Main Engine Cut Off - T+145: Caleb Henry

Episode Date: January 25, 2020

Caleb Henry of SpaceNews joins me to talk about the recent happenings in the satellite industry, including new ITU milestones for megaconstellations, SpaceX’s big year for Starlink, OneWeb’s progress, and DirecTV’s battery issue.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 325 other supporters.TopicsCaleb Henry, SpaceNews.comCaleb Henry (@CHenry_SN) / TwitterITU sets milestones for megaconstellations - SpaceNews.comSpaceX becomes operator of world’s largest commercial satellite constellation with Starlink launch - SpaceNews.comDirecTV fears explosion risk from satellite with damaged battery - SpaceNews.comBoeing says Spaceway-1 battery failure has low risk of repeating on similar satellites - SpaceNews.comThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and today we've got one of our favorites back on the show for our every now and then check in on the satellite industry. Caleb Henry from Space News will be joining us talking about the new ITU rulings that we heard from last year, or the end of last year, I guess it was. Starlink's been getting a lot of satellites up and running. OneWeb's had a little bit of a slower start. So we're going to talk all about that stuff and check in on the state of things with him in a minute. But first, I want to say thank you to everyone who makes this show possible. There are 362 of you supporting over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. You make this show possible, including 37 executive producers. Brandon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for

your support and for making this show possible. I could not do it without you. So if you want to help and join that club of people, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And with that, let's give Caleb a call here and talk all about satellites. Caleb Henry, thank you so much for coming back on the show. This is maybe, what, third time that you've been on? I think this is third time. Yeah, one on the phone, one in person, and now back on the phone, alas. Yes, I know.

Unfortunately, could not sit in my tiny office like last time, which was a lot of fun. Mostly because we went out to dinner, but but you know, podcast was good too. And then we came for the dinner. Yes, exactly. So we have here back on the show, because there's been a ton of satellite stuff to talk about in the last couple of months that I may have touched on a little bit here and there. But when they get to a certain point of confusing, I just know in my heart, I need Caleb back to figure this stuff out uh so we've got a whole list of topics here is there any particular one that you want to start in on is is itu the big one to start on i think itu was certainly big all through it's probably the one that's

going to have the biggest implications for the future because it was so monumental going into 2019 and now it's of course going to affect the largest satellite systems that humanity has ever seen going forward hopefully hopefully we see them yes well spacex now having 182 or 170 satellites depending on how you count it they've already got more than any other company out there. I think Planet has about 150. Iridium at its peak had like high 90s. So we've got one that is unrivaled and they hope to have another 60, I guess, launch in

three days. Yeah, hopefully we'll see what the weather does. But you're right that that is kind of an amazing shift to go from a major launch company to all of a sudden being you know operating the biggest active constellation in orbit and really nobody blinking an eye at that i it almost feels like there should have been more fanfare around that um but i guess we all just kind of have these expectations out of spacex at this point that they'll be able to pull these kinds of things off. Well, most of the industry thinks that. A lot of people are, you know, in on SpaceX being good at operating things. And there's a portion that are like, I don't know about Starlink.

Not to mention the whole astronomer debate, which I haven't really gotten into too much. But we're going to focus just on the... Let's talk about this ITU thing first before we get all into the weeds. So let me try my best elevator pitch on what happened here and then you can tell me which parts I got wrong. So prior to this, the ITU, which is the what is it? The International Telecommunications

Union? Yes. That's right. Alright. They had a rule that to maintain the spectrum rights that you applied for and were approved by the ITU to use, you just had to launch a single satellite and that met the requirements that you were using that spectrum, and you maintained rights to that. They have now changed those rules after what probably was a long process at the conference at the end of 2019 to fit more in line with what we've seen from FCC and others that have strict requirements on how many satellites

of your constellation you need to launch in a certain amount of years to maintain those rights. So no longer can you launch a single satellite and get your spectrum reserved for thousands of satellites. You've got to actually be putting a lot of satellites into orbit. Is that a good high level overview? That is it. You got it. Now here's where I get very confused because there's so many different guidelines of when these years start and when these timers start. So this is where I need your help breaking things down. Could you do your best here to help me understand this? Sure. I'm in. All right. So we've got the general guidelines is

here's I get confused right off the bat because it is the deployment milestone dates start seven years after requesting the spectrum from the ITU. That's kind of where these guidelines start. So I would love to hear a little bit about that process as much as you know from not having applied for a satellite

constellation in the past. I'm reading from one of your articles here. You say that it starts from the time you request the spectrum. Is that not like, you know, the ITU is to approve your paperwork? It's just the day that you send it in? So it's roughly the day you send it in. And I say roughly because I don't know what the gap is between when a company will apply for aation and when the ITU publishes that request. Because the whole reason the ITU does this is they want to make sure that companies can put satellites up without causing interference with other forms, other satellites or other

