> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?
I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?).
And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers.
I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out.
> And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?
Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert.
What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).
> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?
Not the author, but Starlink’s parallel competitive threats are usually exaggerated. They have cheap capital and they own their own trucks. That helps. But it’s not a blocking advantage. Their existing fleet is only a marginal competitive advantage to a new sensor suite; there is little evidence they build better birds than anyone else (versus their rockets, which are in a class of their own).
An order of magnitude lower launch costs to LEO (about $1K/kg now for Falcon 9) and another two magnitudes with Starship.. is a blocking advantage. Constellations don't make sense otherwise, see history: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Background
Keep in mind lasers don't work to the ground unless there are no clouds and stable atmosphere. RF 10-30 GHz work fine to ground and are directional enough that spectrum can be reused and multiple beams formed with one phased array. The real limitation is ITU regulation on total power flux density on the ground for all constellations in these frequencies.
Lasers work to the ground better than your implying. ,
Modern laser communication ground stations are designed or bring designed incorporating adaptive optics to significantly improve their resilience to atmospheric turbulence. Clouds remain an issue but most laser communications networks are designed with multiple ground stations to ensure sufficient good weather to provide continuous communications. Also several laser communications providers are designing their systems using relay satellites either MEO or GEO to serve as the space to ground really, centralising the higher power space to ground laser link and more expensive optics, and simultaneously placing them higher up enabling better ability to switch between multiple ground stations in the event of cloud disruption.
The laser communication industry is very small still but it’s growing as ground stations get more standard and economical, with commercial units available for both space and ground sides, for a couple of years now.
> If they used it to block, sure. Starlink’s advantage is SpaceX’s margin.
As long as Starlink competitors use SpaceX to reach orbit, the advantage is realized on both Starlink launches (as savings) AND on competitors’ launches (as profit). Doesn’t that make SpaceX’s advantage 2x their margin?
> the advantage is realized on both Starlink launches (as savings) AND on competitors’ launches (as profit). Doesn’t that make SpaceX’s advantage 2x their margin?
Sort of. Every dollar of competitors’ launch margin doesn’t go to Starlink. SpaceX’s near-infinite fundraising capacity, and thus low cost of capital, is far more significant. (There are also orbital trade-offs between imaging and comms.)
I have to wonder how sustainable this is. From the perspective of an investor, I would not be excited by Tesla being down 70% off peak and Twitter becoming the most notable corporate clusterfuck of the year. Investing in SpaceX these days seems like a bet that the CEO will be so distracted by his other problems that he won't have time to mess with the people actually running it.
What I actually said is "most notable corporate clusterfuck of the year".
We don't know how it's actually going. Musk is a notorious BSer, and as a privately held company, they don't have to release actual numbers.
But Musk took a company that was doing just fine, made a weed-joke-priced offer, changed his mind, tried to BS and wriggle his way out of the deal, and grudgingly went through it when it became obvious a chancery court judge was likely to force him to buy it anyhow. With that alone it was probably the most notable corporate clusterfuck of the year.
And that's before the actual takeover, where he loaded it up with so much debt that -- and this is according to him -- it could very well be bankrupt in short order. He then flailed around with his amateur-league management dramatics for months in ways that if you somehow missed, you can Google. All while ignoring a much more valuable company that's the source of his wealth as its stock price plummeted by 70%.
If you think there's a more notable corporate clusterfuck in 2022, please do name it.
If not, how narrow can be made a beam by using a beam-forming phased array 10-20 m wide? The diffraction limit at 30 GHz (10 cm) should be reasonably small.
Unfortunately not ready for prime time yet, optical beamforming today is only a few degrees steerable angle and single beam. Also low power and poorly focused.
Totally agree. But the frontier is advancing thanks to LiDAR. And in the meantime, the advantages of laser relay and downlink are vast enough to make mechanical actuation worth it. Particularly for unboosted birds in LEO.
> Curious how LiDAR tech could be used for high speed communication?
Lasers don’t care if they’re carrying data out or on return. The same optics being pursued for LiDAR have applications in communications. Solid-state waveguides and MEMS being examples.
When Mike Griffin started the Space Development Agency under Trump in 2019, he said we need LEO constellations to track hypersonic missiles and be proliferated to be robust against anti-satellite tech.
However, existing MEO satellites have proven capable of tracking hypersonics just fine. Meanwhile LEO satellites are way more vulnerable to ASAT, they can be directly hit. No... LEO only makes sense when you look at Mike Griffin's history working on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He sees LEO constellations of sensors as the first step to including space-based kinetic interceptors (hypersonic reentry vehicles, aka space weapons) which need to be close to Earth in LEO to work. He is part of the hawks in Washington trying to build a space-based power projection system for boost-phase interception and prompt global strike.
Not invalidating the rest of your chain of reasoning, since I agree with the idea this is likely to lead to eventual space based mid course interception….
