SpaceX started with their Falcon 1 booster followed by several versions of the Falcon 9. The Falcon Heavy will fly later this year and the rocket that will take the first person to Mars is called, for now, the Big F***ing Rocket or BFR.
The Falcon1, Falcon 9, Falcon heavy and the BFR (source)
The 150-ton BFR payload will be 10 times that of the Falcon 9. It will have an have an extra landing-guidance engine for reliable reusability and SpaceX also expects to be able to soft-land and reuse the second-stage payload rocket as well as its protective nose cone, substantially reducing cost per launch. (Note that Boeing is also planning a Mars mission so they may be planning their own BFR).
SpaceX applied to launch their 4,425 satellites in two phases -- an initial deployment of 1,600 satellites and a final deployment of 2,825. That is a lot of satellites and the FCC has required licensees to deploy their full constellations within six years of their grant, but last month they relaxed that constraint, establishing milestones of launching 50% of a constellation within six years and allowing another three years to complete the constellation. The FCC has delayed licensing SpaceX's plan until spectrum sharing agreements are reached by satellite operators, so the clock has not yet started running on their six and nine-year milestones.
SpaceX plans to send a BFR to Mars in December 2022, and they won't give me any details, but they will surely be used "locally" before that. They plan to begin launching operating Internet satellites in 2019 and those will be launched by Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rockets, but the BFR should be available to launch many of the planned 4,425 satellites before the FCC deadline and it will be used for replacement satellites when they are eventually required.
SpaceX estimates the satellite mass as 386 kg and the BFR can carry a 150-ton payload so, if they fit perfectly, a BFR could launch about 350 satellites at a time, but they won't fit perfectly, so let's say 300 per launch. SpaceX Senior Director Tom Ochinero says they will be capable of up to six launches per month. Using the BFR, 4,425 satellites in nine years sounds feasible and relatively cheap. (Elon Musk has estimated that future versions of the BFR may carry up to 1,000 tons).
The BFR may also play a role in debris mitigation. When they are taken out of operation, satellites are de-orbited and they burn up in the atmosphere, but there is some risk of debris hitting the Earth. Bloomberg reported that the FCC had challenged SpaceX's assessment of risk of human casualty from falling debris and SpaceX responded the following month. Recently two Senators have also asked the FCC to investigate the risk of collisions and debris.
The BFR may render the debate moot. In a recent presentation, Elon Musk speculated that the BFR might be used to capture orbiting satellites and return them to Earth, as illustrated here:
SpaceX hopes to recapture satellites in the future (source)
I will conclude with the following image that illustrates how the BFR got its name -- it is a BFR. If you are interested in the BFR and its role in Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars, you should definitely read the post this illustration is taken from.
Still not sure how big it is? Check out this view of a BFR in Boston:
=====
Update 10/20/2017
In a talk at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress in Australia last month, Elon Musk summarized SpaceX's technology progress, including 18 successful booster landings, and described the BFR design and economics and its applications -- launching satellites, shuttling to the International Space Station and travel to the Moon, Mars and between distant cities on Earth. It is a terrific talk, well worth watching:
On October 15, Musk followed up his talk with an “Ask Me Anything" (AMA) discussion about the BFR on Reddit. You can read a good summary of the AMA discussion, which includes video excerpts from the IAC talk and a concept video on terrestrial travel here. if you have time on your hands to geek out, you can see the entire AMA session here.
Last, but not least, SpaceX has posted a terrific 39-slide presentation on the project. It's a "Steve Jobs" kind of presentation -- long on images illustrating a concept and short on words. (I'm a big fan of that presentation style and try to force it on my beleaguered students). The presentation also includes links to a couple of animations and a video illustrating a hypothetical terrestrial travel scenario. Here are four of the slides to whet your appetite:
=====
Update 12/9/2017
The much-delayed test launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled for January 2018. The payload capability of the Falcon Heavy is about 2.5 times that of the Falcon 9 and around one-third of that of the BFR -- "well over 100,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit" according to Elon Musk.
(The Falcon Heavy test payload will be a Tesla Roadster destined for solar orbit -- a good publicity stunt and a near-permanent symbol of our transition to alternative energy sources).
The Falcon 9 will be used to launch SpaceX's first two prototype satellites next year, but in 2019, when SpaceX will begin launching operational Internet-service satellites, the Falcon Heavy will be available. The BFR will be available before the first Internet constellation is complete in 2024.
=====
Update 12/20/2017
SpaceX has released photos of the first Falcon Heavy rocket. It is expected to launch next month, putting a Tesla Roadster in solar orbit. When asked why he wanted to put the car in orbit, Musk said he loves "the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future," and so do I. That reply is even cooler than Mallory saying he climbed Mount Everest "because it's there."
They hope to retrieve and reuse the three booster rockets.
