Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.

Lump

Active Member
Mar 31, 2013
2,618
2,632
So. Cal.
Huh???

Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites - WSJ - WSJ
Elon Musk shook up the automotive and aerospace industries with electric cars and cheap rockets. Now, he’s focused on satellites, looking at ways to make smaller, less-expensive models that can deliver Internet access across the globe, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Musk is working with Greg Wyler, a satellite-industry veteran and former Google Inc. executive, these people said. Mr. Wyler founded WorldVu Satellites Ltd., which controls a large block of radio spectrum.
In talks with industry executives, Messrs. Musk and Wyler have discussed launching around 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds, the people familiar with the matter said. That is about half the size of the smallest communications satellites now in commercial use. The constellation would be 10 times the size of the largest current fleet, managed by Iridium Communications Inc.
The venture would face large financial, technical and regulatory hurdles. Industry officials estimate that it would cost $1 billion or more. The people familiar with the matter cautioned the project is in a formative stage, and it isn’t certain Mr. Musk will participate.

Messrs. Musk and Wyler are considering building a factory to make satellites, the people said. One of the people said initial talks have been held with state officials in Florida and Colorado about locating the factory. In addition to Mr. Musk, WorldVu is seeking a satellite industry partner to lend expertise to the project, this person said.
Mr. Musk’s closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, likely would launch the satellites, those people said, though no agreement is in place. SpaceX has launched a dozen of its Falcon 9 rockets in the past five years and plans more than four dozen launches through 2018. In September, the company won a $2.6 billion NASA contract to develop, test and fly space taxis to carry U.S. astronauts into orbit.
Building a plant and testing satellites is a lengthy process, and WorldVu needs to clear the use of spectrum with other operators. SpaceX may not have capacity to launch the satellites until the end of the decade, by which time WorldVu risks losing its spectrum.
A previous satellite Internet startup founded by Mr. Wyler, O3b Networks, has faced technical problems with the first four satellites it launched, which likely will shorten their lifespans. O3b aims to serve large areas on either side of the equator with a constellation of 12 satellites. Mr. Wyler has left the company, though he remains a significant shareholder.
One indicator of the challenge: Mr. Wyler brought a similar plan to Google, which prides itself on tackling big problems. Yet he stayed only about a year before leaving to work with Mr. Musk.
Two people familiar with the matter said Mr. Wyler’s relationship with Google soured in part because he wasn’t sure the search giant had sufficient manufacturing expertise. Google declined to comment.
If Messrs. Musk and Wyler choose to build the satellites, they would face competition from other makers of small satellites, such as Nevada-based Sierra Nevada Corp. and Britain’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.
Messrs. Musk and Wyler share an interest in reducing the cost of satellites. WorldVu needs a lot of satellites, and could be the anchor customer for a high-volume, low-cost satellite maker. Mr. Musk changed the economics of launching rockets by simplifying designs while building engines and other components in-house.
The smallest communications satellites now weigh under 500 pounds and cost several million dollars each. WorldVu hopes to bring the cost of manufacturing smaller models under $1 million, according to two people familiar with its plans.
High costs and limited users have hobbled past efforts to deliver telephone and Internet service from space. Iridium filed for bankruptcy protection nine months after it launched in 1998, after attracting few users willing to pay $3,000 for a phone and up to $7 a minute for calls. Rival Globalstar Inc. sought bankruptcy protection in 2002. Both re-emerged as mobile-data providers.
Messrs. Musk and Wyler also may also be able to find willing investors among technology giants. Both Google and Facebook Inc. are working to extend Internet access to unwired parts of the globe, through drones, balloons and other means.
 
Last edited:
After today's misadventure with Tesla Tech being UNABLE!!!!! remotely to unlock our P85 when the fob wouldn't do the trick, primarily because Wickenburg, as most Phoenix-Las Vegas travelers know, is in an AT&T dead zone, here is one owner who not only hopes this story comes to fruition but also becomes the backbone of a worldwide (??????????) Tesla-Communications setup.

Perhaps???
 
Yay, an advanced global satellite network. What could possibly go wrong?

In a briefntwitter conversation, maybe with DrTaras, he said it'd be low cost. They don't have reusability yet. ;)
Anybody remember Teledesic? It's been almost 20 years but it's a similar technical story: 840 satellites, 120 kg, T1 speeds from orbit. Bill Gates and other tech giants supplied the initial funding. They got one satellite off the ground before selling the company as the scheme proved too costly ~$10B IIRC.
We'll see.
 
All I can think is "LAG".

Maybe they could be placed relatively close to earth and provide decent ping times.

Still I don't know about gaming via satellite.

