Working for spacex is like being a monk, you're totally dedicated to the craft and life isn't ballanced. You're always under the schedule gun. I'm speaking from experience. This guy likely has a much more balanced life as a professor.
Assuming all goes according to plan and Elon can keep cost competitive with, or hopefully LOWER, then we are finally going to see the end of cable monopolies in the U.S.. Honestly, even if costs a bit more i'll STILL give it a try if for no other reason then to stick it to comcast.
telstra is no longer a monopoly, nbn means every telco can do internet without telstras help. unfortunately, the people in charge of pricing havent figured it out yet cant wait for starlink, nbn is shit (still better than adsl though)
he should run it at a loss, and break every last one of those ISPs. im so sick of them. they got millions of dollars to roll out fiber multiple times. They did nothing. break them I say break them.
So you rather pay for a few people living far outside any city that cant pay the cost of a cable broadband? That is not how busines is done. Noone big car factory makes any models to work in really cold weather just because there is to few that wants to pay for it. And i promise you that its way more important than using YT in the reality world. Why would I pay for someone in the bush in Australia, so they would get a faster internet? I dont care if the monks in Tibeth can pay their bills in microseconds or seconds. But they all already have a internet that works. And everyday its getting faster and better.
@@mikeissweet I don't know, connections in usa have to follow usa law, same goes for connections in china. now granted because to operate in countries that have a more open internet the network has to be able to allow for that openness it should mean for citizens of more censored locations may have an easier way to subvert said censors. and this is a good thing.
@@mikeissweet If China doesn´t want to reduce their controll. Do you really think Elon can play God and give the people a open internet? You must live in a fake world! By the way. China have already a better coverage than usa and at a lower cost.
@@hakan8997 it reduces the likelihood, i said. Increasing options can only serve to decentralize control - if not by governments, by corporations. If nothing else, prices will go down.
@@GeoFry3 Indeed. The beginnings of a Solar System Internet, with relays between the various networks. They would also be able to double as navigation beacons to make it easier to fly between the celestial bodies.
I know what you mean. I am buying a TeslaCyberTruck, with the secondary objective to 'stick it' to the big legacy truck makers- for ripping me off for many years!
@@TheAefril omg thats hilarious dodge,ford,gm have been making trucks for years and know what there doing tesla does not know how to produce a good vehicle
I would really love to have a more up to date video about the progress that starlink has made and your best idea on where things stand right now. Thank you for this educational video.
I sent myself to sleep on many nights pondering this project but Dude, you laid it all out right down to the millisecond. Amazing intuitive graphics. Who else but Elon could come up with this idea - just to finance a freakin' Mars colony. With "lasers".
The simulation back-end that you coded from scratch in C# and the animation in Unity are quite impressive and marvelously informative. Subscribing and eagerly awaiting your next video.
Amazing video! Kudos for combining the curiosity about how it might work with the knowledge needed to suggest a solution AND with the ability to display and explain it so eloquently! Why, oh why did I not get this UA-cam recommendation until 3 months after posting?? I’m off now to check your other content! 👍
I hope you make more videos in the future, Mark. Your explanations are really easy to understand and follow, the fluidity and everything. Feels like i'm being taught by a teacher. Other youtubers have tried to kind of explain this and gets really confusing
It's a custom simulator I wrote from scratch in C# using the Unity3d game engine for visualization. There really isn't a user interface, just custom code for each scene, camera movement, and so forth.
@@skyr8449 I would assume so. The code is probably a list of relay objects with 3D trajectory and communication delay with other relays (dependent on their distance and type). The rest is a generic routing algorithm.
@Lightspeed Retro Yea but Amazon coming late to the game as two companies one being starlink have first rights to these frequencies which means if amazon satellites detects it's causing interference it must wait till it can start broadcasting on the frequencies so it doesn't mess up star link or the other provider causing high latencies or even short outages till the satellites get away from each other. Amazon is trying to just buy there way in though without going through the hoops Elon went through.
Actually one problem I see is everyone is going to want to get in on this, so whatever amount of satellites SpaceX is launching, everybody else is going to want to launch that many too. From a business point of view, healthy competition is a good thing so they should be allowed to... but from a space crowding point of view, there are limits to just how many satellites we can have up there before it's a real issue.
High quality content, easy to understand, and super useful graphic demos. I would actually pay MORE for starlink internet service just to stick it to my current ISP.
Lovely! You should publish all the code (Unity engine?) under a GPL license so we can tweak and play with it! Keep up the great work, I think this was your best video yet.
Tks, really informative. I especially enjoyed the detail of traffic between London and Johannesburg. Showcasing data traffic speed between Australia and the rest of the world will be useful too. 😉
Nope! Not at all. Iam just curious aboute the globe people, that eat everything that has with sci-fi space to do! Why DOESN`T the big companys like Google, Ebay,Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft,Apple and others TRUST ELON? Why would they lay their own cables if they are so outdated? Watch the whole video. It might give you a second thought about what you learned so far! And if you research undersea cables you will find that the first fibre cable have not reached the limit of transmissionspeed and lifespan yet. And the electronics is still the plug in the system. But it´s easy to replace when faster equipment comes. No can do that with +10 000 satelites that are getting out of date from the first day they left the factory! Electronics ages by the day in real life. And dont mix this with a update of a program! That can also be done in the fibre optic systems. But it does not change the whole system. ua-cam.com/video/iMAThVcqzuk/v-deo.html And faster optic cables is already here. Research!
@@hakan8997 so never buy a tv, pc, phone etc etc, because it WILL GET OLD!!!!!!! RIGHT? Dont use internet because maybe tomorrow there will be even better option right? Dont go to shit because maybe tomorrow you will be so advanced that you wont even have to shit!!! right?
Mark you made this video visuals so great, that you're channel was my fastest to subscribe ever! Thank you for sharing your ideas in so visually pleasing and easy to understand way. Elon says his main issue is lack of good engineers - so my though was like: if you'd be the professor at tech university, I believe we'd got many more good engineers! And then google search told me you already are one. I am very happy to see man doing what he's great at. Thank you.
@@ukwildcats85 so is survival of the fittest. Makes great TV on the wildlife channel. Not being eaten is better though. Capitalism isn't perfect. We just haven't figured out how to do it better.
Your animations have the laser links jumping from sat to next nearest sat. Providing they can aim the lasers accurately enough the actual system may use far fewer links. Line of sight should allow a path across the Atlantic or from South Africa to Europe with just 3 satellites.
They could do that, but each satellite will only have 4 lasers so it's doubtful they would skip satellites as they simply won't have enough lasers available to do that and maintain contact with directly neighboring satellites at the same time.
