Naive question - let's assume this all becomes a really competitive market and 10+ companies are pumping satellites into orbit.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
It would be incredibly unlikely for there to be enough competition at a grand enough scale for it to become a problem. Space is just very big. Earth's surface is ~197 million sq miles. If you move up to a LEO shell at around 550 miles up, the surface area of that sphere is 34% larger than that.
If you were to distribute 100,000 satellites across that shell, each one would have 2,600 square miles to itself. That's like having a single car in the entire state of Delaware. Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
The issue isn't space, it's traffic management. Satellites zipping around at 17,000 MPH would make one hell of a debris field if even one pair of them collide. That's the Kessler Syndrome boogie man everyone is worried about.
> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
Yes but don't forget that orbits decline and only satellites with onboard propulsion have the ability to boost them back up. Everything else like cubesats and random debris doesn't and thus doesn't "stay in their lane".
> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane.
Sure, but satellites in a higher plane will need to navigate satellites below them during de-orbit. Conversely, satellites in a lower plane will likely need to avoid non-functional satellites that are uncontrolled as their orbit decays.
How much mental bandwidth do you put into not hitting a car that's in a different city? Even if all 100 layers collapsed to one, that's still only 100 satellites in 2600 square miles. NYC is ~300 sq miles. There are about 2.2 million cars there. I feel like you still aren't grasping how much space we are talking about.
But crashing in LEO is not as disastrous as GEO or higher. It's an unstable orbit so eventually everything will deorbit, crash, and burn. May take a while though.
In a certain sense, we do. Pumping thousands satellites to LEO increases probability of triggering the Kessler syndrome. Luckily, LEO orbits are also self-cleaning on reasonable time scales (decades), so I think that some day we will trigger it (potentially, with some "help" from anti-satellite weapons) after which some kind of international regulation will be introduced to prevent repeating it in future.
I'd say there's plenty of room for competitors along multiple dimensions: Geopolitical security (this alone will probably preclude a single monopoly), price and lack of a moat (once a monopolist starts jacking up prices, there's an immediate incentive for an alternative), delivery profile (store-and-forward for IoT-like use cases vs. dumb pipe vs. in-space forwarding), frequency band (L- or S-band for direct to device vs. Ku/Ka band requiring directional terminals) etc.
The only thing that's actually scarce and that could be monopolized rather easily is frequency spectrum. In fact, I suspect this to be a frequency/operating license driven acquisition.
I disagree on some of those dimensions (esp. lack of a moat), but agree things like geopolitics and security would lead to multiple wholesale providers.
My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.
As I see it, the moat for terrestrial (and in particular wire-based) last-mile comms infrastructure is that each additional customer connected is often expensive, and if they switch to your competition, that wire is basically a sunk investment.
For wireless, the dynamics are very different (as long as spectrum isn't monopolized). As soon as you have enough satellites launched for global coverage, you can compete for all customers, and each one that switches away to the competition is more bandwidth available to you to undercut your competitor on pricing with.
On HN, the standard response is that earth-based observation is lesser than space-based.
Which boils down to "Use something incredibly expensive that we have very few of, instead of something that we have a number of that is comparatively cheaper. How dare you question the holy, sacred internet!"
During the Artemis launch it was very briefly mentioned that the launch window isn't a continuous window, but a series of windows interrupted for short times. I wondered if that was because of the thousands of satellites in orbit.
Don't get me started. So many existing laws just seem to be conveniently ignored because... it's 'digital'?
In a lot of countries there are specific laws banning the deliberate targeting of advertising to children (and in contexts where you would reach children, heavily regulated), but for over a decade Meta would allow you to target within the ranges of 13 to 18 years old.
That's to say nothing of the scams and deepfake celebrity ads they let run. Imagine if a deepfake ad of Warren Buffet promoting an investment opportunity ran on TV, the network would get sued into oblivion. On Meta though, there's no repercussions.
A bit of a moving target there, especially with the definition of medium data on disk considering the rise of high speed NVMe vs spinning metal. Makes me wonder if the 00s 'Big Data' era and the resulting infra is largely just outdated now...
Not really a comment on laptops, but I recently built a new desktop for the first time in nearly two decades. I'm sure that there has been some innovation in the space, but overall I was surprised that everything just seemed... the exact same?
PCI slots are from the 90s.
DIMM from the 90s.
SATA from the early 00s.
LGA sockets from the mid 00s.
In almost every category meaningful differentiation is a myth. It sounds nice to tell yourself you've got it and talk about moats or whatever, but it misses the point.
What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got.
The U.S. gov't is now committing a sizeable chunk of GDP to investments and subsidies to AI companies and data centers and has reduced overall investment in wind and solar.
Brutally cold capitalist take. Go walk around your city, friend; remember the tragedy of the commons. There is a lot that needs to be done that isn't being done, because we're soaking up people's life's work on this effort that we don't even know the end goal of. It could result in some awful outcomes for everyone if not guided correctly, and it seems like it's not being guided at all - or worse, it's being guided by the Department of War.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
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