[HN Gopher] Canadian startup Kepler stirs debate with planned fl...
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Canadian startup Kepler stirs debate with planned fleet of internet
satellites
Author : manesioz
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-12-11 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theglobeandmail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theglobeandmail.com)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| https://archive.md/QBEW5
| walrus01 wrote:
| It remains to be seen whether they can really raise the money to
| do this.
|
| I am a bit skeptical that a double-6U-cubesat will have enough
| power and RF link budget possible to compete with starlink. I'm
| saying this as a starlink beta customer for a year now.
|
| If their intended target market is more like a lower-bandwidth
| competitor to Iridium and Inmarsat's L-band based services for
| mobile terminals/offshore/industrial/aviation and similar
| markets, maybe it can find a market niche, but it will have to be
| a whole lot less costly in dollar per MB.
| goatsi wrote:
| From the article it looks like they are trying to act as an
| uplink/downlink service for other satellites rather than
| anything terrestrial.
|
| >Kepler CEO and co-founder Mina Mitry said the six-year-old
| privately-held Toronto company only plans to launch 200 of its
| own small satellites to establish its internet-of-the-sky
| service called AEther. The rest of the six-figure sum of flying
| objects would actually be launched by its customers - such as
| Earth observation services, space tourism operators, space
| agencies and defence departments - which would affix a
| cellphone-sized 220-gram terminal provided by Kepler to their
| own satellites. The Kepler box would function like a SIM card
| and enable customer satellites to connect to the larger
| constellation "and any other space-borne assets" in LEO, via
| the always-on, always-available AEther network.
| walrus01 wrote:
| on their website they have that, and also what appears to be
| a ground-to-space LEO data service.
| [deleted]
| hourislate wrote:
| This might as well be a joke. I am willing to bet anyone here
| that this will never happen. It would be like trying to start a
| new company to compete with AMZN selling the same things they
| sell online. Yeah, good luck with that.
|
| Why is it no one wanted to put up a fleet of Satellites to
| provide Internet access until SpaceX did it? What makes these
| companies/countries think they can do it when the expense will be
| (?) times greater than what SpaceX can do it for?
| goatsi wrote:
| They are competing with Amazon (the AWS groundstation
| product)[0], not SpaceX Starlink.
|
| >Kepler CEO and co-founder Mina Mitry said the six-year-old
| privately-held Toronto company only plans to launch 200 of its
| own small satellites to establish its internet-of-the-sky
| service called AEther. The rest of the six-figure sum of flying
| objects would actually be launched by its customers - such as
| Earth observation services, space tourism operators, space
| agencies and defence departments - which would affix a
| cellphone-sized 220-gram terminal provided by Kepler to their
| own satellites. The Kepler box would function like a SIM card
| and enable customer satellites to connect to the larger
| constellation "and any other space-borne assets" in LEO, via
| the always-on, always-available AEther network.
|
| [0]https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/
| kingcharles wrote:
| At what point will this be cheap enough that we could crowdfund
| enough satellites to build an Internet that can't be taken down
| with conventional means?
|
| What rights does my satellite have? Is it like ships, that they
| must be registered to a nation-state? Or is it total anarchy?
| e.g. If I am ISIS can I launch a satellite filled with
| recruitment videos and have it essentially outside the
| jurisdiction of any country?
| detaro wrote:
| There's a pile of international treaties on this, starting with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#Responsibil...
| walrus01 wrote:
| > If I am ISIS can I launch a satellite filled with recruitment
| videos and have it essentially outside the jurisdiction of any
| country?
|
| sure, in this highly unlikely scenario, if you take into
| account that the likely result would be the USA air-striking
| your launch facility into rubble, which is big and fragile.
|
| developing a launch vehicle that can send a 200-300kg payload
| into low earth orbit on short notice is pretty much the same
| thing as developing an ICBM, which the nuclear power nation
| states of the world tend to frown upon.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| So their business plan is to buy launches from SpaceX to build
| their own fleet. Then SpaceX has the booster paid for and can re-
| use it up to 4 times to launch their StarLink satellites for a
| fraction of the cost.
|
| Seems like it would be simpler for them to just write a check to
| Musk...
| yumraj wrote:
| I didn't see anything in the article about them using SpaceX to
| launch. Perhaps I missed it.