communication systems. So you have to go to the ITU, which is part of the UN, say, I want to put these satellites here using these frequencies. And then they basically share that with everyone that's on their distribution list. And they say, hey, so-and-so wants to put up all these satellites using these frequencies. You all now have to make sure that there's no interference. You're not shouting over each other. And that's when the timer starts. Okay, so that starts at seven-year timer,

and that's seven years before the milestones begin. Correct. So there's a seven-year period where now you've got that posted, you can start doing all your prep work to get these things built, and then seven years expires, and from that point in time you then have to launch 10 of your satellites within two years 50 in five and 100 in seven so the full timeline we're looking at is 14 years from requesting the spectrum to 100 launched yeah which is different from in the past because as you mentioned it used to be you

just had to put one satellite and then you just kept you had to operate it for 90 days so i guess there's a little bit of a rule the it has been increasingly trying to prevent people from skirting the rules or manipulating them uh they don't want people to put up one satellite and then hoard really really valuable spectrum. And then either people don't get to use it, or they can sell that one satellite and its spectrum rights for like an inordinate amount of money, just because you got to say, hey, I was there first, right? Something like that. So now the other part that that this kind of plays in is that, you know, everyone has to abide by the ITU rules. but then we have things like the FCC,

which is a US-based organization, and they have their own guidelines. So it kind of seems like if you are planning one of these constellations, you have to abide by the strictest rule of all of these different types that apply to you, given the markets that you're going after, where you're launching from,

or whatever other regulations there are. It's kind of, you know know the strictest one wins so would you say the itu uh in the grand landscape of things is this a extremely strict timeline or does this feel a little bit more lax uh than something like the fcc has in place it's more lax than the fcc because if i recall right the fcc you have have 50% of your satellites up in six years yeah and 100% in nine years so right and that's not that doesn't have the similar seven year waiting period before that begins right that's correct that's from when they approve your paperwork but we're also talking about with the FCC just the the US market, so that US market access.

I don't know if that has specific rules for US satellite operators, but definitely for US market access, that's the criteria that the FCC stipulates. So it's stricter for the US. And we have more transparency on US regulations because the FCC is a well-known regulator. It's followed pretty closely. It's not as easy to look into the regulatory requirements of, say, China or Nigeria or Brazil, which all have their own established regulatory regimes and have large populations that megaconstellation operators are going to want to serve but they have to start everyone has to start with the itu that you begin globally and then you fan

out on a nation by nation basis and try to make sure that you can obtain market access in each of those places so uh it's a maybe two-step is not fair i don't want to call it 193 step process it's somewhere between two and 193 depending on what you decide yeah exactly so the interesting thing here is that um you know the itu i think they went into this conference it was the world radio communication conference i believe it was um they went into this and i think everybody knew that they were going to change this rule because the the single satellite thing was just not going to stand up to what the industry is looking to do in the next couple of years and um do you think that they were they were shaped by some of the things that similar you know other agencies have done

like the fcc and things like that that they put these rules in place about percentages of your satellites was that was there any other system that was being thought about? Or was this kind of like, well, we're just going to do it the way everyone else is doing it to make things a little easier? I'm not sure what else could have been put in place, but it does seem very much in line with the other agencies out there. And I was wondering if that's something that was kind of a, we just figured that was the way it was going to go? Or were there other options they were looking at? The ITU definitely acknowledged that their rules were similar to the FCC. And I can't remember if they said it was inspired by the FCC rules, but they knew that there was a strong similarity there. I think the neat thing here is that globally, there was

consensus that there needed to be milestones. There just wasn't consensus on what those milestones should be. So everybody thought that you needed to make something stricter. Basically, the rules that the ITU had around megaconstellations,

things that were created around the time that Iridium was putting up its first constellation and Globalstar was putting up their first constellation in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and hadn't been looked at in the age of CubeSats or massive satellite manufacturing where you can have factories that pump out several satellites a week or a month. They needed something that reflected the technology of today and to use maybe a weird metaphor but then it's iridium too uh it's like they were making rules for a world where like landlines were the norm and then all of a sudden everybody shifted to cell phones and now you need

new rules iridium was like the landline era. Today we're in the cell phone era, and you have to have rules that reflect that. Now, my one other thing that I've kind of been wondering here, and I don't know who to ask this question to, so you're the best one to ask this question. If these all stipulate a percentage of satellites that you have in your constellation, now, is there a strict definition

on what a satellite means? Or is this, you know, going full Potter Stewart and saying, I'll know it when I see it. You know, if you launched 100 blocks of metal and called them satellites, does that count? Or is there a specific set of operational, you know, pieces that you need on a satellite? Do they have to have power generation and broadcast, you know, pieces that you need on a satellite? Do they have to have power generation and broadcast, you know, functionality? Or what's, what is that stipulation to getting it like approved as yes, I launched 100 satellites this time? Yeah, good question. So I would have to look at the ICU issued over 100 pages of space regulations after WRC. You haven't read every single one? pages of space regulations after WRC. You haven't read every single one?

