Starry starry night? No, it's just more low Earth orbit satellites as BT and OneWeb ink deal Government-owned satellite broadband slinger OneWeb says it is planning to loft 648 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites in the next eight months, after signing terms with BT for a new Distribution Partner Agreement. This builds on the initial Memorandum of Understanding the pair signed in July and will see BT test how LEO …
Except of course it's not nationalization is it? Those railways have been brought into public ownership, but almost all the work is carried out by private contractors. Of course I'm not suggesting for a moment that the deals struck with those private contractors are anything other than completely transparent or that those private contractors may have links with any current or former government ministers.
Hopefully there will be a low'ish cost option for us offshore Yachtsmen and women. Inmarsat et al are all good and well, but still so bloody expensive that they feel like a premium rather than as a standard safety feature that everyone should be able to afford.
Still, and excuse the pun, but with Starlink et al slowly evolving - the tide does seem to be turning.
Ensuring that the Kessler Syndrome will indeed bring us back to the 1940s.
Until recently, to put a satellite into space you needed to be part of the space industry, work with NASA, generally be reliable.
Ever since everyone and his dog have started making rockets, everyone and his dog are now chucking things up in orbit and I don't feel like they know what the hell they're doing.
Oh for sure, they know they want to make money and space seems as good a place as any. No cables or backhoes to worry about (not to mention no pesky local laws to obey).
But there are other things to worry about and I think there are too many companies vying for opportunity for all of them to have competent personnel who know what they're doing.
So some of the constellations being proposed are not actually too bad in this regard. Starlink satellites, for example, orbit at around 550km. Something at that altitude will decay and enter the atmosphere within about ten years, so things are self-cleaning to a reasonable degree, especially once you factor in that the vast majority of satellites will successfully self-terminate and self-dispose in a controlled way.
OneWeb is kicking around up at 800+km where the orbital decay time, due to the tyranny of exponential growth, is much more like 1,000 years. Admittedly there's a lot more space that far out, but it means any debris that does end up there is going to stay up there and there's nothing we can do about it. That's an issue not being taken seriously enough by uk.gov on this little adventure into space.
It's not so long ago when the consensus seemed to be that one of the reasons we are not detecting alien civilisations was because there would only a short window during which radio was used and we'd all be going wired and/or fibre. It seems the move from wireless to wired was the blip and it's all going radio again, with 5G being touted as cheaper infrastructure than fibre.
Cost effectiveness will flip between wired/wireless as technology improves but eventually even the tightest beam directional radios won't be able to compete with fibre for bandwidth into a box for terrestrial transmissions.
In cosmic terms, the lifespan of any radio technology is so short that finding another civilisation by looking for any specific signal type* is akin to looking for Martian meteorites and finding one in the first pebble you pick up on your doorstep.
*those that we can understand at the tiny received power levels, everything else is just background mush until it can be decoded and there's no guarantee we're capable of recording the full spectrum extra terrestrial radio signals at high enough resolution anyway.
If they knew, they wouldn't do it. The driving force is as always greed, and space is the new Wild West where the grip of the law is weak and you can get away with pretty much anything. (Which doesn't mean that you'll be successful either, but that's another story.)
A business plan relying on there being enough "locations where there has been a disaster" to break even is doomed from the beginning. As for people living in the sticks, they don't necessarily have much money to spend on (slow) Internet.
It's once again a solution looking for a problem, and, I guess, an excuse to neglect ground infrastructure.
"A business plan relying on there being enough "locations where there has been a disaster" to break even is doomed from the beginning. "
<we're doo0ooooomed>
Maybe "they" know more about climate change and increasing extreme weather events than we do
</we're dooooooomed>
"What on Earth?"
This is being set up with I suspect mostly tax payer's money, when it gets sold off at a snip there will be benefits available for those who helped it along.
Just because governments don't plan much beyond the next election, doesn't mean the people in them are not looking slightly further ahead.
Waste of resources and ruining things are the mainstay of human activities.
You'll soon have hundreds of complete or partial (aborted) constellations flying up there like a a swarm of angry mosquitoes, as about anybody who has the money will jump on the bandwagon. Some will never complete their constellation, leaving clouds of orphaned, useless satellites zooming across the sky, other will, but they will realize that competition, and a small market to start with, won't ever cover the costs. Many will pull the plug (more zombie satellites up there), others will keep trying a little longer until rising costs and ever-increasing collisions make them throw the towel too.
(Yes, yes, they will all properly dispose of their satellites, sure, dream on. They will just file for bankruptcy and that will be it. You can control governmental agencies or big telecom companies, but not mushrooming single-purpose fly-by-night companies based in the Bahamas or some such.)
Now is probably a good time to start thinking about how to clean up local space while making money out of it.
The good news is, in the near future there will be little chance of waking up one morning to discover vast alien ships floating over every capital city, they will have to navigate the maze of junk first, maybe blast some out of the way and give us time to phone Will Smith
"Can we not just have one of these damn networks"
No, because without competition, the natural human gravitation towards greed would make it exorbitantly expensive to use. Not to mention the "national security" implications of running your nations data through a hostile nations data pipes (yes, I include the USA in that "hostile" group too)
From the oneweb webpages:
https://oneweb.net/network
"Position Navigation and Timing (PNT)
OneWeb’s first generation system is being used to develop an innovative and accurate timing capability in a project with the UK-based space hub Satellite Applications Catapult that requires no satellite changes and minimal ground network modification. OneWeb intends to introduce PNT capabilities on subsequent generations of satellites, to complement existing services, and to provide additional global resilience for this critical infrastructure."
From the details of the implementation I've heard so far, it seems like a very neat solution they have working. Perhaps the Reg could follow up for more details?
I enjoyed laughing at the government purchase at the time. I'm not so certain any more that it was a bad idea.
What is the betting that buried somewhere is a bit of code that means the OneWeb satellites have to check in with an existing GPS system......
On the plus side all this junk that is being thrown up SHOULD be clear of any of the more useful platforms that are in MEO and Geostationary.
On the other hand there is so much now that some sort of calamity is going to be inevitable, even if it is "blue on blue" within a constellation.
so much orbital crap that anything smaller than a 5 Km diameter boulder will be broken up on way down. Full orbital asteroid defence which might let remote areas have working phones. One briefly had visions of Earth freezing as the satellite swarms block the sun for a few years. Pity the astronomers with new shiny powerful and obstructed telescopes coming online in a decade
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