Typical satellite Internet works with slow ping, slow upload and faster download. But most data are downloaded, and for a car, much could be multicast. Maybe Elon Musk has worked out that it'll be cheaper to use satellite smartly than pay for cellular data. Or maybe he hates Sirius enough that he thinks it's worth spending a few hundred million to replace them.
 
Typical satellite Internet works with slow ping, slow upload and faster download. But most data are downloaded, and for a car, much could be multicast. Maybe Elon Musk has worked out that it'll be cheaper to use satellite smartly than pay for cellular data. Or maybe he hates Sirius enough that he thinks it's worth spending a few hundred million to replace them.

Yeah but ping time is what matters when playing online games. Doesn't Hughesnet come with about 1 sec ping times. Can't play any sort of real time game with that much lag. Granted GSO is a lot farther out than you would have to be if you just stayed in LEO. Not sure what sort of latency you could get with a 'cloud' of LEO com-sats. And what sort of packet dropping you might incur swapping satellites that often.

- - - Updated - - -

Ok I just looked. A LEO com-sat cloud would probably provide "as good" latency as ground based communication systems. I didn't quite realize how far out GEO/GSO really is in comparison.
 
All I can think is "LAG".
Maybe they could be placed relatively close to earth and provide decent ping times.
Lag/ping does not come from satellites being far away - EM waves travel faster through air/vacuum than through copper wires (300Mm/s in vacuum, only 2/3 of that in Cu) - but from inadequate bandwidth of their back links.
 
Satellite internet has slow ping times because it usually uses geostationary satellites in a high orbit. Original satellite telephones were like this too, in fact they were painful to talk on because of the delay. Modern satellite phones are really no different than talking on a cell phone or landline, the new ones use a constellation of low earth orbit satellites instead of a single geostationary. By switching to low earth orbit, ping times for data could be greatly reduced. Maybe not quite to the high end gaming market, but enough that normal use would be no problem at all, even with interactive web applications. Problem is that what you used to do with one satellite, now needs many, which tends to be expensive (both the companies that did this for satellite telephones went bankrupt almost immediately after setting up their networks, and one of them doesn't even have enough satellites up there for decent coverage)

What is proposed here is that they can make both the satellites themselves, and the launches for them, inexpensive enough for this to be practical. This is something I've speculated would happen for some time, generally people have told me it'll never happen, and that I'm crazy to expect it, but I'll take crazy if it puts me in the same category as Elon...
 
Lag/ping does not come from satellites being far away - EM waves travel faster through air/vacuum than through copper wires (300Mm/s in vacuum, only 2/3 of that in Cu) - but from inadequate bandwidth of their back links.

Yeah lag/ping does come from distance when you are talking GEO/GSO. It takes ~1/2 second to make the round trip to GEO/GSO at the speed of light! That is why news "via satellite' news feeds have those awkward gaps in them.
 
Satellite internet has slow ping times because it usually uses geostationary satellites in a high orbit. Original satellite telephones were like this too, in fact they were painful to talk on because of the delay. Modern satellite phones are really no different than talking on a cell phone or landline, the new ones use a constellation of low earth orbit satellites instead of a single geostationary. By switching to low earth orbit, ping times for data could be greatly reduced. Maybe not quite to the high end gaming market, but enough that normal use would be no problem at all, even with interactive web applications. Problem is that what you used to do with one satellite, now needs many, which tends to be expensive (both the companies that did this for satellite telephones went bankrupt almost immediately after setting up their networks, and one of them doesn't even have enough satellites up there for decent coverage)

What is proposed here is that they can make both the satellites themselves, and the launches for them, inexpensive enough for this to be practical. This is something I've speculated would happen for some time, generally people have told me it'll never happen, and that I'm crazy to expect it, but I'll take crazy if it puts me in the same category as Elon...

I've long thought that cheap launches would mean cheap satellites, because cheap launches would lower the cost of failure and shorten the required lifespan. Maybe this is SpaceX preparing for the next step.
 
Is this a solution looking for a problem? Why one would need this, when we allready have working mobile internet?

One word (really, one acronym): IoT (Internet of Things).

Internet of Things - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For this concept to fully catch on and be truly useful and incoorporated in everyday life you need full coverage of everywhere. The bandwith requirements would perhaps not, at least initally, be that enormous since a 1st gen IoT will consist of many, many objects communicating limited ammounts of data per object (position, simple metrics such as for example temperature, state of charge, pressure, etc. etc).

In a more avanced IoT situation you would eventually need higher bandwidth since the number of objects in communication will increase as well as the complexity of data (live audio and video streams, continous data on position, speed, rotation etc. etc.)
 
Last edited: