It is not that those who have money spend it “throwing balloons” or “looking at the ceiling”, it is the opposite! They have the resources to execute ideas outside the planet earth that, the rest of us mortals, we could hardly carry out. Why do multi-millionaires think about space?
The answer is simple, as we said in several chapters of the DGTal podcast, it is a new frontier that can generate from new resources (given the possibility of space mining) to new business models. related to telecommunications, tourism, and others. Watch full videos at kissanime
Precisely, the telecommunications issue is the one that has two great tycoons facing each other such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and, additionally, a company like Dish that, also, wants its share of space broadband in order to compete with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to provide 5G services.
Both SpaceX Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper Project plan to send a bunch of satellites into space in order to create the infrastructure to provide high-speed internet to consumers. But, keep in mind that since October 1957, more than 10,000 satellites have been launched into space including Sputnik 1, which was the first.
But that number is skyrocketing since 2019, as SpaceX has put more than 1,000 satellites into orbit and the count for the first phase hovers around 12,000 to create a global internet network that could eventually have around a few. 42,000.
Now, the Amazon Kuiper Project plans to build a similar network to compete with SpaceX Starlink and provide internet to the most remote places on the planet and, although so far it has not sent a single into space, it is known that from this year it will begin to catch up with that task to reach an initial number of 3,236 satellites.
The heart of the matter begins by analyzing the orbits of each of the projects since, if they are not traced in the appropriate way, both SpaceX Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper Project, Dish and anyone who wants to follow the same path to provide services of Space broadband may begin to suffer from interference from all other satellites that use the same orbit between 500-6000 km from the earth (which, due to latency issues, is the most desirable).
However, while the telecommunications war continues to escalate, organizations such as the FCC will have to carefully evaluate the options so that both radio waves and orbital space can be distributed in a logical, organized way (to avoid interference between these and other services that may be future) and sustainable, otherwise we may soon see a whole war for space broadband.
Worse still, space debris may also start to grow uncontrollably if a plan is not created for the disuse of so much satellite that has entered orbit since 2019, it is worth remembering that many of the pieces that leave the earth never they are recovered and are simply wandering through space.