The article doesn't even mention AWS, which I think is the obvious implication being overlooked here. AWS has Government and defense contracts, with DoD notably. This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers (of which there are a lot) and of course, to any point on the Earth. The idea that this is for "underserved communities" is probably a sly nod to battlefield logistics.
They will undoubtedly sell some aspect of Kuiper through AWS. They already have IP addresses and DNS in the AWS product list, and they have all kinds of data transport services.
I don’t know if the government implication is as big as you think, as the US government has been doing secure satellite communications for decades and has already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield. So undoubtedly Kuiper would love a piece of the action but there is already competition and Kuiper is a bit late to the game.
The federal acquisition regulations have fairly strict rules against acquiring duplicate systems. It totally permits buying systems from multiple vendors, but there are interoperability requirements, and these would have to be interpreted and negotiated. If Kuiper wants to provide services to the government, I’d expect that they would have to be compatible with the Starshield user equipment at a minimum. The military doesn’t want to be lugging around multiple satellite terminals to connect to both the SpaceX and Kuiper versions of Starshield. I doubt the government would go so far as to require SpaceX and Kuiper make their constellations interoperable in space, but even just requiring compatibility with the ground terminals is a pretty big hurdle.
SpaceX has proprietary info in practically all of their comm layers, so interoperability is not easy. The government probably did not buy full rights to the protocols. So the first step to Kuiper getting a piece of the pie is convincing the government that it is worth paying to license SpaceX’s comm standards so Kuiper can use them. That is not an easy task.
There are a dozen hypothetical ways that Kuiper might get a portion of government programs, but the fact is that SpaceX has been embedding themselves into the US government’s space infrastructure for years without competition, and has used that lack of competition to build up a bunch of technical hurdles to purchasing services from other contractors. For the past several years there has been no reason for the government to spend money and effort to prevent these hurdles because there was no other contractor that might be able to offer a similar service. So SpaceX has got a pretty sweet position right now, and Kuiper is going to have to invest heavily before the government changes course.
Starshield is like a private totally separate Starlink for the US government (and controlled/operated by the US government). I am not sure what sort of neutrality you were expecting as US government is SpaceX's biggest customer and is obviously a critical infra company.
Why would you assume any space company anywhere can be neutral to their nations military. These companies depend on government for far too many things (projects, permits) and are much more tied to government than other industries.
Currently “space” as an AWS region is only ground stations communicating with satellites the customer owns, so nothing from AWS is actually in space. But with the way AWS allows customers to configure their network configurations, I expect there will be an option to communicate between AWS data centers using Kuiper for people who have a use case and care enough to pay for it. I expect it to be pretty niche, as most customers are fine with public fiber and Amazon’s own fiber, but I’ll bet they sell it to someone, like a remote AWS Outpost with Kuiper terminal on it for people that work in the field.
I suppose in any realistic scenario we should assume that the enemy may be listening to all our communication at all times. This is the assumption behind such daily things as WPA3, SSH, TLS.
Yes, so all in all for satellite vs. fiber in backbone applications, I'd say that it's a wash (or slight win for fiber) when it comes to security, and a definitive win for fiber when it comes to jamming resistance.
In the field it's a completely different story, of course – you can't always pull fiber (although it does appear in unexpected scenarios, such as fiber-operated UAVs or torpedoes).
Wire-guided drones and missiles seem to be increasingly common, probably due to the cost of instantaneous radio jamming being so low - that's a short-lived signal that is going to a vehicle near your adversary. Torpedoes make a lot of sense for other reasons because radio has a very hard time getting through water (and things like sonar have too low bandwidth as well as giving away your position).
However, it's very easy to cut a fiber in a way that is hard to repair. Fishing trawlers do this all the time. In that sense, fiber can be "jammed" (sabotaged) much more easily than radio/satellite.
FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military communications for decades. It doesn’t make it impossible but jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this) at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a F35’s radar. It’s so much more complex than legacy analog stuff.
It’s easily possible to jam a frequency spread signal from a satellite, assuming you can get the directionality right (i.e. you need to be in the beam of whoever you’re trying to jam, or you’ll need even more power to overcome their receive directionality, which is never perfect).
Signal strength (satellites are power constrained) and distances involved are tough.
GPS uses frequency spreading too, and locally jamming that (even the military version with a secret/unpredictable spreading code) is trivial, for example.
US military gps is encrypted and heavily used FHSS. It is jam resistant, and can’t be jammed without significant expertise and know how.
Russia has some of the best EW chops in the world (after the NSA perhaps), and they struggled to successfully jam Starlink after some defensive work was carried out by SpaceX. They use Starlink in the “sea baby” USVs that attacked Crimea just last night.
GPS uses DSSS, not FHSS. The military version has a higher processing gain than the civilian signal, but it can still be overpowered by sheer signal strength.
I'm not saying that that's trivial against moving targets in a large area (especially if they can use directional antennas), but it's still very possible. GNSS jamming is a big concern of the militaries of the world, and there's currently somewhat of a renaissance of high-precision inertial navigation systems as a result.
Jamming a stationary satellite terminal, if you can get reasonably close, doesn't seem harder than cutting a fiber (although as a sibling comment has mentioned, jammers have the nice property that communication is restored once they're disabled, unlike damaged cables, so maybe the two can complement each other?)
With some satellites, you just point a dish at the satellite and get the same data everyone else gets. With more advanced ones, you have to be in roughly the same place as the intended recipient because the satellite has different antennas pointed in different directions. In either case, it's presumably encrypted data so what good is intercepting it?
If you have a dedicated circuit, you can send dummy data 24/7 to mitigate any traffic analysis. Even if you don't, you configure each link to send dummy data, so eavesdroppers can't do any traffic analysis without compromising the node itself.
Traffic analysis tells your adversaries who you communicate with, and what apps you're using, inferring what communication was caused by what preceding communication, etc which lets your adversary guess what the communication was about. Esp when compared against what other people is communicating about just then.
Yes, which makes it a particularly bad idea to run unencrypted metadata over satellite connections if it can be avoided – and that's the case for communication between data centers, arguably.
That might change once lasers or extremely tight radio beams can be used for ground stations, but for the latter you'd still need to make sure that nobody can get reasonably close to your ground stations, which might be possible for remote military bases, but probably not for AWS data centers.
The defense angle us civilians are probably not seeing is important. One big advantage for example is they're hard to take down.
Let's say there's a war with China, one of the first things the PLA will do is take down any US government controlled satellites. The normal big ones you can shoot down but thousands of them that can be replaced within a day, not so much. The PLA would also be giving out their launch positions for retaliatory attacks.
Let's presume the PLA has effective radio and GPS jamming tech, one solution is to use cameras on satellites for positioning and laser as well as frequency hopping satellite radio comms. Small, easily replaceable constellation satellites are ideal.
in times of actual war, i doubt anyone in the military would care. The result is undesirable but there won't be any threat to life as a result, and there is always a chance the debris problem can be solved in the near future (just shoot it all down! lol)
The US military was able to stop using the U2 because they had imaging satellites for remote reconnaissance, nevermind that whole GPS thing. It would be a severe hit to their capabilities if space around Earth was made unusable.
I wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites.
Probably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).
> has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).
state of the art is about 2x diameter, with adaptive optics methodologies that avoid needing to polish a giga-mirror over several years
Even if it would just deliver 1 or even just 10 meter resolution, I would imagine the high revisit frequency would make it commercially valuable, and potentially also provide some value to military/intelligence groups because it would make it harder to hide activity through careful timing and the data would come with fewer secrecy requirements.
And I have no clue what is doable with SAR, but I'd imagine multiple satellites following each other would enable some interesting features, as it essentially gives you a giant antenna.
The observation cadence could be game-changing. Instead of once-, twice- daily revisit times, in principle you could contemplate continuous observation, of large parts of the Earth, from LEO, with enough downstream bandwidth to make interesting use of all that data.
Ive seen a video around 2005 about USA spy satellites/drones where they kind of disclosured what was possible at this time. Having a very wide area with realtime object/person tracking and multiple terrabytes of data every minute while beeing able to go back in time with all this features.
This all was like 20 years go. 20. 20!!
Than I see my upper consumer grade canon camera, a r6mkII with 70-200mm lens (mk1, 20 years old) that is able to make a photo of some dog in high speed motion, with a 1/800 shutter with 200mm while its dawn and you are still perfectly able to zoom into the photo and see and identify a midget [1]
It’s a 450km orbit. Cameras are good, but you’d need quite a bit of mass per satellite to identify anything of interest that isn’t already covered by other satellites. At a certain point photography becomes more a matter of optics (using lens to collect light) than anything else.
To a first approximation, no one is going to forgo better Internet for whatever definition of better because they don’t like some billionaire’s politics or behavior.
> Say a couple perpetually quarrels about who's going to do the dishes. To prevent further squabbles they decide to split the chores on weekly, alternating basis.
>
> Everything works well, until one of the spouses falls ill. The dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, but the other spouse does not feel responsible for the mess. It’s not their turn. And yes, there's nobody to blame.
And this is where accountability sinks distinguish two different kinds of people: some will (rightfully) realize that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, so they will do nothing. Others will see also see that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, but they will also see that it will become their problem regardless of responsibility or blame, and so they do something about it.
Unfortunately the latter is often not rewarded or even actively discouraged or punished in corporate settings.
Kessler cascades as depicted in Gravity aren’t really possible [1]. Instead, a Kessler cascade would proceed linearly, within a tight orbit, and over the course of decades if not centuries. In LEO, the timeline for a Kessler cascade is on the order of natural decay times.
It's comments like these that sadden me. It's this mindset that make me pessimistic about the long-term viability of humanity as I think it is shared among many people. When we (individuals/groups/society) don't plan far ahead (even for the loosest sense/meaning of the word "plan"), that will tend to lead to short-term benefits with long-term detriments. That even applies even for things that can occur past our lifespan. In my opinion, we should strive to benefit/help our decedents. Climate change is the most obvious case of this, but it applies to other cases like solar flares on the scale of the Carrington event or greater or like Kessler syndrome here (both perhaps on the order of hundreds of years). If Kessler syndrome is a legitimate concern to be a problem in the not crazy distant future, we shouldn't dismiss it outright just because the issue is unlikely to be a problem within our lifetime.
There's no incentive to do this, it's politically untenable to plan that far ahead. The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and evolving because we only do things within the scope of our lifetime.
The curse of humanity is having a brain that lets us think too hard about what we want to be rather than acknowledging what we are which is a bunch of mortal animals with finite time spans that like to fuck, make babies, raise families and occasionally we come together and do shit together in the form of work so we can further those three other priorities.
> The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and evolving because we only do things within the scope of our lifetime.
This is just simply not true. For thousands of years, humans have done things that are meant to endure beyond our lifetimes - from building monuments like the the pyramids to conducting scientific research to creating art. Our ability to look beyond the here and now is actually one of the defining characteristics of humanity.
Legislation would certainly require political will, which we don't have now for tackling anything on such a time scale. To tackle the problem through laws and government enforcement, it would have to become politically tenable at some point, but how would we go from where we are now to something that is closer to this? It's difficult to say with any confidence. But I do know politicians are still human, influenced by their biases and beliefs inherited through biology and life experiences. If our future politicians are to grow up in an environment in which a larger (than today) proportion of people care about problems on a longer time scale, they are more likely to care as well. Consequently, a larger proportion of individuals getting into politics will care about these types of problems, increasing the likelihood of them being addressed.
In parallel but as a separate point, fewer people will be willing to use products or services provided by organizations that they believe are doing wrong or harm by contributing to such problems, thus making it less profitable within capitalism. We already see this to some degree today (Harry Potter comes to mind). Even if the reduction in customers and profit is small, it would decrease compounding and ever so slightly disincentivize the company from making such a pursuit.
It's impressive how adaptive humans are, I must admit. We are quite good at tackling problems we see right in front of us if we set our minds to it. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss problems that are not causing an issue right here and now. We shouldn't wait until it becomes an actual problem because there could be irreversible consequences (or rather, we cannot reverse on reasonable timescale).
We better make double-sure than any leftover value past your life is purely meted out through hereditary lines and couldn't possibly benefit any but a tiny minority of people. Like, if you had three houses and two kids at death, there ain't no way some poor fool is getting that leftover house for free!
That's what they thought in the 70s when they discovered climate change. Look where we are now. Is basic concern for others a sin in our current world?
We're living out the consequences of a system where the Nash equilibrium is everyone maximizing their individual benefit at the expense of all else. And that extends to being an unapologetic jerk--as long as that face looks like a stepping stone, climb on. And screw future people and animals.
Late update: if you look at the fancy full version of the IPCC graphs[0], there's a funny (ehh...) observation: the human destruction of stratospheric ozone was one of the largest climate radiative forcing factors—and it was on the "cooling" side!
It's the negative-side, green (O₃) bar in the third row, "halocarbons". There's multiple human contributions to ozone I don't fully understand, but, *that* one's the stratospheric ozone destruction due to CFC's. (That's not to to say CFC's were good for the climate: as that same row illustrates, CFC's themselves are also ultrapotent greenhouse gases. If you trust the fancy graph, the CFC's direct heating effect slightly outweighed their cooling effect via destroying ozone).
It's hard to internalize just how big space is. Low Earth Orbit has nearly twice the surface area of Earth. These LEO constellations (Kuiper and Starlink) are trying to put one object the size of a car per each area the size of Rhode Island. We're a long way away from junkyards.
I doubt we’ll end up with 200+ of these consolations in 100 years. Probably not even 20.
