We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

Post by daymanstep » Sat, May 03, 2025, 12:27 PM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #11

greatgib wrote: post #9

[flagged]

It’s not big corps. Interns. Student projects. I make software typically used in the space industry and our customers are surprisingly small, just s dozen people each time. Startups, half of them funded by the EU startup funds. The kilogram in orbit is supposed to go down to $1000, and everyone’s joking that it becomes affordable to send a turd to space “for the lulz”. It’s literally the case. Ariane 5G is already do…

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, May 03, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #17

ks2048 wrote: post #6

I wonder how competition will play out against StarLink. People just choose which billionaire they like better?

Nah, people will chose on price, reliability, price, speed, price and free gigas.

Post by nkrisc » Sat, May 03, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #13

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress tends to have downsides. Highways and rail tracks destroy the environment and make areas hard to cross, but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing. In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.

You could turn that around. Progress in Earth bound astronomy has the downside of less satellite internet.

Post by entropie » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:02 PM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #21

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #8

I wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites. Anything like that would explain the secrecy...

The observation cadence could be game-changing. Instead of once-, twice- daily revisit times, in principle you could contemplate continuous observation, of large parts of the Earth, from LEO, with enough downstream bandwidth to make interesting use of all that data.

Post by jvanderbot » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #19

jvanderbot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).

Even if it would just deliver 1 or even just 10 meter resolution, I would imagine the high revisit frequency would make it commercially valuable, and potentially also provide some value to military/intelligence groups because it would make it harder to hide activity through careful timing and the data would come with fewer secrecy requirements. And I have no clue what is doable with SAR, but I'd imagine multiple sate…