I have not yet read every single one. Real page turners. I know. When I stay up late, that's what I mean. I believe what the rule is, and I'd have to double check it, but you can't just put an empty metal tin in the designated orbit and say, there, I did it. You have to also broadcast using

the frequencies that you said you were going to use so if you go up and you put the satellite there but it doesn't use the frequencies you said it will use then it doesn't count okay well that's a good enough that's a good enough guideline teslas do not count unless they have transmitter yes unless you've equipped them with transponders instead of speakers, it will not be the truth. All right. Well, that gets out of my system. My thing that I've been wondering are like, what if a satellite launches and it blows up into 100 pieces?

Does that count as 100 satellites? The rules are there so that people can't cheat. The whole idea was people have figured out how to cheat the system or might try to cheat the system. And we need to make sure that viable businesses can succeed. And that was the other concern with the rules is they didn't want to make them so strict that no one could succeed. We saw Telesat and Leosat, before Leosat went belly up, voicing their concerns that if the ITU put rules that were too strict, maybe they wouldn't be able to get enough satellites up in time, or it could prevent companies from making really ambitious plans if maybe there's not enough launch capacity, they can't

get on enough rockets, or they realize they have to do a redesign. Anything that might hold back somebody from actually doing what they want to do a redesign, anything that might hold back somebody from actually doing what they want to do. The ITU had to find a sweet spot in between where they said, all right, here's what's going to weed out the nefarious opportunist, and here are rules that are also not going to squash the dreams of people who actually want to do something big in space and do it responsibly. So let's use that really good transition to start talking about some of the companies that are working on this kind of stuff right now. You mentioned Starlink earlier. They've got 170 to 180, depending on how you count, satellites up in orbit at this point, and they're looking to launch a ton this year. So I'm curious to hear what your take on Starlink's

initial deployment has been. Anything that you've been paying attention to with that specifically or anything that we should be watching for as we see these launches just continue to fire off every couple of weeks here? I do think you're right that it's sort of breezed past without a whole lot of fanfare that they suddenly have the biggest commercial commercial system and i keep using the word commercial only because i i don't know if like some government agency has more satellites

up there that just nobody knows about absolutely yeah chance is low but just for the sake of like not being proven wrong when the nro just comes out and it's like oh by the way we've had 300 like cubesats in orbit you've heard it here first zuma was in fact a cubesat constellation in a single launch yeah it's just a massive batch of cubes huge huge batch yeah but yeah they they did this um musk but there was that video that apparently leaked on youtube of musk talking to a massive crowd of people out in Washington saying they were going to put up this constellation in hopefully about five years. And then they actually did it about on time.

Usually there's the joke that SpaceX will say something or Elon will say something and then it doesn't happen on time. But maybe just because they were so quiet about it, that sort of slipped by. They had a notional deadline five years ago to start putting satellites in orbit five years later they started putting satellites in orbit and now they've eclipsed one web which had originally planned on starting to put satellites up in 2017 2018 then they one web sort of kept spacing out the time between when they would build satellites when they would launch them or when they would start their launch campaign

it seems like spacex has taken the lead that being said a question that comes up at virtually every industry conference is how many of these constellations does anyone think will succeed and the answer that i heard over and over again was uh you know one to two and so one to two would leave room for basex and one web uh more recently it's been two to three and that's because people expect china to have at least one successful constellation of their own and that whatever success is defined as at that point however that's defined i mean maybe it'll be four because now uh the space development agency in the u.s. military mega constellation doesn't have to have uh revenue or profit to prove that it exists.

So the number could keep going up. But SpaceX did one launch this January. They've got another one in a couple of days. And if they hit that twice-a-month cadence, it will be really impressive. It'll show that they were serious and that they can, again, do what they said that they're going to do and it also would mean they'd have over a thousand satellites in orbit by the end of the year which is really a staggering count so they've gone from at a time where satellite operators are really

hesitant the world over to try and say what the future of satellite communications is going to be to try and say what the future of satellite communications is going to be. For SpaceX to go and really, without the same sort of ambivalence that other companies have or hesitation that other companies have, to go out and do something to put a system in orbit and say, we believe in it, we're going to invest in it, and we're going to seek really hard to make money from it. It's not the kind of confidence that you see as often across the industry today. So it stands out. Now, there's a couple of things that we haven't seen on Starlink yet. They just really haven't showed much aside from the launches and the satellites.

