internet

To save the internet, Silicon Valley is sending it to space – Astronomy Magazine


But the first Starlink deployment wasn’t without problems. The satellites caused light pollution that drew outrage from the astronomy community. Some complained that doubling the objects in Earth orbit could make it harder to see and study the heavens, and even further contribute to space junk. According to Business Insider, SpaceX lost contact with three of the satellites. They will gradually deorbit — burn up in Earth’s atmosphere — over the next year. But some say these issues will likely be worked out as the projects scale.

“I am not sure it is possible to speak of right or wrong at this point,” Cerf says. “Something like 60 nodes have been launched for what I understand to be evaluation purposes — a prudent move before putting up thousands of satellites. There are concerns from astronomers that they will have an effect on Earth-based optical and radio astronomy. The low-Earth orbits reduce latency significantly, making satellite and terrestrial networking more similar.”

Bridging the gap between internet in space and on the ground may not just be a good business prospect — it may be necessary for the survival of companies like Amazon. The mega-corporation is best known for selling toothpaste and USB sticks from warehouses, but it also sells online data storage known as cloud computing. A lot of it. According to The Verge, Amazon controls as much as 40 percent of the programs running in the entire cloud. That’s more than Google, Microsoft and IBM combined.

But to keep up with the massive demand for data, Amazon may eventually have to move their servers off-planet. Bezos has said his plans for going to space will mitigate climate change and “save the Earth.” He’s not just talking server farms in low-earth orbit, but entire factories.

SpaceX and Amazon’s plans are still in the very early stages, however. Meanwhile, several smaller companies like Swarm and LyteLoop are racing to beat the major players, offering different variations on data storage in space. But history has shown that this nascent industry is incredibly expensive and most companies have failed before they’ve gotten off the launch pad.

Take Teledesic, for example. The ’90s startup received millions of dollars from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and a Saudi prince, among others, to deploy 288 broadband satellites built by Boeing. But that didn’t stop the $9 billion project from flunking in 2002. Around nine other efforts from that period also promised to “darken the skies” with spacecraft, eventually fizzling out. Could the new race for satellite internet be déjà vu?

“The space industry is basing a lot of its growth on DTN and the rise of mega-constellations,” says Christopher Newman, Professor of Space Law and Policy at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. “The question is essentially an economic one: can the market sustain both cable providers and internet-from-space … In essence, satellite providers are moving heavily into the telecommunications market and the mega-constellations are all predicated upon the market being able to support this alternative method of data delivery.”

In other words, interplanetary internet is still bound by the rules of capitalism: If Starlink or Project Kuiper can’t make money, the projects will likely phase out, like earlier, failed experiments. In the meantime, we could still be searching for signal.





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