@@Skyrossm Skipping satellites would dramatically reduce latency and increase bandwidth of the network as a whole. Every time data is relayed through a satellite it adds latency as the sat processes the data. As well the skipped satellites are now free to form new connections with other skipped sats giving the network several pipelines instead of one.
@@robertmarder126I don't see what purpose staying in direct contact with neighboring sats serves. Their all connected to the same network and will be communicating at some point directly with pretty much every other sat. In fact I'd think an individual sat has little reason to ever communicate with it's nearest neighbors on the same orbital plane as those sats will rarely if ever provide a useful data path.
My guess is the ground stations look less like a grid and more like a cell service coverage map. While some areas can be laid out pretty close to that gaps will still exist in some places.
I for some reason picture some random ass little podunk town having this massive badass tower in the middle of their main block over shadowing everything around it just so someone from San Diego can send a picture to their friend in New York .2ms faster.
I disagree; conventional cell phone towers would need other nearby cell towers (or fibre/phone lines) to have internet connectivity, whereas with this system it's just beaming a signal off a satellite, so it doesn't need a nearby ground station. It only needs the antenna and a power source to power the antenna so that it can receive and send. Which should be doable with solar + wind + battery (or power, but some locations might not be near power lines).
While I really admire the work that went into this. I do suspect that the network will function quite a bit different than what you present it as here. The purpose of starlink is not to minimize signal delay to the other side of the world. It is to provide coverage and high data throughput to people. If the satellites have any kind of limit in bandwidth, which they do. Then it seems much more reasonable to build the ground stations with a large ground fiber connection and then take the signal trough the "regular internet" after the first jump. Nearly all data in the world is going to a already well connected server.Of course this rules out the idea of user based ground terminals, but building 100 or so ground terminals around the US seems rather trivial. Point to point signal the entire way would eat up nearly all the capacity of the satellites.
@halvor9797 I think it will end up using a combination of what you say and what is shown in this video, for example for signals going overseas really the best path is to use the starlink network and well there is not much population outside of like cruise ships and aircraft over the oceans. so you use the network rather then the underwater fiber for a lower ping to say japan from LA
@@JMac85X well it is most often a bit of both, in terms of spying 5G is more sinister it tracks your exact position down to a few cm 100% of the time and such.
... funny idea. So if there's going to be 10,000+ satellites, you might estimate that up to 5,000 should be in line of sight from any angle you look at the Earth. What the maximum wattage going to be on those lasers? What if SpaceX can slip in the ability to fire off very high wattage bursts, if in synchronized intermittent pulses... Or in other words could we LASER ABLATION DEFLECT ASTEROIDS USING STARLINK? How many cumulative watts do you think we'd need? A synchronized 5 petawatt pulse focused on the same point of a single asteroid - could that potentially vaporize enough material to alter its trajectory?
Mark, I'm quite certain you are very busy with many important projects, but if you find some free time I'm sure a lot of people would love to see an updated video. A lot has happened in the past year and much more is known now.
What about bandwidth? Even if the link through a satellite can be made faster than a fiber optic cable, can it also handle the same sorts of traffic density? Something tells me the answer is going to be no.
The limitations of the satellite is how much data each satellite can handle, so if you have a lot of users in one area they have to share the available bandwidth. However, if you have a data center near a city, and you needed more bandwidth, you could use fiber to get a couple hundred miles out into the country, and put your uplink there, where it is hitting a different satellite that's not over the city. Once the data hits a satellite, then it can be relayed via laser, and that can be routed around the mesh network freely to balance load. So the bottleneck is each satellite. Which is why Elon raised the number of satellites he is planning, putting them closer together, thus increasing the possible bandwidth per square mile.
@@ke6gwf even with lots of satellites, you still have the problem of *RF* bandwidth. You can only squeeze so many signals into a given slice of the RF spectrum before your stations start to interfere with each other.
@@andrewreynolds9371 that's not a problem, because they are using phased array antennas on both ground and sky, so they can have good beam control. I don't remember off the top of my head how many frequencies and bands they have in their permit, but it's plenty to cover any area of ground. Each satellite in the first wave has about 20 Gbps throughput capacity, divided over however many frequencies that each satellite uses, and then the surrounding satellites will use different frequencies for the overlapping areas. And then as soon as you get a little ways away from a satellite using a particular frequency, you can reuse it. And since this is all digital and steerable, you can instantly swap frequencies as often as needed to avoid interference. And using digital, with steerable beams on both ends, you can have very close proximity without interference, because you aren't letting the signal leak out.
Estimated numbers I seen about the star link satellites they were currently at 40,000 users watching 4k video per a satellite on there tests on the ground. I'm sure that number will increase but 4k video is demanding for a ISP also. Throughput will be the biggest factor on the satellite. UA-cam and Netflix partner with local large ISP and put servers in the ISP hubs/data center around large cities so the bandwidth used mainly is only on the ISP network not the back bone if that makes since. I can't see why they couldn't put a couple of racks at a large ground station in a populated area and serve the videos local if the fiber to the ground station will be a limiting factor.
That's the clever part - technology is always improving when it comes to bandwidth, you can fit more data into a smaller bit of spectrum. But you can't make light go any faster than it does, so the latency (ping) part is most important to get right. Somewhat ironically, bandwidth is the easy part - latency is the hard part, hence all this work and effort to lower it
Thank you so so much u are truly the best I cannot say how happy I am even tho I'm 2 years late to this video I live in SA and starlink is coming next year this is a massive help thank you so much great work
Not just loss - you only get the latency numbers in the video if you can avoid building queues in the satellites. That requires a control plane unlike anything in the Internet. I don't know how SpaceX plan to achieve this, but I have my own ideas how this can be done. Need to build the packet-level simulator to demonstrate whether I'm right though. I've started on that, but simulating a global network at packet-level granularity is a interesting challenge.
@@markhandley Why come up with your own idea instead of the actual way Tesla is solving this issue? Take a look at the Tesla GPU patent and get familiar with van Emde Boas trees.
SpaceX needs to figure out sat-sat communication if this is going to be offered worldwide. Ground stations are expensive to maintain, and while like Mark says its sometimes better to have both in a lot of remote areas it may not be economically feasible.
Do your latency calculations account for atmosphere and error correction? In addition, the load on a relay increases exponentially per hop if the satellites are being used as ground access points. My guess is that more than one or two hops will not be economical from the standpoint of power and spectrum availability (Maybe for a NYSE - Chicago link). Most likely these will use fiber connected base stations, and one satellite to maximize available bandwidth and power. Free space optics will remove most ground to LEO bandwidth issues, but may only support up to 3 connections at a time. Really nice simulations!