I've seen some leaked photos of what people are thinking is the ground station for Starlink, which the pictures I saw, I think they're on Reddit somewhere, was four terminals on the back of a flatbed, something like that. And they were kind of putting these all throughout the country. So the rumor on the subreddit said, we have heard some stuff about the user terminals, but haven't really seen that yet. So is there anything in that department that you're looking for SpaceX to unveil this year? Or, you know, maybe put differently, what is the kind of rollout plan for Starlink beyond launching and deploying the satellites?

Where are we going to see this kind of service come about first? And what are those things that we should watch for? I am also really watching and waiting for them to unveil a user terminal. I want to see if it's something that is affordable for the average consumer, or if this is going to be something that's so expensive that nobody will really be able to buy it except for government customers and your traditional buyers of really expensive equipment. I think that's going to be a very telling wait-and-see moment. Now, I think, again, I'm waiting for SpaceX to show this, but based on the fact that they've demonstrated the ability to build satellites en masse

and the ability to launch them en masse and all of the attention that's been given to ground infrastructure in recent years, it's become a much more consistent topic for people to say you can't forget the ground because maybe this is an opinion. I don't even really think it's an opinion. I think it's pretty well known that O3B anticipated having much more effective end-user terminals and user equipment for their system when they set out to connect the other 3 billion, as their company name stands for. And by the time they got their satellites in orbit, that equipment was nowhere to be found.

So now, I mean, I had a colleague that joked that it was the other 3,000 on a Caribbean boat who now get O3B service. And to be fair, O3B has connected lots of islands and people that would otherwise not have internet access. But the number of people who lack internet has grown from 3 billion-ish to around 4 billion. And the dreams of connecting the world by satellite have been hampered by a lack of effective antennas. That being said, SpaceX has already estimated the cost of Starlink at $10 billion, or at least that's what Glenn estimated it a couple of years ago. And they know that it would be a fool's gambit to go and put up thousands of satellites and then have nothing to really effectively connect to them.

So because the satellites have phased array antennas on board already, and because they're producing those satellites en masse, I think that they've learned a thing or two about the type of antenna that they would need on the ground to make the service work. I'm really interested in seeing how advances with antennas not just for user terminals but also on the spacecraft themselves really show an increased adoption of that type of technology. You probably, I imagine you're really familiar with this already, but the

reason that electronically steered antennas are so important is because if you've got a mega constellation, the satellites are all moving around relative to your position on the Earth, and you have to have something on the ground that can track it. You don't really need that with a geostationary satellite because it always appears in the same spot in the sky. So you need better antennas that can track the whole system, and as soon as you try and do that with a mechanical system, it tends to get really expensive really fast.

even traditional geostationary spacecraft are now starting to put really advanced beam forming antennas on their spacecraft that used to only be available for the military it shows that the prices come down and that the hardware has become more accessible and even that the technology has become something more easily understood by the industry i think before it was just so complicated that no one could figure it out. And now it's still complicated, but people are figuring it out and starting to make more use of it. So that bodes well. My last point on this, because I've been rambling. No, this is like the best satellite content that's ever been on MECO. so this is definitely not rambling. A lot of the emphasis has been on the consumer, like you and I, who wanted satellite internet. Can we go and buy an antenna from SpaceX real company

or Best Buy or wherever, and actually just go and do it ourselves? SpaceX has talked about wanting that level of simplicity, but the reason that O3B has been successful is because they learned how to make a really effective satellite system work for customers that wanted it with more expensive user terminals on the ground. And so I wouldn't hedge the success of any of these mega constellations

solely on whether or not they can connect consumers like you and I. Bringing broadband to rural populations and connecting the world, as big of a goal as that is, and even if it's often put up as a centerpiece for some of these systems, it doesn't mean that they won't be successful or effective if that part fails or is delayed because there's still a lot of demand in connecting ships, there's a lot of demand in connecting aircraft, and there's a lot of attention that's being given by the military to these types of systems.

So if they can start with more lucrative customers that are willing to pay a premium and then work their way down, that's what OneWeb is discussed doing, and it's what Telesat has discussed as well. I don't think that that's really that ridiculous of an idea. Yeah, and certainly that's very similar to the Tesla roadmap that has been out there for years of make really high-end cars and then use that to improve technology and over time bring it down, right? Different market, but same kind of idea.

So certainly that's a proven thing that's happened in most industries. I mean, even other stuff, right? Like cell phones used to be really expensive and now they're pretty cheap. So that's not weird. And we've already heard them doing tests. I think it was like a C130 or something that was already connected with Starlink and doing some initial testing there. Yeah, 610 megabits. Yeah, that's pretty good.

