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OneWeb to Restart Internet Satellite Launches Using SpaceX Rockets:
After canceling business with Russia's space program, OneWeb is tapping rival SpaceX to help it launch its remaining internet satellites into orbit.
"We are pleased to announce that we have entered into a launch agreement withSpaceX that will enable OneWeb to resume satellite launches," UK-based OneWeb announced on Twitter today. The first launch of the OneWeb satellites using SpaceX rockets is scheduled for sometime later this year, the company added.
OneWeb previously relied on Russia's Roscosmos to launch the satellites. However, the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions from Europe caused Roscosmos to essentially retaliate by postponing an upcoming launch of OneWeb satellites.
Roscosmos then demanded the UK government divest itself from OneWeb. In response, the company canceled all launches through Russia's space program.
OneWeb's contingency plan of using SpaceX is a little surprising since both companies are competing in the internet satellite market. This has resulted in some bickering amongst each other in government regulatory filings. Last year, for example, OneWeb accused SpaceX's satellite internet system of colliding with its own.
SpaceX wins OneWeb launch contracts, demonstrating extreme flexibility
Demonstrating a level of flexibility that no other commercial launch provider on Earth can likely match, SpaceX and OneWeb have entered into a major launch contract barely three weeks after Russia kicked the satellite internet company off of its Soyuz rockets.
Beginning in early 2020, OneWeb has launched approximately 430 operational small internet satellites – about two-thirds of its first constellation – on a dozen different Russian Soyuz 2.1b and ST-B rockets, including a mission completed as recently as February 10th, 2022. That nominal – albeit slow – deployment ground to a violent halt alongside Russia's second unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. Within a week, extraordinary Western economic sanctions pushed the unstable head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency to retaliate by both ending the practice of European-owned Soyuz launches and holding OneWeb's 13th operational launch hostage.
Another three weeks later, outside of increasingly tense and reluctant cooperation on the International Space Station, the relationship between Russian and Western spaceflight programs has effectively ceased to exist. That includes all 6-7 of OneWeb's remaining Soyuz launch contracts, each of which the company had already paid more than $50 million for. Though OneWeb technicians were able to escape the increasingly hostile country, Russia effectively repossessed (i.e. stole) OneWeb's remaining rockets and its 13th batch of operational satellites.
That left OneWeb in an unsurprisingly precarious situation. Having already gone bankrupt once, a major delay could be financially catastrophic for the company. Normally, procuring half a dozen near-term launch contracts at the last second would be virtually impossible. Indeed, ignoring a certain US company, no other launch provider on Earth could even theoretically find or build enough capacity to launch the last third of OneWeb's constellation without at least a one or two-year delay. Luckily for OneWeb, SpaceX does exist.
Also at Space News, NYT, The Guardian, Reuters, and The Verge:
Just a few days before the launch was set to take place, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, demanded that Russia would only launch OneWeb's satellites if the company promised that the spacecraft would not be used for military purposes. Rogozin also demanded that the British government divest its entire stake in OneWeb. In 2020, the UK invested roughly $500 million in OneWeb in order to save the company from bankruptcy, and the UK government became a major shareholder along with Indian telecommunications company Bharti Global.
OneWeb and the UK refused to submit to the demands, and the company wound up suspending all further launches of its satellites from Kazakhstan. Roscosmos rolled back the Soyuz rocket carrying the 36 OneWeb satellites from its launchpad, and the satellites have yet to be returned to OneWeb. The company isn't sure what happened to the spacecraft or if they'll ever be returned. "The thing about the satellites is honestly they're the least of our problems," Chris McLaughlin, chief of government, regulatory, and engagement at OneWeb, tells The Verge. "We make two a day in the factory in Florida. So we can find ways to get a resilient solution."
Previously: SpaceX and OneWeb Clash Over Proposed Satellite Constellation Orbits
FCC Approves SpaceX Lowering Orbit of Internet Satellites
SpaceX Approved to Deploy 1 Million U.S. Starlink Terminals; OneWeb Reportedly Considers Bankruptcy
Russia Places Extraordinary Demands on OneWeb Prior to Satellite Launch
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 23 2022, @11:28AM
You would have to build a rainbow table containing a hash for every practical IP address (IP4 and IP6, I suppose. I am certainly on IP6 here and to my provider). That would produce a massive amount of data - hundreds of gigabytes by a quick estimation - so you would have to find some way of comparing the hash that you know with the elements of your rainbow table to find a match in some efficient manner.
But what would that give you? Well it probably wouldn't give you the address of the origin of the hash that you know. It would probably give you a VPN or TOR exit node. So what? There is nothing of any use that you could do with that. That is why all this rubbish about 'tracking' people' via their IP address is just that - rubbish. We couldn't do it even it we wanted to - and we don't. We simply don't care who you are in real life, where you live, or what you do.
But some people are very, very stupid. They think that they will pick a really obscure VPN - lets say somewhere like a really remote Pacific Island. Then they use that VPN to contact us. How many other people do you think actually use that same VPN to contact this site with its small community of a few thousand active accounts? I can tell you - nobody else. They then create their sock puppets from the same VPN. Well that could just be a coincidence. But then those 2 accounts start moderating each other. Wow, the odds against this are really getting high. And they repeat this for half a dozen or more accounts. The odds are now astronomical. All coming from a unique IP address and 'just by coincidence' all moderating each other on a small site such as ours. And then you watch them get confused about which account they are pretending to be. They all join and leave in similar time frames. They have to give their usernames to moderate and, on looking more closely, you find that they all have multiple similar account characteristics. They were all created within certain time frames. They all write in the same manner. They have email addresses that are in sequence. Yeah, some people are far more stupid that you would ever imagine they could be.
An analogy... Imagine if you will that you are trying to hide from somebody looking for you. So you go into a packed sports stadium. But, for some bizarre reason, you don't hide in the crowd, but you go and stand in the middle of the pitch. How long would you expect to stay hidden doing that?
Most people on our site who post as AC use VPNs that are also used by other community members. We cannot tell one from another. If it is coming from a TOR exit node we can have several thousand connections a day from a single IP address. They are all the same account as far as this site is concerned. They all have the same hash. It tells us very little except it allows us to manage stories, comments, moderations in a database so that other people can see what is being said.
But if somebody thinks they are being smart by being different I have got some bad news for them.