=====
Update 9/23/2018
Elon Musk announced changes to the evolving BFR design and introduced their first moon passenger in a presentation at SpaceX headquarters. During the first portion of the talk, Musk outlined 18 changes to the BFR design. For example, as shown below, the payload capacity has been revised at least twice since the initial BFR announcement, the second-stage spaceship is larger and it has fins for landing and deceleration during reentry.
The specific changes are each of interest, but the transparency of the engineering process is unique. Can you imagine Apple giving periodic public presentations on the evolving design of the 2022 iPhone and it's target applications every few months?
Another insight into Musk's thinking was illustrated by a question from the audience near the end of the presentation. He was asked what he thought about the Boeing CEO's prediction that they would build the first rocket to take a human to Mars and his answer was
Game on ... I'm glad he said that. that's great. I hope Boeing really goes, like, hard-core for Moon and Mars missions ... that would be really great.
Musk's goal is for us to become a multi-planet species and he welcomes Boeing as a competitor and a collaborator. Similarly, he wants us to transition to renewable energy and sees Tesla as accelerating the renewable-energy plans of other automakers. His open-patent policy is further evidence of his working toward goals that transcend corporate growth and profit.
Musk also introduced Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa who has paid to be the first passenger on a BFR Moon trip. Maezawa also paid the fare for eight artists -- he and Musk are clearly kindred spirits.
Will we have global standards for Internet satellite spectrum sharing one day?
Four companies, SpaceX, OneWeb, Boeing and Leosat have announced ambitious plans to put thousands of Internet-service satellites in non-geostationary low-Earth orbit (NGSO) and other companies like ViaSat and SES are currently operating hundreds of communication satellites in medium-Earth and higher, geostationary orbits.
With so many satellites orbiting in different planes and at different altitudes, there are bound to be frequent "inline events" when two satellites are simultaneously above an area both are communicating with -- causing potential radio interference.
Terrestrial radio interference has historically been handled by setting limits on transmitter power and granting exclusive rights to organizations, so, for example, in the Los Angeles area radio station KPCC has the exclusive right to broadcast at 89.3 MHz. Since transmitter power is also regulated, KPCC does not interfere with stations broadcasting at the same frequency in distant cities.
Technology has improved since the early days of radio and we are entering an era when smart radios can be programmed to cooperatively share the same spectrum (range of frequencies) by quickly changing frequencies, power levels, antenna focus, etc. (You can see a quick overview of the frequency ranges these companies wish to use here).
Last month, the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) voted to delay SpaceX's application to launch satellites, saying they would defer to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on how these new satellite systems should coordinate and share spectrum. Since OneWeb had already been granted permission to launch their satellites, Bloomberg and others speculated that the issue of potential interference might pose a significant problem for SpaceX.
It would have been a problem in the past, but today's regulators recognize that we need new rules for the spectrum-sharing era. In 2015, the ITU came out in favor of coordination between operators stating that they did not intend "to state an order of priorities for rights to a particular orbital position and the coordination process is a two way process" and last month FCC chairman Ajit Pai agreed, saying "given recent trends in the satellite industry and changes in satellite technology, the Commission began a review last year of the rules governing NGSO fixed-satellite service operations to better accommodate this next generation of systems."
What this means is that OneWeb and other early applicants who have been approved by the ITU and FCC as having priority access to frequency bands do not have exclusive rights to that spectrum, just that SpaceX will have to negotiate and define a sharing mechanism that satisfies them.
OneWeb technique to avoid inference
with geostationary satellites (source)
That process has begun. For example, OneWeb has a patent pending on progressive pitch technology, a technique to avoid interference between their low-Earth orbit constellation and geostationary satellites, which orbit around the equator at relatively high altitudes. Their satellites will automatically change orientation and power level as they pass over the equator to avoid interference with geostationary satellites orbiting above them.
SpaceX has proposed that NGSO operators share data to indicate the steering angle of each beam within a satellite's footprint. As shown below, they assert that this data sharing would drastically reduce the occurrence of inline events between their 4,425 satellites and a ViaSat geosynchronous satellite.
Inline events (red dots) without and with information sharing
This effort to enable efficient spectrum sharing by OneWeb, SpaceX, Boeing and operators of other satellites (and one day perhaps balloons, drones and other high altitude platforms) reminds me of the proposal for the Ethernet standard for local area networks by three companies -- DEC, Intel and Xerox. A major difference, in this case, is that the Ethernet standard was adopted by a professional engineering organization and a satellite communication standard would be approved by the ITU, a United Nations agency. It may be too soon, but might engineers from OneWeb, Boeing and SpaceX one day define global standards for non-terrestrial spectrum sharing?
