Personal Micro-Satellites will soon be a huge market

a reply to: Klassified

I'm not sure if you read any of my posts in this thread but I did mention these would be designed to deorbit themselves at the end of their useful life. A 1-kilo satellite even a bunch of them if they deorbit themselves this should not prove to be a factor.

a reply to: machineintelligence
Didn’t the Chinese piss us off when they blew up a satellite, now there’s thousands of micro meteors we have to track as not to turn the space station and future space vehicles into Swiss cheese.
Last thing I’d want is to run into one of these things head on at 17,500 x2 mph.

Edit: to me it’s more of a gimmic, like I’m better then you because I have my own personal satellite, keeping up with the Jones’s space style.

This sort of thing while good will suffer from bandwidth issues especially once you start sending down hi res 4-8k video especially with having to use node jumping to get data to a sat thats in range of a ground station so having the ability for each sat to be able to route the data for all the rest of the system to/from earth will just kill it from contention load issues.

Probably more of a proof of concept to get the ideas and bugs sorted out and once you've got a few snaps/5 mins of video of your local area the fun will drop off for the average joe so it'll be more for education/business usage so the profit per sat will be pretty low.

a reply to: Maxatoria

Like anything new the early adopters will do it because they see the potential of the technology. The site I am setting up for this project will include a lot of education on what can be done with it and will encourage technologists to get in on the development of apps, sensor packages, and improvements on micro propulsion and communications technologies. As you notice from the images I posted in the OP these sats can be hooked up together to form larger satellites. This is likely going to happen so making determinations of potential problems and heading them off is one of the reasons for this thread and the site I am working on for it.

originally posted by: machineintelligence

If these can offer communications to the ground for subscribers at a reasonable cost perhaps SpaceX would hook up a private satellite network to ground as well. In this way, a constellation of up to 22,800 personal satellites could be launched and controlled by the ground via a Starlink connected ground control system. These personal satellites could have some autonomous behavior and provide a 2-year personal satellite space service to consumers.

Imagine if you had your own satellite under your control for a cost of lets say $10,000 or $417 per month for 24 months The company would have gross revenue of $228,000,000 per launch. Subtracting from this $10,000 unit cost the $2,719 per unit for launch costs, then subtract about the cost for a high-end smartphone $1,000. Then subtract the design cost per basic package of about $1,000 each, and you are up to $5,281 on the cost side per unit. From there everything is an upgrade. This locks in a minimum net cost for a launch of 22,800 personal satellites of $5,281 per unit or $120,406,800 for the entire first payload.

Your numbers are way off. You can't launch 22,800 satellites on one flight. The maximum they've previously launched have been 64 cubesats and microsats on the SSO-A mission in December, 2018. Let's assume you can come up with a really slick, low-mass dispenser system and you can up that to 256 3U cubesats per launch. That's still ~$242,000 per satellite per launch, just for the launch costs.

Also, having just a single small satellite in orbit doesn't seem like it would be that interesting for the average user. Sure, I could see the value for students and specific kinds of research. If you're interested in looking at imagery of the Earth's surface, a single satellite is going to provide very limited coverage. Your money is better spent buying services from Planet, where you get the benefit of their 140+ satellites. That means wider coverage, more frequent coverage of areas of interest, and they handle all the data archiving and presentation.

Have any of you heard of satellite TV?? All satellite TV comes from private satellites. Private satellites than any one can rent space on. Including you. So why waste money on your own personal one with the cost involved.

The thing is that you would still need to pay for access to a provider, that satellite would only receive and transmit. They would need a big satellite to support the small satellites or maybe you would need two of them to direct links to a internet uplink and to disperse it to the location. Either way, a charge would need to be paid to access the link.

I think this could be good for a small cable company to get small towns. Split a terabite between a thousand customers and it is about a gigabite per person. I think it would need to have a small receiver dish though, or maybe an outside antenna.

Today I found this article on open source ion propulsion for tiny satellites as I mention in this thread and it seems I am not alone in my observation that this will soon be a growing and vibrant market.

Resource: Hackaday article

more here: hackaday.com...