Yeah, pretty solid. That's awesome. Yeah, it doesn't beat my fiber line that's coming in from my house here, but it's pretty close. You know, you mentioned something about people saying that SpaceX hasn't talked about this yet. I wonder if they're going to get it right. I often find that that's a common thing that people say about SpaceX in all of their endeavors, not just Starlink, but Starship and everything else that they work on. And I think it's a factor that they're so open most times to talk about what they're working on and what the roadmap is going to be that the assumption is if they haven't mentioned it, they haven't thought about it or they're not working on it.

Rather than people just realizing that they're not ready to talk about that thing yet. But the fact that they're so open to talk about many of their plans, as far out as they may be, like landing humans on Mars, when they leave something out, the instant assumption is they haven't thought about it, they have nobody working on it. And it's kind of funny to just pit them against other companies in the way that people talk about their work versus other companies. It always comes down to that kind of thing there. So, you know, you're saying they're going to spend $10 billion on satellites and not have developed some sort of ground system for it it would just be absolutely insane to do that um but you know if they don't talk about it that's kind of what everyone assumes so it's maybe maybe an unfortunate part of their success

at this point perhaps so now one web that's the other one that we want to talk about a little bit here because you mentioned they were promising these launches every couple of months for a couple of years now um they've got uh was it six up on that first launch that they did uh when was that was that like a year and a half ago i think it was a year it was last february last february okay wow feels like it's been longer than that but almost a year now what's going on there they haven't had another launch to follow that one up. What's going on if you've got any insight on what the, if they're having issues or if they're just changing their plans, what's the deal?

So unfortunately, I don't. I would love to do an interview at some point with them in the not too distant future. I know that they delayed initially. future. I know that they delayed initially the first six, they set back out of caution. They wanted to, actually originally it was going to be 10 satellites that they were going to put up, but then they held four back just I guess in case the first launch failed, maybe to spread them out.

OneWeb, I'm speculating a bit here, but it seems to me that they've been delaying and spacing out their plans really just to make sure that everything works. I think that there's a great deal of caution in making sure that once they start a mass launch campaign, that they get it right. A fear with any of these mega constellations is that if you had any sort of systemic flaw, somebody or a robot or a person screwed the wrong bolt on 30 satellites and they all come unwound. You don't want that to happen in orbit. So certainly not if you're only launching four to six to 10 at a time.

Future launches should have 34 per rocket. The Soyuz is supposed to, and they anticipate now doing roughly a monthly launch cadence starting this February. So, what percentage of the workforce of OneWeb do you think pooped themselves when the first

Starlink launch had 60 on there? From day one. I feel like there were rumors about how many were going to be on the starlink launch but um you know they had two test satellites and then all of a sudden they start rolling with batches of 60 uh pretty quickly and if they're promising you know two launches every month that says something about their production rate at this point so that's the other side of this that is interesting to me is, you know, OneWeb, if they're waiting a while, and they're getting their production right, it sounds like they're not going to have as quick of a production line as SpaceX will, you know, that SpaceX is planning on some of these things dying before they make it

to their final orbit. OneWeb seems to be making sure everything's right before they launch these things at all. So what do you think the differences are there on production? Is that a mindset thing? Is it capability based on who's producing this? Or is it just a fundamental theory that both of the companies are working with that marks that difference? Yeah, I hesitate to say who is right. I mean, I don't know who is right or wrong in this approach we know that spacex has talked about 12 000 satellites and then their itu filing was discovered for 30 000 more which would put it at 42 000 that's far more than

any uh what is it humanity has launched like 8 500 uh of everything like anything we've put in space from sputnik as far as satellites. And I think there were, yeah, I, I should pull up like the actual data. Cause I had to ask, I asked the UN office of outer space affairs about this a while ago,

but 8,500 is about the figure for like humanities, like collective. We put stuff into space. Like on purpose, things that we put into space that's that's the number spacex is trying to do so so so much more than that that they need to have a much higher number of satellites and their satellites are also a lot closer to earth than one web so spacex is putting their first um 1600 satellites at 550 kilometers one web is putting their satellites at about

1200 kilometers which means they'll need fewer because they're higher up so even though spacex is churning out way more they need more because they're closer it may not be the winner might not be who has the most satellites but whose whose architecture... God, I kind of hate the word architecture. I mean, it's accurate. It's a good word for it. It's so often in the space industry. Whose setup, whose architecture really works best? Is it fewer satellites in a higher LEO orbit,

or is it this massive swarm of satellites operating really really close and then also you have to bear in mind that there are different frequencies that are being used one web is ku band which the satellite industry is more well versed in and then spacex is doing a band which satellite operators are using more increasingly, but it's still a newer spectrum for satellite operators to make use of. So there's so many things that are different between the two systems. It could even come down to like maybe incumbent customers will say, I don't want to switch from Ku to KaBand, or I don't like the history that KaBand has with Rainfade.