Yesterday Hillary Clinton pointed out that Cambridge Analytica, an ad targeting company financed by billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer, worked on the Brexit, US, and Kenyan elections. The Kenyan election was overturned by their Supreme Court and Clinton said she hoped someone would write about the ties between the Mercers, Cambridge Analytica and the Trump Whitehouse.
(While she tentatively connected the dots between the three campaigns, it must be noted that the decision of the Kenyan Supreme Court was not based on the activity of Cambridge Analytica).
The format of this post is unusual. Rather than writing an “article,” I have compiled a short PowerPoint slide deck on the issue. The slides are annotated and have links to sources that would usually have been found in an article or blog post so you can read and study them as you would an article or use them in a presentation. (The slides are a subset of the slides used for a longer presentation, which in turn are a subset of the slides I used in class during the campaign).
The Kenyan Supreme Court, ruled 4-2 to nullify their presidential election.
Links between the Merciers, Cambridge Analytica and Trump
-----
Update 9/21/2017
Mari Christian pointed out that Brexit leader Nigel Farage, who is a person of interest in the FBI investigation into Trump and Russia, met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy March 9, 2017. Farage said he visited Assange at the behest of LBC Radio “with a view to conducting an interview” and that he had never even been to Russia.
With this in mind, let's modify the above figure as follows:
-----
Update 9/23/2017
There is ample evidence that Russian Hackers acquired the data that was published by WikiLeaks. It remains to be seen whether the Trump campaign and/or Vladimir Putin were co-conspirators. Robert Mueller and congressional committees are investigating that allegation.
Several readers commented on this, so I added a slide on Russian hacking with links to relevant articles.
The final PowerPoint presentation consists of nine slides:
-----
4/13/2018
In an informative timeline on the data hacking scandal, CNBC reports that the originally reported figure of 50 million hacked profiles, has been revised to 87 nmillion.
Four companies, SpaceX, OneWeb, Boeing and Leosat are working on constellations of low-Earth orbiting satellites to provide Internet connectivity. While all four may be thinking of competing with long, terrestrial cables, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said "the goal will be to have the majority of long-distance traffic go over this (satellite) network" at the opening of SpaceX's Seattle office in 2015 (video below) and Leosat is focusing on high-end fast, point-point links.
Can he pull that off?
Their first constellation will consist of 4,425 satellites operating in 83 orbital planes at altitudes ranging from 1,110 to 1,325 km. They plan to launch a prototype satellite before the end of this year and a second one during the early months of 2018. They will start launching operational satellites in 2019 and will complete the first constellation by 2024.
The satellites will use radios to communicate with ground stations, but links between the satellites will be optical.
At an altitude of 1,110 kilometers, the distance to the horizon is 3,923 kilometers. That says each satellite will have a line-of-sight view of all other satellites that are within 7,846 kilometers, forming an immense mesh network. Terrestrial networks are not so richly interconnected and cables must zig-zag around continents and islands if undersea and other obstructions if under ground.
Latency in a super-mesh of long, straight-line links should be much lower than with terrestrial cable. Additionally, Musk says the speed of light in a vacuum is 40-50 percent faster than in a cable, cutting latency further.
Let's look at an example. I traced the route from my home in Los Angeles to the University of Magallanes in Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile. As shown here, the terrestrial route was 14 hops and the theoretical satellite link only five hops. (The figure is drawn roughly to scale).
So, we have 5 low-latency links versus 14 higher-latency links. The gap may close somewhat as cable technology improves, but it seems that Musk may be onto something.
Check out the following video of the speech Musk gave at the opening of SpaceX's Seattle office. His comments about the long-distance connections discussed here come at the three-minute mark, but I'd advise you to watch the entire 26-minute speech:
Update 10/30/2017
Elon Musk has set a goal of having the majority of long-distance Internet traffic go over the SpaceX satellite network. The key to that is a richly connected, optical mesh linking their fast-moving satellites.
SpaceX is building a vertically-integrated organization -- rockets, satellites, ground stations, etc. are all being designed and manufactured in-house as opposed to OneWeb, which is working with strategic investors and partners. Based on this, I suspect that SpaceX is designing their own optical mesh network for inter-satellite communication.
I've not heard OneWeb talking about optical links between their satellites but, if they are planning for that, they might be seeking a partner and Mynaric may be a likely candidate. Mynaric says they have solved the problem of steering a narrow laser beam sufficiently accurately to keep it locked on a target only centimeters in diameter on a moving platform hundreds of kilometers away. OneWeb might satisfy their inter-satellite communication requirement by partnering with Mynaric.
Mynaric technology might be a good fit for OneWeb and other airborne platforms.
=====
Update 12/21/2017
As stated above, Elon Musk set a goal of having the majority of long-distance Internet traffic traverse the SpaceX satellite network. He based that goal on an inaccurate assumption about terrestrial networks and said nothing about competition from other LEO satellite networks. Let's look at both factors.
