336
FCC Denies Starlink Low-Orbit Bid for Lower Latency
(spectrum.ieee.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
336 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
58775 readers
5734 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The alternative is not "higher orbit satellites", it's "put wires on the earth".
Firing infinite rockets that fall out of the sky in a year is a bad, wasteful option that only exists because the American government is not under enough pressure to fix its infrastructure problems.
the rest of the world, even the big countries with lots of remote citizens, they used wires not infinite rockets.
It doesn't make any sense to dig cables into rural areas. It would cost a fortune to connect some remote house to the grid. Going wireless is the obvious solution to this and satellite internet gives you much better connection than cell towers. They didn't dig landlines into poor african countries either but skipped right into mobile phones.
You might have a point if launching rockets was cheaper, but launching infinite rockets forever is not cheaper. The rockets fall out of the sky. So we're talking about one upfront cost or a cost forever.
We'll likely have much better technology in the future and the problem will more or less solve itself. In this day and age satellite internet simply just is the most sensible option and probably cheaper aswell. The amount of diesel machinery you'd need to dig all that cable in the rural USA alone would be mind boggling not to mention the enviromental damage of all that digging. These cables don't last forever either. They too need maintenance and eventually to be dug up and replaced.
Rocket is just the delivery vehicle for the satellites. It's not supposed to stay in orbit itself. Building the rocket is what has made space flight so expensive in the past because they were single-use but now with reusable rockets the cost is much less of an issue. They run with renewable fuel aswell - oxygen and methane.
Space travel is going to be getting much more common in the future and the number of rocket launches is only going to increase either way.
Shockingly, you don't need to dig. And handwaving away the cost, including the environmental cost of infinite rocket launches forever because "oh magical technology will save us some day" does not help your case.