Buddy, I’m an aero eng. There are lots of ways to get satellites in polar orbits.
Why didn’t you look at the actual Lightspeed site from Telesat? Why would you pick a random paper? The Telesat site explains how they get coverage in polar regions.
I suggest you look up the solution that Telesat will use. I’m not involved in that project, but a quick glance shows me that the engineers involved have probably done their homework and have considered the customer base and their needs, including the need to service all regions of the country.
Terrestrial solutions for remote areas typically have excessive build out and maintenance costs.
Engineers will do a tradeoff and select the most suitable solution given the criteria. It’s very easy to underestimate costs, particularly over the entire lifetime of the system.
Yes there are such solutions, but for remote regions without infrastructure and with high build out and operating/maintenance costs for terrestrial technology, I suspect that the most cost effective solution that we can achieve in a timely fashion is probably LEO, like Lightspeed or Starlink. Particularly since Canada has half a century of experience building satellite systems.
Managing LEO debris and congestion is not an insurmountable challenge.
Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.
Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.
Correctamundo. You can’t speed up light. For low latency you need LEO, and since they don’t sit still for you (8km/s roughly) you need a bunch of them in some kind of formation or constellation, so that you generally have something to connect to at any given moment, or at least a chain that can relay to ground stations.
Yea I can see that, we can live comfortably on earth with Kessler syndrome but some carrington event and already struggling populace would probably set us back a century at least and wed be trapped on earth nearly forever, or until we can solve Kessler syndrome
Some combustion products have climatic effects. For you to lean into this, the next step would be to calculate the relative effect of perhaps 80 tons of space junk burning up on reentry per year, versus perhaps 42 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. You’ll want to estimate the radiative forcing or climatic effects of the space junk combustion products to get there. I’ll save you the effort and tell you that space junk burning up on reentry is likely to be several hundred thousand times less impactful than terrestrial GHG emmissions.
Which should not be surprising intuitively, just considering the volume of GHGs we produce globally each year.
If you’re so far in the woods that you need a satellite connection for Internet, you don’t need a low ping. It’s not with ruining our sky, radio astronomy and our atmosphere for a few people’s convenience.
We do not need a constellation. We do not need more space junk.
We need fibre everywhere.
Fibre is not going to get us up north.
Neither are satellite orbits.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/llustration-of-two-X-Y-paths-with-different-X-component_fig5_347273912
Buddy, I’m an aero eng. There are lots of ways to get satellites in polar orbits.
Why didn’t you look at the actual Lightspeed site from Telesat? Why would you pick a random paper? The Telesat site explains how they get coverage in polar regions.
https://www.telesat.com/leo-satellites/
Of course there are, but the customers are mostly not at the poles, so any times the satellites spend at the poles is wasted.
I suggest you look up the solution that Telesat will use. I’m not involved in that project, but a quick glance shows me that the engineers involved have probably done their homework and have considered the customer base and their needs, including the need to service all regions of the country.
Similar problems with fibre to all of Australia. It’s just not feasible for small remote communities.
Microwave towers? They don’t bridge enormous distances but can bypass areas that it would be inadvisable to lay cable
Terrestrial solutions for remote areas typically have excessive build out and maintenance costs.
Engineers will do a tradeoff and select the most suitable solution given the criteria. It’s very easy to underestimate costs, particularly over the entire lifetime of the system.
And satellite consolations don’t. How are we launching them into space with our friends the Americans, Russia, China or India?
You use any of the launch providers, yes, including Arianspace.
I had to look up that name and I’m sure glad there’s another E in there…
There are solutions for the far arctic that aren’t high density mesh networks polluting low earth orbit.
Yes there are such solutions, but for remote regions without infrastructure and with high build out and operating/maintenance costs for terrestrial technology, I suspect that the most cost effective solution that we can achieve in a timely fashion is probably LEO, like Lightspeed or Starlink. Particularly since Canada has half a century of experience building satellite systems.
Managing LEO debris and congestion is not an insurmountable challenge.
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Maybe when we get 6g and our avian bird flu boosters we can get 6g access through our minds 🤯
/s due to it being utterly insane, but I recognize Poe’s law is alive more than ever now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe’s_law
If we must have a satellite it should be a single geostationary one.
Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.
Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.
Correctamundo. You can’t speed up light. For low latency you need LEO, and since they don’t sit still for you (8km/s roughly) you need a bunch of them in some kind of formation or constellation, so that you generally have something to connect to at any given moment, or at least a chain that can relay to ground stations.
Kessler syndrome has entered the chat
We could be architechting our own Great Filter (assuming we’ve not passed it already, and assuming we can’t solve the Kessler syndrome).
Some light reading for those unfamiliar:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
I think Kessler is rather less of a concern than global climate change.
Yea I can see that, we can live comfortably on earth with Kessler syndrome but some carrington event and already struggling populace would probably set us back a century at least and wed be trapped on earth nearly forever, or until we can solve Kessler syndrome
And all those sattelites burning up on the atmosphere have absolutely no impact on climate?
Assuming your question is not rhetorical…
Some combustion products have climatic effects. For you to lean into this, the next step would be to calculate the relative effect of perhaps 80 tons of space junk burning up on reentry per year, versus perhaps 42 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. You’ll want to estimate the radiative forcing or climatic effects of the space junk combustion products to get there. I’ll save you the effort and tell you that space junk burning up on reentry is likely to be several hundred thousand times less impactful than terrestrial GHG emmissions.
Which should not be surprising intuitively, just considering the volume of GHGs we produce globally each year.
If you’re so far in the woods that you need a satellite connection for Internet, you don’t need a low ping. It’s not with ruining our sky, radio astronomy and our atmosphere for a few people’s convenience.
We are talking about problem in their living rooms or offices, not just on the trap line.
Eat your fibres, everyone.