| goatsi wrote:
| It's one of the photo captions.
|
| >At top, Kepler launches eight GEN-1 satellites on a mission
| provided by SpaceX
| eloff wrote:
| Or pay more to the competition? Nobody is on par with SpaceX
| right now.
| robscallsign wrote:
| Is this really reasible to scale for a company without their own
| launch platform though?
|
| As a Canadian living in a "rural" area, 15km from a municipality
| of 160,000 people with no access to wired broadband internet, I'd
| rather see whatever funding gets thrown at this startup into
| actually developing Canadian terrestrial infrastructure.
|
| As a rant, in the 8 years since living here, I've seen cellular
| data prices double. Yes, double.
| michael1999 wrote:
| What infrastructure would you like to see? Running high
| bandwidth cable in rural areas is expensive.
| robscallsign wrote:
| Yes, I won't disagree that running cable or fiber is
| expensive, but I'd like to see a push to run cable or fiber
| to places like ours which are on a major highway, and only a
| few kilometers out of town. Somehow in these discussions
| running a few kilometers of infrastructure to outlying areas
| around major cities gets painted with the same brush as
| running thousands of kilometers of cable to hit every outpost
| in Nunavut.
|
| The next would be more cellular towers with realistic data
| plans to service rural data. As an example these Telus plans
| are fairly representative of what's available. $90 for 20GB,
| $135 for 50GB. https://www.telus.com/en/mobility/mobile-
| internet?linktype=g...
| Arubis wrote:
| Initially misread this as "Kessler" and thought that was pretty
| direct.
| chinathrow wrote:
| For those not getting the reference:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Hm, what if we filled the sky with satellites to cool down the
| planet?
| thuccess129 wrote:
| > satellites to cool down the planet?
|
| 2% shade stationed at L1 is a 20 million tonne umbrella 1.5
| million km above ground.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
| eloff wrote:
| But quite economical at starship prices per ton.
|
| I feel like this option is not seriously considered enough.
| robscallsign wrote:
| I don't know enough orbital mechanics to understand the
| feasibility, but it's fun to consider that putting a shade
| over some of the hotter cities of the world - Phoenix for
| example, could have a big effect by reducing the need for
| air conditioning.
| wiremine wrote:
| "Just how many satellites can we fill space with"
|
| That's the (honest) question I have. Articles like this pop up
| from time to time on HN, but it's hard to tell how big a problem
| this is. What's the reasonable upper bounds for LEO satellites?
| How do we determine what is reasonable? Who gets to decide and
| enforce that?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The big unknown in the back of the envelope calculation is the
| degree of control over each satellite. What percentage of the
| satellites are uncontrolled? For instance, of Starlink's 1600
| satellites, over 100 of them have become non-functional, most
| of them the unused v0.9 test satellites. However, most of these
| failed satellites have been actively de-orbited. A few failures
| are non-responsive and are de-orbiting naturally, which takes
| about a year.
|
| This factor is much less important at the Starlink of 550km
| because air pressure deorbits those satellites relatively
| quickly.
|
| If failure rates stay below 0.1% and orbits below 500km and
| proper international "traffic control" is implemented, billions
| of satellites would not pose a Kessler risk, IIRC. At higher
| altitudes that number decreases very rapidly. Sorry I can't
| find a link to those calculations.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| We can probably do a back of the napkin estimate on this. The
| radius of the earth is 6563 km, and LEO is 2,000 km or less.
|
| If we use 2,000 km for LEO and round the radius of the earth to
| 6,500 km, the "radius of LEO" is 8,500km.
|
| Surface area is 4 pi r^2... so that's a surface area of about
| 908 million square kilometers.
|
| There's a couple ways we could try to guesstimate the upper
| limit of satellites.
|
| How many satellites per square kilometer? Maybe 1? If so, that
| means 908 million satellites, which is far more than the
| 114,000 the Canadian company wants to launch. But if we start
| seeing many deployments in the millions of satellites... that
| starts to add up pretty quickly.
|
| Given the speed of the satellites, is there a certain amount of
| distance travelled per second that we need to ensure is kept
| between them, or significant gaps to leave windows for other
| launches to pass through safely?