In his talk, Musk claimed that a route from Seattle to South Africa would involve 200 router hops. That is a major overstatement. I just ran a trace from my home to Durbin Technical University in South Africa and it was only 16 hops with an average latency of 350 ms. Musk also asserted that it would take only 2 or 3, perhaps four hops via satellite. My estimate to Chile, shown above, was 5 hops so that claim may have been a little optimistic. Regardless, it is far fewer than 200 hops.
Second -- Musk drew a comparison to terrestrial cables, pointing out that transmission is slower through a cable than in space and cables had to weave around geographic obstacles. That is true, but it seems that SpaceX will have at least one strong, satellite-based long-link competitor, Leosat. Leosat is focusing on the market for low-latency, secure, point-point links.
I can't believe I am contradicting Elon Musk (I am a big fan), but he may not reach his goal in the long-distance Internet service market.
Browsing the Politifact site convinces one that all politicians, including the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Polisi, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, lie, but Trump, his administration, and their supporting media have taken it to a new level
I teach a class on the applications, implications, and technology of the Internet and we spent time on the impact of the Internet on politics during the 2016 election. One of the things we noted was that Donald Trump had lied much more frequently than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or President Obama. I went back to the fact-checking service, Politifact, and it turns out that Trump is lying as frequently now as he did during the election season:
That is not surprising, but it seems to have set the standard for others in the administration, as illustrated by last week's announcement of the termination of the DACA policy by Jeff Sessions. Politifact found several statements that were one-sided or incomplete during Sessions' announcement.
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern also found a number of lies in Sessions' announcement and, in this 7-minute interview, he spoke of the way lies are picked up and propagated by Fox, Breitbart and other right-wing media outlets.
Browsing the Politifact site convinces one that all politicians, including the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Polisi, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, lie, but Trump, his administration, and their supporting media have taken it to a new level.
Update 9/3/2018
From time to time, I revisit Politifact.com to see if Trump's rate of lying (making statements that are rated either "false" or "pants on fire") has changed. As shown below, Politifact finds him lying a little less than a year ago on the statements they chose to fact-check and they are checking more of his statements.
The Washington Post also does extensive fact checking and they find that Trump's rate of lying increased slowly until last June:
I recently posted updates on the satellite Internet service projects of SpaceX and OneWeb. OneWeb and SpaceX have received a lot of publicity, but there is a new entry in the global satellite Internet race -- Boeing. (Leosat has kept a relatively low profile).
Boeing has applied for a license to launch a constellation of 2,956 Internet-access satellites orbiting at an altitude of 1,200 km. (In a subsequent amendment, the orbits were lowered to three different levels 970, 1,034 and 1,086 km ). They outlined a two-phase plan -- the first 1,396 satellites would be operating within six years and another 1,560 would be launched within 12 years as demand justified.
Boeing will use beam-forming, digital processing and instantaneous handoff between overlapping satellite footprints to generate thousands of narrow spot beams, dividing the Earth's surface into 8-11 km diameter (50-95 km2) cells as illustrated here. Each cell will have 5 Ghz bandwidth and, if a cell contains both user terminals and Internet gateways, time-division algorithms will enable frequency re-use to serve both. These are very smart radios!
In reviewing the FCC filings, I was struck by the degree of cooperation between the competitors. When Boeing proposed 1,200 km orbits, OneWeb filed a comment saying that would interfere with their design which also called for 1,200 km orbits. In response, Boeing met with OneWeb and altered their plan, lowering altitudes to 970, 1,082 and 1,030 km.
There were also concerns that waivers Boeing requested might lead to radio interference and SpaceX responded by stating that:
The Commission should encourage systems that facilitate spectrum sharing among licensed users. The waivers Boeing seeks will help to build a sensible regulatory environment for NGSO operations while honoring the goals of the rules at issue.
These companies value engineering as well as business. (Tesla has shared their patents -- might SpaceX do the same)?
In researching this post, I came across two other Boeing filings -- one for 60 high-altitude satellites (shown here) and another for a low-Earth constellation of 132 satellites and 15 high-altitude satellites. I imagine these smaller constellations will complement the larger constellation somehow, but have not been able to learn how they will interact.
Sixty high-altitude satellites launched in three phases: the Amercas, Europe
and Africa and Asia and Australia. Click to enlarge. (source)
Boeing, OneWeb and SpaceX are from different generations. OneWeb and SpaceX are relatively recent startups and Boeing is venerable. The startups may have less legacy overhead and have gotten off to a faster start, but Boeing has been thinking about providing Internet service using a satellite constellation for over twenty years -- they were the prime contractor for Teledesic's failed attempt in the late 1990s.
