[crowcroft]

Naive question - let's assume this all becomes a really competitive market and 10+ companies are pumping satellites into orbit.

Are we going to run out of space?

At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?

[krisroadruck]

It would be incredibly unlikely for there to be enough competition at a grand enough scale for it to become a problem. Space is just very big. Earth's surface is ~197 million sq miles. If you move up to a LEO shell at around 550 miles up, the surface area of that sphere is 34% larger than that.

If you were to distribute 100,000 satellites across that shell, each one would have 2,600 square miles to itself. That's like having a single car in the entire state of Delaware. Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.

The issue isn't space, it's traffic management. Satellites zipping around at 17,000 MPH would make one hell of a debris field if even one pair of them collide. That's the Kessler Syndrome boogie man everyone is worried about.

[joezydeco]

The Crash Clock is currently at 5.5 days.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock

[wolvoleo]

> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.

Yes but don't forget that orbits decline and only satellites with onboard propulsion have the ability to boost them back up. Everything else like cubesats and random debris doesn't and thus doesn't "stay in their lane".

[AshleyGrant]

> Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane.

Sure, but satellites in a higher plane will need to navigate satellites below them during de-orbit. Conversely, satellites in a lower plane will likely need to avoid non-functional satellites that are uncontrolled as their orbit decays.

[krisroadruck]

How much mental bandwidth do you put into not hitting a car that's in a different city? Even if all 100 layers collapsed to one, that's still only 100 satellites in 2600 square miles. NYC is ~300 sq miles. There are about 2.2 million cars there. I feel like you still aren't grasping how much space we are talking about.

[zwily]

But Starlink satellites are low enough that we don’t worry too much about Kessler Syndrome at that altitude, right?

[wolvoleo]

Orbital collisions are very energetic and definitely do launch debris into higher orbits with much longer decay times

[anvuong]

But crashing in LEO is not as disastrous as GEO or higher. It's an unstable orbit so eventually everything will deorbit, crash, and burn. May take a while though.

[newpavlov]

>Are we going to run out of space?

In a certain sense, we do. Pumping thousands satellites to LEO increases probability of triggering the Kessler syndrome. Luckily, LEO orbits are also self-cleaning on reasonable time scales (decades), so I think that some day we will trigger it (potentially, with some "help" from anti-satellite weapons) after which some kind of international regulation will be introduced to prevent repeating it in future.

[lxgr]

I'd say there's plenty of room for competitors along multiple dimensions: Geopolitical security (this alone will probably preclude a single monopoly), price and lack of a moat (once a monopolist starts jacking up prices, there's an immediate incentive for an alternative), delivery profile (store-and-forward for IoT-like use cases vs. dumb pipe vs. in-space forwarding), frequency band (L- or S-band for direct to device vs. Ku/Ka band requiring directional terminals) etc.

The only thing that's actually scarce and that could be monopolized rather easily is frequency spectrum. In fact, I suspect this to be a frequency/operating license driven acquisition.

[crowcroft]

I disagree on some of those dimensions (esp. lack of a moat), but agree things like geopolitics and security would lead to multiple wholesale providers.

My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.

[lxgr]

As I see it, the moat for terrestrial (and in particular wire-based) last-mile comms infrastructure is that each additional customer connected is often expensive, and if they switch to your competition, that wire is basically a sunk investment.

For wireless, the dynamics are very different (as long as spectrum isn't monopolized). As soon as you have enough satellites launched for global coverage, you can compete for all customers, and each one that switches away to the competition is more bandwidth available to you to undercut your competitor on pricing with.

[vlapec]

There might be room in orbit for everyone, but not in the night sky without ruining observation, I’m afraid.

[reaperducer]

On HN, the standard response is that earth-based observation is lesser than space-based.

Which boils down to "Use something incredibly expensive that we have very few of, instead of something that we have a number of that is comparatively cheaper. How dare you question the holy, sacred internet!"

[reaperducer]

Are we going to run out of space?

During the Artemis launch it was very briefly mentioned that the launch window isn't a continuous window, but a series of windows interrupted for short times. I wondered if that was because of the thousands of satellites in orbit.

[newpavlov]

No, it's not. Launch windows [0] are about relative position of orbital bodies which enable use of more efficient transfer orbits.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_window