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SpaceX today said its planned constellation of 4,425 broadband satellites will launch from the Falcon 9 rocket beginning in 2019 and continue launching in phases until reaching full capacity in 2024.
SpaceX gave the Senate Commerce Committee an update on its satellite plans during a broadband infrastructure hearing this morning via testimony by VP of satellite government affairs Patricia Cooper. Satellite Internet access traditionally suffers from high latency, relatively slow speeds, and strict data caps. But as we reported in November, SpaceX says it intends to solve these problems with custom-designed satellites launched into low-Earth orbits.
SpaceX mentioned 2019 as a possible launch date in an application filed with the Federal Communications Commission in November and offered a more specific launch timeline today.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 05 2017, @10:57PM (3 children)
4425 SpaceX sats in LEO, 700 for Facebook, Google, whoever ... hollywood can forget about the male hero landing the crippled ship by hand, it's gonna a take good size computer to make a re-entry trajectory without getting hit by something, unless you can magically invoke "never tell me the odds".
It's far less than one in a million. If you're in a reentry trajectory, then you're not at an altitude that intersects satellites.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday May 06 2017, @12:55AM (2 children)
Depends from where ... The original post is about Aliens and Hollywood spaceships, both of which tend to come (back) from outside of LEO, and therefore have to plan because they're not on the same type of orbital paths as our sats.
Reposting for the fun: http://stuffin.space [stuffin.space]
The odds are probably in the ballpark of the lottery, and with enough attempts, someone does occasionally win.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 06 2017, @01:33AM (1 child)
The odds are probably in the ballpark of the lottery, and with enough attempts, someone does occasionally win.
In other words, not often enough compared to other risks. The length of a reentry trajectory is typically about half the length of one low Earth orbit and doesn't traverse the zones where satellites would be.
Consider the ISS. This spacecraft already dodges somewhere around 20k pieces [wikipedia.org] of space debris large enough to severely damage or destroy the station on impact. It also orbits every 90 minutes. Since November of 2000, the ISS has been continuously inhabited. That's crudely 100k orbits without serious impact. I recall that the ISS was expected to have a significant chance of destruction due to impact over its lifespan of around three to four decades. That indicates to me a chance of impact for this pretty large object of one in 100k to one million per orbit.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday May 06 2017, @01:52AM
The ISS is tiny compared to what Elon's shield will defend us against [ytimg.com].
We need more Macs in orbit, though ... darn shields.