We have four potential global Internet service providers -- SpaceX, OneWeb, Leosat and Apple(?)/Boeing. I hope they all succeed, giving us some competition in the Intenet service market. That might one day help current Internet customers who have only one choice for their service provider (like me) but it would surely be a boon for people with no terrestrial Internet access today.
-----
Update 12/10/2017
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg said a Boeing rocket will be used to put the first person on Mars (presumably in a NASA mission).
A Boeing infographic shows their Space Launch System (SLS) rocket powering a manned Mars mission in the mid to late 2030s, which raises a couple of questions:
Why the sudden acceleration -- is it about competition for NASA funding? Catching up with the SpaceX BFR?
If Boeing speeds up the SLS program, will it affect the timetable for their satellite Internet business?
I wonder what the SpaceX and Boeing Mars missions will cost the US taxpayer -- which will be more cost-effective?
Finally, does the winner of this race gain any legal or property rights advantage?
I'll conclude with a bit of business speculation:
As noted above, Boeing has said they would like LEO satellite Internet partners and Apple was a possibility. More recently, Boeing announced that they will build satellites for O3b, a company Wyler founded. Boeing has also applied to transfer one of its V-band satellite broadband filings to SOM1101, a company controlled by Greg Wyler. Might we see OneWeb teaming up with Boeing in order to compete with SpaceX?
The following short video (3:18) outlines Boeing's Mars plan and previous timetable:
He spent over a third of the speech attacking the "dishonest", "crooked", "fake" media -- 3,215 out of a total of 8,833 words. That is frightening.
Trump gave a speech yesterday in Phoenix and this morning, the transcript was online. In less than an hour, I was able to read it and do a little analysis.
The 77-minute speech included 105 pauses for applause and 13 interruptions for booing the media and others -- Trump was energized by the enthusiastic crowd. It was a typical campaign speech in which he assailed Obama care, illegal immigrants, Democrats, trade deals, the Senate; praised tough law enforcement and the wall and bragged about creating jobs, stopping crime, etc. Here is a particularly hyperbolic example:
Can you imagine, in this day and age -- in this day and age in this country, we are liberating towns. This is like from a different age. We are taking these people. They don't shoot people because it's too fast and not painful. They cut them up into little pieces. These are animals. We are getting them out of here. We're throwing them in jails, and we're throwing them out of the country. We're liberating our towns.
But two things stood out for me. He spent over a third of the speech attacking the "dishonest", "crooked", "fake" media -- 3,215 out of a total of 8,833 words. That is frightening.
He also devoted 409 words to the "absolutely necessary" border wall. (When he turned to the topic, the crowd applauded and chanted "Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!"). He called out the Democratic obstructionists and threatened to shut down the government in order fund the wall. Mexico paying for the wall is evidently off the table after his embarrassing call to the Mexican President.
That was evidently the start of a wall building campaign/distraction because I got an email from
contact@victory.donaldtrump.com this morning asking me to sign a petition calling on the Senate to fund the wall:
Naturally, I "signed" the petition (using the name "Jim Jones" -- they do not check) and was redirected to https://action.donaldjtrump.com/, where I was asked for a contribution.
For better or worse, the Internet gives us machine-readable access to presidential speeches (and tweets), allowing us to quickly analyze and digest them. The downside is that they distract us from more mundane news about meaningful actions like changes in enforcement of immigration and drug laws or environmental regulation. We are suffering from attention-deficit disorder.
The OneWeb mission is to bridge the digital divide globally by 2027.
Greg Wyler, 2017 Softbank World conference
Whoever gets the most data wins.
Masayoshi Son, 2017 Softbank World conference
Global prices will vary, making connectivity affordable in developing nations.
Greg Wyler, 2017 Senate testimony
Satellites in 18 orbital planes
SpaceX and OneWeb are formidable, experienced competitors in a race to become global Internet service providers using satellite constellations -- routers in space. I posted a status report on SpaceX last week, now let's look at OneWeb.
OneWeb founder and executive chairman Greg Wyler has extensive experience with networking in developing nations. In 2003 his company, Terracom, signed a contract to connect Rwandan schools, government institutions, and homes. Terracom failed to meet their goal, and the difficulty of dealing with terrestrial infrastructure led Wyler to focus on satellite connectivity.
In 2007, he founded O3b Networks (Other 3 billion), which today provides high-speed connectivity to Internet service providers and phone companies using a constellation of 12 satellites orbiting at 8,012 km above the equator. (The geosynchronous satellites used for TV transmission and Internet access in remote areas orbit 35,786 km above the equator). In spite of its name, O3b was not going to connect the entire world and Wyler founded OneWeb in 2012, with the mission of bridging the digital divide, which he hopes to do by 2027.
OneWeb also has a symbiotic relationship with Softbank, their largest investor. SoftBank's Vision Fund has invested $1 billion in OneWeb and OneWeb plays a strategic role in SoftBank's vision of the future.
SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son outlined his vision of the future in the keynote session ofth the 2017 SoftBank World conference. He believes the information revolution will be driven by strong, general artificial intelligence (AI), therefore the key material asset for the information age will be AI training data -- "whoever gets the most data wins."
Low-cost, user-installable
terminals will support WiFi, cell
phones, and the Internet. Solar panels
and batteries are optional.
Several Vision Fund investments focus on collecting that training data from Internet of things (IoT) devices. They have invested in ARM, which dominates the IoT and smartphone processor markets, Nvidia which makes processors used in AI, Boston Dynamics which is building intelligent robots and, you guessed it, OneWeb, which will link 1 trillion IoT devices to AI projects.
Wyler and representatives of some other Vision Fund companies made presentations during the keynote. Here is a summary of what Wyler said:
They have priority rights to 3.55 GHz of globally harmonized spectrum for non-geostationary satellites. (They also have a technique for avoiding interference with geo-stationary satellites when over the equator).
They will have 49 satellites in each of 18, 1,200 km orbital planes.
With Airbus, they have devised a novel satellite manufacturing process that will allow mass production rather than hand building.
Cost per satellite will be under $1 million and they will be able to produce three per day.
They will connect both Internet gateways and end users.
The first satellites will have a capacity of 595 Mbps, but that will increase to over 1 Gbps. (More on capacity below).
Latency will be under 50 ms, making interactive applications like 5G mobile telephony, game playing and Web surfing possible.
The following is a video (9:43) of his presentation:
(You can see the entire keynote session with presentations by several Vision Fund companies (2:12:15) here or just Son's introduction, outlining his Vision Fund strategy (30:17) here).
Satellite footprint 1,080 by 1,080 km
System capacity is a key variable. OneWeb claimed satellite throughput would be "up to" 7.5 Gbps in a June 2016 presentation to the ITU, but Wyler quoted much lower capacity in his Softbank talk. (I've asked OneWeb for clarification on this change, but have not received a reply. I will update this post if and when I do).
That revised capacity estimate may explain Wyler's February 2017 statement that they had sold a considerable portion of the capacity of their planned constellation. The following month they filed an application with the FCC for an additional 720 satellites orbiting at 1,200 km and 1,280 orbiting at 8,500 km. The 720 satellite constellation application has been approved.
I have no idea what their planned customer mix is. They will presumably serve relatively few Internet gateways, but those will require considerable bandwidth. End users like homes and schools will require less bandwidth, but there will be more of them. There will be large numbers of IoT devices, but they will require little bandwidth. Population densities also vary greatly -- between urban and rural areas, continents and islands and, in the extreme, ships at sea. 1 Gbps will go a lot further in Alaska than Bangladesh.
OneWeb seems to be ahead of SpaceX's schedule. They plan to launch their first satellites in March 2018. (That will satisfy the ITU requirement that they are using their spectrum). They will begin offering service in Alaska in 2019 and hope to cover all of Alaska by the end of 2020. By 2025 they expect to have 1 billion subscribers and their mission is to eliminate the global digital divide by 2027.
Update 10/28/2017
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and OneWeb have signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on rural connectivity. Greg Wyler, Founder and Executive Chairman of OneWeb, promised that “Starting in 2020, OneWeb will be able to deliver everyone in Saudi Arabia, regardless of their location, high-speed broadband at their home, office, or school."
The Saudi National transformation plan calls for extending connectivity to nearly all rural areas and OneWeb is expected to help them reach 30% of rural homes. No details were released, but since this is a deal with the government, the strategy may be to use OneWeb for a national "backbone" and provide backhaul for local area networks rather than serving consumers directly.
Note that OneWeb investor and partner Richard Branson is witnessing the signing.
OneWeb's Greg Wyler signing an MOU with the Saudi MCIT
In his introductory remarks, Wyler said their schedule had slipped by two months and they will launch their first ten satellites next May. By 2019, they will be able to offer service throughout Alaska and will cover the entire US in 2020. Their first constellation will offer connections of up to 500 mbps and have a total capacity of 7 tbps. The second constellation, planned for 2021, will offer speeds up to 2.5 tbps and bring total capacity to 120 tbps. (High speeds will be possible in lightly populated regions). The third constellation, planned for 2013, will cover 1 billion potential consumers by 2025 and have a total capacity of 1,000 tbps. By 2027 they will cover the globe.
Wyler said they and their partners will invest $30 billion and provide many high-paying jobs. They will partner with local ISPs and phone companies in marketing their service. He also spoke of space debris and reentry casualties.