Maybe SpaceX has overcome that, but that was a big holdup for a lot of people in the past. They said, you've moved to a higher frequency. You've proved that you can give me more data, but you haven't shown that it'll survive a thunderstorm. I would rather use something stronger. There's a lot of factors that play into it. And I don't think production is the only one or potentially even the most significant.

That's a really good way to put it. Yeah, just how many different trade offs there are. And certainly SpaceX is going the way of Google in the early days, which was let's spend less money on more servers and they'll die and they'll crap out, but we'll replace them with other ones that are also cheap to to purchase and put up uh you know on the internet at that point so it's kind of a similar strategy there for them um but you know it's you're right in that there's so many different trade-offs that it's more complex in when in the final formula there's a lot more variables than uh how many satellites and all that and you've got latency to deal with and different uh you know markets that certainly need different kinds of latency and things like that uh and maybe things will specialize as they always tend to do and it won't just be a single network for everything so yeah there's also the opportunity that one web has to make this uh a pr move of their own because spacex has already attracted

attention for the failure of a few of their satellites. They said the first three failed pretty shortly after launch. And the reason I made a comment early on in our conversation about counting 170 or 172, excuse me, 170 or 182 in their constellation is that astronomers, Jonathan McDowell, I don't know if you follow him on Twitter, he showed that about 10 of the Starlink satellites never raised their orbits. And actually, SpaceX just told me pretty recently

that they plan on deorbiting some of their older satellites. Even while they're doing this build-out cycle, as they decide to put in better, fresher technology, I think that OneWeb could, if they want for appearances' sake, they could put their satellites up and say, hey, we made sure that each satellite was right from the get-go. We're not going to put satellites up there, let them fail, and then rain back down.

And granted, again, SpaceX is at a lower orbit. If a satellite fails at 280 kilometers where they launched their last 60, it's coming down pretty fast. You're not going to really create a debris problem. But the optics could look good for OneWeb if they put all their satellites up at a higher orbit and say, these work from day one. We knew what we were doing. We're know making this up as we go along it's and again this is speculation on my i don't even know if that is speculation though i've heard i heard greg weiler talking some wild

shit about that a little while back so it's not it's not wild speculation at all that the biggest thing that i had concerns about were the deployment rods that SpaceX uses to attach all the satellites in. And then they get these four rods kind of shoot off at the moment of deployment, which SpaceX won't show us, which I grumble about from time to time. I did see a tweet last week that the four rods from I think it was the last launch that was deployed much lower. They've already deorbited. But the first launch that they did of the batch of 60, those are still up above the ISS and have barely moved. So things like that,

obviously they've now lowered their deployment altitude to improve that situation for anything that does fail. They're going to come down a lot quicker. OneWeb, is OneWeb going to deploy at that 800 kilometer plus mark? Or is it, do they have a different strategy to get up to that altitude? Or I guess they're at 1200, you said, right? That's a good question.

So they're at 1200. That's their operational mark. The first six, they launched directly to 1000 kilometers, which spooked Telesat, because that's where they plan on putting their 300 satellites. But I think that future launches for OneWeb, I'd have to ask, this information is more than six months old, and so these things change. I think that they were trying to launch these to around 500,

maybe 500 to 600, and then use their onboard propulsion to raise it the rest of the way. But I'd need to double-check with One one way to make sure that's still their plan. Anything that's below 600 kilometers, to me, doesn't really raise an eye as much for space debris concerns. Of course, the ISS is around 400 kilometers. So there is that as a concern. But the FCC put 600 as the mark where they said if you're applying for one of our

streamlined licenses anything above that has to have propulsion because it won't come down in a reasonable amount of time yeah that'll stay up there for hundreds of years once you get to like 800 900 kilometers yeah so I think it's become a good sustainability marker for satellite operators and mega constellation companies to launch their satellites below 600 kilometers and then do their tests and then once they're competent move it to a higher orbit if you're going to one and i believe one web is doing that but i would still want to double check or we may just know in like two weeks yeah exactly i will update everyone when that happens um all right i don't want to take up too much of your time, so let's hit some other topics before we're out of here for the day.

What else is going on in the industry? There's this DirecTV satellite that has been talked about the last couple of days here that might explode? Yeah, there's that. There's the risk of an exploding satellite. It just sounds like such a click-baity thing, but it's the risk of an exploding satellite. It just sounds like such a clickbaity thing, but it's the truth. DirecTV, or AT&T now, has notified the FCC that one of their satellites had an anomaly in December. One of the batteries has malfunctioned and they can't confidently recharge it without a risk that it would cause the satellite to explode.

