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SpaceX Seattle 2015

Cliff O

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX
  • Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

45K views11 years ago2 recommendations

Distributed systemsSystems programmingNetworking and protocolsScaling and large-scale architecture

Elon Musk announces SpaceX's plans for a low-latency global satellite internet constellation to fund future Mars missions.

SpaceX announced that they are opening an office in the Seattle area to design and manufacture satellites for the long term vision of traveling to Mars. Elon Musk visited Seattle Center and gave a short presentation plus Q&A at the party. This is the full version that has been edited to remove pauses between questions.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Pointed to as the original announcement where Elon Musk detailed the latency, routing, and physics advantages of a space-based internet network.

matznerdon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space”

Elon covered all of this and more during the launch of the SpaceX Seattle offices. He pretty much goes over the entire game plan in this video -> link to this video
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andrewtbhamon Hacker News • Recommends

On “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

no one saw it coming? they anounced this in 2015. Here is a video where elon explains the system very well in 2015. link to this video
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matznerdon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space”

It's faster and more direct to go earth->satellite->earth for certain routes/types of data, than traversing through various routers and undersea cables. Roughly paraphrased quote from Elon Musk SpaceX Seattle Office Opening: "The speed of light in vacuum is 40-50% faster than in fiber. So you can do long distance communication through space(vacuum), a lot better than if you route it through fiber and use far fewer hops. Lets say you want to communicate from Seattle to South Africa, the path is extremely convoluted, follows outline of continent, goes through 200 routers and repeaters, if done with satellite network, it can be done in 4 hops" Video link to time of quote -> link to this video
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites”

…backhaul is that it's lower latency (no need to avoid continents, 50% faster speed of light, fewer hops) and works everywhere. Giving global gigabit internet to rural areas and ~10% of urban customers (with the rest on fiber) is only a bonus. :) Most of what we know about the plan comes from this video. Timestamp is to the start of the juicy bits. link to this video…
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) 2! Thanks for working this out. This matches with Musk's stated goals for the project from January 2015 ("the majority" of internet traffic): link to this video >The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is... in the long term it will be like rebuilding the internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of long distance internet traffic go over this network , and about 10% of local and business traffic. Probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10% of business and consumer direct, and more than ha…
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

> That means routers and intelligence which means uplink, interlink, downlink hops in both directions. 600 ms here we come again. The story from Musk is 20-30 ms latency anywhere on Earth. link to this video Fiber has an order of magnitude greater number of hops/routers/repeaters, moves 50% slower, and has to travel more distance to route around continents. See link In the linked video Musk says 4 hops to go from Seattle to South Africa, so they're skipping satellites. It works out that at 1100 km altitude they have vacuum line-of-sight for any satellite within 6000 km ground track in any direction. >I don't know how they're going to ... >Managing that ... hurts my head. It is indeed a Hard Problem.…
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>it's curious noone mentions how this have been attempted and failed Musk mentioned Teledesic the very first day it was announced (back in January 2015). link to this video >Things to consider about success? Well, I think it's important to assume that terrestrial networks will get much better over time. >You know, one of the mistakes that, say, Teledesic made was not assuming that terrestrial networks would get much better over time. So we need to make sure that the system we design is good even taking into account significant improvements in the terrestrial systems. >But I do there there are some important differences between what we're doing and, let's say, Teledesic. In the case of Teledesic they we…
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>Is this going to scale? ...not that much bandwidth for any given densely populated area. We're going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they're giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb/s on fiber right now) Except the goal isn't to replace fiber in densely populated areas. Musk said this during the initial announcement: link to this video > The goal will be to have the majority of long distance internet traffic go over this network, and about 10% of local and business traffic. Probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10% of business and consumer direct, and more than half I think of the long distance traffic. link to this video > And then space is also really good for sparse c…
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>Free, Not free according to Musk. link to this video > Well it can't be free. Because then we'll, like, we'll go out of business. laugh > No, no, it can't be free to the user. I don't think so. > This would be... this would cost a lot to build. Ultimately over time to build the full version of the system, we're talking about something that would be 10 or 15 billion dollars to create. Maybe more. And the user terminals would be at least 100, to maybe 300 dollars, depending on which type of terminal. > And this is intended to generate a significant amount of revenue, and help fund a city on Mars. So looking into the long term, and saying, "what's needed to create a city on Mars?" Well one thing's for…
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mlindneron Hacker News • Mentions

On “SpaceX’s Starlink surpasses 2M active customers”

…ho went to work for Amazon, which still has yet to launch any of their satellites). In a presentation1 in 2015 to a group of people (early employees?) he mentioned that they plan to launch prototypes in "3 months" (standard Elon time), they didn't launch any prototypes until 2018. That'll kind of throw off your plans to getting to 20 million. 1. link to this video…
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schiffernon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Starlink Direct to Cell”

Not really feasible. The only reason Starlink DTC works is because it's not trying to supply coverage inside dense cities. Musk mentions this in the very first announcement of Starlink. link to this video
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