After the introductory remarks, the senators asked questions of the panelists. Mr. Wyler said the US is the technology leader among spacefaring nations and, if we take the lead in regulation, other nations and the International Telecommunication Union would follow. For example, he feels that a 125 km orbital altitude separation should be maintained between satellites and they should be limited to a five-year lifespan.
Several senators asked about pricing and data caps and Mr. Wyler responded that their partner ISPs, not OneWeb, would set prices that were affordable in their regions -- we can expect a customer in a high-GDP nation to pay considerably more than a customer in a low-GDP nation. He also stressed the importance of safety, saying investments would dry up if there were a satellite collision and he said prolonged uncertainty over spectrum-sharing would also dampen investment.
You can read Wyler's written testimony summarizing their plans, expected benefits and policy recommendations here or watch his oral testimony, beginning 1:02:50 of the archived video of the hearing. Representatives of OneWeb, Intelsat and ViaSat also testified, but, Boeing was noticeably absent.
Hughes has shipped a new satellite-Internet gateway to OneWeb. It is capable of making 10,000 handoffs per second -- times have changed since antennas moved to track satellites! (Hughes has contracted to deliver 40 of these gateways to OneWeb).
SpaceX and OneWeb have different strategies. OneWeb is working with partners like Hughes and Isotropic Systems while SpaceX is vertically integrated; however, even if they are designing their own edge terminals, SpaceX may use components from companies like Isotropic and Alcan.
Update 3/25/2018
OneWeb has joined the Seamless Air Alliance, which is developing standards for in-flight Internet connectivity through low-Earth orbiting satellites to terrestrial Internet gateways. Early members are mobile network operators Sprint and Bharti Airtel, Delta Airlines and Airbus.
Will SpaceX Starlink join the alliance? Will medium-Earth orbit satellite Internet service provider SES-networks (O3b)? An open standard for connectivity and billing will facilitate competition.
OneWeb's Greg Wyler expects standard communication with LEO in-flight Internet service to disrupt the industry. He says they will be offering service in 2020 and there will be several competing terminal manufacturers at that time.
Update 12/16/2018
OneWeb has made two major changes to their plans.
Citing pressure from national regulators who insisted on being able to control the routes of all traffic coming into or out of their nations, OneWeb has dropped inter-satellite laser links from their design. Doing so will simplify satellite design and save money and weight, but will lead to increased latencies and require more terrestrial gateways.
They have also decided to cut the number of satellites in their initial constellation from 900 to 600. After seeing better than expected results in their satellite ground tests, they concluded that they can achieve global coverage with only 600 satellites. The satellites will cost a little more than the initially budgeted $500,000 each, but this represents a significant overall cost reduction. They have also decided that their initial priority will be connecting boats and planes before focusing on the Internet for the masses.
They have not decided whether or not the next 300 satellites will be the same design as the initial 600 or a next-generation, higher capacity design. Their first 10 satellites will launch next February and while company founder Greg Wyler said he hopes to begin service next year, that could slip to 2020.
Update 2/6/2019
OneWeb founder Greg Wyler announced that his self-funded side project, Wafer LLC, has developed $15 antenna module, paving the way for user terminals priced between $200 and $300. (The antenna is only one component of the Earth station, but it has been a sticking point). Wyler said that “The entire antenna is less than an eighth inch thick -- you can have an extremely light, thin, low-power antenna that’s very cost effective and can be produced in large volumes.” Wyler said tests of prototypes showed 50 Mbps capacity per antenna "tile" and said multiple tiles could be combined. It is not clear how many tiles there are per antenna, but presumably, combing them would cut into the number of satellites that could be visible at any one time. SpaceX just asked the FCC for permission to deploy 1 million Earth stations and is slated to begin launching their constellation in 2019. They must be capable of mass producing cheap antennas too.
Update 2/20/2019
OneWeb has pushed their launch date back to February 26 and the British Space Agency is providing them with 17 million pounds in funding. The article refers to OneWeb as UK-based -- they have operations in the US, but must be incorporated in the UK. It also describes LTE-based ground stations that could be deployed in emergencies as establishing 200-meter coverage circles.
Once the testing is complete they plan 20 more Soyuz launches, each carrying up to 36 satellites. Virgin Orbit, which has a 39 mission contract, is also expected to begin launches this year. OneWeb plans to have 150 satellites in orbit by the end of this year, start regional service in 2020 with around 300 satellites and have global coverage in 2021 with 600 operating satellites and 48 spares in orbit.
The test satellites were placed in a 1,000-kilometer orbit and they will climb to 1,200 kilometers during the 60-90 day test. Perhaps the two-altitude test is related to the conflicts over sub-1,200 km orbits and spectrum between OneWeb and SpaceX. (At one time, OneWeb founder Greg Wyler and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk planned to work together, but today they are said to be personally hostile in addition to being business competitors).
