campchase

It's cherry-picked, but it's a combination of commercial tasking and discretionary tasking. There isn't much to read into in terms of the distribution, it's just one person's best guess at where there's likely to be a lot of diverse types of ships.

I’m personally really worried. It doesn’t bother me when I hear my neighbor flying his drone. And I never notice the Cessna survey planes overhead. But god forbid, on a clear day at exactly 10am I’m sunning my cheeks on my back porch when the GOVERNMENT snaps a 10cm GSD photo intruding on MY privacy. What a man does in his backyard should be his own business!! Not that I have anything to hide!!!

Absolutely brutal for the SkyFi team trying to have a relaxing Saturday afternoon - keep up the good work, you nuts.

Best comment in the thread, I knew about Onyx but nothing more than the Wikipedia page (hardly anything)

Agree with you!

Fun fast: the largest US satellite imagery provider, Maxar, was founded by the technical program lead for Brilliant Pebbles. It’s a small world and history rhymes.

I can’t comment on Griffin or the history of SDA, but proliferated LEO targets are much harder to take out with an ASAT than a small number of MEO or GEO satellites that are practically sitting ducks. If it costs ~$10M to take out a ~$1B asset, it’s gonna be the first thing to go in an apocalyptic scenario.

> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?

I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?).

And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers.

I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out.

> And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?

Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert.

What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).

Will go into more detail on why I believe that in part II but you are spot on.

It’s a dual-use technology, and while my job is to focus the commercial half of the equation, I’m not ashamed to support the US military and intelligence communities, either.

Convenient