The only purpose of this constellation and its truly profitable target is to sell ultra fast links between US east coast and west coast stock markets at skyrocketing high prices to greedy traders who want to play man-in-the-middle attacks on each other. And they do it by cluttering the entire world's sky with thousands of metal boxes, interfering with observation satellites and causing hazard to current and future space missions (see the near miss they caused with a European science satellite in the summer). And they only "offer" internet access to remote off-grid locations in order to get buzz and public opinion support.
@@markhandley I am sure Starlink will have local offices in many countries and there will be many jobs which have nothing to do with rocket engine design or missile guidance, and would not be burdened with ITAR compliance. And even ITAR controlled stuff can go outside US, provided it is done with proper safeguards -- half of the Rocket Lab is New Zealanders in New Zealand, and they work with ITAR-controlled US technology there.
I doubt they would use ship relays. In the near term they will probably just use a less direct path, or combine starlink with fiber routes on the ground to cross the oceans. The ground stations will need to connect to the fiber network anyway to reach the rest of the internet, so using that same link for some transport when starlink doesn't have a route itself would be easy. Even doing this, for many routes they would still have a huge latency advantage. It just wouldn't be an advantage over fiber for all possible routes. Even if starlink never gets a laser link between satellites working, they are planning a future phase at a much higher orbit (1350km), which drastically increases coverage area for a single satellite and means they can route using those for getting across large areas like oceans using far fewer ground stations spread further apart. Routing via ground stations means a satellite at 550km can speak to a ground station which then can relay that traffic to a satellite at 1350km, which would be visible to another far away ground station the satellite at 550km couldn't see itself. I also highly doubt they would use user terminals to route bulk traffic. The user terminals would have to be designed to handle all that extra routing and throughput, increasing their unit cost. And they couldn't be depended on for long term reliability and quality of service the same way a real ground relay station could.
Err... yeah, "nonsense". A relay doesn't need to be connected to anything other than power, it just acts as a mirror, bouncing traffic from one satellite to another. The fact that they can also route traffic between starlink and terrestrial internet (an "edge node") doesn't mean it needs terrestrial internet links to be of any use. Internal nodes have obvious value, and even small scale, low power nodes could still be used for sending lower amounts of traffic through.
Kessler Syndrome. One satellite collision spawning debris that collides with other satellites and creates a chain reaction that destroys most of our satellite network. I wouldn't worry about it anytime soon. Space is *big*.
I would imagine there would need to be thousands if not millions of ground stations to work on the scale you present, simply because the satilites would need to link to existing ground based networks functionally. That being said I can't wait for more widespread TRUE high speed internet, 500ms ping from current gen internet satilites is abysmal, while starlink and other low orbit internet startups are saying they can do less than 10ms. I sure hope nothing gets in their way!
600mb a second is massive for rural regions. I cant get better than 300kbs where I live. Funny how you dont see 1.2 GB every two seconds as impressive. Lol must be nice wherever you live.
@@larsrosing5033 600mb/s is better than I got on a fiber optic connection a few years ago. . . now I'm rural and over the moon to get 5mb/s so I'll be amazed even if I get a twelfth the number you're saying
I think they might address that at some point by making sure the solar panels are tilted in such a way that they never reflect the sun back on earth. At least I would hope so. Either that or some kind of anti reflective coating. Though it may still be a problem for higher end astronomy like say, focusing an area in space for an hour. You will get lot of "noise" from the satellite passes.
Excellent Video! Very thought provoking. One point you missed, is that for trans oceanic connections, there will be plenty of customers from commercial shipping/yachts to airplanes which are all currently bandwidth starved. So having dedicated ships would only be necessary when bootstrapping the service. subscribed.
To suggest laser can beat fibre in speed probably isn't true when it comes to packet loss and bandwidth. The bandwidth of fibre also improves at a higher rate with time.
Free-space lasers are unlikely to ever beat fibre on bandwidth, and using RF ground relays certainly won't - not enough spectrum. I made no claims about bandwidth. But for many uses, bandwidth is less important than latency, and that was what I wanted to explore.
My first theory is that the laser links (which are not yet deployed as of January 2021) can only connect satellites within the same orbital planes. This means the lasers will not have to be dynamically steered and will always "look" at the "previous" and "next" satellites. My second theory is that ground station send a northbound and a southbound beam to each orbital plane served. Given the FCC fillings the forward link can have up to 16 250 MHz wide channels, thus each ground station can serve up to 32 satellites (16 northbound and 16 southbound) assuming each satellite in the chain only "consumes" one of the channels through its user beam and sends the remaining to the next satellite and so on. (But I think in most cases each satellites will broadcast multiple channels within its user beam). Thus each ground station needs 3 antennas per orbital plane served : one for the northbound beam, one for the southbound beam and the last one for handover.
if he wanted to, he could use the same idea for interplanetary communication, assuming he lives long enough for that, he could have these in a similar pattern across the whole star system rather that some huge cables across the star system. just an idea
Just watch as Elon Musk launches to Mars on the eve of WW3 just before getting all world governments to rely on Starlink. Lol hit the kill switch of Starlink and then "launch." Hed make a good supervillain. Plot twist, he is Starman and needed to get his Tesla there first. 😎
You would be surprised how many fiber relays there are on ground it can only go about 40 to 60 miles on a good fiber line before a relay or a repeater to boost the light in the fiber. When you do a trace route you're just seeing the hubs where it routes through where you're going but it has passed over probably 100+ devices one way. In space with lasers it's way quicker and more direct.
I know not everyone is lucky to live in Europe and have cheap extremely fast internet (and does everyone needs it?) but to me this looks just like a lot of space pollution making it harder and more expensive to launch anything into orbit in the future.
Not really. Space is quite vast, even at low earth orbit. These satellites, even if there are tens of thousands of them, would have little chance of striking something. They're also quite small, and you can track them.
@@dasbubba841 they are planning 12 thousand of them. Space agencies are already tracking thousands of dangerous fragments from older satellites, tests etc. They might not be problem today but lets say 20 years from now? Do they have plan how to safely burn them all in the atmosphere when that time comes? What if Chinese, Pakistan or India test another anti-satelite weapon and debris from that hit one of the 12 thousand and debris from that hit another and then another and then another... and for what? Something that I already have.
