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I was Director of Marketing with Teledesic, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky from 1995 to 2000. I'm a huge fan of what Musk is doing, with order of magnitude cheaper launch costs and satellite hardware. AMA.
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How will devices on the ground communicate with the satellites? i.e. do we still need fixed dishes, or are we looking at something new so an iPhone can get signal right from the satellite?
I believe Musk is, like Teledesic, planning to use the Ka-band. That means the smallest antenna would be the size of a large laptop (and that's only if phased arrays become cheap enough). So, it would work for a car, plane, boat, or house, but would be too big to use while walking.
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As opposed to current pipe dreams: * gigafactory under construction * freemont factory producing ~50K vehicles/year * spacex successfully, repeatedly delivering payloads to orbit (and successfully demonstrating their crew escape vehicle recently)
Just because something is being built with other people's money does not make something a success. None of the companies Elon has been involved with have ever actually generated a profit -- they have largely just taken advantage of speculative investors and their willingness to buy into his ideas.
It doesn't preclude it, either.
Pretty much every business larger than one or two person operations uses Other People's Money to grow to profitability. See Facebook, etc.
Use of OPM doesn't guarantee success, but for industries that have large capital entry and operating costs, it's necessary.
Musk is working in fields that manipulate matter, not just bits - so it will take longer to see if Tesla and SpaceX reach profitability ("success") than it would for a generic software startup.
Be patient. You may not know whether a company or a child is successful for a couple of decades, at least.
Musk claims to want to launch 4,000 or so satellites. The Goddard Space Flight Center indicates that there are 2,271 satellites in orbit now. I'm wondering to what degree this would make it more likely to have a negative feedback loop of satellite destruction in the case of a satellite being hit by space junk.
4000 is still a large number, especially at a higher LEO altitude where junk lasts forever. There's a reasonable case to be made for shifting to a regime where we require that satellite providers remove more mass and more pieces of debris from orbit than they put into orbit. But we don't want to split the baby and force them into bankruptcy either. The weak interim guidance might be that built-in deorbiting devices are required for anything with more than a ~10 year orbital lifetime. This doesn't end the Kessler Syndrome cascade, but it at least doesn't contribute very much. Presently there is only a ~25 year voluntary initiative, and adherence is not universal.
The most advanced initiative in this area is the geosynchronous graveyard belt, which the FCC enshrined into law for US telecom providers, but even that fails a large fraction of the time.
If this were to ultimately succeed in cheap internet everywhere, it doesn't bode well for other projects like Google's Loon. https://www.google.com/loon/ Unless they can do it cheaper I suppose.
From the article: "SpaceX would need permission from countries to operate the service, a process that could be difficult, if not impossible." Yep. To operate in many countries an ISP has to block access to a lot of content. It differs greatly from country-to-country. Would they really get involved in that? That would mean taking orders from governments all over the world and implementing blocks per those orders. Or w…
Note that countries have not succeeded in stopping satellite phone users within their borders... for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan use satellite phones extensively.
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How far did you get? What went wrong? What sort of latency/bandwidth did you expect to achieve? Was it relaying via geosynch/higher orbit 'hubs' or peer to peer sideways routing?
We raised $1.6 B, received the largest spectrum allocation in the history of the world (1000 Megahertz, in the Ka band, available globally), and launched one test satellite. But, the biggest problem with these sorts of systems is that there is no MVP. Essentially everything has to work before anything can. Our design was for a network of Low Earth Orbit satellites, which would mean cellular-like latency. We were plan…
Musk claims to want to launch 4,000 or so satellites. The Goddard Space Flight Center indicates that there are 2,271 satellites in orbit now. I'm wondering to what degree this would make it more likely to have a negative feedback loop of satellite destruction in the case of a satellite being hit by space junk.
The ability to go off-grid is becoming more of a reality for me now. I'd love to be able to get a cabin in the middle of nowhere, slap some solar panels on top still have access to highspeed internet. Even if you didn't want to go off-grid, this could open up a lot of developing countries to being more viable remote-working locations. I recently spent some time in Bali and considered moving there for awhile but ultim…
Isn't the internet by very definition a grid?