So they are, from reading the filing, it seemed like they were pretty nervous about this because they told the FCC that they don't even have enough time to expel all the fuel, which is a common safety practice when you're done with the satellite. You release all the fuel, you put it up in the orbit away from the rest of the satellites in geo, the geostationary orbit being about 36,000 kilometers above the Earth. You send it up above that a little bit further, and you make sure it has no gas on board so that it can't get struck by something and ignite or whatever would cause problems. They said they don't have time to do that.

ignite or whatever would cause problems. They said they don't have time to do that. And one of the conversations that I think will be interesting to follow this, especially with the development of satellite servicing, is how safe it is to actually try and operate satellites well past their design life. So for the constellations, the mega constellations, a lot of them are talking much shorter lifespans, maybe around five years or seven years per satellite. But a traditional geostationary spacecraft is designed to last 15 years. Some are short. I think these were designed for 12 years. And if an operator is confident that they can push it further, they will because

you can make more money from something that you've already paid off. But if these things present symptoms that show up in old age for spacecraft, like maybe exploding or losing contact, we saw two years ago there was an Indonesian satellite that was caught on video more or less exploding it's hard to really tell what's going on but one moment it's fine and the next it's in a bunch of pieces and uh that operator is still never spoken to me about it they actually will shy away from my question so i still don't have answers on that and there was a couple around

that time period right there was the the intel sat uh it was like 29e or something um there was like two or three that died within a couple of months of each other or yeah some of them exploded and it was that 29e was the younger satellite so that one perhaps is a more disconcerting anomaly because uh i think that satellite was only three years old. Still not great, and it was built by Boeing as well. Although I think they concluded that might have been a micrometeorite impact or that it was a possibility that it was some sort of external event that caused it to fail. But DirecTV has, just going back to them, they have until February 25th

to get their satellite out of the geostationary arc so that it doesn't pass through the Earth's shadow and be forced to rely on the batteries I think that I think that it is going to trigger conversations about what it looks like

to keep satellites healthy for long periods of time especially with people who want to refuel them um it's common to keep satellites a few years later but who knows how sustainable that practice is if you know once we realize maybe we'll start keeping them longer and longer and then realize hey once the satellite is about 20 past its design life it starts to get real iffy. Maybe we should just call it a day. I don't know yet,

but because we have our first actual satellite servicer in orbit, the MEV-1 that Northrop Grumman launched on a proton late last year, that conversation now becomes a real one. We're shifting from these hypothetical, oh, I wish we had something in space that could go and check this out, maybe save it, maybe fix it, maybe just move it out without using propulsion. That's shifting from hypothetical to, you know, plausible, and maybe one day we'll even see it. The one thing that I wonder with this, with this DirecTV one, and I should get somebody that I can ask more astrodynamic-y questions about. But if they've got some fuel left, enough that they can't vent it all by the time that this would happen,

couldn't they boost this up above the geobelt into a section of the geobelt or above the geobelt that wouldn't go into eclipse during that eclipse season and then bring it back to its position once that position is out of the eclipse or is that way too much fuel considering they've got i think you said like 70 kilograms or something i gotta do the math on this but i was trying to figure out a way that they didn't have to just immediately declare this a total loss um but it's what a crazy situation

because then you know if that thing does explode violently, you've got quite a lot of debris in the geobelt, which is, you know, more serious knock on effects of that at a certain point. So it's definitely I guess we'll know pretty soon if everything goes well with it, because they said it was the end of February that that would be in the eclipse time period. So as long as they can solve it within the next month, everything should be OK. But I don't know. I still don't even like knowing that a battery could explode yeah it's not the most comforting uh detail uh i should add uh that the the satellite spaceway one was one of three spaceway satellites and i still have not been able to figure out if the the same risk is present on other satellites boeing sent me a statement saying that they have informed other customers of theirs what they should do to prevent a similar anomaly a repeat of the battery malfunction

that suggests to me that they know what it is that caused it the circumstances that led to it but they haven't exactly been very clear in what it was or how many satellites are at risk for that so it's um again we were talking about mega constellations earlier and if there's the risk of a a major flaw that would impact hundreds or thousands of satellites. I think this sort of drives home the concern about space safety and the need to just be careful when people are putting items up into space, satellites up into space, that if they have malfunctions, certainly in geo, it's not a ton that you can do about it. If you create debris in geo geo atmospheric drag is not going