@@dasbubba841 True, but it's already difficult to launch in the right window (average window is about 10 to 30 minutes), let alone if there's a dense grid of satellites you also have to pass through.
lamebubblesflysohigh The Kessler effect is still a concern regardless of the addition of these satellites. As for anti-satellite missiles; we can only hope world leaders have the foresight to avoid using them unless they want to risk managing their affairs without their satellites as well. The satellites do actually have a plan for deorbiting. Each of the satellites is equipped with an ion Krypton thruster which helps the satellite get into its initial orbit as well as to deorbit the satellite at the end of its lifespan. It wouldn’t make getting into space much more difficult either because of the orbital planes the satellites will follow. So long as those orbits are stable, you’re left with plenty of gaps to fire other rockets through. It’d be like trying to crash a rocket into a truck that’s in the next city.
Maybe it's all part of a bigger plan, as Elon escapes to Mars, then crashes his satellites into each other to stop anyone from being able to follow him! Otherwise, yeah it does look like we're in danger of being grounded, but considering Elon is putting loads of work (and passion) into space travel, he's no doubt taking care to not also do anything to ruin it for himself... for example, ensuring the satellites de-orbit and burn up safely etc. But yes, I do hope he knows what he's doing, nothing that risks grounding us should be even close to acceptable.
While I cheer for the global deployment of internet infrastructure, I am saddened what this will do to astronomers around the globe, also the gardenchair variety. Also, UFO reports everywhere. ;)
Just means we need to get astronomers in space where they can see farther and clearer then ever before. Thinking back to the impact space telescopes like Hubble have had for astronomers.
@@Zer0cul0 You don't know the extent of the amateur astronomy impact, do you? However, I personally don't expect that much trouble. Darker satellites + better imagr processing algos should compensate for more stuff in orbit.
Lasers are only meant to be used for satellite-to-satellite communication. Which is out in space so no problem there. Bad weather might cause signal attentuation so your speed might decrease in bad weather.
High quality content, easy to understand, and super useful graphic demos - this needs more views!
graphic demos are from spaceX
High quality cgi nothing new
There hundreds of such channels
Dan would you consider watching high quality content on a different subject ? ua-cam.com/video/eEvYNI5qguI/v-deo.html
Working for spacex is like being a monk, you're totally dedicated to the craft and life isn't ballanced. You're always under the schedule gun. I'm speaking from experience. This guy likely has a much more balanced life as a professor.
Assuming all goes according to plan and Elon can keep cost competitive with, or hopefully LOWER,
then we are finally going to see the end of cable monopolies in the U.S.. Honestly, even if costs a bit more i'll STILL give it a try if for no other reason then to stick it to comcast.
Yeah, fuck Comcast. I would definitely take Starlink over Comcast.
So your Comcast is like Australia’s Telstra I guess lol
telstra is no longer a monopoly, nbn means every telco can do internet without telstras help.
unfortunately, the people in charge of pricing havent figured it out yet
cant wait for starlink, nbn is shit (still better than adsl though)
he should run it at a loss, and break every last one of those ISPs. im so sick of them. they got millions of dollars to roll out fiber multiple times. They did nothing. break them I say break them.
So you rather pay for a few people living far outside any city that cant pay the cost of a cable broadband? That is not how busines is done. Noone big car factory makes any models to work in really cold weather just because there is to few that wants to pay for it. And i promise you that its way more important than using YT in the reality world. Why would I pay for someone in the bush in Australia, so they would get a faster internet? I dont care if the monks in Tibeth can pay their bills in microseconds or seconds. But they all already have a internet that works. And everyday its getting faster and better.
This concept will probably have huge impact on structure of the internet. Thanks for the insight.
What changes will occur when you restructure the internet ?
@@doug5372 More options - more connectivity. This also reduces the likelihood of controlling or blocking data and speech.
@@mikeissweet I don't know, connections in usa have to follow usa law, same goes for connections in china. now granted because to operate in countries that have a more open internet the network has to be able to allow for that openness it should mean for citizens of more censored locations may have an easier way to subvert said censors. and this is a good thing.
@@mikeissweet If China doesn´t want to reduce their controll. Do you really think Elon can play God and give the people a open internet? You must live in a fake world! By the way. China have already a better coverage than usa and at a lower cost.
@@hakan8997 it reduces the likelihood, i said. Increasing options can only serve to decentralize control - if not by governments, by corporations.
If nothing else, prices will go down.
Ship relay points? Easy peasy lots of shipping with regular routes to put relays on.
EZ money.
Very good point.
Can easily add lots of large aircraft to that mix as well.
Let's not forget this is probably going be deployed on Starship and around the moon and mars.
@@GeoFry3
Indeed. The beginnings of a Solar System Internet, with relays between the various networks. They would also be able to double as navigation beacons to make it easier to fly between the celestial bodies.
This video is an absolute masterpiece, I can see myself watching this again with Starlink in just 6 months!
M'lady
@@NiekKuijpers Lords and ladies, *Tips fedora*
You mean you hope to watch it while using Starlink.
can you wait another 6 months?
Guess not
I would actually pay MORE for starlink internet service just to stick it to my current ISP.
I know what you mean.
I am buying a TeslaCyberTruck, with the secondary objective to 'stick it' to the big legacy truck makers- for ripping me off for many years!
@@TheAefril omg thats hilarious dodge,ford,gm have been making trucks for years and know what there doing tesla does not know how to produce a good vehicle
Tyler Baldwin the cybertruck is bulletproof run faster then a Porsche, and beat Ford and GM in every way
@@tylerbaldwin1633 and still GM products are rubbish
your comment made my day man!!!
I would really love to have a more up to date video about the progress that starlink has made and your best idea on where things stand right now. Thank you for this educational video.
I sent myself to sleep on many nights pondering this project but Dude, you laid it all out right down to the millisecond. Amazing intuitive graphics. Who else but Elon could come up with this idea - just to finance a freakin' Mars colony. With "lasers".
Best video about this in all aspects. Thanks!!
It's all become clear now, they won't use ships for oceanic ground stations, they will use sharks!
Always someone else money!
Trump. He's working with Elon to set up a new communications system free of corporate media's grubby little fingers. Free speech again
@@vDarknessFalls Dump? He's only for his masters in Israel.
Thanks for your simulations. Really appreciate your work.
Really nice representation and simulation.
The simulation back-end that you coded from scratch in C# and the animation in Unity are quite impressive and marvelously informative. Subscribing and eagerly awaiting your next video.
You developed this all yourself? Well done! I can't wait to see how the complexity of the higher orbit satellites affects things.
why does it affect things?
Love to see an update to this! This is excellent and high quality content.
Amazing video! Kudos for combining the curiosity about how it might work with the knowledge needed to suggest a solution AND with the ability to display and explain it so eloquently! Why, oh why did I not get this UA-cam recommendation until 3 months after posting?? I’m off now to check your other content! 👍
This is very well done, clearly explained, and expertly animated. Thank you. Excellent information.
