It will not affect it in any way. They have released their plans for Starlink and there will be a "blackout" zone over China, so China doesn't shoot down their satellites. In 2007, China shot down FY-1C as a test of a kinetic kill vehicle (leaving tons of high speed space debris). Unless they receive approval from China to broadcast, they won't over China.
China won't shoot down commercial satellites, they'll just either jam the signal, or block ownership of the ground terminals. Shooting down satellites is very expensive, and would cause an incredible hue and cry internationally. It's one thing to shoot down one of your own defunct satellites, quite another thing to shoot down someone else's.
China might or might not shoot down the satellites, but the FCC would absolutely not have authorized the satellite network had SpaceX been so blatantly antagonistic towards China as to provide service there.
I doubt it, since a single Falcon Heavy launch would carry dozens of Starlink satellites but the existing anti-satellite technology can only hit one at a time. Keep in mind they have said the final constellation will be 12,000 satellites!
I'm not sure that it is cheaper, but I am sure there is a cheaper way to shoot something down than to keep it up. Idon't know if the tech and economics are correct, but the physics says it should be.
Moving something to the same altitude as Leo requires much less energy than moving something to Leo. Rockets don't fire straight up because the need their momentum to be at an angle. In addition, the payload of a communication satellite is more expensive than the payload required to throw it either disable the satellite or put it into a declining orbit.
Maybe Elon's rockets are just so cheap he can make it up in margin, but we are really talking about we aren't talking about marginal amount of difficulty difference, but an entire order of magnitude.
Yeah I completely agree it could be done cheaper because physics, my comment was about the current economics.
I'm not sure how efficient China's military industrial complex is, but I wouldn't trust the US's military to be able to build a weapon system that could destroy SpaceX satellite's more efficiently than SpaceX can launch them, haha.
Are you sure? If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs. We’ll also likely implement a suite of sanctions. Shooting down a satellite is an act of war.
>If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs.
No, we won’t. We’ll impose several decades of meaningless tariffs and embargoes with tons of loopholes so it looks like we’re doing something until everyone forgets what everyone was mad about in the first place.
The linked source says nothing about a "blackout zone" over China. More likely SpaceX won't sell ground receivers in mainland China and/or the PRC will simply ban Starlink receivers.
> I’m sure lots of North Americans wouldn’t want Chinese satellites overhead for concern of privacy.
Umm, there are of course Chinese satellites overhead and they have excellent imagery of all of our military bases. As we do for theirs (and every other country!). Orbits aren't very friendly to avoiding airspace.
National sovereignty over airspace does not extend into orbit. Otherwise nearly every earth science satellite in polar orbit would be in violation of international law.
no nation-state wants to start the game of shooting down another's satellite, either military or commercial, because everything up there is so vulnerable. it would open china to retaliatory strikes taking down their own polar orbit LEO, inclined LEO (35-45 degree) molnia, MEO and GEO satellites. satellites are fragile things and can be killed with one 200g chunk of tungsten at a closing velocity of 18,000 km/h.
Why is a Chinese sattelite less private than a sheriffs helicopter, private imaging plane running grids or an American satellite? Or my neighbors drone?
If China shoots down a SpaceX satellite, that is an act of war against the United States. China wouldn’t risk it. This is a great opportunity to break the great firewall and finally give the Chinese people access to unfiltered information.
Your comment implies they could successfully destroy said satellite. It might be a better distraction to tell NK there's one overhead, "leak" it's orbit, position, etc. and watch the fireworks month over month.
I know NK has made some major advancements in their missile capabilities but shooting down a satellite is pretty advanced stuff... any indications that they're capable of doing what you claim they would do?
> If China shoots down a SpaceX satellite, that is an act of war against the United States.
These are not government satellites and china owns the airwaves over their nation. I highly doubt the US government would retaliate whatsoever against China if they shot down a satellite that illegally interacted with their airspace.
> China wouldn’t risk it. This is a great opportunity to break the great firewall and finally give the Chinese people access to unfiltered information.
Take this with a grain of salt since this is mostly based on what I have heard hearsay, but they can jam the signals and/or monitor who transmits back and go after the citizens using said signal (and china is not a country where you want to poke the government). I doubt this will have any effect on the great firewall.
Not much effect. The Chinese government will prohibit import and possession of the ground terminals. Smugglers will bring in a few but not enough to really bypass the Great Firewall for many people.
Also, even if they were manufactured in the US, China is literally the best country to reverse-engineer electronics and produce knockoffs ;).
That said, AFAIK those satellites aren't meant to be dumb routers/repeaters - so China might just politically/economically pressure US to tell SpaceX to pretty-please don't service connections to/from China.
If you can get a 1Gbps up-link and VPN within China that's going to be harder to track down and could service a lot of people.
However, I suspect SpaceX will however allow China to monitor/limit connections. Further, China has a lot more power to crack down on purely internal operations would deter many.
a) the rooftop CPE needs to be reasonably large and have high gain to be used effectively, and needs clear unobstructed line of sight to as much of the sky and horizon as possible.
and
b) It needs to transmit, it will transmit in very known frequency ranges, and the chinese authorities have plenty of budget to buy portable spectrum analyzers, horn antennas and to reach people how to use them. It only takes a couple of hours maximum to reach somebody how to use a portable spectrum analyzer to physically locate and identify transmitters in almost any band.
A) all radome materials have some degree of loss. Ideally you want no loss at all. The path loss in higher than 10GHz frequencies to LEO is already extreme.
B) not just up but to the sides and toward the horizon as well. This will be a non moving phased array antenna that can talk to two LEO satellites moving across the sky at the same time. I predict that any reasonable amount of blockage to the sides will not be a good idea for their network architecture.
C) all Tx have some sort of sidelobes and nothing has a perfect f/b ratio. Will still be detectable by spectrum analyzers from the side.
A) 1% signal attenuation is not going to kill this and that's plenty to work with.
B) Depends on how many satellites are in the constellation. Ideally you want a lot of them as there is vastly more atmosphere the lower your angle to the horizon.
C) detectable at say 50 feet sure, but a signal you can detect from 10+ miles in a van doing 60mph without a lot of false positives is another story.
And those people who would be interested in smuggled ground terminals will already be using VPNs. Maybe this will be more convienient and possibly somewhat safer, but not it won't be a game-changer for even a minority (at least not in the firewall problem, general internet connectivity in rural China is another issue)
Probably not really a factor. Countries were the government wants to control the Internet or communications in general will outlaw the possession of sat-com equipment if they can't get adequate control over it through some other means.
I can, basically anything that transmits needs an indian license from their version of the FCC. No license, it might get taken away by men with guns. You can't even bring a handheld Iridium satellite phone into India without a license. It is not rigorously enforced, because the Indian version of the FCC is certainly not fitted out with Sprinter vans equipped with $60,000 of spectrum analyzers, but it is occasionally enforced. The more traffic you move or the more significant your thing becomes in your local area's telecom infrastructure, the more likely it is to be noticed.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-con...