to bring it back down so it it is something to be concerned about boy everyone at in boeing communications deserves a raise this year holy crap are they having a year all right well is there uh any other topics that you had on your mind that you want to talk about here? I know you were working on some pieces recently for the magazine, I believe you mentioned. I did. So the last big thing that I worked on was an article about the number of geostationary satellites that were ordered. I'll give a quick plug for this because it's something that I've been following since I started at Space News. And this year, or excuse me, 2019,

was the highest number of geosatellite orders since 2016 at least, if not 2015. Basically, they'd been in the single digits the previous years. And then last year, there were 15, I think 13, if you're not counting small geos that were like under a thousand kilograms or something like that. But it sort of shows that the industry is buying satellites again. And I don't know, I hesitate to say if that shows any sort of trend, but manufacturers are feeling more confident that this is becoming a norm. And it's also pushed them to invest in much more capable spacecraft. I know everyone, I was talking with my old college

roommate just yesterday, he was telling me how much satellite internet sucks for his family out on the eastern shore of Maryland. And it was neat to be able to tell him that there's so many new technologies that have been invested in that in a couple of years that may not be the case it could be the mega constellations that bring much better internet or it could be companies that have figured out how to build massive very high throughput satellites and geo that can actually provide a quality internet service i feel like it's opened up a lot of new business opportunities for the space industry, and it's a cool thing to watch.

So I'll be counting again in 2020 to see if this marks the beginning of a new normal, or if maybe everybody gets panicky again, maybe SpaceX launching 1,000 satellites will freak everyone out and they'll press pause on buying until they know what exactly they should do again. Maybe SpaceX launching a thousand satellites will freak everyone out and they'll press pause on buying until they know what exactly they should do again. We'll see. Yeah, that is a pretty huge rebound.

I mean, you know, like you're mentioning, there was a lot of panic from reading your articles over the last couple of years that I feel like at some point I've read one article from you about how every satellite manufacturer was convinced they were going out of business because nobody wanted geo-satellites anymore. Granted, there's not a lot of people that are manufacturing these, but they all individually thought that they were going to be out of business pretty soon. And then on the other side, you know, the launch side, there is some concern within certain launch companies that they're going to run out of payloads at some point, that there's not enough people out there that need to put things into orbit for the amount of launch vehicles that are coming online, the big projections that they all

tend to survive on getting investment saying that they can launch a certain amount of satellites per year. So that's definitely something that is always in the back of my mind. So it's good to hear that they had an uptick in the year. But yeah, you're right. Is this the fluke? Or were the last three kind of the weird downtime for that section of the market? Right. Yeah. The things that go on with satellite manufacturing definitely have a trickle effect to the launch providers a few years out. So we saw that with SpaceX launching. What was it, 13 last year? Yeah, something like that. Was it 13 last year?

Yeah, something like that. Way below their initial estimate. And they blame that a lot on the fact that the market for satellites just wasn't what they thought it was going to be. So rocket factories need to have enough payloads to launch so that they can build enough rockets to keep their costs down. It's something to pay attention to for the health of the whole space industry, what's going on in the telecom sector. Definitely. Well, Caleb, thank you so much for coming back on the show, talking about all that. It's always helpful to get a download from somebody so knowledgeable on it.

So I always point people to your articles all the time on the blog and here on the podcast. But is there anywhere that you want people to follow along with what you're working on day to day? The website and Twitter are both great. I'm writing for Space News pretty regularly and pretty much every day. And then trying to stay on top of Twitter as well. You always tell me that.

You always tell me that you're working on your Twitter game. Yeah, you know, I think I've gotten better. I think you're good at Twitter now, yeah. I got on the Twitter. It's fun. I feel like I have to remind myself to not be a passive observer on Twitter. I also realize that I share a lot more launch stuff

than I do other deals. I'm following a lot of things that happen in the space industry, but for whatever reason, those are the ones that grab my attention. I think maybe my resolution for 2020 will be to tweet more satcom stuff and then like we were talking about at the tail end of this conversation to show people why that's significant to the overall space industry because when i started writing about satcom it wasn't clear to me i got into space because i like stargazing and it wasn't clear to me the

connection between those two but now i understand how important it is to have an actual industry that's um involved and regularly building all kinds of spacecraft i think it helps with everything that goes on in space awesome so everyone follow along because that was uh masterfully put and that's why i'm reading you so keep keep doing what you're doing. And obviously, we'll have you back whenever more satellite stuff happens. But thanks again, man, for coming on. Yeah, anytime. Thanks again to Caleb for coming on the show talking all about satellites today. He is one of my favorite writers, so definitely check him out over at Space News. But for now, that is it. Thank you all so much for listening. As always, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support if you would like to join the crew that supports this show

every single month. And until next week, thank you all for listening. I will talk to you soon. Bye.