Lifeboat Foundation

Previous competitions have involved satellites that weren’t in orbit, but this is the real deal.

Satellite-to-phone connectivity provider Lynk has made its debut in Palau, where the nation’s hundreds of islands make traditional cell coverage difficult to achieve. The company’s “cell towers in space” now cover the entire country — intermittently, but that’s a lot better than nothing, and service will improve as more satellites are added to the constellation.

Lynk is among the first of a new wave of direct satellite-to-phone providers, replacing the bulky, dedicated satphones of yore by connecting ordinary mobile devices to low Earth orbit. It’s difficult to engineer for many reasons, as you can imagine.

Apple’s SOS has the most high-profile use case, with the distinguishing characteristic of having to actually point your phone at an unseen satellite, but Lynk’s service requires no special behavior by the user — it just works like a roving cell tower, connecting when it passes overhead.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation continues to deliver stunning download speeds in Germany. The network, comprised of thousands of satellites, became well known all over for its remarkable download speeds soon after it was opened for public participation. However, the hype around Starlink, the world’s first commercially successful low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet, led to millions of users signing up for SpaceX’s service — faster than SpaceX could add capacity. This led to performance downgrades across areas of high demand, particularly in several regions of America. However, now and then, Starlink reminds everyone of its true potential, and that’s the case with today’s internet tests.

Starlink Crosses 500 Mbps In Multiple Download Speed Tests

Today’s test comes courtesy of a Reddit user who recently received their Starlink user terminal after moving to rural Germany. Starlink tests in the European country have often produced remarkable results, owning partly due to lesser congestion as well as the placement of satellites. SpaceX is gradually building out its constellation, which eventually aims to be made of thousands of satellites. This leads to unevenly spread out satellites that benefit some areas in the form of higher speeds.

WASHINGTON — Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital has signed an agreement with French aerospace giant Safran to explore U.S.-based production of satellite propulsion systems, the companies announced June 23.

Under the agreement, Safran Electronics & Defense and Terran Orbital will investigate opportunities and prerequisites for the production of electric propulsion systems for satellites based on Safran’s PPSX00 plasma thruster.

The PPSX00 is a hall effect plasma thruster, recently introduced by Safran for the low Earth orbit satellite market.

The technology may be acquired by the Ministry of Defense in the next fiscal year.

Reuters.

If all goes well, the organization may adopt the technology next fiscal year.

Continue reading “Japan’s military is testing Elon Musk’s Starlink for potential adoption” »

SpaceX is revolutionizing the Internet industry with its Starlink broadband satellite network. As of today, the company operates a constellation of around 4,265 Starlink satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that provide high-speed internet to over 1.5 million subscribers globally. SpaceX is launching Starlink satellites every month to continue expanding service coverage, with plans to launch a total of 12,000 satellites. Besides providing internet to homes and businesses, Starlink beams service directly to user antennas installed on vehicles in motion, like RVs, cruise ships, and aircraft.

In the early days of satellite internet, Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites were the norm for aviation. These GEO satellites, positioned at an altitude of approximately 36,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, provided coverage to large regions but have limitations in terms of speed and latency – making it hard to livestream or have video calls in-flight. However, everything changed when SpaceX set its sights on LEO and launched thousands of satellites. One of the key advantages of Starlink’s satellites is the ability to provide faster internet speeds because they operate at much lower altitudes of around 550 kilometers. With traditional GEO satellites, the signal had to travel a considerable distance to reach the satellite and then make the round trip back to Earth, resulting in noticeable lag and latency average of around 600ms (milliseconds). In contrast, Starlink’s LEO satellites are positioned much closer to the planet, reducing the distance the signal travels.

The space firm, which has previously plucked a rocket booster out of the sky, will also launch NASA’s ‘swarm’ satellite, Starling.

Rocket Lab’s upcoming Electron mission, called “Baby Come Back”, will see the US and New Zealand-based company perform another marine recovery attempt of its rocket booster.

Rocket Lab announced in a press statement it will lift a number of satellites to low Earth orbit before attempting to retrieve its rocket booster from the ocean. The company is developing two reusability methods, one that plucks boosters out of the sky using a helicopter and the marine recovery method.

Optical data communications lasers can transmit several tens of terabits per second, despite a huge amount of disruptive air turbulence. ETH Zurich scientists and their European partners demonstrated this capacity with lasers between the mountain peak, Jungfraujoch, and the city of Bern in Switzerland. This will soon eliminate the necessity of expensive deep-sea cables.

The backbone of the internet is formed by a dense network of fiber-optic cables, each of which transports up to more than 100 terabits of data per second (1 terabit = 10¹² digital 1/0 signals) between the network nodes. The connections between continents take place via deep sea networks—which is an enormous expense: a single cable across the Atlantic requires an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. TeleGeography, a specialized consulting firm, announced that there currently are 530 active undersea cables—and that number is on the rise.

Soon, however, this expense may drop substantially. Scientists at ETH Zurich, working together with partners from the space industry, have demonstrated terabit optical data transmission through the air in a European Horizon 2020 project. In the future, this will enable much more cost‑effective and much faster backbone connections via near-earth satellite constellations. Their work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Join us on Wednesday, June 21 at noon Pacific for the DIY Picosatellites Hack Chat with Nathaniel Evry!

Building a satellite and putting it in orbit was until very recently something only a nation had the resources to accomplish, and even then only a select few. Oh sure, there were a few amateur satellites that somehow managed to get built on a shoestring budget and hitch a ride into space, and while their stories are deservedly the stuff of legends, satellite construction took a very long time to be democratized.

Fast forward a half-dozen or so decades, and things have changed dramatically. Satellite launches are still complex affairs — it’s still rocket science, after all — but the advent of the CubeSat format and the increased tempo of launches, both national and commercial, has pushed the barriers to private, low-budget launches way, way down. So much so, in fact, that the phrase “space startup” is no longer something to snicker about.