It’s just a physics problem. Rocket launches are expensive from an energy standpoint. These satellites will have a decaying orbit that requires replacement. It won’t look appealing to most net-importers of energy (which is most countries, but the whole EU might bear the cost for one network for strategic reasons).
Not to mention most countries just don’t operate enough military assets outside of their borders to justify their own network. Non-military applications will be just fine with E2E encryption over public channels. More localized military operations can have communication needs served other ways.
It’s not big corps. Interns. Student projects. I make software typically used in the space industry and our customers are surprisingly small, just s dozen people each time. Startups, half of them funded by the EU startup funds.
The kilogram in orbit is supposed to go down to $1000, and everyone’s joking that it becomes affordable to send a turd to space “for the lulz”. It’s literally the case.
Ariane 5G is already down to 10k$/kg, Falcon 9 is at 6500k$, pricing on https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ and you can literally click “Buy” and enter your credit card number.
SpaceX isn’t providing a discount to student groups. The program, Cubesat Launch Initiative, is funded by NASA and covers the cost of launch and integration into the deployer.
325k$ is for 50kg. Yes it’s the minimum for this program. The students I had were programming the 10cm^3 satellites, I don’t have more details than this cursory explanation but it’s definitely possible.
I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.
Yes, I am quite aware that the current generation of space-based telescopes are quite limited. And it's solely due to the historically extreme cost of mass to orbit.
The largest proposed ground observatories already use segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space, it's only a matter of launch cost.
Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?
> people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a rational conversation about the trade offs of these large commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.
> Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?
It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.
I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people likely fall into the same camp.
As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that the common person whining about "the poor amateur astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are, but "finding any reason possible to whine about billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.
> I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet
Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not being served before that are now suddenly capable of accessing the internet now that these particular constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's current availability map shows how little you might actually care about this particular outcome.
Even so was this the most affordable and sustainable option for these countries? Was there absolutely no way to achieve both goals at once?
> I don't really care that much.
Noted. We're just picking sides today, I guess. Bummer.
You did notice that many of those areas are "Service Date Unknown," "Pending Regulatory Approval," and "Coming Soon?"
The first world has great coverage, I'll give you that, but to say that this network is somehow an inherent advantage to indigenous and under served "remote" people is quite literally laughable.
And yes, the Amazon is being served, and they have _faster_ internet than before, which is somewhat good and not without it's problems to be sure, but they had the internet before. They have smartphones. How did you think they utilize the starlink service at all? They have a pretty narrow power budget which this really doesn't help with all while delivering them deeper into the pockets of American monopolies.
Oh, and the mining and logging companies absolutely love that they have the service necessary to support their commercial work in the Amazon. High rating from them, they would agree, it's "amazing."
The ocean, planes, and all sorts of remote vehicles had internet before as well. This is nothing particularly new other than being faster. Which moves the question to the appropriate place. Is it worth damaging the sciences for faster commercial internet? Are we actually doing anything more than sending youtube poop and pornography and gambling websites into places that never had to deal with these intrusions before? All while enabling a higher rate of destruction of the very place they live?
this is such a weird talking about that basically any real astronomer doesn't really care about, at all. it just comes across as "let's find any way to criticize elon possible" or "let's write clickbait based on a couple of terminally online comments on twitter". satellites are not blocking views, and astronomers are overwhelmingly in support of a healthy space industry, which includes satellite launches. the cutting edge of astronomy relies on satellites, it would be weird to be against them
Progress tends to have downsides. Highways and rail tracks destroy the environment and make areas hard to cross, but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing.
In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.
> but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing.
Of course it is. The next question is "is it a good thing to let a single owner completely control access to this resource?"
We've actually decided in the case of highways and rails, that no, it's not. There needs to be reasonable and non-discriminatory access to these resources otherwise the trade is not worthwhile. We actually have laws that are meant to enforce this.
> the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.
Define the "astronomy community." Do we do first come first served or do we have a priority list? How do we handle disputes? Is it just US citizens or do we need to offer this to the entire world? What if the vendor fails to make good on their concessions? What sort of penalties should surround this system?
Building a highways is not necessarily "progress". We really ought to stop calling "progress" the destruction of a natural habitat that we will never be able to rebuild, for the construction of a superflous road that will close in 15 years because of poor traffic anyway.
If Jeff has the right to jam my telescope with his satellite due to the lack of regulation, do I have the right to jam his satellite with my telescope due to the same lack of regulation, or does it only work one way?
this reads really strongly as satire to the point i can't believe it's authentic.
hacker news poster says "my cheap fiber is working just fine, why does anyone need satellite internet", completely ignoring the literally billion people who can't access the internet reliably at all due to infrastructure failures
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