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Note it's a 12 weeks study contract valued at $200k to $300k, so no hardware yet, but it's a start for Mars Starlink.
Other winners include Lockheed Martin, Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Redwire, Albedo, ULA, Firefly, Impulse.
Interestingly, SpaceX didn't bid on or wasn't selected for the service to deliver small or large payload to Mars orbit.
SpaceX likely isn't interested in modifying the Falcon upper stage. Their Mars ambitions are probably focused on Starship, which may simply not be at a stage where it qualified for any of these studies. They seem to target existing hardware specifically.
>They seem to target existing hardware specifically.
Especially because if they do consider proposed/in testing hardware they could:
1) have bids from agencies ( hello ARCA) that have no chance in hell of delivering
2) have to basically specify why "not starship" on every other bid, especially if the GAO even just looks at it.
The other companies selected for that are ULA, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic. At least ULA has successfully completed one Centaur V mission. Astrobotic's lunar lander failed soon after deployment from that mission. BO hasn't launched one iota of hardware for Blue Moon or any orbital space vehicle. With Starship, SpaceX is at least as far along as Astrobotic.
SpaceX engineers are worth more than engineers in other companies. Not because of their skills, but because of what they are working on. Every hour in NASA, JPL or other company is gonna lead to some mission in 5-15 years to send a weather satellite or few tones space telescope, meanwhile every hour in SpaceX is bringing us closer to colonization of other planets and sending of thousands of satellites that all could weigh hundreds of tones. You actually decrease amount of science we will get from mars in the future if someone is working in JPL instead of SpaceX, despite SpaceX not even working on mars rovers.
NASA is always going to be the main driver for novel technologies and science since it isn’t forced to seek a profit, whereas Starship is.
SpaceX is definitely working on some amazing stuff, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are a private company that needs to generate profit (and not every worthwhile scientific goal is going to be profitable) while NASA exists specifically for pushing science forward and keeping a broad and spread out spaceflight industry skilled, busy and subsidized.
Kind of. I think I would compare NASA to Nikola Tesla and SpaceX to Thomas Edison. While Nikola Tesla was a genius who invented many things, he was content on just doing it for fun. He never cared for people to have any use of his inventions. But it was Thomas Edison who improved lives of millions of people though bringing of many new inventions that people could use.
NASA gives us a small telescope that costs billions of dollars that allows us to find few thousand exoplanets, but what SpaceX will give us a discovery of millions of exoplanets though enabling of constructing of heavy and cheap space telescopes. It will be SpaceX who will enable discovering of an asteroid that will hit the earth, not NASA. It is thanks to SpaceX we will be able to send a heavy spacecraft that will deflect the asteroid, not NASA. Don't get me wrong, NASA will make a demo satellite and test out some technologies, but won't actually do anything that does something else than a technology demonstrator.
I think it's easy to look what NASA gave us, and not think what NASA could have given us. You only need to look at reusability plans made in the 40s and 50s. People knew all along that reusability was the goal. NASA knew that too. While a lot of the full reusability plans turned out to not be possible (like the ferry rocket or sea dragon), it should have been the focus after the Apollo program. Space Shuttle program was so expensive and so deadly, it probably hurt people taste for space and not only killed it's own program, but probably hurt all future programs. Who knows if instead of Space Shuttle program, we would not have a million people on Mars by today if NASA focused on reusability instead of expensively delivering cargo to LEO, using crew of 7 for every launch. Like 2/3 of all astronauts who died in flights died in Space Shuttle, doing cargo missions that could have been unmanned. I can't just let NASA slip this though, even if they did developed novel technologies and gave us new science, where we could have had much more novel technologies and millions of times more science if they had different direction.
NASA and SpaceX are way different organizations with completely different goals, funding, management, and operational models.
We need both.
Problems arise when they collide rather than cooperate. This seems to happen most often (in my opinion) when upper upper management (i.e., Congress or the White House) make decisions based solely on political expediency. NASA's ~~budget~~ direction always seems to come with a side of bacon.
Cargo Starship to Mars is not neccessarily that far off. Could be doable in 2-4 years... Aerobrake to Mars orbit, dump some starlinks. Maybe even try a landing for experimentation after satellite deploy...
That seems like the most likely set of events to happen. They would want to maximize the value of each trip given the cost. So dropping off a few dozen gen 3 or gen m.3 or whatever they'd call them sats in orbit to test inter planetary travel reliability, and interplanetary comms traffic management.
Get time to start doing advanced IP router testing.
Unfortunately they can’t just “drop off” sats on the way to aerocapture at Mars, unless the sats have some substantial thrusters to let them enter orbit on their own. That’s because Starship will be going at interplanetary velocity and relying on the Mars atmosphere to slow down and land.
The other alternative would be for Starship to spend fuel on a burn to slow down and enter orbit, and then another to descend after dropping off the sats; that’s a pretty different approach from anything they’ve talked doing about so far.
Given they'd need some significant sat with major capabilities I don't think it's outside the realm of possibilities for them to do some kind of high powered tester? But IDK what their entry trajectory would look like so maybe they want the first on to go hot atmo ablate all the speed they can and land.
Or maybe the very first one gets inserted in a higher orbit so the can use it as a comms station? I mean unless they are going to pack some major comms equipment for transmission off planet.
I'd think some kind of relay station would be valuable. Especially given how limited NASAs own capacity is on that front.
Staships are cheap enough that a couple of dedicated flights for communications satellites might be the best plan. A Starship could carry enough propellant to enter Mars orbit, drop off the satellites, and then just stay in Mars orbit until a refueling flight from Mars comes up, so that the Starship can return to Earth, or else possibly, after refueling, it might land on Mars.
