personnel at the Connectivity Lab were transferred to Amazon Kuiper.