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Project Kuiper's custom-built antenna architecture
- nindalf 6y agoGood for them, and good for all of us. If there was only one provider of satellite internet, it’d be priced out of range for all of us. But both Amazon and SpaceX look like they’ll be able to ship viable products. This really is a game changer though, because it makes rural areas much more attractive places to live in. With access to stable, fast internet anywhere, remote workers could live wherever they wanted to. But more than that, once this becomes affordable I’m excited to see how getting nearly everyone internet access changes the internet.
- Beached 6y agoI wouldn't hold your hopes for blue origin being able to produce anything any time soon. remember they started before spacex, and have accomplished very little during that time.
- jasonpeacock 6y agoNobody mentioned Blue Origin, what do they have to do with Kuiper?
- wmf 6y agoMany people are thinking tribally and assuming that Bezos's Kuiper must launch on Bezos's Blue Origin.
- waiseristy 6y agoRealistically, isn't that the only path to a competitively priced product? What other launch provider are they going to use? Surely they can't utilize the falcon / starship as that directly funds their competitor
- wmf 6y agoA. Go out of business (e.g. because Blue Origin is not ready and the FCC is about to revoke the spectrum license) B. Fund your competitor If it came down to it, would you really choose A?
- waiseristy 6y agoI would think B would quickly lead to A as Kuiper would not be able to compete with Starlinks pricing advantages
- RandallBrown 6y agoDoes Amazon have a way of putting the satellites in orbit yet? Is that going to be up to Blue Origin?
- nceqs3 6y agoI sincerely hope not. The lawsuits will fly if Bezos awards Blue Origin launch contracts.
- modeless 6y agoReally? Who would sue?
- switch11 6y agoIt's a joke Reference: Amazon lawsuit against Pentagon for Azure contract Reference: Amazon lawsuit against Future Retail etc etc
- Gwypaas 6y agoOr Blue Origin trying to patent rockets landing on floating platforms and then suing SpaceX. At least we are soon coming up on the 5 year anniversary of the first successful landing! https://spacenews.com/spacex-gets-partial-win-in-patent-ruling/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-gets-partial-win-in-patent-ruli...
- DetroitThrow 6y agoAmazon investors if there was preferential treatment given to the owner of the company's other, unrelated company. I don't know why the above comment is so downvoted - Elon Musk recently had to field a similar set of lawsuits for Tesla's solar city acquisition.
- rlt 6y agoJeff Bezos would probably just subsidize the launch cost by dumping another couple billion into BO, making it the cheapest option to Amazon.
- themgt 6y agoBlue Origin is also talking up their moon lander, but we still haven't seen them actually put a payload in orbit. The BE-4 engine has been delayed and they've still only delivered test stand versions to ULA. If you read the Blue Origin Glassdoor and subreddit where a number of anonymous employees talk, they're not doing well. New Glenn looks unlikely to fly until 2022 at the earliest, and presumably they'd need at least 6-10 launches even being optimistic about fitting hundreds of sats in the large fairing. I can't see them being able to offer service until 2024 at the earliest, and there's a non-nil chance Blue Origin implodes trying to leapfrog from suborbital test vehicle to reusable heavy-lift rocket with their own (possibly flawed) engine and Kuiper would need to launch with SpaceX or fold.
- modeless 6y agoIs Kuiper completely dependent on Blue Origin? I assumed they would start by buying a few launches from other providers, though I didn't expect them to try SpaceX. I guess SpaceX would sell to them although it would be a little weird.
- tidepod12 6y agoPer this tweet, they're planning on using multiple launch providers: https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1339306611488288768?s=21 https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1339306611488288768?s=... > Interesting comment at TC Sessions: Space by Amazon’s David Limp about launching its Project Kuiper constellation: we hope that Blue Origin can provide launch capacity, but hope others will, too. Expecting to use multiple launch providers.
- themgt 6y agoFCC approval only gives Amazon until July 30, 2026 to launch at least 50% of their 3,200 sat constellation into orbit. I don't know of any existing provider other than SpaceX that could plausibly put that much payload into orbit in 5 years. It's not like ULA has a ton of spare launch capacity sitting around.
