SpaceX Announces That It Will Deploy Satellite Broadband Across The United States Faster Than Expected

SpaceX has announced its intention to modify its satellite launch strategy in order to accelerate the deployment of its Starlink broadband service and has set a goal of providing broadband in the southern United States at the end of the year. next year.

In a document filed on August 30, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission to "change the orbital spacing of its satellites." With this change, each launch of SpaceX would deploy satellites into "three different orbital aircraft" instead of one, "speeding up the satellite deployment process spanning a wider service area".

"This adjustment will accelerate coverage in the southern states and territories of the United States, potentially in the southern regions of the United States by the end of the next hurricane season and reach other US territories. United before the next hurricane season, "SpaceX told the FCC. The hurricane seasons of the Atlantic and Pacific begin each spring and end on November 30 of each year.

SpaceX has already announced its intention to "provide continued coverage of northern states after only six additional launches," but said that a license change was needed to speed up deployment in the southern United States . SpaceX's case highlights the importance of getting service quickly in parts of the US where broadband coverage is limited.

"With this simple adjustment, SpaceX can expand its geographic coverage early in the constellation deployment and enable the initial service to serve customers earlier in the mid-latitude and far-southern states, and most importantly , to the often underserved Americans in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, "the company told the FCC.

SpaceX was somewhat vague about the launch dates of its broadband service. In October 2017, SpaceX announced in front of a congressional committee that it would launch at least 800 satellites before offering a commercial service, saying that this commercial service would probably be available in 2020 or 2021, as SpaceNews reported. l & # 39; era. Last year, Reuters announced that SpaceX's goal of a launch in 2020 was "pretty much consistent". SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had fired some of Starlink's senior executives to meet his schedule.

In its new FCC application, SpaceX said that adjusting the orbital spacing meant that it would take "fewer satellite launches – maybe even half less – to be able to service the entire from the contiguous United States (as well as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands). "In the rest of the world," the modification would allow faster coverage of all longitudes and grow towards the United States. equator, as well as increased capacity in areas with higher population density, "said SpaceX.

Unlike traditional satellite broadband, SpaceX's low Earth orbit satellites would be able to provide as low as 25 ms latency and gigabit speeds. In order to cover a given region, SpaceX stated that it had to "deploy a sufficient number of nodes to ensure continuous coverage" and "have enough antennas in the right physical configurations to transmit the data. signals ".

No change in altitude or inclination

The setting of the orbital spacing will be do not change "the total number of satellites, their altitude or inclination, their operational characteristics, or their orbital debris implications," said SpaceX.

If the amendment is approved, the SpaceX satellites will travel in 72 orbital aircraft instead of the previously approved 24, and there would be 22 satellites in each aircraft instead of the 66 already approved. This would affect 1,584 of the 11,943 satellites for which SpaceX is authorized to be launched by the FCC. Altitude and tilt would remain unchanged at 550 km and 53 °, respectively.

An orbital plane is defined by two parameters: the tilt of the object in orbit and the longitude of its ascending node. I did not know how to describe this in simple terms, so I consulted our science editor, John Timmer. He explained it this way:

Imagine a spaceship in orbit so that it is constantly above the equator. The plane defined by this orbit would cut Earth in two, separating the northern and southern hemispheres. But it is relatively easy to tilt this plan, so that a spaceship will buckle in the northern latitudes for half of its orbit and in the south for the other half. By putting enough spacecraft into enough of these aircraft, SpaceX plans to significantly expand the areas that can be served by its fleet of satellites.

SpaceX launched 60 satellites in May this year to test the system before preparing for a wider deployment. SpaceX said its "iterative process" led to its new proposal.

"SpaceX has demonstrated the effectiveness of its revolutionary deployment process and has confirmed its ability to equip three orbital aircraft in a single launch," the company said in a new brief. "By subsequently reorganizing its satellites at the already authorized altitude, SpaceX can provide more homogeneous and faster coverage and capacity over a larger part of the US."

SpaceX also announced its intention to "carry out several other Starlink launches by the end of 2019" and asked the FCC to make a quick decision on its application.

This month, the European Space Agency (ESA) had to take steps to avoid a collision with a SpaceX broadband satellite, as a bug in SpaceX's on-call paging system was preventing the company from making a mistake. get a crucial update on the increased risk of collision. But SpaceX said in its report to the FCC that the overall collision risk is still close to zero "because SpaceX has invested in the propulsion of its satellites."

OneWeb, Space Norway, Telesat and Amazon are also part of the low Earth orbit satellite projects. OneWeb recently announced that it would begin offering broadband in the Arctic by 2020.