I hope you make more videos in the future, Mark. Your explanations are really easy to understand and follow, the fluidity and everything. Feels like i'm being taught by a teacher. Other youtubers have tried to kind of explain this and gets really confusing
Another amazing video !
Incredible quality content. I applaud your efforts, thank you!
Great simulations - how do you run them? What libraries and frameworks do you use?
It's a custom simulator I wrote from scratch in C# using the Unity3d game engine for visualization. There really isn't a user interface, just custom code for each scene, camera movement, and so forth.
@@markhandley that's pretty awesome and I'm quite impressed by the amount of work you put into this!
@@markhandley How versatile is the simulation? Can it simulate any arbitrary communication constellation?
@@markhandley that's how i would of done it. unity is great.
@@skyr8449 I would assume so. The code is probably a list of relay objects with 3D trajectory and communication delay with other relays (dependent on their distance and type). The rest is a generic routing algorithm.
I can't wait to see what Starlink develops into!
It will develop into an electromagnetic weapons system maintained by whatever the "space force" is. It already is. Don't beam me up Scotty!
the matrix.
@@archiefisher4131 They're really building a Star Destroyer..
skynet
oisiaa a fucking mess in the sky. Like traffic jam between you and the stars.
I sooo hope this is enough to completely Disrupt comcast, they will be Crawling to elon to get in on that service.
Never mind Comcast this will disrupt the entire transportation industry...autonomous tesla trucking & ubers world wide....
@Lightspeed Retro Yea but Amazon coming late to the game as two companies one being starlink have first rights to these frequencies which means if amazon satellites detects it's causing interference it must wait till it can start broadcasting on the frequencies so it doesn't mess up star link or the other provider causing high latencies or even short outages till the satellites get away from each other. Amazon is trying to just buy there way in though without going through the hoops Elon went through.
You'll see the day when the last Starlink satellite burns in the atmosphere, and Comcast is still around.
@@cunn1n6hamah yes autonomous gridlock forever
Actually one problem I see is everyone is going to want to get in on this, so whatever amount of satellites SpaceX is launching, everybody else is going to want to launch that many too. From a business point of view, healthy competition is a good thing so they should be allowed to... but from a space crowding point of view, there are limits to just how many satellites we can have up there before it's a real issue.
High quality content, easy to understand, and super useful graphic demos.
I would actually pay MORE for starlink internet service just to stick it to my current ISP.
Lovely! You should publish all the code (Unity engine?) under a GPL license so we can tweak and play with it! Keep up the great work, I think this was your best video yet.
Wow! What content, detailed thought, scope and graphics. Brilliant analysis! Subscribed immediately!
Tks, really informative. I especially enjoyed the detail of traffic between London and Johannesburg. Showcasing data traffic speed between Australia and the rest of the world will be useful too. 😉
Excellent explanation. I had absolutely no idea before what star link was. Now I know more than enough to teach others. Well done
This video must blow the minds of the flat earthers LoL
Nope! Not at all. Iam just curious aboute the globe people, that eat everything that has with sci-fi space to do! Why DOESN`T the big companys like Google, Ebay,Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft,Apple and others TRUST ELON? Why would they lay their own cables if they are so outdated? Watch the whole video. It might give you a second thought about what you learned so far! And if you research undersea cables you will find that the first fibre cable have not reached the limit of transmissionspeed and lifespan yet. And the electronics is still the plug in the system. But it´s easy to replace when faster equipment comes. No can do that with +10 000 satelites that are getting out of date from the first day they left the factory! Electronics ages by the day in real life. And dont mix this with a update of a program! That can also be done in the fibre optic systems. But it does not change the whole system.
ua-cam.com/video/iMAThVcqzuk/v-deo.html
And faster optic cables is already here. Research!
@@hakan8997 so never buy a tv, pc, phone etc etc, because it WILL GET OLD!!!!!!! RIGHT? Dont use internet because maybe tomorrow there will be even better option right? Dont go to shit because maybe tomorrow you will be so advanced that you wont even have to shit!!! right?
no
@@password9384 You must have Albert Einstein, in your family tree!
@@hakan8997 Be careful not to fall of the edge of the world
Although I am way too dumb for following the technical reasoning, this video is so satisfying to watch.
Mark you made this video visuals so great, that you're channel was my fastest to subscribe ever! Thank you for sharing your ideas in so visually pleasing and easy to understand way. Elon says his main issue is lack of good engineers - so my though was like: if you'd be the professor at tech university, I believe we'd got many more good engineers! And then google search told me you already are one. I am very happy to see man doing what he's great at. Thank you.
I hope you continue making this sort of content, a video or blog post about how you make these videos will be very helpful imo
It's weird. that seems to be a project in the scale of the ISS and other international cooperations and it's done by a single company.
And the profits from starlink alone are estimated to give SpaceX a larger R&D budget than NASA! 🤣
Capitalism is amazing!
@@ukwildcats85 so is survival of the fittest. Makes great TV on the wildlife channel.
Not being eaten is better though. Capitalism isn't perfect. We just haven't figured out how to do it better.
@@liquidminds We have its called decentralization.. but it won't happen as long as the top 0.05% keeps taking a cut from everyone.
Please keep making videos! You're an amazing teacher!
Much work went into this: I hope you're usually paid handsomely for the required skillset.
Impressive analysis, insights, and visualisations - subscribed!
Your animations have the laser links jumping from sat to next nearest sat. Providing they can aim the lasers accurately enough the actual system may use far fewer links. Line of sight should allow a path across the Atlantic or from South Africa to Europe with just 3 satellites.
See satnetwork.github.io These guys say Starlink could realize a 54% gain in efficiency.
They could do that, but each satellite will only have 4 lasers so it's doubtful they would skip satellites as they simply won't have enough lasers available to do that and maintain contact with directly neighboring satellites at the same time.
@@Skyrossm Skipping satellites would dramatically reduce latency and increase bandwidth of the network as a whole. Every time data is relayed through a satellite it adds latency as the sat processes the data. As well the skipped satellites are now free to form new connections with other skipped sats giving the network several pipelines instead of one.
@@robertmarder126I don't see what purpose staying in direct contact with neighboring sats serves. Their all connected to the same network and will be communicating at some point directly with pretty much every other sat. In fact I'd think an individual sat has little reason to ever communicate with it's nearest neighbors on the same orbital plane as those sats will rarely if ever provide a useful data path.
This is beautifully explained here. I was excited about it before, but now that you broke it down and explained it, I am even more excited now.
