Unlike SpaceX, OneWeb is working with a team of investors and partners. Five companies bid for the contract to build OneWeb's satellites and Airbus won. They will build 900 150-kilogram satellites, 648 of which will be used in OneWeb's initial, near-polar orbit constellation, as shown in this animated video:
The Airbus announcement raises a lot of questions, that are addressed in a terrific in-depth interview of
Brian Holz, OneWeb’s Director of Space Systems. Holz talks about the reasons for producing the satellites in the US and the factors in choosing a factory location, the cost of the satellites ($4-500,000 each), the need to have global participation in a global project, launch services, satellite reliability and plans for eventually deorbiting them, financing and the business case, the search for manufacturers of millions of user terminals and antennas, etc.
Brian Holz, OneWeb’s Director of Space Systems
Holz and CEO Greg Wyler have experience -- they were together at O3b Networks, which is already delivering industrial-scale connectivity using medium-orbit satellites -- and are worthy competitors for Elon Musk's SpaceX effort. While seeking the same goal -- global connectivity -- OneWeb and SpaceX are using different technologies and have different organizational strategies.
SpaceX plans to have around 4,000 smaller, cheaper, shorter-lived satellites orbiting at only 645 kilometers. SpaceX will also keep more of the project in-house than OneWeb. OneWeb is becoming a coordinated coalition of partners. Virgin Galactic, Qualcomm, Honeywell Aerospace and Rockwell Collins are already on board and Airbus will not be a mere supplier, but a partner in a joint venture, which will include others for finance and marketing as well as technology.
Both projects are extremely ambitious, expensive and risky. I don't know which, if either, will "win," but the best possible outcome would be for both to succeed and compete with each other and with terrestrial ISPs.
I worry about the problems of capitalism with its massive concentration of power and income inequality, but this is an example of capitalism at its best.
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Update 6/25/2015
OneWeb founder Greg Wyler announced that they have received $500 million in funding from a group that includes Airbus and is seeking to raise that much or more in their next round of funding. Previously announced partners Qualcomm (communication technology) and Virgin Glactic (launch services) are also investors.
Their plan will require an estimated $2-2.5 billion, and it does not seem they will have trouble raising it. I'd like a few shares myself :-).
But, let's not forget OneWeb -- they are also making steady progress toward their own constellation of Internet service satellites. OneWeb just announced that they (in a joint venture with Airbus) will build a factory to mass produce small satellites near NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (SpaceX is also designing satellites suitable for mass production).
One Web plans to place Internet satellites in 18 orbital planes at an altitude of 1,100 kilometers. They plan to build about 900 of these 150-kilogram satellites -- 720 for use and the rest spares -- at a cost of $500,000 each. (See the animation above).
They will also build satellites for other customers at the new plant and they hope to be able to launch up to 36 satellites on a single flight.
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Update 12/19/2016
The Japanese conglomerate Softbank is investing $1 billion in OneWeb, giving them a 40% share of the company. They are joining Richard Branson, Qualcomm, Airbus and others as OneWeb participants.
OneWeb and Elon Musk's SpaceX are both planning to launch constellations of Internet service satellites, but OneWeb is doing so in conjunction with technical and financial partners, while SpaceX is building their own satellite and launch technology.
I hope they both succeed, giving us an oligopoly rather than a monopoly. Regardless, a global Internet Service Provider presents difficult regulatory questions.
Click here for more on OneWeb and Internet service satellites.
We have been following the plans of Elon Musk and Greg Wyler to launch constellations of low-earth orbit satellites to provide global Internet service and fast long-distance links. Neither company plans to be in operation for several years, but Musk's SpaceX is ready to test two satellites.
The application calls for launching two identical Ku-band downlink satellites (cubesats?), which will orbit at 625 kilometers and have an expected lifetime of 6-12 months. The objective of the launch is:
To validate the design of a broadband antenna communications platform (primary payload) that will lead to the final LEO constellation design using three broadband array test ground stations positioned along the western coast of the US.
They will do broadband array testing using a network of three broadband test ground locations at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California, Tesla Motors Headquarters in Fremont, California and SpaceX Washington in Redmond, Washington. (It pays to own multiple companies). Two types of the ground terminal will be evaluated at each location.
These test results will lead to a revised, perhaps final version of the satellites and ground stations. I've no idea how soon they might be ready for operation, but SpaceX is first out of the gate in the satellite constellation Internet service race.
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Update 10/17/2017
SpaceX has applied for FCC approval to test satellite communication using radios on two buildings in Redmond Washington. The ground station equipment will be mounted on the SpaceX satellite research and development building shown here and the communications equipment that will eventually be in test satellites will be on top of a tall building about 6 km away. You can read more on the application and test on Reddit.
SpaceX satellite research and development building
Let's not bury the lead -- I admire Elon Musk. He is an inventor/entrepreneur reminiscent of people like Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison. Let me tell you why I admire him, then suggest that you watch videos of an interview of and two talks by Musk.
