I hate seeing the star link satellites in the sky. Shouldn’t there be some sort of law about how much garbage some company can put up there? How long do these things even last and how long until the technology is outdated or obsolete?
It’s actually pretty well understood that a starlink satellite’s life span is approx. 5 years at which point it is intentionally deorbited, and any malfunctioning satellite’s orbit would naturally decay within a few years as well.
That being said, I agree that there should be regulations about this. Feels like we’re in a bit of a wild west situation.
Starlinks are good to passively deorbit from around 500 something km, but Amazon is higher at around 600km, Oneweb out at 1200km, Gouwong with a shell at 1100km, SDA at 900+… I’m more worried about the other ones with less experience that could die and stay up there.
Reminds me of the novel The Cassini Division by Ken McLeod where space launches are no longer possible after a runaway ablation effect turned Earth’s near orbit into a lethal debris field.
Blue Origin
I don’t understand this company at all. Why would they add this to the mix? It really seems like Bezos’ only motivation is to compete with SpaceX for everything.
TBF this is a very different proposition than Starlink, enterprise-only, MUCH higher bandwidth (6 Tbps!) and presumably higher latency due to the larger distance to earth. To my knowledge nothing like this has been proposed by anyone so far.
They should prove those speeds before I believe them.
I’m weary of more incompatible internet megaconstellations, especially when this one has the money behind it to actually launch.
I don’t understand why Blue and Amazon both have constellations, or why the Amazon one couldn’t have added a MEO optical backhaul layer, or how an “enterprise” focus actually differs from what Starlink already offers or Leo will offer. I suppose it’s just a faster version of what Oneweb is doing.
I think this one is more meant for high-speed links between (AI?) datacenters. In theory it could be more reliable than ground-based links, until a solar flare comes along of course. And once the constellation is up linking two locations that are very far apart is a hell of a lot easier than laying more cables.
Anything Blue does or announces should be taken with a hefty grain of salt, so I fully endorse your scepticism about the speeds. We’ll see how this one pans out. But from a purely technical standpoint it does sound kinda neat.
Yay more space junk!