My guess is the ground stations look less like a grid and more like a cell service coverage map. While some areas can be laid out pretty close to that gaps will still exist in some places.
I for some reason picture some random ass little podunk town having this massive badass tower in the middle of their main block over shadowing everything around it just so someone from San Diego can send a picture to their friend in New York .2ms faster.
I disagree; conventional cell phone towers would need other nearby cell towers (or fibre/phone lines) to have internet connectivity, whereas with this system it's just beaming a signal off a satellite, so it doesn't need a nearby ground station. It only needs the antenna and a power source to power the antenna so that it can receive and send. Which should be doable with solar + wind + battery (or power, but some locations might not be near power lines).
Me thinks you got hired by spacex! Grats sir - your real-time network optimization algorithm using cuda-cores was genius.
That was my thought as well given the lack of new videos.
I understand so much more about SpaceX plans specifically and about how everyone's systems (e.g. OneWeb) work generally. Thanks!
This one is the best video so far about Starlink.
While I really admire the work that went into this. I do suspect that the network will function quite a bit different than what you present it as here. The purpose of starlink is not to minimize signal delay to the other side of the world. It is to provide coverage and high data throughput to people. If the satellites have any kind of limit in bandwidth, which they do. Then it seems much more reasonable to build the ground stations with a large ground fiber connection and then take the signal trough the "regular internet" after the first jump. Nearly all data in the world is going to a already well connected server.Of course this rules out the idea of user based ground terminals, but building 100 or so ground terminals around the US seems rather trivial. Point to point signal the entire way would eat up nearly all the capacity of the satellites.
It's to spy on us. It will cause more cons than pros.
@@JMac85X its mainly so the us military can have low latency drones
@halvor9797 I think it will end up using a combination of what you say and what is shown in this video, for example for signals going overseas really the best path is to use the starlink network and well there is not much population outside of like cruise ships and aircraft over the oceans. so you use the network rather then the underwater fiber for a lower ping to say japan from LA
@@kinggoten sure isn't for me and you to have fast internet in the woods. I see something sinister where others see opportunity.
@@JMac85X well it is most often a bit of both, in terms of spying 5G is more sinister it tracks your exact position down to a few cm 100% of the time and such.
Patiently waiting for a video on the plans for next phase
... funny idea.
So if there's going to be 10,000+ satellites, you might estimate that up to 5,000 should be in line of sight from any angle you look at the Earth. What the maximum wattage going to be on those lasers?
What if SpaceX can slip in the ability to fire off very high wattage bursts, if in synchronized intermittent pulses...
Or in other words could we LASER ABLATION DEFLECT ASTEROIDS USING STARLINK?
How many cumulative watts do you think we'd need? A synchronized 5 petawatt pulse focused on the same point of a single asteroid - could that potentially vaporize enough material to alter its trajectory?
lol ahaha
That’s good and all, but how about ordering fried poultry that literally falls from the sky? Think big, man!
If I understand correctly they have the green light for 12,000 and then an extension to 42,000...what could go wrong?
Mark, I'm quite certain you are very busy with many important projects, but if you find some free time I'm sure a lot of people would love to see an updated video. A lot has happened in the past year and much more is known now.
9:57 . . . Still waiting on the ". . . examine those plans further in another video." ?
Your modeling skills are impressive. This is a good job interview.
What about bandwidth? Even if the link through a satellite can be made faster than a fiber optic cable, can it also handle the same sorts of traffic density? Something tells me the answer is going to be no.
The limitations of the satellite is how much data each satellite can handle, so if you have a lot of users in one area they have to share the available bandwidth.
However, if you have a data center near a city, and you needed more bandwidth, you could use fiber to get a couple hundred miles out into the country, and put your uplink there, where it is hitting a different satellite that's not over the city.
Once the data hits a satellite, then it can be relayed via laser, and that can be routed around the mesh network freely to balance load.
So the bottleneck is each satellite.
Which is why Elon raised the number of satellites he is planning, putting them closer together, thus increasing the possible bandwidth per square mile.
@@ke6gwf even with lots of satellites, you still have the problem of *RF* bandwidth. You can only squeeze so many signals into a given slice of the RF spectrum before your stations start to interfere with each other.
@@andrewreynolds9371 that's not a problem, because they are using phased array antennas on both ground and sky, so they can have good beam control.
I don't remember off the top of my head how many frequencies and bands they have in their permit, but it's plenty to cover any area of ground.
Each satellite in the first wave has about 20 Gbps throughput capacity, divided over however many frequencies that each satellite uses, and then the surrounding satellites will use different frequencies for the overlapping areas.
And then as soon as you get a little ways away from a satellite using a particular frequency, you can reuse it.
And since this is all digital and steerable, you can instantly swap frequencies as often as needed to avoid interference.
And using digital, with steerable beams on both ends, you can have very close proximity without interference, because you aren't letting the signal leak out.
Estimated numbers I seen about the star link satellites they were currently at 40,000 users watching 4k video per a satellite on there tests on the ground. I'm sure that number will increase but 4k video is demanding for a ISP also. Throughput will be the biggest factor on the satellite. UA-cam and Netflix partner with local large ISP and put servers in the ISP hubs/data center around large cities so the bandwidth used mainly is only on the ISP network not the back bone if that makes since. I can't see why they couldn't put a couple of racks at a large ground station in a populated area and serve the videos local if the fiber to the ground station will be a limiting factor.
.
Great video! Your effort really shows!
so it can be faster in terms of ping, but what kind of bandwidth are we looking at?
That's the clever part - technology is always improving when it comes to bandwidth, you can fit more data into a smaller bit of spectrum. But you can't make light go any faster than it does, so the latency (ping) part is most important to get right.
Somewhat ironically, bandwidth is the easy part - latency is the hard part, hence all this work and effort to lower it
@@robdavy4468 but bandwidth is still a problem when everyone wants a slice.
Killer work on this. Thank you for taking the time to show me how this might work.
You have WAY too much time on your hands. I love it!
Thank you so so much u are truly the best I cannot say how happy I am even tho I'm 2 years late to this video I live in SA and starlink is coming next year this is a massive help thank you so much great work
What is station hop delay that you used in simulations? Data processing in a relay point is not free anyway.
It would be great to see some updates based on deployments to date, and how it will look in the future!
My one concern when looking at this is packet loss when doing all that switching
this can, and sometimes does, happen now. TCP/IP traffic is designed for this. so not sure it would be an issue.
@@brianhoehn949 ok well I dont know how it works on a lo level just a basic understanding.