Musk was thoughtful at an early age. While he was in college, he concluded that the three areas that would most affect the future of humanity were the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration. He did not expect to found companies in all three areas, but went to grad school to work on energy storage for electric cars (using capacitors, not batteries). He realized that his capacitor storage might fail and decided he would rather work on the Internet than study it.
He speaks of large problems he wants to solve, not of business, profit, return on investment or stock prices -- those are means to his ends. He wants to bring Internet connectivity to sparsely populated and developing areas and provide 50% of global, long-distance connectivity (5-15 years), accelerate the advent of sustainable transport (half of our cars to be electric in 13-14 years), send people to Mars (12 years) and eliminate use of fossil fuels (a generation or two).
He is not trying to do any of this on his own -- he wants to be a catalyst. Tesla was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport, not to dominate the car industry, so they will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use their technology. Similarly, Musk sees their huge battery factory, Gigafactory version 1, as a product to be replicated by others -- The Tesla policy of open sourcing patents will continue for the Gigafactory and battery systems.
He is a relaxed speaker with a sense of humor. Musk and Steve Jobs are two of the best speakers I have seen, but a Jobs presentation was planned and rehearsed to perfection, while Musk seems to be speaking off the cuff. That being said, his product introductions in the following Tesla Energy talk were reminiscent of Jobs -- he used a few slides with images, not text, and spoke over them in the Jobs style. He even included a Jobs-like surprise. He revealed that the auditorium and talk were powered by his batteries, which had been charged using solar power (image below) -- like Job's "one more thing" moments or the "three new products" that turned out to be the iPhone.
If you would like to get to know Elon Musk and how I came to admire him, I recommend the following videos. (I have my students watch them).
Sal Khan of the Khan Academy interviewing Elon Musk
April 2013, 48:41, 502,483 views
This conversation gives insight into Musk’s goals and his motivation for investing in Tesla and SpaceX and you get know Sal Khan as well.
Announcement of Tesla Energy
May 2015, 18:02, 2,112,997 views
In this presentation, Musk announces products -- integrated, open-source battery systems for consumers, enterprises and utilities and the open source Gigafactory to manufacture them.
If you'd like to see more, there is a YouTube channel that claims to have links to every Elon Musk video and you can read an excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Musk here. It's a long post that traces events from his early desire to grow plants on Mars in order to stimulate interest in space through the near-bankruptcy of Tesla and/or SpaceX, which was averted at the last minute by winning a NASA contract. You can see a video (4:53) of an interview of the author, Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance, here.
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Update 6/29/2015
This post looks at "the bad behavior of visionary leaders" and concludes that leaders like Musk, Jobs, and Bezos could be more effective if they behaved better:
The question raised by the stories of these three men is not whether being tough, harsh and relentlessly demanding gets people to work better. Of course it doesn’t, and certainly not sustainably. Can anyone truly doubt that people are productive in workplaces that help them to be healthier and happier?
The more apt question is how much more these men could have enhanced thousands of people’s lives – and perhaps made them even more successful — if they had invested as much in taking care of them as they did in conceiving great products.
I've personally been chewed out by the young Bill Gates and wonder whether he should not be added to this list.
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Update 8/2/2016
Gigafactory footprint:
room for 93 Boeing 747s or 50 billion hamsters
Elon Musk and JB Straubel, Tesla's Chief Technical Officer, gave a short presentation at a ceremony celebrating the completion of the first portion of their first Gigafactory. Some of the points they made:
The Gigafactory is a machine for making machines -- designed just like a multi-layer chip.
It's more important to design the factory than to design the product it makes. (The Model 3 design is done).
They will improve the factory "clock speed" and "density" over time.
This is their first Gigafactory and they anticipate at least one will be built on each continent.
When complete, Gigafactory 1 will have production capacity equal to all the other lithium ion battery factories in the world combined.
Gigafactory 1 will operate 100% on sustainable energy.
They expect to cut the production cost of their electric vehicle batteries and Powerwall storage packs by 30 percent.
Batteries will be recycled, significantly reducing the cost of future batteries and eliminating the demand for "replacement" lithium.
Their self-driving car target is to be about 10 times safer than the average driver.
Here is the video of the presentation:
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Update, August 5, 2016
Ten years ago, Elon Musk published his first master plan. Here is a summary:
Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
With the roadster, models S, E, and 3 he has achieved the first three goals. Solar City is the fourth.
Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it
The first step is underway -- he is building the largest battery factory in the world (by far) and Tesla has purchased SolarCity. No doubt, the Gigafactory will turn out batteries integrated with solar panels for roofs and electric cars.
Tesla's purchase of SolarCity has been controversial, but I would not bet against Elon Musk.
Note that this is just his short-term plan to free the world from fossil fuels. It's part of the long run plan to create a colony on Mars so he can die there (without crash landing).
