EU hopes new satellite system can rival Starlink – The EU’s new multibillion-euro satellite system dubbed IRIS² is meant to provide the bloc with its own network of broadband distribution, both for civilian and military purposes

12 comments

  1. Why would we need satellites for internet when probably 99% of the EU already has a broadband internet connection?

  3. *Geopolitical context (translated from German):*

    —

    A revolution took place above our heads in space, as a result of which military conflicts are changing drastically. From now on it will be even wilder, more blatant, more unpredictable, more science fiction.

    **What happened so far**

    Humanity has had functioning satellites for 60 years. Until a short while ago, commercial and military communication satellites were mostly one-offs, sometimes small series, built by highly specialized manufacturing companies in years of manual work. Typical unit prices were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, including the cost of launching the tons of hardware into orbit.

    Charges for Internet and voice telephony over the systems of previous top dogs such as Inmarsat , Intelsat , Thuraya and Viasat are geared toward users who don’t have to look too hard at the money – i.e., militaries, governments, oil and mining industries and large nongovernmental organizations. The militaries of the larger space nations have their own systems, but they operate on the same principles and often with very similar satellite hardware as their commercial equivalents.

    And all of these systems – with one exception, which we’ll look at in a moment – operate with a few satellites in geostationary orbit at about 36,000 kilometers above the equator. There they “stand” – as seen from Earth – always in the same place in the sky, able to illuminate large areas with their radio signal and communicate there with relatively expensive terminals. Data and calls are transmitted via the satellite to a small handful of ground stations, from where they are fed into the terrestrial fiber optic network. While the market for such services is not small in absolute terms, it is more of a niche business compared to the revenues of typical telecommunications companies that offer mobile communications and Internet lines.

    **Vulnerable single pieces**

    From a military perspective, communications via large geostationary satellites has one key advantage – availability in many otherwise underserved areas of the Earth’s surface, including the oceans – and a long list of disadvantages.

    The three most important: the available bandwidth is rather limited, the antenna must point at least roughly in the direction of the satellite, and the few handfuls of satellites are priority targets for the respective adversary in the event of a major war.

    All states with significant space programs have tested anti-satellite weapons. The visible, successful tests have been directed against satellites orbiting in low orbits. However, there is ample evidence that methods for disrupting or destroying geostationary systems are also being planned and built. There are enough launches with classified payloads into geostationary orbits or nearby orbits that it is plausible that malicious (sub)satellites are among them. In the event of war, these could approach enemy satellites to destroy them or, more likely, cause them to spin or electromagnetically jam.

    Modern major power armies are barely functional without satellites. (We’ll just leave out GPS, Galileo and similar navigation systems here, that would be going too far). The prospect of losing significant parts of the ability to communicate with one’s own units right at the beginning of a conflict is a major headache for strategists. During Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a geostationary satellite system used by the Ukrainian army for its communications was flattened by a digital attack right at the beginning.

    **Instructive failure: Iridium**

    There is one major exception to the principle of communication via a few satellites, the Iridium system. Iridium works on the basis of dozens of orbiters that fly only about 781 kilometers high and communicate with each other in space of radio. Calls and data are relayed from satellite to satellite until the connection between the ground station and the telephone is established. However, Iridium was conceived, built and launched at a commercially and technically maximally inopportune time, around the turn of the millennium.

    On Earth, cellular networks were springing up in population centers at the time, and high-speed data connections were becoming increasingly important. With system costs of over $5 billion, the market for Iridium was far too small for the per-minute prices that could be achieved. Data rates were paltry, and so the company went bankrupt, nearly taking its parent company Motorola down with it. In the end, the U.S. government bought the system from the bankruptcy estate for a token amount. The military, by far the largest customer, ensured continued operation. The Iridium story is told in epic breadth in the very readable book Eccentric Orbits.

    But what Iridium had proven, despite its commercial failure and woefully inadequate data bandwidth, was a principle that dampened the military’s worries about a decapitation strike against communications satellites. Many small satellites communicating with each other in space are much more difficult and expensive to destroy than a few large ones. Small satellites in low orbits are much faster and cheaper to replace than the geostationary one-offs.

    After the bankruptcy of Iridium, it became relatively quiet for quite a while about the previously announced projects for so-called mega-constellations. From time to time, big plans were announced in the press, a few very daring investors tried their luck, but the big breakthrough failed to materialize for cost reasons.

