back to article Amazon convinces FCC it can avoid space junk chaos

Amazon's plan to launch a series of satellites to offer broadband internet service can move ahead now that the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has endorsed the web giant's plan to keep space tidy. Barring unforeseen obstacles, Amazon expects to launch its first Project Kuiper satellites "in early 2023." Project …

  1. gbchew
    Thumb Up

    Raise your hand if you think Amazon or SpaceX wouldn't violate any agreement, contract, or law they could profitably afford to violate.

    When your old gran gets smashed flat by flaming debris that used to be part of a flying sales funnel, they'll just tap the legal department, pay the fine, settle out of court, and launch two more.

    1. Catkin Silver badge

      I imagine the deaths from space debris compare quite favourably with the deaths of workers needed to maintain and telecommunications cable/fibre.

    2. MachDiamond Silver badge

      "When your old gran gets smashed flat by flaming debris that used to be part of a flying sales funnel, they'll just tap the legal department, pay the fine, settle out of court, and launch two more."

      Flaming debris is less to be worried over than the loss of useful access to space once all of the companies have lofted even half of their intended fleets. The reason they are choosing low Earth orbit is for ping time which is mainly a concern of gamers. Just about everybody else can live with the latency of signals being exchanged with sats in geostationary orbit even if they don't like it. The vast majority of people that need high speed internet are in places that are already well served leaving the rural and way-off-the-track customers to be served. Most of the world's population doesn't have the income to pay for the service much less a computer that will work on the web. That's a pie that isn't going to divide up into three new providers so at some point there will be a whole flock of birds that are just left to deorbit in their own time. Many of the initial Starlink satellites are dead and drifting with no way to be brought down. After all this, it will get harder and harder to launch weather sats, missions to the moon and the rest of the solar system. For every dead satellite that can be tracked, there are loads of bits and leftover pieces that came from those deployments that can't be tracked.

      1. Christoph

        There's also the problem of ground-based astronomy trying to see the stars through all the satellites.

        1. ITS Retired

          Keep this up and there will be enough stuff/junk in orbit to block enough sun to stop global warming.

          See, it ain't all bad, even if it is all for profit. /s

      2. Barrie Shepherd

        "The reason they are choosing low Earth orbit is for ping time which is mainly a concern of gamers."

        I think ping time is mainly the concern of the financial institutions and their search for the 'instant' transaction.

        They built a microwave system across from the UK to Europe and around the financial cities because it was faster than satellite/cable/fibre optic.

        Financial institutions will be more than happy to pay well over the odds, and certainly more than gamers, for shortest ping - particularly from Europe to the USA and Asian markets.

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge
          Megaphone

          Calling, too

          Video and audio calling needs low latency, as otherwise they degenerate into a mush of "you go first".

          You can already see the latency in a Teams call, as people start to talk over each other due to the "x is about to speak" cues being delayed.

          A Chair can handle this for a large meeting by choosing who gets to hold the conch, but that doesn't work for the majority of meetings with fewer than perhaps ten people.

        2. MachDiamond Silver badge

          "I think ping time is mainly the concern of the financial institutions"

          It's of such a concern that even sats in LEO will be too slow. The volume stock traders located their machines near to where the exchange's servers are to get the best latency figures since those trades are slicing milliseconds to make pennies per transaction. If they can't hit the volumes and at the right instant, they can't make money.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The reason they are choosing low Earth orbit is for ping time which is mainly a concern of gamers.

        Not really.

        The closer they are to the ground, the better the link budget is, and the smaller the footprint is, which is beneficial for large constellations with large customer numbers. They would like them as low as they can get, until atmospheric drag limits it.

  2. MachDiamond Silver badge

    The end of space

    Starlink has a planned constellation of 42,000 satellites that have an expected lifetime of 5 years. OneWeb is adding more to LEO and now Amazon is getting into the game. This is not going to end well.

    1. Spherical Cow Silver badge

      Re: The end of space

      Starlink satellites are quite low. When a Starlink satellite is switched off or fails, it starts to gradually get even lower due to slight atmospheric drag, and in about 5 years it re-enters and burns up. They are not a long-term concern.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: The end of space

        "When a Starlink satellite is switched off or fails, it starts to gradually get even lower due to slight atmospheric drag, and in about 5 years it re-enters and burns up. They are not a long-term concern."

        Says a multi-billion dollar advertising company, all of which are well known for telling the truth at all times.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The end of space

        "... it starts to gradually get even lower due to slight atmospheric drag, and in about 5 years it re-enters and burns up. They are not a long-term concern."

        Unless some part of the dead (and unresponsive to manouevering commands) satellite just happens to land on your house - one assumes this is of some concern to your family and friends ?

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: The end of space

          That's not really a concern, these LEO satellites are so small that they break and burn up on reentry and nothing dense enough to directly cause an issue lands intact.

          They're deliberately flimsy, because every kg shaved from each sat saves a very significant launch cost.

          The primary concern is orbital collision. The more stuff in LEO, the more difficult it is to safely launch anything to LEO or higher orbits.

          One collision could easily deny orbit to everyone for five to ten years.

      3. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: The end of space

        The concern is that while you're waiting a twentieth of a long lifetime for the satellites to come down, they might hit something, possibly another dead satellite. All those pieces generated by the collision will have decaying orbits too. Just five years to clean up all that rubbish, except that each of those pieces now gets its chance to hit something, and that would generate more pieces. Waiting five years before more space systems can be set up is a problem.

        This problem gets harder to handle as we throw more stuff up there. The U.S. has already authorized two companies to put up tens of thousands of things each, each company hoping to make billions in profits. The UK has a company of their own that is planning to set up a constellation, though they kept changing their minds on how big and what for. What stops other countries from deciding to do the same? Russia has plenty of space that's poorly cabled. They could benefit from a satellite network, but it obviously can't be a U.S.-based one. Why don't they find a couple of their companies to put up thousands. India's got ambitions to expand their space program, mobile-only internet coverage for some parts of their country, and poor environmental regulations on the surface let alone kilometers away. See if they can make a partnership to set up their own. If India did it, China will want to do it, and in any case it could be handy for the military bases they're building in far away places without great communication links. The EU, not to be left out of the sovereign internet game, might want their own program. All these people launching things will reduce prices, so more countries or companies would have the ability to start launching now and worry about whether there's a management problem later. Perhaps it's worth worrying about how we're going to deal with the problem before all that happens, which does not include giving some head starts to someone now so they get the first mover advantage while we've frozen everyone else.

      4. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: The end of space

        "in about 5 years it re-enters and burns up. They are not a long-term concern."

        The expected lifetime of the satellites is also 5 years which leads to a big conundrum with Starlink. Even as fast as they are throwing them up isn't fast enough to establish the planned fleet before the earliest ones start failing. It's a big problem to have unresponsive satellites in orbit as they can't be moved.

        The one thing that these satellites are interfering with in a major way is asteroid spotting which is best done in the morning and evening. The Starlink and other LEO satellites will be lit by the sun and that's what causes the bad trails in long exposure photos. SpaceX did try to use a black matte finish to stealth the satellites and learned some high school physics about black-body heat absorption. All of those test articles are toast.

  3. Dinanziame Silver badge
    WTF?

    WTF is Amazon doing in the internet satellite business? Is there even profit to be obtained from people who, from the very start, don't already have a good internet connection?

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      You could ask the same of SpaceX - will any of them make money without tapping gov for subsidies ever?

      The USA is a special basket-case of crap internet and reasonably wealthy folks in the sticks who might be able to pay, but as you point out there are huge areas that are without decent connection precisely as they lack money to make it worth businesses going there (yes, i know, gov policy and corruption pays a part as well). Even with its ~1M subscribers Elon has been whining about how much it costs to provide this service and can governments please help. Yes, Ukraine is an unusual case but he was wanting *way* more than the advertised $600 deposit and $100/month to provide connections per terminal.

      1. Blank Reg

        This is iridium all over again. Do they not have any accountants at these companies telling them they will never make their money back? Or maybe they are working with bullshit customer projections from sales and marketing

        1. Barrie Shepherd

          "This is iridium all over again."

          Wasn't Iridium only saved because it provided 'emergency' communications for the US military (and presumably US three letter organisations)?

          1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

            It was salvaged from bankruptcy and having the satellites de-orbited by the US gov for that, but it was not "saved" in the sense of a going concern. The original investors like Motorola, etc, lost billions.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "You could ask the same of SpaceX - will any of them make money without tapping gov for subsidies ever?"