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Update 2/4/2018
You can see links to videos and transcripts of 166 of Elon Musk's talks, press conferences, etc. here. The first talk is an October 2003 presentation in the Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series and the last, so far, is his September 2017 talk "Making Life Multiplanetary" at the meeting of the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
The site is a community effort -- a large-scale collaboration. When Musk gives a recorded talk, a link to the video is posted on a wiki and the community members transcribe it. If you view a talk and the transcription is incomplete, you can pick up where the last editor left off and extend the transcript.
Lynda.com has focused on vocational training and lifelong learning since its begining in 1995. They have developed over 2,900 video courses in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese and have 4 million subscribers in 150 countries.
LindedIn has 350 million users who are looking for career advancement and job opportunities. (It's currently the 14th most visited Web site on the Internet).
LinkedIn has acquired Lynda.com and one can imagine the combined company pointing users to specific courses that would help them move up in their current positions or find better jobs.
That seems to be the basic idea and they say they want to do it on an ambitious global scale. Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content at LinkedIn, says the vision of the merged company is to "create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce" and their goal is to "lift and transform the global ecomomy."
(That sounds like something you might hear in a VC pitch in the comedy TV series "Silicon Valley," but let's suspend judgement).
They hope to create an "economic graph" -- compling databases with profiles of every member of the global workforce (what they have studied and what their skills are) and the available jobs and skills required to obtain those jobs at every every company in the world. Those databases plus an inventory of courses offered by every higher education organization and university will let people find the training they need to get a specific job and let employers find the people who are qualified to do a particular job.
My first reaction is that establishing standards and definitions that would enable them to come close to that vision across a variety of industries, cultures and languages is impossible, but they might be able to create economic graphs for specific industries and countries.
I worked as a consultant to Hyundai some time ago, and the Human Resources department had a system for tracking employee skills, job skill requirements and available training classes. There are also human resources software packages like Trackstar for such systems. Perhaps LinkedIn will take a bottom-up approach, replicating this sort of system industry by industry.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post asking if there was a place for Lynda.com and other online training companies in the MOOC discussion. It's become clear that the answer is "yes" and with this acquisition, LinkedIn will be a prominent player and competitor to companies like Udacity and Coursera. To the extent that company hiring practices and societal certification change, they will also be an alternative to universities for students whose promary goal is getting a good job.
Here is a video of LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner describing the Economic Graph and their vision for the next ten years:
Microsoft was founded in April 1975, when the personal computing hobby was just beginning, and the Economist has an article on the company evolution to "middle age."
Microsoft began with development tools -- a BASIC interpreter and Pascal and Fortran compilers -- but soon moved on to Windows and later Office. Under Bill Gates, and later Steve Balmer, the company strategy was to "strengthen Windows, to make it ever more crushingly dominant." That strategy worked well during the desktop/laptop/on-premises server era, but it constrained Microsoft -- keeping them from purusing new opportunities on the Internet and mobile devices.
Current CEO Satya Nadella, shown below with Gates and Balmer, has a different strategy -- "just build stuff that people like."
That has led to the porting of Office to other operating systems and the Internet, support of open source and emphasis on their Internet platform, Azure.
The article constrasts Microsoft's middle age slump with Apple (founded in April 1976), which has passed them in profit:
and now accounts for a much larger percent of the US technology sector than Microsoft:
The Economist article is on Microsoft, but the fall from dominance of IBM, as illustrated in the above graph, is even more striking. IBM totally dominated the (smaller) technology market until a disruptive startup, Microsoft, led the revolution that toppled them.
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.
Note that he is not talking about what would be the largest theoretically possible chips, but about what would be cost effective.
Moore's prediction was based upon extrapolation of the history of the integrated circuits up to that time:
Note that he is predicting exponential growth -- growth at a constant percentage rate.
He does not use the term "Moore's Law" in the article, but the term/meme caught on and we are still using it to describe exponential growth of all things techie -- storage and memory density and speed, communication speed, etc.
Moore's projection held up well beyond 10 years. In this plot of the number of transistors on commercial CPU chips through 2011, the line represents doubling every two years:
The accuracy of his projection is all the more remarkable when you realize that the prediction was made six years before Intel's first CPU chip, the 4004, which had 2,300 transistors.
At some point, density increases will level off, but that point has not yet been reached. Apple's 8X system on a chip that is inside your iPad Air has 3 billion transistors.
The first electromechanical compputers used electromagnetic relays as switching elements. Folloiwing genertions moved to vacuumn tubes, transistors and today's integrated circuits. When Moore's law finaly hits the wall, will we move to another switching technology and continue improvement?
A Re/code article says Moore's law is 50, but may not reach 60. The article quotes Intel executive Tracy Smith as saying they expect to be making chips with 5 nanometer features (about twice the size of a strand of DNA) around 2022, but that will be the end of the line.
The article goes on to speculate on what technology might come next -- the red question mark in the above figure -- but makes no predicitions. It also includes the following video (1m 53s) of Gordon Moore reflecting back on his 1965 article and the term "Moore's law," coined by semiconductor pioneer Carver Mead.
Wyler plans a constellation of about 650 satellites in low-earth orbit (about 1,200 kilometers). He said that they plan to launch satellites in 2017 and hope to begin offering service in 2019. (It seems that OneWeb is ahead of the SpaceX schedule).
They will offer 50 mbps, 30 ms latency connectivity to $250 ground stations that will also serve as hot-spots, providing WiFi, LTE, 3G or 2G connectivity.
As shown below, a terrestrial route between Los Angeles and the tip of Chile requires 14 hops. The same route via satellite may require only five low-latency hops. (The figure is drawn to scale).
Think about the possibility of a WiFi network with a low-latency, 50 mbps back-haul link to the Internet in every school or rural clinic in the world.
Wyler showed a prototype of one of his ground-stations and also showed how easy it is to set up. The operator just spreads the solar panels and turns it on -- five seconds install time. Here we see one on the corrugated roof of a building:
This ease of deployment would be terrific for establishing ad hoc communication in the wake of disasters that had disrupted terrestrial communication.
While I have focused on OneWeb's primary goal of providing Internet connectivity in developing nations and rural areas, Wyler also spoke of providing connectivity in aircraft (and ships at sea).
Of course, all of this is speculation for now. Some conference attendees and presenters were skeptical about Wyler's project, pointing out that his low-cost satellites would have to be replaced every five years or so -- a recurring expense. Critics also pointed out that much of the time, the low-earth orbit satellites will be over oceans, polar regions and other sparsely populated areas.
That being said, Wyler has been able to attract backers and partners, each of which brings money and expertise to the table:
Like a modern Internet company that follows the dictum "do what you do best and link to the rest," OneWeb will focus on the backbone and market through local retail Internet service and cell phone providers.
One can also imagine OneWeb providing competition for conventional terrestrial ISPs in developed nations. I can dream of going over to Best Buy, picking up a OneWeb ground station, installing it on my roof and escaping the clutches of my ISP monopolist Time Warner Cable. I am not holding my breath till that happens, but I will be keeping my eye on OneWeb's ambitious project.
For some background on Wyler's previous satellite company, O3B Networks, and more on his plans for OneWeb, check out this video:
Wyler says "We've got a pretty clear path. It's not just a technology problem. It is a technology, regulatory, implementation, education problem. It's kind of a little bit of everything." In the interview, he talks about terminal design, their business model and spectrum.
As mentioned above, he stresses ease of installation and low cost for the terminals. OneWeb has the rights to the Ku and Ka spectrum they will use and patent-pending technology to assure non-interference with geo-stationary satellites in those bands. Scale is critical to their business model -- once the constellation is operating, they marginal cost of a new customer is very low.
5G mobile communication is coming and prototypes are being developed along with demonstrations. (Remember the saying that projects had to "demo or die")?
Here are a couple of 5G prototype demos:
Samsung transmission speed demo -- 7.5 gbps standing still and a 1.2 gbps in a car going 112 kph:
Erricson demonstrates seamless hand-off between LTE and 5G:
and they brought their virtual reality, remote control excavator with them to MWC:
The final products will probably not be as fast as these prototypes, but they will eventually cost about the same as today's mobile radios.
Both Samsung and Ericsson are talking about initial deployment around 2020, but general rollout and ubiquitous adoption will take many years after that. (This is one technology in which developing nations, which are generally more mobile reliant than developed nations, may somewhat narrow the digital divide). Furthermore, there are no 5G standards, and you can bet there will be more than one.
<dream>
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a global 5G standard -- everyone using the same license free spectrum and protocols -- your phone moving seamlessly between nations and carriers -- cars that were compatible with instrumented roads everywhere ... like WiFi ...?
</dream>
Awake again -- Maybe I will get a Verizon 5G phone for use in the US around 2022.
By that time, out mobile devices will be 10-20 times as powerful and there will be a lot of "things" connected to the Internet. What new applications will we find for this high-speed, low-latency wireless connectivity?
I've not heard about this effort until now, but former Schlumberger executives Cliff Anders and Phil Marlar have been developing the network architecture, spectrum plan and satellite payload since 2013, and they just hired satellite industry veteran Vern Fotheringham as CEO.
Leosat will not be marketing to individual end users, but will target government and business -- maritime applications, oil and gas exploration and productions, telecom back-haul and trunking, enterprise VSAT, etc. Their market seems closer to Wyler's former company O3b, but Leosat plans to cover the entire Earth, while O3b is restricted to locations near the equator.
They plan to offer encrypted connectivity at up to 1.2 gbps with latency under 50 ms using a constellation of 80 to 120 small satellites, with launches beginning in 2019 or 2020.
While SpaceX and OneWeb have focused their publicity on end users and developing nations, they will also have the ability to deliver low latency service over long distances. As shown below, a terrestrial link from my home in Los Angeles to La Universidad de Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile required 14 hops whereas a satellite route could be achieved with five hops. (The following illustration is drawn to approximate scale assuming a satellite altitude of 700 miles).
The Ping time for the terrestrial link averages around 224 ms, considerably slower than the sub 50 ms latency Leosat hopes to achieve.
Like many Americans, I am served by a monopoly Internet service provider. Might these folks actually be able to provide competition -- at least in the developing world -- some day?
Update 12/4/2017
Leosat seems to be planning a mix
of polar and inclined-orbit satellites.
Leosat, which recently received an investment by Japanese geosynchronous satellite company SkyPerfectJsat, has announced rough milestone dates for their LEO project. They plan on offering store-and-forward service using two "early bird" satellites in 2019. In 2021 they will begin launching the rest of their 108-satellite constellation. Completion of the constellation and full worldwide service is planned for 2022. (Their initial store and forward connectiivty is reminscent of VITAsat, which offered 38.4 kbps email service in Africa in the 1990s). Judging from this illustration, they seem to be planning both polar and inclined orbits like Telesat.
In this interview (5:31), CEO Mark Rigolle says they will focus on point-point connections rather than linking to terrestrially connected ground stations. Doing so will cut latency -- he estimates 119 ms between Singapore and London. These point-point links will also be more secure than those using the terrestrial Internet. These features will appeal to enterprises needing to synchronize databases, financial trading firms, firms with a lot of sensitive data online, etc.
Thales Alenia Space will develop the relatively large, 670 kg satellites will have four optical links to other satellites, 10 Ka-band steerable antennas, each providing up to 1.6 Gbps of symmetrical data connectivity and two steerable high-performance antennas, each providing up to 5.2 Gbps of symmetrical data connectivity. With their emphasis on speed and security, they are focusing on a premium market in contrast to OneWeb or SpaceX, which hope to provide affordable connectivity to homes, schools, community centers, etc. as well as long-distance links like the one illustrated above.
I also found their patent application for a "System and method for satellite routing of data" on Google, but could not find one in the US Patent Office database. I am not sure why that is nor am I sure what patent-worthy unique invention they claim.
Update 12/21/2017
Leosat has updated their Web site -- it has a rotating image gallery at the top with illustrations and the following captions:
Faster Than Fiber
Secure Data Communication
Instant Infrastructure
From Anywhere to Everywhere
This, along with their recent SkyPerfectJsat investment is an indication that they are making progress and focusing on high-end, fast, secure links.
In a talk at the opening of the SpaceX office in Seattle, Elon Musk predicted that they would get 50% of the long-haul Internet traffic. It seems like Leosat will be a strong, focused competitor. (Note that Musk also based his prediction on inaccurate assumptions).
Update 11/14/2019
LeoSat, unable to raise capital, has shut down. I guess investors assumed they would not be able to compete with SpaceX once they begin service with inter-satellite laser links.
I've been studying and working on the Internet in developing nations since 1991 when only a few nations had any sort of Internet connection, as shown in Larry Landweber's 1991 connectivity map:
Every nation is connected today, but the digital divide remains as deep as it was in 1991. Both Facebook and Google are working to bring the 3-4 billion people who do not have Internet connectivity online and they described their efforts at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Google
Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps at Google Inc., updated the audience on two projects -- Project Loon and Project Link.
Project Loon seeks to deploy a constellation of balloons at an altitude of around 20 kilometers -- above the mountains, air traffic and weather.
The balloons will be airborne routers able to communicate with end users, each other and Internet back-haul locations.
Pinchai said the balloons now average more than six months in the air and keep nearby smartphones operating at 4G or LTE speeds, around 10 megabits per second. “We are well on our way to a platform that, by the end of the decade, will touch 4 to 5 billion people.”
He also gave a progress report on Project Link in Kampala, Uganda where they have installed over 800km of fiber, creating an urban backbone.
As is often the case with municipal networks (as in Stockholm), Google is not a retail Internet service provider, but provides wholesale connectivity to retailers. Pichai said they would be expanding Project Link -- installing fiber backbones "many more" African cities this year.
For more on the Kampala deployment and a thoughtful analysis of the reason for its success, see this post by Steve Song.
Facebook
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Internet.org, which hopes to make basic internet services affordable, so everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy.
While Google is working on long range projects (including an investment in Elon Musk's SpaceX project to provide Internet service using low-earth orbit satellites), Internet.org is already up and running in Ghana, Columia, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia and India.
Facebook and their Internet.org partners are focusing on improving traditional terrestrial cell phone technology by improving mobile infrastructure, mass producing cheap, powerful cell phones and caching and compressing data. Their partners reflect this orientation – phone manufacturers, Opera, a Web software company, and Mediatek, a fabless semiconductor company.
Facebook also has a Connectivity Lab lab working on more exotic, long-range solutions.
