[rburhum]

I am very familiar with the purchasing process of satellites by LATAM countries. Basically the Chinese or the French (i.e. Airbus) come in and offer you a satellite that ranges between 180M-380M USD in price depending on what you want. The price includes a building with a ground station, the launch, and some basic training. If you negotiate correctly, the full telemetry is send only to you and you process it all locally. If you don’t, then they have a hook on you and hand hold you through the entire process - at an additional cost.

Additionally, after a country purchases one, they tend to have their own development path for the future ones.

For example, the Argentinians did their first four satellites with the help of the US (SAC-A, SAC-B, SAC-C, SAC-D), the next two were done by themselves (ARSAT-1, ARSAT-2), two more with the Italians (SAOCOM-A, SAOCOM-B) and one with the Brazilians (SABIA-MAR).

It is a process filled with a lot of politics, questionable monetary interests, and pseudo national pride.

It is the new shortcut process by which countries are entering the space era. Buy a satellite when you don't know what you are doing, then co-build it with somebody, then build it by yourself. It effectively saves you billions in trial and error tests that other countries had to go through... but it really begs the question of when is it truly yours, because if you don’t follow the rules (e.g. taking high res imagery of an area you are not supposed to), “your” satellite can easily be temporarily or permanently disabled... and there goes your 300M

[chirau]

Why do these countries need satellites anyway, what exactly are they using them for?

[faizshah]

I dunno how true this is but my african friends have told me that telecom in africa is extremely expensive and calling someone the next village over can have huge charges. So african countries under the African Union created the African Telecommunications Union to send out an african owned telecom sattelite instead of having to pay for western owned telecom sattelite usage.

Again this is second hand info and I don't know much about African politics but telecom is clearly one important reason.

[filleduchaos]

Call to the next village? Really?

Unless you were having that conversation two decades ago, they 100% were just having you on.

[faizshah]

Exaggerating, sure. But, the general point is accurate especially when looking at cost relative to income: https://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/o...

More recent: https://a4ai.org/extra/mobile_broadband_pricing_heat_map-201...

[filleduchaos]

Your first link is from 2011 and is about cost of devices, and your second is about data plans, not mobile call rates.

I doubt your intention was to prove my point very loudly, but here we are.

[faizshah]

Actually it's based on this data on mobile services cost: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/ipb/

I included the data from 2011 because it includes mobile services cost whereas the other is newer but on data costs.

Not sure what your point is at all other than to be pedantic and obfuscate the general point to be honest. The point being that african telecom costs are some of the highest in the world and this would be one use for a satellite...

[aassddffasdf]

This should not be downvoted. filleduchaos is right. Get over yourselves nerds.

[mirajshah]

Not sure if you read the linked article:

> The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, climate, mining and environmental observations, allowing the Horn of Africa to collect data and improve its ability to plan for changing weather patterns for example.

[pergadad]

I guess the real question is whether this is cheaper than to just license these services.

And a second question: how much power do others have over you? I'd your agricultural output or tax system becomes dependent on a certain provider/country they have a lot of leeway over you. Same reason Europe and Russia and China built their own satellite-based positioning system: can't trust the US to keep GPS accessible.

On the other hand any satellite built for you might have the same issue through some hidden software-based off switches.

[chatmasta]

I wouldn’t underestimate the political value of a satellite launch. There is a lot of propaganda value, both domestically and internationally, to entering the “club” of space-faring nations. Not to be crass, but “launch a satellite” is literally an achievement in the Civilization games. The very act of launching it means something, even if only symbolic.

[elil17]

Each satellite is launched into an orbit that has it fly over certain areas more than others. Most satellites are stationed over the richest countries, so there is very little satellite image coverage of many parts of Africa. These images help monitor everything from weather to crop health. Just like building a road, buying a satellite for your country provides critical infrastructure which can boost an economy.

[iguy]

But is this true? Sure if you want coverage of Siberia you may need your own, but doesn't every orbit cross the equator? I would have thought plenty of satellites cross Ethiopia every hour, although perhaps not bothering to run all their cameras without a customer?

[elil17]

I’m by no means an expert on satellite orbit selection, but from my experience as a consumer the quality and frequency of imagery for an area has to do with a variety of factors - how often the overhead pass occurs in daytime vs. nighttime, how much data capacity they will devote to downloading the imagery, and what angle they point the sensor at.

Here’s a real world coverage map from a European earth observation mission, you can see they were able to select and orbit that gives them daily coverage of Europe but only biweekly coverage of Africa: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Slater12/publicat...

[iguy]

Thanks, nice to see a map. But all those lines which stop at the mediterranean coast... those satellites surely cross north africa at almost the same time of day, it's just not marked because they are turned off? As you say, perhaps limited by daily bandwidth (or perhaps power?)... but that sounds like a commercial consideration.

[mdszy]

Geostationary orbits won't necessarily cross the equator.

[yellowapple]

I'm reasonably sure satellite imaging happens pretty far below geostationary, though. It'd be interesting if we could someday park satellites in geostationary and just stare at a given spot continuously, but lens technology just ain't there yet, last I checked.

[mdszy]

NOAA has a network of geostationary weather satellites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_Operational_Envi...

[goodcanadian]

Yes, they will. The only place you can put a geostationary satellite is on the equator. In theory, they stay in position above the selected point on the equator. In practice, they aren't perfectly stationary, and they will move around the designated point, which will, of necessity, cross the equator.

[mdszy]

for the practical purposes outlined in the context of this thread, they do not cross the equator

[alphakappa]

The same reasons any country needs satellites. Telecommunications, resource monitoring, science, weather... Sorry, but unless you believe that satellites are superfluous in general, why are you asking if these countries need satellites? Are they something only rich/western countries need? Or should other countries simply be dependent on the countries that already build/launch them?

[trophycase]

Why does anyone need satellites? This might have been a relevant question in the 80s.

[reaperducer]

Why does anyone need satellites? This might have been a relevant question in the 80s.

Or in the 1940's, when communications satellites were first proposed by Arthur C. Clarke.

[rburhum]

Bolivia bought a communication satellite from the chinese to provide TV and Internet to the entire country - which is mostly rural areas that are difficult to reach (think the Andes). The other countries use multi-spectral and radar-based satellites to do several things like:

- territorial planning (e.g. cadastre and zoning)

- agricultural yield improvements (irrigation and disease detection, crop classification, etc)

- forest fire detection

- illegal mining, illegal deforestation or illegal plantation detection

- pre-disaster planning and post-disaster recovery

and other military activities. the use cases depend a lot on the type of satellite they own

[trianglem]

The uses are endless. Telecom, survey, mining, weather, agriculture etc.

[api]

Nothing is "truly yours" at a national scale. Inventions happen everywhere and nations get concentrated expertise by either accumulating it by being on the receiving end of brain drain, purchasing it, or stealing it. This is purchasing, like buying a national course in basic space ops.

[beambot]

It seems like college students can design, build, & launch a microsat for $50k-$1M. Why jump straight to $200M+ for those learnings? It shouldn't take $Billions to start getting your feet wet.

[lainga]

I think there's a different scale involved when you're running an experiment on a CubeSat vs. trying to set up telecommunications. ARSAT-1 and -2 were both the size of a car (3 tonnes).

[true_religion]

Ghana launched a satellite in 2017, for 500,000 dollars. It was used for environmental monitoring. Since the Ethiopian satellite is to be used for the same thing, it will likely cost the same amount.