Not just loss - you only get the latency numbers in the video if you can avoid building queues in the satellites. That requires a control plane unlike anything in the Internet. I don't know how SpaceX plan to achieve this, but I have my own ideas how this can be done. Need to build the packet-level simulator to demonstrate whether I'm right though. I've started on that, but simulating a global network at packet-level granularity is a interesting challenge.
@@markhandley Why come up with your own idea instead of the actual way Tesla is solving this issue? Take a look at the Tesla GPU patent and get familiar with van Emde Boas trees.
@@markhandley Is anyone else here concerned about *Layer 1* packet loss?
Thanks for all the effort put into this! Such a cool description
high frequency traders would kill for this.
I believe selling to them is part of the plan
If there can monopolize it! 🤭🤭🤭🤭
Please, please, please, can you provide an update video. This is totally awesome!
SpaceX needs to figure out sat-sat communication if this is going to be offered worldwide. Ground stations are expensive to maintain, and while like Mark says its sometimes better to have both in a lot of remote areas it may not be economically feasible.
The user terminal should supposedly cost $150 iirc.
@@alis4328 I think he is talking about ground stations, not user terminals.
You’d think they would’ve done that before launching a bunch of satellites already lol
@Charles Ball Nice! I wonder how they will resolve changing terminals all the time to have lower latency
Do your latency calculations account for atmosphere and error correction? In addition, the load on a relay increases exponentially per hop if the satellites are being used as ground access points. My guess is that more than one or two hops will not be economical from the standpoint of power and spectrum availability (Maybe for a NYSE - Chicago link). Most likely these will use fiber connected base stations, and one satellite to maximize available bandwidth and power. Free space optics will remove most ground to LEO bandwidth issues, but may only support up to 3 connections at a time. Really nice simulations!
The only purpose of this constellation and its truly profitable target is to sell ultra fast links between US east coast and west coast stock markets at skyrocketing high prices to greedy traders who want to play man-in-the-middle attacks on each other. And they do it by cluttering the entire world's sky with thousands of metal boxes, interfering with observation satellites and causing hazard to current and future space missions (see the near miss they caused with a European science satellite in the summer). And they only "offer" internet access to remote off-grid locations in order to get buzz and public opinion support.
Spacex should hire you
They probably can't - under ITAR rules, you usually need to be a US citizen or Greencard holder to work on space stuff, and I'm not.
@@markhandley
I have friends that work there....I'll inquire
@@markhandley I am sure Starlink will have local offices in many countries and there will be many jobs which have nothing to do with rocket engine design or missile guidance, and would not be burdened with ITAR compliance. And even ITAR controlled stuff can go outside US, provided it is done with proper safeguards -- half of the Rocket Lab is New Zealanders in New Zealand, and they work with ITAR-controlled US technology there.
Awesome video dude! Thanks for the detailed visuals and explanations!
I doubt they would use ship relays. In the near term they will probably just use a less direct path, or combine starlink with fiber routes on the ground to cross the oceans. The ground stations will need to connect to the fiber network anyway to reach the rest of the internet, so using that same link for some transport when starlink doesn't have a route itself would be easy. Even doing this, for many routes they would still have a huge latency advantage. It just wouldn't be an advantage over fiber for all possible routes.
Even if starlink never gets a laser link between satellites working, they are planning a future phase at a much higher orbit (1350km), which drastically increases coverage area for a single satellite and means they can route using those for getting across large areas like oceans using far fewer ground stations spread further apart. Routing via ground stations means a satellite at 550km can speak to a ground station which then can relay that traffic to a satellite at 1350km, which would be visible to another far away ground station the satellite at 550km couldn't see itself.
I also highly doubt they would use user terminals to route bulk traffic. The user terminals would have to be designed to handle all that extra routing and throughput, increasing their unit cost. And they couldn't be depended on for long term reliability and quality of service the same way a real ground relay station could.
nonsense
Err... yeah, "nonsense". A relay doesn't need to be connected to anything other than power, it just acts as a mirror, bouncing traffic from one satellite to another. The fact that they can also route traffic between starlink and terrestrial internet (an "edge node") doesn't mean it needs terrestrial internet links to be of any use. Internal nodes have obvious value, and even small scale, low power nodes could still be used for sending lower amounts of traffic through.
So interesting - topically and visually - even if it's speculation. Excellent work! Thank you
does anyone else think this is too many satellites to be zooming around up there?
Kessler Syndrome. One satellite collision spawning debris that collides with other satellites and creates a chain reaction that destroys most of our satellite network. I wouldn't worry about it anytime soon. Space is *big*.
Anyone concerned about birds?
@@betsybarnicle8016 Birds don't live in space.
Excellent work here, us networking guys are really excited about starlink
I would imagine there would need to be thousands if not millions of ground stations to work on the scale you present, simply because the satilites would need to link to existing ground based networks functionally.
That being said I can't wait for more widespread TRUE high speed internet, 500ms ping from current gen internet satilites is abysmal, while starlink and other low orbit internet startups are saying they can do less than 10ms. I sure hope nothing gets in their way!
Maybe the ping is lower or faster, but the data rate is not that impressive, about 600mb/s and that was obtained from a test aircraft.
600mb a second is massive for rural regions. I cant get better than 300kbs where I live. Funny how you dont see 1.2 GB every two seconds as impressive. Lol must be nice wherever you live.
@@larsrosing5033 600mb/s is better than I got on a fiber optic connection a few years ago. . . now I'm rural and over the moon to get 5mb/s so I'll be amazed even if I get a twelfth the number you're saying
That was a really great video. Nice work on the content, the algorithms, and visual way you conveyed it!
The unfortunate bit is the repercussions on astronomy once all these get put up.
Unfortunate is an understatement.
I think they might address that at some point by making sure the solar panels are tilted in such a way that they never reflect the sun back on earth. At least I would hope so. Either that or some kind of anti reflective coating. Though it may still be a problem for higher end astronomy like say, focusing an area in space for an hour. You will get lot of "noise" from the satellite passes.
Well done sir! This was very insightful and in-depth!
*Spends entire video screaming about how he'll have REAL Internet at his house for the first time since dial-up*
I honestly would rather go back to dial up. I had less problems.
and mobile!
Excellent Video! Very thought provoking. One point you missed, is that for trans oceanic connections, there will be plenty of customers from commercial shipping/yachts to airplanes which are all currently bandwidth starved. So having dedicated ships would only be necessary when bootstrapping the service. subscribed.
Soon it will be like a scene from WALL-E where the rocket has to break through a layer of satellites to get into space.
Perktube1 Wont happen.