Short videos on Project Loon and Internet.org
Project Loon:
Internet.org:
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Update 4/10/2015
Mark Zuckerberg spoke at a business conference being held in conjunction with the Summit of the Americas in Panama City yesterday. He announced that Internet.org would be available in Panama and stated that eventually expanding into Cuba “definitely fits within our mission.” (Recall that Internet.org provides “basic Internet services" -- access to leading Web sites -- not access to the open Internet).
The Indian courts failed in their attempt to stop the showing of "India's Daughter," a BBC documentary exposing the New Delhi bus gang rape of a medical student and its aftermath.
The Indian government banned the showing of the film and the BBC blocked it on YouTube for copyright reasons. (Perhaps it is visible in Britain).
Banning the video gave it notoriety, increasing its popularity. (This is an example of the so called "Streisand effect," referring to the rush to view an aerial view of Barbara Streisand's house when she objected to it being posted online).
I am not certain when it was banned on YouTube, but it became available on Vimeo on March 5 and by the afternoon of the 6th had been viewed 60,000 times, but it was subsequently taken down.
As of this writing, it is available on the Daily Motion site. By the time you read this, it may be gone from there, but you will probably be able to find it using Google search. (If you are reading this from England or using a VPN -- is it still available on the BBC Web site)?
At nearly the same time, the Chinese government blocked access to "Under the Dome," a scathing documentary on pollution, which had hundreds of millions of view on Chinese Web sites within days of its release.
It may have been banned in China, but it is readily accessible in other nations (with English subtitles) and to any Chinese person willing to use a VPN to view it on YouTube.
A Coursera Specialization requires completion of a group of related courses followed by a capstone project. A Specializations consists of several online courses, developed at universities, leading up to a real capstone project/case study developed by a company in the relevant industry.
For example, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and Instagram have collaborated on an interaction design Specialization. UCSD will provide six MOOC-format courses and the capstone project will come from Instagram.
Students can still take the courses for free, but they will not receive a certification of completion and will not be allowed to do the capstone project. Students wishing to complete the capstone and receive a certificate of completion will pay a tuition of $343.
The SMC program would take longer to complete and would cost more in terms of tuition and opportunity cost, but it covers more ground and is taught face-to-face.
These are interesting, innovative times for vocational education. Hiring practices and societal values will eventually determine the winners, but for now, how would you advise a young person who wanted to become an interaction designer?
(See the related post on constellations of Internet service satellites).
Sunday February 8 at 6:10 EST (two minutes after sunset), a SpaceX rocket is scheduled to launch. Previous SpaceX satellites delivered payloads into low-Earth orbit, but this one is destined for the Lagrangian Point nearly 1 million miles from Earth.
At the Lagrangian point 1 (or L1), approximately one
million miles from Earth, the gravitational forces between
the sun and Earth are balanced, which provides a stable
orbit that requires fewer orbital corrections for the
spacecraft to remain in its operational location for a
longer period of time.
Source: NOAA
SpaceX will attempt, for the second time, to recover the rocket. The first time they tried to recover a rocket they failed, but they understand the reason for the failure and hopefully will succeed this time.
The satellite, called "DSCOVR," has scientific and symbolic goals. At the Lagrangian Point, DSCOVR will remain stationary with respect to the Earth and the Sun, enabling it observe the Sun and serve as an early warning system for potentially disruptive solar flares.
Being stationary relative to the Earth will also enable DSCOVR to serve as a distant "Web cam" providing us with a feed of the entire, fully-lit Earth -- an ever changing version of the famous "Blue Marble" picture taken from Apollo 17. (Al Gore called for this space cam while Vice President and, after a long political struggle, his vision is about to be realized).
With a bit more than two minutes to go, the Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed -- there was an apparent problem with part of the telemetry system as well as at an Air Force radar tracking station.
They may try again tomorrow about two minutes earlier than today.
The picture below is from the launch live stream just after it was scrubbed.
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Update 2/9/2015
Weather conditions are not favorable for a Monday launch and so NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Air Force and SpaceX have made the decision to postpone the launch until Tuesday, February 10 at 6:05pm ET with a backup date of Wednesday, February 11.
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Update 4/14/2015
Elon Musk tweets the bad news -- SpaceX failed again to recapture a rocket after launch.
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Update 4/15/2015
A Boeing-Lockheed joint venture is also working on a reusable rocket engine to compete with SpaceX and to reduce dependence on Russian rockets. That will increase the competitive pressure on SpaceX, leading them to cut costs of a potential satellite Internet offering.
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Update 4/21/2015
SpaceX reports that their latest failure to retrieve a rocket failed because of a "slower than expected throttle valve response." The next attempt will be in two months. They are learning from their mistakes and rocket reuse will eventually be routine.
NASA launched a new website Monday so the world can see images of the full, sunlit side of the Earth every day. The images are taken by a NASA camera one million miles away on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force.
Once a day NASA will post at least a dozen new color images of Earth acquired from 12 to 36 hours earlier by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). Each daily sequence of images will show the Earth as it rotates, thus revealing the whole globe over the course of a day. The new website also features an archive of EPIC images searchable by date and continent.