OneWeb, formerly known as WorldVu Satellites, was founded in Arlington, Virginia in the US but is now headquartered in London and the UK Space Agency has given them an £18 million grant to work on 5G cellular integration through the European Space Agency. OneWeb's mission is to bridge the digital divide by 2027, and moving its headquarters to London emphasizes its position as a global company. (Airbus, Virgin Orbit and Softbank are collaborators and investors in the OneWeb project). Ironically, both the US and England are distancing themselves from Europe at this time.
That being said, an investment of $500 is a relatively small part of the cost of ongoing broadband Internet service to a home or a school or other organization.
OneWeb hopes to establish three ground stations in China. They have signed a "framework agreement" for one in Sanya, a city in southern China, and hope to have that and two others approved. They are also seeking partners to market and support their service. They plan a total of 45 global ground stations.
Update 1/20/2020
Pacific Dataport Inc, a subsidiary of established geostationary satellite company, Microcom, has signed an agreement to distribute OneWeb Internet service in Alaska. (The Web site refers to it as an "exclusive agreement with Alaska and Hawaii," but the press release does not mention Hawaii or exclusivity). Regardless, you can sign up to be notified when the service becomes available now. The service will be available "as early as" the fourth quarter of 2020.
On February 7, Arianespace launched the first 34 of 648 Internet-service satellites for OneWeb. The satellites were deployed in nine batches at an altitude of 450 km and they will self-propel to their operational orbit of 1,200 km. altitude and 87.4° inclination. OneWeb confirmed signal acquisition with all 34 satellites within hours after launch.
They plan one more launch in March and then they will take a "breather" to produce a newly designed element of the satellite. They expect to conduct customer demos by the end of 2020 and to provide full commercial global services for maritime, aviation, government and enterprise in 2021.
Update 3/3/2020
OneWeb has obtained the permit -- signed an MOU -- for working in Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. I wonder if it is exclusive? This sort of thing is necessary along with launches and technology.
Update 3/20/2020
Update 12/13/2020
OneWeb has emerged from bankruptcy and chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal says they planned to offer coverage in most of northern Europe by October or November of next year and would cover the entire world by may or June of 2022. He also said the current 648 satellites would be able to provide precision timing service and that the next generation would offer positioning, navigation and timing services.
---
Click here for a couple of earlier posts on OneWeb.
This morning, contact@victory.donaldtrump.com sent me an email offering a chance to enter a lottery for a trip to a Trump rally:
The email greeted me as "friend" and was signed by Trump himself. Trump said the winner would be flown to the rally and have his or her picture taken with him. (He did not say anything about per diem or a stay at a Trump hotel. I wonder if it would be a business class flight.)
I clicked on the Enter Now button and was taken to the solicitation page at https://donate.donaldjtrump.com:
I checked, and it turns out that the domain name donaldjtrump.com belongs to "THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION" (their caps).
I wonder how the receipts for those contributions are divided up.
-----
Update 8/17/2017
I just got another offer to enter the raffle for a trip to a rally. This one is telling me I better hurry to donate because the deadline for entering the drawing is drawing near: "All it takes is ANY CONTRIBUTION before 11:59 PM, Friday, August 18, 2017, to be entered to win this once-in-a-lifetime chance".
Trump is shameless.
------
10/7/2017
I get these offers every day since I am on Trump's email list, but this one stands out. It came from Trump Headquarters and is addressed to friend.
Trump HQ says that "Just like before the election, we don’t trust the approval polls of President Trump that the media continue to put out ... Instead, we want to hear straight from you (italics in the original).
The poll asks only one question (there is a textbox for an optional comment).
I submitted an empty form -- no vote and no comment -- but I was still thanked and asked to contribute a suggested amount between $25 and $2,700 one time or, optionally, on a monthly recurring basis. The old $1 option has been replaced by "other" -- evidently, too many people were only giving a cheesy $1.
Does anyone believe this is an unbiased poll? Does Trump think his supporters are dumb enough to consider this a legitimate poll? I guess the answers must be "yes" or they would not keep sending this sort of thing out.
Last Saturday, Newt Gingrich sent me an email inviting me to the President's Trust. Newt said I had to act quickly because the membership list was being sent to the White House at midnight. Here's the invitation:
When I clicked on the link to join the Trust, Newt asked me for a donation. He suggested amounts a lot higher than $1 and offered me the chance to make it a recurring donation:
The next day, I got an invitation to take a survey to show the liberal fake news outlets how out of touch with the truth they were on immigration.
I took the survey and, when I submitted it, got another request for a donation. It looked a lot like Newt's.
This is my first experience with a political mailing list and I have a couple questions:
Is this typical -- have other presidents requested donations this frequently and this early in their terms?
If so, is the childish deception in these offers typical?
Outside of Trump's base "base," are people naove enough to fall for this sort of thing?