While MEO satellites are able to do the job, they pose a greater “systemic risk” than LEO satellites do.
If a war goes hot with long range use of prompt global strike style hypersonic weapons against the USA or its closely allied military alliance partners like UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc… we’re talking about a scenario where the potential adversaries are going to be precipitously close to the use of anti satellite weapons, and potentially even nukes but let’s ignore them and focus on the satellites.
If you have a smaller number of larger MEO platforms (and they need to be larger to accommodate instruments that can to do their job from further away) your much more vulnerable to having large parts of your system knocked out. These larger platforms will also cost more, so you have less redundancy, higher costs, and are more vulnerable when your system will be needed most. The final systemic risk element is the post action debris risk… if a war goes hot and someone starts chucking ASAT weapons around, then we’re going to have a pile of debris, the sort of debris left behind by a kinetic kill ASAT in medium earth orbit is easily an order of magnitude more of an issue to other satellites for decades to centuries, it’s further away from all the existing space surveillance radar and optical systems on the ground making it harder to track the kind of small high velocity shrapnel that will have spread furthest away from the original orbit, which complicates the replacement of any destroyed space based assets as it will take longer to work out new safe orbits. LEO assets on the other hand have much shorter debris risk lifetimes, decades is usually the case as opposed to centuries, and LEO is much easier to track higher risk shrapnel debris down below 10cm, leading to better operational safety before and after a potentially satellite destroying hot war, meaning they are more likely to have a working system when needed and be able to replace it faster when damaged.
It’s a logical and reasonable argument on several fronts. However I do still agree with the assessment that eventually if the military has a sophistication LEO fleet of hundreds or thousands of Starlink style satellites, they are basically half way to the Star Wars “Brilliant Pebbles” architecture and it won’t be long until someone tries to build the other half of the architecture assuming they aren’t already planning this.
Unless you have a plan that involves using violence at a time of your choosing, the temporary advantage you get from deploying a new solution is mostly just peace of mind for a very small group of space force nerds until the adversary adapts.
And the sort of "worst case" imaging we're talking about here, the kind that makes you think the MEO sats that are part of the nuclear early warning system will be attacked in the first place, _absolutely_ compels you to assume the adversary will adapt in time.
Another important point here is that "systemic risk" here really only means "risk to US space systems of dubious utility", and nothing so grand as international deterrence or even international stability: jamming can a perfectly fine solution to ensuring the space based information is not timely available to US forces, and it's not like the timelines SIBRIS gives you are competitive with what good humint around intentions can give you.
Fun fast: the largest US satellite imagery provider, Maxar, was founded by the technical program lead for Brilliant Pebbles. It’s a small world and history rhymes.
I can’t comment on Griffin or the history of SDA, but proliferated LEO targets are much harder to take out with an ASAT than a small number of MEO or GEO satellites that are practically sitting ducks. If it costs ~$10M to take out a ~$1B asset, it’s gonna be the first thing to go in an apocalyptic scenario.
A LEO satellite can be hit directly with relatively cheap surface to air missiles in a matter of minutes (e.g., RIM-161). Getting to space for the ASAT takes much less energy than putting something into orbit. On the other hand, MEO and GEO satellites take a long time, many orbits, to interact with.. would even have enough time to summon ambassadors and ask questions.
For these "proliferated LEO constellations" an adversary just needs to punch a hole in the mesh immediately before launching an attack.
The fact is, putting HAWC-style interceptors in space (that could also of course be used offensively) hovering over every country on Earth, is incredibly aggressive and provocative. Everything is accelerated and mistakes will be made on both sides. It's fundamentally destabilizing (as the link above concludes). We've been down this road before and collectively decided its a terrible idea (Brilliant Pebbles). Helping SDA means furthering a dangerous future.
With what sounds like the industry moving to something more like high throughput real time mapping, does that mean that there's a chance we'll see an open source imagery dataset/tile server sometime afterwards, when the current dated offerings become less competitive?
I’d love to see someone step up and try to improve this, there’s programs in place at both NASA and ESA for making access to their own archives of satellite imagery and other data, but there’s a lot more imagery out there. It would be good to have some kind of internet archive style depository run by an organisation dedicated to preserving the data.
So that satellite imagery providers could chuck them a copy with contractual guarantees about how and when the information can become public access, that satisfy the imagery providers and make the process streamlined enough to keep up with the increasingly volume of imagery being produced.
It would be a shame to see valuable archives of imagery that catalogs the history of our planet, lost due to someone losing track of the either the data itself or the copyright ownership (and thus are legally unable to keep the data) between now and the absurdly long time in the future that such images become public domain over a hundred years from now. Most companies don’t last a hundred years so this kind if stewardship feels like an important thing to start working on now rather than later.
Hi Joe, thanks for the article. I am thinking of getting into satellite data science (from a data science/ software eng background). If you can recommend any datasets that are open to the public that can be fun to play around with or any other advice I'd be happy to hear it.