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Update 11/27/2015
Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, has succeeded in landing a rocket for reuse. Here's a schematic of the flight:
and here is a video showing the takeoff and slow, controlled landing:
This is a bit of a publicity win over SpaceX, which has failed in attempts to safely land a rocket, but it also shows that it can be done.
Elon Musk used Twitter to congratulate Jeff Bezos on the Blue Origin achievement:
Then he tweeted a reminder that you have to go a lot faster and use a lot more fuel to put a satellite into orbit, as SpaceX has done often, than to go up 100 kilometers to the arbitrary "start" of space and come back down.
Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit.
The latest SpaceX launch put 11 satellites into low-earth orbit and safely landed the booster rocket. This is good news for the prospects of low-cost, world-wide satellite Internet service.
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Update 1/6/2016
On December 31, 2015, Elon Musk said "Falcon 9 back in the hangar at Cape Canaveral. No damage found, ready to fire again." Could it have been thoroughly inspected so quickly? Regardless, SpaceX says this one will not be reflown. It will be retired for display -- not sure where, but there are a number of possible locations.
In the hangar at Cape Kennedy
Closeup showing superficial damage
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Update 1/11/2016
SpaceX has twice tried softly landing a rocket on a barge so that it could be reused, but they will try again on January 17th. That launch will be from Vandenberg Air Force base in California and the recovery barge will be in the Pacific Ocean. If they can do barge landings reliably, they will have more launch-site options.
The SpaceX rocket that recently soft-landed on Earth had about 15 times the thrust -- it was about 15 time bigger -- than Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket that landed safely a few weeks earlier.
Musk's goal is a settlement on Mars, but a large reduction in launch cost will enable more scientific study of the earth, our atmosphere and the universe, enhanced national security and commercial applications like mining and space tourism.
SpaceX has twice failed at a soft landing on a barge at sea, but it is important that they be able to do so for safety and because there are not many landing pads. (They will try again this Sunday).
SpaceX has already reduced the cost of launches to low-earth orbit by about 75% -- from several hundred thousand to 60 thousand and with reusability of rockets and other components will achieve the 100x improvement that Musk has predicted.
The inscription on the landing barge, "Just read the instructions," is a reference honoring science fiction author Iain M. Banks, author of the novel Player of Games.
The coolest quote was from SpaceX investor and board member Steve Jurvetson, who said "Mars is great for some, but for a starter vacation, I think the moon is a much more interesting destination." He envisions flying around the moon in very low orbit -- just above the highest peaks.
The post also contains videos of the interview:
and the launch and soft landing of the Falcon 9 rocket:
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Update 1/16/2016
Here is a drawing of the soft landing SpaceX hopes to pull off tomorrow. After separation, the first stage will flip around, do a couple of burns to slow down, then adjust its trajectory using fins once back in the atmosphere and do a final burn as it softly lands on the barge. They have failed twice, let's hope the third times a charm.
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Update 1/18/2016
SpaceX's attempt at a soft landing at sea failed for the third time :-(. Evidently ice, not rough seas, caused the failure. Here is video of the landing and explosion:
@Elonmusk took it with humor, tweeting "Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!". (Note that a big piece does end up on the barge -- for study and perhaps for spare parts).
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Update 1/23/2016
As mentioned above, Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origins, succeeded in soft landing one of their New Shepard booster rockets last November. Subsequently, Elon Musk's SpaceX achieved a vertical landing of a much larger booster that had flown higher and faster, stealing some of Bezos' thunder.
Now Bezos is back in the spotlight, because Blue Origin inspected their recovered booster, replaced the expendable parts, made a significant software improvement and relaunched and again recovered it. As Bezos says Launch. Land. Repeat.
Here is a short video (1:49) showing the soft landing last November and the launch and soft landing from yesterday:
Bezos is optimistic because greater inertia will make it easier to soft-land the larger rockets he plans for putting satellites and people in orbit -- comparing the difficulty of balancing a vertical pencil on your hand to balancing a broomstick and they will start full-engine testing of their first orbital booster this year.
The competition between Musk and Bezos is terrific -- let's see if Bezos tries to land a New Shepard on a ship next.
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Update 3/11/2016
Yet another cool selfie of the Earth. NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) captured an eclipse, with the shadow of the moon moving from the Indian Ocean to Indonesia and Australia and the pacific islands.
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Update 4/8/2016
SpaceX succeeded in landing a Falcon 9 rocket on a barge at sea! They will be able to inspect, repair and reuse the $60 million rocket, dramatically cutting the cost of space projects, including their effort to put a constellation of Internet access satellites in orbit!
Here are pictures of the rocket landing and standing on the barge after landing:
You can see the archived Webcast of the entire mission from launch to orbit here.
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Update 4/9/2014
Of Course I Still Love You, we have a Falcon 9 on board.