- modeless 6y ago> Instead of placing antenna arrays adjacent to one another, we used tiny antenna element structures to overlay one over the other. This has never been accomplished in the Ka-band Starlink does this but in the Ku band. Starlink is 2 feet in diameter vs. 1 foot for Kuiper. Much more portable, although I imagine still far too power hungry to run off a laptop and of course still far from cell phone sized.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoSeems like they both have a lot of potential on the roof of vehicles (airplanes included). Or even as a 'ground station' for a neighborhood or village (but that depends on the latitudes they cover, and their billing structure).
- Closi 6y agoOh great, yet more space junk.
- rafaelturk 6y agoThe picture shows UpLink at 28-28GHz and Downlink at 17-19GHz I'm curios why not the opposite?
- mNovak 6y agoThose are the bands designated by ITU / FCC for everyone else as well. To change them would cause big interference problems for existing systems.
- madengr 6y agoYou typically put the uplink at the higher frequency so the RX antenna on the satellite can have the same gain (as the downlink) with the smaller size aperture. Also, transmitters are less efficient at higher frequency, so you want that on the ground.
- colinng 6y agoI wonder when it’ll be commercially available.
- cle 6y agoBlue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX.
- kerng 6y agoBezos also makes the same references that Elon Musk spearheaded in his interviews... like Bezos says that noone would use throwaway planes that would be only good for one flight. Musk said that long ago also. So, the observation that a lot of copying is going on is more incorrect, but that's the case with most things in life. Shows though how strong Musks influence is in the area
- dang 6y agoPrevious threads on this project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24142135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24142135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010633 (If anyone's curious. Not dupes.)
- mNovak 6y agoAs an antenna engineer working on phased arrays, I find the claim that reducing the physical size directly reduces manufacturing cost by an order of magnitude laughable. As if the plastic radome or PCB factors into the cost at all. The cost of these systems is 100% in the electronics. What I presume is going on here, is that Amazon (like SpaceX) has developed custom RFICs, which handle both uplink and downlink in a single package, thus requiring the apertures to be overlapping. The advancement is in having developed a better IC, the size reduction is an indirect outcome. If Kuiper is taking a very different approach, more akin to Kymeta or ThinKom, the original statement might be credible, but the aperture looks too thin for that to be the case.
- adamweld 6y agoThe enclosure costs will be negligible, but the PCB will not be. These phased array antenna designs from SpaceX and Amazon are some of the most complex PCBs ever theorized, with many dozens of layers and requiring manufacturing processes that do not currently exist at scale.
- madengr 6y agoNot really. I just built a 256 element array covering 2 octaves BW. The feed board is seven layers. Arrays are lots of repetitive circuitry. I think the impressive part are getting microwave RFIC for pennies. Now this PCB is crazy: https://youtu.be/nurL3N1Etuc https://youtu.be/nurL3N1Etuc
- jcims 6y agoTwo quick questions that may or may not make any sense. If you've seen the Starlink dish teardown, would you suspect that it's built for just a single beam or could it support multiple simultaneous beams? And what would you expect are the primary performance/capability differences between the 'dish' antenna and the one they fly in the satellite (space-hardening aside)?
- matmatmatmat 6y agoNot the OP. We have to clarify what you mean by "support multiple simultaneous beams". The SL receiver is half-duplex, so it can only send or receive at any given time, and, in theory anyway, it uses beamforming to communicate with just one bird at a time (if it couldn't beamform to within sufficient tolerance, then that would be an FCC no-no.) There's no theoretical reason, AFAIK, that it couldn't rapidly switch between birds, but the actual feasibility of that depends on terminal firmware, the ground network being setup to handle that, the arc between two birds, and whether or not the antenna's scan angle can encompass that arc. The primary difference between the ground terminals and the antennas in space is the amount of power passing through them, but also their sophistication (primarily the beamforming capability.)