        SpaceX has been receiving various subsidies for a while in order to provide broadband services to far-flung communities miles away from any dedicated infrastructure.

        such as: "SpaceX was awarded $2.2 billion and $2.8 billion in federal contracts in 2021 and 2022, respectively, the majority of which came from NASA, according to public records. Those figures also include its deals with the SDA contracts, but exclude any classified contracts."

        https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-subsidies-tesla-billions-spacex-solarcity-2021-12?r=US&IR=T

      3. MachDiamond Silver badge

        "there are huge areas that are without decent connection"

        There are already two satellite internet companies with coverage across the US. There are also things like wireless internet even in my area where we have cable except on "the hill" where there is no cable but might be getting fiber as Frontier has discontinued landline POTS phone service and is using their corridors to thread in fiber so they can offer internet, voip, etc. All Starlink, OneWeb and Kuiper are bringing is faster ping/lower latency. If you've chosen to live out in the sticks, why would you whine about not having access to services that you'd be able to get in the city?

  4. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Holmes

    Avoid spacde junk?

    And in the meantime, they will create a whole load more space junk.

  5. ecofeco Silver badge

    Sub-head says it all

    We wanted cool stuff but got useless tat instead.

    Now excuse me while I'm off to try and monetize steaming piles of fresh bollocks as the latest hipster trend. Someone's already cornered the market on stale bollocks so I have to rush!

  6. rnturn

    The FCC? What restrictions does the FCC have on the creation of space junk? Why isn't Amazon having to convince NASA -- or, perhaps, the DoD -- that their brazillion satellites aren't going to cause problems?

    1. Blank Reg

      Or maybe the Space Force :)

    2. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      FCC, NASA, DoD - All American governmental departments.

      Fair enough, it's an American company, but these things cover the whole world, so why aren't international organisations involved?

      Related to that, if the FCC refused, what would stop a fully owned Amazon company based in the small country of Togreenze doing the launch instead?

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        "Related to that, if the FCC refused, what would stop a fully owned Amazon company based in the small country of Togreenze doing the launch instead?"

        This is the only part that has a satisfactory answer. Nothing would prevent them launching the satellites from Togreenze, but they would then be prohibited from selling communications with the satellites in the U.S., where they're presumably looking for customers. The FCC regulates any communications equipment in the U.S., so if they say no to the uplinks to the satellites, the entire domestic service would be cut off and no profit for Amazon. If they're hoping to make profits there, they'll get that approval before the expensive launches. If they don't intend to sell the service to anybody in the U.S., they're free to ignore the FCC as they like.

        The fact that this is the only restriction that affects these companies is not good. The FCC is not an expert on whether something is a bad idea in space, and it obviously has no jurisdiction over international activities or input from international governments.

        1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Ahhh. That makes sense. Thank-you!

  7. jake Silver badge

    The FCC? How Universal!

    "Our orbital debris mitigation plans demonstrate the Kuiper System is designed to meet or exceed all requirements set forth by the FCC."

    I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Pakistanis and miscellaneous very wealthy Islamic states will take that into consideration as they shoot down the blasphemous, free-speech loving infernal machines.

    There goes low-Earth orbit ... and safe launches in general. All for the almighty buck. Bastards.

  8. Muscleguy
    Alien

    Ah well, it was nice getting into orbit or putting things there wasn’t it? What halcyon days before the debris chain reaction cataclysm.

    Icon since the aliens won’t be able to visit either.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      yup - the Kessler syndrome might already have started...

      https://www.space.com/kessler-syndrome-space-debris

    2. Jamie Jones Silver badge
      Mushroom

      I'm sure the visiting aliens will have the technology to avoid / clear the space junk. They'll just wait until they are ready to invade. At the moment they are having a quiet chuckle (as aliens do) about us being trapped in our self-imposed prison!

    3. doublelayer Silver badge

      "Icon since the aliens won’t be able to visit either."

      That depends on why the aliens want to visit. If they're the type who doesn't like competition, they can probably just travel on by, laugh about how we couldn't even manage to get off our planet without messing it up, then fire into our junk cloud to expand it and destroy anything that still works. While we're busy dodging falling internet pieces and trying to debug the network drops, they can cheerfully blow us up whenever is convenient. If they're friendly, then they probably have some methods of interfering with junk and might helpfully remove enough of it to land something, then give us some tools to finish the rest of it. I think the scenario most likely to cause them problems (assuming basic sci-fi alien tactics and drives) is if we're tasty, in which case they don't want to pollute their food supply but it's probably not worth the slow cleanup process.

  9. David Pearce

    Congestion

    So Kuiper is just above the Starlink orbit and they in turn are just above Hubble, the ISS a bit lower.

    Any launch failures and you will risk collisions

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