|
| LEO velocity is about 25,000km/hr, so about 7km/second. If we
| want a gap of 1 second between satellites (I am not sure if
| that's excessive or insufficient, just a ballpark) but assuming
| the orbits are mostly "aligned" so we can keep 1km distance in
| one axis and 7km distance in the other axis, we can round that
| to about 1 satellite per 10 square kilometers, so 90.8 million
| satellites as an upper bound.
|
| On the other hand, maybe clusters of launches can be handled
| more easily by launch planning software by treating them as a
| group instead of an individual object to be tracked, and maybe
| for some reason that makes the process easier.
|
| Also, the above estimates are probably wild underestimates,
| because these are based on the surface area of a spherical
| shell, disregarding all the shells are different altitudes of
| the sphere... for example, LEO was taken to be 2,000km, but
| there are nearly equivalent shells at 1,999km, 1,9998km, etc.
| Even if we assume 10km between shells for our back of the
| napkin estimate, if we say anything from 1,500km to 2,000km is
| basically equivalent, we have 50x more capacity than estimated
| above.
|
| Going in the reverse direction, if we assume that for some
| unknown reason these estimates are off by 2 orders of
| magnitude, 100x, after accounting for all the equivalent
| "shells", we're back at roughly the original capacity estimate
| of 90-900 million satellites.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't think you can use surface area because satellites
| orbit in great circles, not lines of latitude.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Good point! So we would want to calculate the surface area
| excluding the poles?
|
| We could calculate it more accurately, but the surface area
| excluding the poles is definitely more than 50%, probably
| closer to 60-80% of the total surface area, right? So the
| estimate is still mostly reasonable.
| tejtm wrote:
| I think each great circle has its own poles orthogonal to
| its inclination and earth's poles has naught to do with
| it. Without station keeping, LEO orbits (thankfully)
| degrade so the outter shells will be gradually bleeding
| into the lower shells as well.
| vkou wrote:
| You want to calculate the number of orbital
| intersections, and space them out to avoid collisions.
| [deleted]
| manbart wrote:
| Another big factor to consider is how obsolete satellites are
| de-commissioned. Can they be made to re-enter the atmosphere
| when no longer needed, or is a permanent piece of debris at
| that point?
| draggnar wrote:
| Also, has anyone studied the debris? If we go to hundreds of
| millions of little satellites, that is a significant mass. what
| is that debris made of, is it reactive, what happens to it?
| wmf wrote:
| I've seen plans for an orbital shell every 10 km with around
| 2,000 satellites per shell. Maybe 150 shells total with over
| 300K satellites.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| 2,000 per shell shoulds like a a very small lower bound. The
| density would be less than 2,000 humans spread over the
| entire earth.
| choeger wrote:
| Space is big. Any orbital plane has a diameter of, roughly,
| 13000km. That gives a sphere with a surface area of about 5.3 *
| 10^8 square kilometers. We could give every satellite in a
| single plane 100 square kilometers and still put millions of
| satellites in it. From the perspective of a rocket launch
| through a plane that's pretty safe.
|
| But orbital mechanics dictate that satellites on different
| orbits have their orbits intersect in two points, obviously.
|
| So we need to coordinate Management of orbital planes such that
| the satellites' orbits in a single plane don't intersect with
| each other. That means, inside a plane we would have to create
| "subplanes", instead of a plane one would assign a shell.
|
| Capacity then depends a lot on how much space we want to leave.
| Say we want 1km "vertically" and 10km "horizontally" and a
| shell has a thickness of 10km. Then you can still put about
| 4000 satellites on the same orbit and have 40000 satellites in
| that shell at most.
|
| So there _is_ a lot of space in space. But coordination will be
| crucial.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| When you look at WHERE everyone wants to put those orbits it
| does shrink dramatically though (hint: central lattitudes)
| gentleman11 wrote:
| We may as well get it over with. Our launch strategy as a
| species is so bad that we will inevitably lose access to our
| orbital region due to the high velocity garbage eventually. If
| we get to that stage early on, we can stop pretending that
| governments and companies are capable of acting like adults
|
| /s
| ozfive wrote:
| This won't just cause issues for earth through collisions.
| Imagine a mass coronal ejection that would fry the electronics in
| all orbiting satellites. The more that are up there the more that
| can come down very quickly and randomly.
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