I am not sure how long the video with commentary (above) will remain on the SpaceX web site, but a video (46:18) of the mission without commentary -- just the radio traffic -- is archived on YouTube, below. The reentry and safe landing of the first stage rocket is shown at 35 minutes 34 seconds into the video.
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Update 5/6/2016
SpaceX does it again -- lands a Falcon 9 rocket on a barge at sea for the second time! If they can do this routinely, it will dramatically cutting the cost of space projects, including their effort to put a constellation of Internet access satellites in orbit.
This landing was more difficult than the previous one because the rocket was launching a satellite into a higher orbit. That meant that it returned twice as fast -- 2 km/second rather than 1 km/second. That meant with 4 times the energy and 8 times the heat needed to decelerate it.
As shown in his before and after tweets, Elon Musk was not so sure this one would work out:
Elon Musk played it cool before the launch.
You can see the mission video, starting just before the successful landing, here.
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Update 6/3/2016
Cool pictures of latest Falcon 9 soft landing:
The rocket came down at an angle, yet they were still able to land it safely:
This is the rocket entering the port. I had not understood how small the barge is compared to the size of the rocket or how large the rocket is compared to the size of a person. It's amazing that they can land something so big on such a small barge.
On July 5, 2016, the moon passed between NOAA's DSCOVR satellite and Earth. NASA's EPIC camera aboard DSCOVR snapped these images over a period of about four hours. In this set, the far side of the moon, which is never seen from Earth, passes by. In the backdrop, Earth rotates, starting with the Australia and Pacific and gradually revealing Asia and Africa.
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Update 814/2016
JCSAT booster after recovery
It's getting to be a bit routine -- SpaceX once again recovered a booster after soft-landing it on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. Check out the following video (5m 37s) summarizing the launch and booster recovery. A SpaceX engineer explains the tradeoffs in a soft landing beginning around 3m 50s.
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Update 1/26/2017
SpaceX expects to launch only one or two more expendable rockets. They have also proposed construction of three booster landing zones. It seems rocket recovery and reuse will become routine, making satellite Internet service significantly more affordable..
Proposed expansion of landing facility to three zones.
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Update 3/30/2017
SpaceX has recovered 8 rockets after soft landings and they hope to reuse one of them for the first time today. A rocket that landed at sea last April will hopefully be successfully launched and recovered either today or Saturday.
The two and a half hour launch window opens March 30, at 6:27 p.m. EDT, or 10:27 p.m. UTC and the backup launch window opens April 1, at 6:27 p.m. EDT, or 10:27 p.m. UTC. Here is the approximate mission timeline:
The countdown, launch and deployment will be streamed online -- with the usual excellent commentary by SpaceX engineers:
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Update 5/9/2017
In 2015, Boeing announced that they were working on reusable rockets (see above). There was no mention of Internet service at that time -- the goal was simply reducing reliance on Russian and SpaceX rockets. As late as October 2016, Fortune published a long article without mentioning Internet service.
The week after the Fortune article was published, Boeing's FCC application to launch a constellation of 1,396 satellites operating at an altitude of 1,200 km and to subsequently increase the constellation to the total of 2,956 satellites was announced.
If so, we have three potential global Internet service providers -- SpaceX, OneWeb and Apple. I hope they all succeed, giving us some competition in the Intenet service market. That would be a boon for current Internet customers who have only one choice for their service provider (like me) as well as people without any terrestrial Internet access.
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Update 6/27/2017
SpaceX is on a roll. They just launched a re-used rocket from Cape Canaveral and recaptured it and, within 48 hours, launched and recaptured a rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base. The precision of the recapture is shown in the following time-lapse video.
SpaceX launched an SES satellite into geosynchronous orbit last week using a Falcon 9 Booster that had previously been flown and refurbished. They also soft-landed and retrieved the booster.
SES CTO Martin Halliwell called this a "major sea change" and spoke of the cost and time savings in an excellent interview following the launch. Here are a couple quotes from the interview:
I think in a couple years time you won’t even consider whether it’s a pre-flown rocket or a new rocket or a second-time rocket ... It will just be a flight and you will buy a service to get to orbit – and that will be that!
Its saving SES months of time and thereby tens of millions of dollars of real money to fly with a used booster rather than having their expensive satellite sit and languish uselessly on the ground.
The average launch delay we have right now is about 7 months ... until we have launch vehicle availability ... It’s just cash out and a very expensive wait ... tens of millions of dollars lost due to delays.
SpaceX has given marginal discounts from the advertised $61 million geostationary launch price for those using refurbished (Musk jokes that they are "flight-proven") boosters, but the price will go down once the roughly $1 billion spent to develop soft-landing capability is recovered. SES CEO Karim Michel Sabbagh expects the price to drop to around $30 million eventually, but Halliwell says the real benefit thus far is the earlier launch date and he does not expect such a dramatic price reduction. In the long run, the Falcons will be phased out and the BFR price will assume reusability from the start.
