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There's still a tiny kink here, how do they get their infrastructure to space?
If necessary, we'll throw them. Using the power of shouting "perkele" real loud whole doing it.
~~Satellite!!!~~ Satanaaaaa!!!
That's basically what SpinLaunch does
What kink? France has space launch capability. And Japan, which is still a good ally.
France and Japan put up a rocket quarterly right now, at best. SpaceX is doing 6-8 launches every month. The only realistic path for commercial access to space is through muskrat (who ICEYE uses now) or russia, that's a problem while trying to maintain a sovereign LEO constellation. Satellites have to be always going up to replace the ones coming down. I hope Europe can ramp up quickly.
SpaceX did 165 falcon 9 launches last year, the majority were starlink.
Appreciate that correction, I was only guesstimating. That's so many launches geez
Its pretty wild ya.
Neither of them have the capabilities to put up and maintain a network like that. Even if they could, itd be their capacity and more and they want to launch other things.
You need global coverage on any given orbit to ensure continuous service, and theyd need multiple rings to cover the entire area they need covered.
Thats a lot of satellites and launches.
Edit: if you didnt care about low latency you could do less satellites, but they need low latency for much of what they do.
Eutelsat also has sattelites up, but they mostly use them to broadcast TV.
Ya, that's the Eutelsat OneWeb constellation.
It's at around 1200km and 650 satellites. It was put up with Soyuz rockets until the war started and then SpaceX (edit: and India) put up the rest.
Looks like SpaceX is about to launch some of the first replacement satellites, but Arriane has some flights booked as well.
Isn't that like the point? That they're developing the capability?
This was about making the satellites for it. Not about launch capacity.
Its a big step for sure and you can't do one without the other, but their current rockets and plans arent a good fit for it yet.
Edit: I just want to emphasis the "yet". I'm not saying they can't, but they'll need to plan for it.
You don't need to cover the whole world, IRISΒ² is aiming for europe for example, we already have satellites and launch capability.
It's not for next wednesday but we're getting there, and in the meantime you'll have coverage, albeit not perfect coverage. Yet.
Not the whole world, but every satellite that wants to serve downtown Paris, has to serve the whole world on that orbit. They need a satellite perpetually going over downtown Paris which creates global coverage for that orbit. Europe is big. Thats going to be a lot of rings. (Edit Paris was just a figurative example, it would need to be in the cell range, not directly over)
Depending on the orbits maybe that never reaches Africa, or never reaches Russia. Im not really sure which orbital planes they'd use or are even possible. That comes down to where they launch from.
To attack thousands of km into Russia though to be useful like starshield is to Ukraine in a war situation, they would probably want that covered. At leaat partially.
Edit: clarity, but also this global orbit requirement is part of what helps fund the network. Now they can also offer service to other countries that line up on their orbits. Starlink wouldn't be profitable if it just served the USA. Trying to perfectly cover the USA got them extensive coverage around the globe though. If this is military use only, it wouldn't need to be as dense as starlink though as itd have less usage so less bandwidth needs.
Edit: i was just looking more into this, but orbits arent over the same spot repeatedly. A dish that goes over Paris on orbit 1 might not reach Paris again until orbit 6. That means you need even more rings, which brings true global coverage closer.
For your edit: yes they can, they are called geostationary satellites.
Way better than starlinks low flying ones in every aspect, except lag.
There are also medium height and so on and so forth, it's not a homogeneous capability.
Weβve had geostationary internet satellites for a reaaaaaaaaaally long time now. You canβt just hand-wave away why LEO satellites are so preferred.
As you said geostationary have substantial lag. If you want to send a message to someone it can work, but to be precicesly controlling things its not realistic. Its upwards of 600-700ms delay. People who have to use it don't like it, that's why Starlink won people over. They want to build a LEO network though.
They could definitely go for less satellites at a medium height and find a balance on usable ping, and that could save some launches. (edit: bigger but fewer satellites at medium orbits could mean more fuels as well to stay up longer on their own, but they would need more fuel as well to deorbit at the end of their lifespan. I don't know how that would balance out. But I'm sure you could get more than 5 years like the LEO ones are planned for, as long as the hardware is designed to last longer too)
The thing with these LEO satellites is if something goes wrong, they will come down in ~5 years. If you go much higher, it could be decades or hundreds of years. Everyone who screams about kessler syndrome because of Starlink is wrong, but the higher you go with a constellation, the higher the risk becomes.