Tesla is facing issues with the bare metal construction of the Cybertruck, which Elon Musk warned was as tricky to do as making Lego bricks
Tesla is facing issues with the bare metal construction of the Cybertruck, which Elon Musk warned was as tricky to do as making Lego bricks
Mate, it’s the opposite that’s true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
I did more digging and:
“Traditional” satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they’re the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I’m not a physics dude, so I don’t know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there’s a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn’t a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The “genius” of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn’t really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
LEO orbits have been practical for decades, but things like GPS use MEO.
MEO was the standard, until now, for reasons. First of all, there is higher drag in LEO orbits as you are passing through the thermo- or else exosphere. This means more energy (and therefore mass) is required to maintain the orbit. And the more mass, the more gravity is pulling on you (LEO gravity is nearly the same as on the surface - you’re falling, but you’re missing the planet… until you’re not).
SpaceX’s “revolutionary” idea was to let/make them deorbit, and to use the space freight program to replace them. Of course, this was possible before, and planned obsolescence is already an important part of designing satellites. However this is insanely expensive and is only practical long-term because SpaceX is already being paid to launch their rockets. And more importantly, the volume of the LEO surface is the lowest of all orbits… there is minimal space available, and anything traveling to a higher orbit must pass through it. So there is a real risk of Kessler syndrome, where debris makes it impossible to continue using the orbit. And the debris of concern is usually small so they stay in orbit longer. This debris comes from launches, collisions, and potentially deorbits.
SpaceX is the only group that has chosen to utilize LEO as a consumable that is inherently limited in nature. They externalized the cost of pollution to society due to operating in an under-regulated domain. Now regulators are scrambling to find solutions for orbital pollution - enacting rules requiring deorbiting, supporting efforts toward satellites that cleanup debris, and so on.
Whether these efforts will be enough and whether they will come to fruition quickly enough, I do not know. But I do know that the rocketry industry involves a lot of pollution, is growing into a significant GHG contributor, and depletes ozone in the atmosphere (the hole in the Antarctic is still estimated to be 50+ years from healing, and one 8 times larger was just discovered in the tropics).
Umm, high latency means slow reactions. I think you and OP meant the same thing, but you have the terms mixed up