    **A new game – Starlink**

    Until the venture capital-funded startup SpaceX appeared on the scene with the Starlink system and completely changed the rules of the game.

    The feasibility of a commercially viable mega-constellation depends essentially on five factors:

    – Low launch costs into orbit.
    – Low costs for manufacturing and operating the satellites.
    – High data bandwidth with low latency.
    – Usefulness to a solvent military.
    – Cheap, uncomplicated terminals.

    The technological leap that SpaceX used to dramatically drive down launch costs was the reusability of the Falcon9 rockets. While competitors have to build and pay for a new rocket every launch (which then burns up or sinks into the ocean), SpaceX now gets over a dozen launches per booster (with some refurbishing, of course). Combined with relatively low development costs (half of which were borne by the government), this results in dramatically reduced prices per kilogram of payload weight and a launch cadence that was previously impossible.

    Consequently, SpaceX launches more rockets per year than all of its remaining competition; boosters that have been launched so many times as to potentially increase the likelihood of launch failures are used to launch Starlink satellites. Their loss, due to their relatively low cost, is easier to absorb and insure in case of doubt than that of an expensive customer satellite.

    With the Starship, which is currently still under development, even drastically reduced launch costs will be possible.

    The second significant breakthrough realized by SpaceX for Starlink is the assembly line production of satellites. The technical details are only partially known, but what is apparent points to an approach that takes modern industrial electronics mass production as its model, viewing the individual satellite as a wear part where appropriate. If the reported cost of well under $500,000 each is accurate (other figures are much lower again), the Starlink orbiters would be at one-hundredth the price of conventional low-orbit satellites with similar performance parameters.

    The price drop due to series production is also seen in other manufacturers, for example for smaller constellations of photo satellites, but not in this dimension. The low price and high production output of well over 100 satellites per month – combined with the low cost per launch, where up to 60 of the relatively small satellites are launched at a time – makes a mega-constellation with several thousand sats possible at all. At the time of publication of this column, there are already over 3000 Starlink satellites in orbit.

    The current generation of Starlink sats contains laser links, each of which allows satellites in orbit (i.e., flying behind each other in a single orbit) to communicate with each other at high bandwidth and very low latency. The speed of light in space is higher than in terrestrial optical fibers. Data packets from a terminal on the ground are radioed to a sat in line of sight, from which they are passed along the laser chain in orbit until they arrive at a sat that is within range of a ground station. There they are radioed to the ground and forwarded by the ground station to the Internet. If a sat sees the terminal and a ground station at the same time, the data is radioed directly to the ground station via the sat.

    To somehow get an intuitive picture of how large and complex Starlink is, it is recommended to spend a few minutes with a simulation that shows the satellites on their orbits, the laser links between them and the radio links to the ground stations.

  7. I understand the reason for wanting that

    But wanting something and having the means to get it are two very different things

  8. Since everyone is brutally downvoting anyone who thinks this is not a good idea, let me chime in:

    Shitty idea

  9. I’m still not convinced Starlink will be a commercial success with consumers. Its pretty medicore internet for a pretty steep price. And considering the cost for the entire constellation, even with SpaceX pricing, i have a hard time seeing this getting into the green. Unless they get lots of govt contracts. Its nice for remote locations, but is this enough? Totally makes sense for military application tho.

  10. Hope y’all Europeans can make it happen so Starlink has competition and we can keep each other in shape kinda like boeing/airbus. Otherwise the Chinese will just take over with massive state subsidies

  11. The fact we lag so far behind the US in so many technologies is sickening.

    This is all great but the US has at least 3 different constellations now that’re all new and already up in the sky, not something that’ll start in the future.

    Rockets too.. US has SpaceX, Blue Origin and even a company 3D printing rockets and that company is in a league of its own when it comes to proven engines / designs.. US is so far advanced that its literally selling rockets to be launched in foreign countries like Airbus and Boeing do with airliners.. except we don’t have an Airbus to compete with SpaceX nor Blue Origin.

    What we do – do currently for the most part is we support other countries ambitions. Many parts go into NASA rockets, NASA rovers on Mars that actually move, even their return to the Moon will have European companies helping them achieve *their* dreams.

    And we do have some minor victories like ASML is a shining star but they’re also a unicorn in comparison. I just find it so sad that space of all things, where we pride ourselves on engineering, science, etc yet even India has a more ambitious, realistic vision than the EU.

    And for those complaining that if we do this, we will help clutter the skies.. well, I dont like it either but we must compete and its better late than never.

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