In the past two days, I've been reading some information about near-Earth satellites, so I'm going to summarize some of the more popular and commercial parts. It's not very professional, if you have no idea about satellites, you can take a look.
Near-Earth satellites, also known as LEO, are satellites with lower orbits. Satellite orbits can be categorized into three types according to their distance from the Earth: LEO, MEO, GEO. Compared to other types, NEOSATs have the advantage of lower latency and wider bandwidth (due to their proximity), but the disadvantage is that because of their proximity, they do not have the same coverage as higher orbiting satellites. The disadvantage is that because of the proximity, the coverage is not as wide as the higher satellites. You can imagine that people who are taller can see farther, so you get the idea.
Near-Earth Satellite (NES) is actually very popular these days. If you haven't heard of NES, you should have heard of Musk, the one who made the Tesla electric car. Besides making electric cars, Musk also started a company called spaceX, and their goal is to launch a lot of near-Earth satellites to cover the earth. Of course we all think Musk is a genius, but he didn't invent the idea, scientists working on satellites already knew it was a good thing. It's very simple. Why do I launch satellites? There are two main purposes, either to take pictures of the Earth or to communicate with it, and in any case, we want to cover the whole Earth. Therefore, a few more low orbit satellites are needed to cover a small area. You may ask why we don't use a larger satellite that is farther away. As I have just mentioned, if the satellite is far away from the earth, the delay will be long, and it will require a very big and expensive antenna, and then the bandwidth will be difficult to be very big.
So why is Musk's satellite network so popular? Because he's Musk! Right, but also because it's hard to make a network of satellites, and scientists and geeks have been trying to do it since the 60's when the US and Russia were still in the space race, but it hasn't worked out so far. In fact, I can't say that it hasn't been successful at all, because there were a few companies that started trying to commercialize the idea in the 90's, 20 years ago, and some people invested in the idea, but then they burned through the money, and most of them collapsed, and the investment community was so scared that they didn't want to invest in such a new technology for more than 10 years.
So why has this idea come up again? To put it simply, it is because technology has advanced and it is less difficult to make satellites. Secondly, because we have a lot of money in the past few years, the big technology companies have a lot of cash and there is not much new technology to develop, investors also have a lot of money, and then there is not much new technology, so the idea has come back to us.
We can explain a little bit about technological advancement. Satellites are very expensive. In the 1960s, the satellites that were launched were big, heavy satellites, and there were three main points.
- Satellites rely on solar power, which was not yet common enough for everyone to understand.
- Communication over long distances and through the atmosphere requires very large and powerful antennas and other components, including satellite stations on the ground, all of which are expensive.
- It takes a very expensive rocket to put a satellite into space, and at first the rocket can only be used once before it has to be thrown away. Not only that, but if anything is miscalculated, it will all be wasted, so it takes a lot of specialists to do the math for a very long time.
That being the case, of course, only governments like the United States and the Soviet Union had the means to do so in the beginning. Later on, technological advances, first of all energy, became easier, and then in the last few decades, communication and electronic components, which had been growing rapidly due to the popularization of cell phones and wireless networks, became cheaper, smaller, and easier to obtain. Gradually, the private sector has begun to have the ability to build potentially commercial satellites. The academic world also gave small satellites a big push, as students came and went, and satellite researchers were committed to making research satellites more accessible, so Stanford came up with the concept of the CubeSat, which is a kind of standardization. In short, this kind of satellite is smaller in size and easier to make, with more readily available components, so it gradually developed into a smaller satellite with more commercial potential. For all these reasons, the ideas that failed in the 90's now seem more "likely" to come true.
In reality, this is still a new technology that is not quite sure to be a successful pandemic. We've already seen some successful satellite applications, for example, wifi on airplanes is based on satellites. However, we all know that you can't watch Netflix on a plane, and it's notorious for disconnecting from time to time, so this proves that the bandwidth that can be widely used is not big enough, and the coverage isn't perfect either.
The goal of the recently popular small satellite network is to have better coverage and to support general applications, such as living in a cabin in the mountains without internet, so it must be a low-orbit satellite, and it needs to be in large quantities. Although satellite technology has advanced a lot, it is still very expensive, and the most expensive part is the cost of launching a satellite. Think about it, managing one satellite is already a lot of trouble, if I want many satellites, not only do I have to send them up, but I also need to maintain them, and I have to launch the rocket dozens of times a year, which costs a lot of money.
Since the US and the USSR stopped the Cold War, the Soviets and Russians have been making money by launching rockets for other countries. So, didn't Musk launch a rocket to send people into space a while back? This proves that it is feasible to use the same rockets that have been used repeatedly in the US to carry out commercial missions, so the Americans are all excited to start making money with rockets. So the market has a lot of confidence in SpaceX. But this is about making money with rockets, SpaceX is getting ready to make money with satellites. They've already launched hundreds of satellites, and the next thing they want to do is sell satellite networks to cabins.
Everything sounds great, but it's not really true that the satellite industry has taken off - the second largest company outside of SpaceX, called OneWeb, went bankrupt around the middle of March during this epidemic. The reason for the bankruptcy is that the rich daddy, Softbank, is no longer willing to subsidize them. In fact, OneWeb has been very successful in raising funds in the past few years, with $3.5B already burned, but this is still not enough to cover the cost of commercial satellite operation, so the biggest shareholders have to go bankrupt if they don't give money.
I think the main reason is that the vision of satellite communications sounds very good, but the application can attract customers are not quite sure that they can make a return on their investment, but the early stage of the problem will require a large cost to build. So if the situation changes a little bit, the investment may stop. Prior to Musk's SpaceX, the companies that were generally more successful were investing in Earth observation applications. Even so, many companies disappeared or were acquired. So it may be a while before satellites are widely available to everyone.
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