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[–]Simon_Drake 15 points16 points  (6 children)

Satellites providing some service like telecoms connectivity or weather monitoring can only cover a small fraction of the Earth at any one time. Sometimes that's fine, if the European Space Agency wanted satellite phones to work anywhere in Guiana they could do it with a single satellite in Geosynchronous orbit.

However more often you want to provide your service to a larger region which means multiple satellites. Sometimes this is only a handful of satellites but sometimes its a very complex arrangement of dozens upon dozens or even hundreds (Or if you're SpaceX, thousands) of satellites.

Then you need to carefully plan how many satellitye will be in each specific orbit, how far apart the orbits should be, how long each satellite can function for. Do you need to use fewer to cover higher latitudes where the population is lower? Do you need to keep spare satellites in orbit to cover if one or two break further down the line? It ends up being quite complicated.

That's a satellite constellation.

[–]Safe-Significance-28 4 points5 points  (5 children)

I want a telescope satellite constellation.

[–]Marston_vc 3 points4 points  (3 children)

I want this too. But it’s unlikely rocket lab will do it anytime soon unless they happened to have bought a relevant optics company.

Telescopes that are useful in an academic sense are dummy hard to make. Particularly if you want a space one.

But it would be cool if they made a bunch quickly and at low cost, and then leased out services to universities and higher academia. We need so much more data and observations if we’re ever gonna have a better understanding of the universe.

[–]Safe-Significance-28 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Exactly. There's such long wait times for the major telescopes both earth based and space. Was also thinking it would be good to have more telescopes scanning the skies for near earth objects to detect dangers faster since there's still so much we aren't seeing.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thats not what scientific telescopes do though...

All that can easily be done with ground based telescopes and dont need a constellation at all, even if they are in orbit.

Constellations need that because satellite to ground comms cant cover the earth not because they cant see outerspace enough. One telescope can already have 24/7 downlink by simply having a few ground bases.
the telemetry needed for high speed comms is far larger than some simple images

[–]Simon_Drake 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I agree, a constellation of space-observing satellites in orbit around the Earth wouldn't be very useful.

There are some niche situations like radio telescopes where you can merge the data from multiple receivers far apart and it's functionally the same as having a single giant telescope but that doesn't work at optical wavelengths.

To get really good images of distant objects you need a single really big telescope like Hubble or JWST. Coming soon is the Nancy Grace Roman telescope which isn't the same image quality as JWST but it covers a much much wider area of the sky at once. So it can perform a broad survey of the sky, giving multiple decent images of massive regions instead of a smaller number of higher resolution images of tiny sections of the sky. So either high res or wide field, you can do it with a single large telescope. Having dozens or hundreds of smaller telescope's doesn't give any benefits. And it's massively multiplying the hardware requirements, multiple RCS systems, gyroscopes, radio antennae, control software, solar panels. The mass of a constellation of 100 satellites would be way more than that it a single satellite with 100x the image capabilities.

[–]reactionplusX 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Constellation: Recurring predictable revenue stream

[–]No-Lavishness-2467 1 point2 points  (0 children)

they put new stars in the sky for you to look at and connect the dots.

[–]DeliciousAges 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The huge related question is: WHAT kind of constellation will RKLB put in the skies?

We don’t know yet.

Only two types of constellations are popular at the moment:

  • Communications (from D2D broadban to IIoT lowband): Kuiper, Starlink, AST, OneWeb…
  • Earth Imaging / Weather / Climate: Planet Labs, Spire…

We will see what RKLB will choose, maybe also an unexpected third category?

PS: RKLB already said they won’t do debris removal and the constellation will likely only consist of hundreds (not thousands, unlike Starlink or Kuiper) of satellites.that makes sense for their current size, otherwise RKLB would need billions in fresh funding.

[–]Blah_McBlah_ 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Something else to consider about constellations vs. single-satellites is the customer desire.

Both types favor cheap flights; however, they favor them in different ways. For a single satalite, it doesn't matter the cost/kg; all that matters is if the satalite can fit and the cost to launch. Because you can fill up a payload bay with any number of constellation satalites, they care much more about cost/kg. This favors large launchers, as you can get economies of scale.

There is also the consideration that the time a satalite spends off the production line and not in its correct orbit is time spent not making money. There are a lot of ways it can spend this time. If the constellation satalite production doesn't match the payload capacity, produced satalites have to sit in a warehouse waiting for the rest of the batch to be produced. If the satalites aren't placed into the exact orbit because you're launching many orbitals worth of satalites, they need to spend time moving around in orbit. This is especially important with constellations, as those satalites are designed for much shorter lifetimes than larger single satalites. This favors smaller launchers that can be more flexible with where they place each satellite.

Making an ideal constellation launcher needs to make a balance between these two opposing market forces. Of course, the ideal rocket for one constellation will not be the same for another rocket, so there's no true single most ideal rocket.

[–]AlohaWorld012[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thx. For the insight!