To suggest laser can beat fibre in speed probably isn't true when it comes to packet loss and bandwidth. The bandwidth of fibre also improves at a higher rate with time.
Free-space lasers are unlikely to ever beat fibre on bandwidth, and using RF ground relays certainly won't - not enough spectrum. I made no claims about bandwidth. But for many uses, bandwidth is less important than latency, and that was what I wanted to explore.
Anybody here now that Starlink Launched in US?
I hope that you update this video. You talked about a follow-up video.
Bruh why don’t they just use ye olde cans on a string?
*Musk wants to know your location*
Carbon nano-strings and graphene alloy cans...
My first theory is that the laser links (which are not yet deployed as of January 2021) can only connect satellites within the same orbital planes. This means the lasers will not have to be dynamically steered and will always "look" at the "previous" and "next" satellites.
My second theory is that ground station send a northbound and a southbound beam to each orbital plane served. Given the FCC fillings the forward link can have up to 16 250 MHz wide channels, thus each ground station can serve up to 32 satellites (16 northbound and 16 southbound) assuming each satellite in the chain only "consumes" one of the channels through its user beam and sends the remaining to the next satellite and so on. (But I think in most cases each satellites will broadcast multiple channels within its user beam). Thus each ground station needs 3 antennas per orbital plane served : one for the northbound beam, one for the southbound beam and the last one for handover.
Earth is a sphere. Confirmed.
OK, it’s been six months. When can we expect an updated video. I love these!
if he wanted to, he could use the same idea for interplanetary communication, assuming he lives long enough for that, he could have these in a similar pattern across the whole star system rather that some huge cables across the star system. just an idea
I think that is the point. Relay between earth and Mars
Mr. Handley: Could you please created an updated video. I love these.
Thank you.
Now imagine how "great" is this for ground astronomy and all astronomic observations in general.
As Maverick once said: "Nah, it's no good. It's no good!"
Most people live with so much light pollution they've never seen the night sky anyway.
You sir are a legend. Very informative and interesting.
I am afraid this will be the skynet.
good, john come on, stop the dark fate.
Fantastic video and very well explained, you've just earned yourself a subscription sir
I hope Starlink covers Australia so I can ditch my current overpriced ripoff data plan and get something faster.
I am curious. What do you pay and where in Australia? I am from Canada and it ranges from very reasonable to highway robbery.
@@markpoidvin5382 Sunshine Coast Queensland, wireless home broadband, $80 AUD/month for infinite data at 10mbps down and 1mbps up.
I know people in both Australia and South Africa that are ridiculously excited about this project!
@R kramer you are 100% correct about South Africa
Really a detailed video thanks! Whatever it comes you did something that is pretty remarkable to describe a system on the build!
I can see why this feels intereating, I watched the whole thing. But this all still remains INSANE AND CARELESS OF LIFE ON EARTH and its well-being.
@Mark Handley: Brilliant presentation, thanks for sharing!
Tholian Web.
They beat us with superior bandwidth...
This is the most intelligent video I've come across on UA-cam maybe ever!!
Just watch as Elon Musk launches to Mars on the eve of WW3 just before getting all world governments to rely on Starlink. Lol hit the kill switch of Starlink and then "launch." Hed make a good supervillain. Plot twist, he is Starman and needed to get his Tesla there first. 😎
This is a video that took much effort and time to do I hope every one watching will put a thumbs up
many relays = many disconnects
With packet data, it just buffers and resends, and as long as the connection is faster than needed, there isn't any noticeable delay
You would be surprised how many fiber relays there are on ground it can only go about 40 to 60 miles on a good fiber line before a relay or a repeater to boost the light in the fiber. When you do a trace route you're just seeing the hubs where it routes through where you're going but it has passed over probably 100+ devices one way. In space with lasers it's way quicker and more direct.
Great video, you actually explained the constellation very well
I know not everyone is lucky to live in Europe and have cheap extremely fast internet (and does everyone needs it?) but to me this looks just like a lot of space pollution making it harder and more expensive to launch anything into orbit in the future.
Not really. Space is quite vast, even at low earth orbit. These satellites, even if there are tens of thousands of them, would have little chance of striking something. They're also quite small, and you can track them.
@@dasbubba841 they are planning 12 thousand of them. Space agencies are already tracking thousands of dangerous fragments from older satellites, tests etc. They might not be problem today but lets say 20 years from now? Do they have plan how to safely burn them all in the atmosphere when that time comes? What if Chinese, Pakistan or India test another anti-satelite weapon and debris from that hit one of the 12 thousand and debris from that hit another and then another and then another... and for what? Something that I already have.
@@dasbubba841 True, but it's already difficult to launch in the right window (average window is about 10 to 30 minutes), let alone if there's a dense grid of satellites you also have to pass through.
lamebubblesflysohigh The Kessler effect is still a concern regardless of the addition of these satellites. As for anti-satellite missiles; we can only hope world leaders have the foresight to avoid using them unless they want to risk managing their affairs without their satellites as well.
The satellites do actually have a plan for deorbiting. Each of the satellites is equipped with an ion Krypton thruster which helps the satellite get into its initial orbit as well as to deorbit the satellite at the end of its lifespan. It wouldn’t make getting into space much more difficult either because of the orbital planes the satellites will follow. So long as those orbits are stable, you’re left with plenty of gaps to fire other rockets through. It’d be like trying to crash a rocket into a truck that’s in the next city.
Maybe it's all part of a bigger plan, as Elon escapes to Mars, then crashes his satellites into each other to stop anyone from being able to follow him! Otherwise, yeah it does look like we're in danger of being grounded, but considering Elon is putting loads of work (and passion) into space travel, he's no doubt taking care to not also do anything to ruin it for himself... for example, ensuring the satellites de-orbit and burn up safely etc. But yes, I do hope he knows what he's doing, nothing that risks grounding us should be even close to acceptable.
Please, update it. I love the explanation.
While I cheer for the global deployment of internet infrastructure, I am saddened what this will do to astronomers around the globe, also the gardenchair variety.
Also, UFO reports everywhere. ;)
Just means we need to get astronomers in space where they can see farther and clearer then ever before. Thinking back to the impact space telescopes like Hubble have had for astronomers.
@@Zer0cul0 You don't know the extent of the amateur astronomy impact, do you?
However, I personally don't expect that much trouble. Darker satellites + better imagr processing algos should compensate for more stuff in orbit.
Curious how different weather affects these lasers like clouds and thunderstorms. Good presentation.
Lasers are only meant to be used for satellite-to-satellite communication. Which is out in space so no problem there. Bad weather might cause signal attentuation so your speed might decrease in bad weather.