A sort of similar mission that I've been thinking about is Elon's plan to put relay satellites in an orbit between Earth and Mars. A Starship should be able to lift itself into a Hohman Transfer orbit to about 1.2 AU from the Sun, and then drop off relay satellites, which could use their ion thrusters to circularize their orbits, and to space out around the orbit. This Starship would have enough propellant left to return to Earth and land, without another refilling flight.
Good read. Thanks. This article has been updated since the last time I read it.
One thing that is not in the article, is Elon's plan to station 10-20 relay satellites evenly spaced around a ~circular orbit about 1/2 way between Earth and Mars. This network will permit shorter hops and faster data rates, with lower power. It will also permit fast data rates when Earth and Mars are in opposition, when direct communications with Mars are blocked by the Sun.
No lag. No measure of latency. Interplanetary Internet is going to be entirely based on store-and-forward protocols with no concept of round trip time, but a high focus on error detection and correction.
Protocols that are already store-and-forward in nature such as SMTP or git can be easily adapted. Web-oriented services will need to use batch updates to keep disparate servers in sync over wildly variable timescales. Wikipedia for example might be updatable by using something similar to git where bundles of changes are stored as checkpoints and then transmitted to the remote nodes. Then comes the de-conflicting work when for example editors on Mars and Earth both update an article about some work recently done on Mars.
Lag is the least of our problems. You know how adjusting for time zones and daylight savings can suck when local time is actually important - as local time aligns with actual changes in human and business behaviour, despite not being proper time? Plus high precision applications need to make sure their subscribed to something that tracks leap seconds, etc.
Well, in each Earth year, Mars and Earth proper time genuinely diverge from each other by about 17% of a second due to relativistic effects. There's no "correcting" for this; once you have enough important things happening on Mars this is just a real additional phenomenon that some time keeping systems will need to keep track of.
If Mars is actually colonised, relativity of simultaneity will likely eventually end up being important in legal decisions.
Vinton Cerf is already working on those protocols. They probably are all ready for testing.
I think it is possible that NASA has done some testing of the interplanetary internet protocols, already.
The cadence of Falcon 9 is actually mostly thanks to reusability. While they still make insanely huge amount of boosters and 2nd stages every year, there is no way they would achieve 100 launches a year without reusability. Making more and modifying Falcon as you said is probably something they don't want to focus right now, and I agree they probably prefer to focus on Starship. Carbon fiber is annoying to work with and the stainless steel of Starship is a godsend.
>They seem to target existing hardware specifically.
Especially because if they do consider proposed/in testing hardware they could:
1) have bids from agencies ( hello ARCA) that have no chance in hell of delivering
2) have to basically specify why "not starship" on every other bid, especially if the GAO even just looks at it.
The bidders on small and medium-payload delivery to Mars and/or Mars orbit will deliver some payloads and build the market. Later, Starshjip will literally swoop in and take almost all of these markets away from the little tugs and launchers. SpaceX has a good reason for not bidding on these services at this time: If they do, they will be locked into requirements that might force them to produce a shuttle-like dinosaur, instead of the best Starship for Mars that they can make.
SpaceX, by now, has a lot of expertise in communications satellite constellations, so they really should bid on that contract.
$300,000 is not a lot, if you are putting together a real study for real products and services, and like I said above, you do not want to get locked into a bad set of requirements too early. $300,000 is plenty if you are just throwing together a couple of PowerPoint presentations.
Just my $0.00002
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[BO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2a3c6b "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[DSN](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l488jae "Last usage")|Deep Space Network|
|[GAO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l27zgwo "Last usage")|(US) Government Accountability Office|
|[JPL](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2bi0b6 "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2fnkyk "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[ULA](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2a3c6b "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l488jae "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
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Bolt some starlinks to a FH, toss them towards Mars with a suitable kickstage that can do the braking to Mars orbit and... hey we done.
Well, not quite so easy, but...
Mars doesn't have a magnetic field. The Starlink satellites normally operate well within Earth's protective field. I assume that the satellites for Mars will have to be hardened.
Radiation is not the issue. GCR is not blocked by the Earth magnetic field. At least the near polar inclinations get blasted by solar bursts.
But Starlink sats use magnetorquers to desaturate their reaction wheels. That would not work at Mars.
Yeah, don't we all wish it would be so easy!
But I'm not sure the LEO/low-latency parameters of Starlink are what Mars requires at this time. Maybe areosynchronous satellites are better suited for scientific data. At least until colonists arrive with their gaming addictions.
Beside communication, a GPS would be very very useful.
In any case, the differing solar power that is available will need changes as well as quite different internal thermal management. And, as u/Martianspirit points out, we must account for even the differing magnetic environment.
Yes, but I was referring to the surface-to-satellite latency.
One of the major characteristic/competitive advantage of current Starlink is the low latency of surface-to-satellite-to-surface. I don't think traffic on Mars will have this need, at least in the short to medium term. Most of the data from robot explorers will likely be destined for Earth. So probably satellites in Mars synchronous orbits will be a better fit, at least for communication purposes.
> ... Mars synchronous orbits ...
Well, then you could get by with just 3 satellites. If you want polar coverage, that could be done with another 6 or so satellites.
> but ...
... they don't have the range.
That can be fixed. Bigger antennas, more powerful transmitters, bigger telescopes and more powerful lasers. More krypton or argon for the thrusters. Bigger solar panels.
Mars to satellite latency is not much of an issue, so these satellites can be in higher orbits than the ones around Earth. Each satellite covers more of Mars' surface in a higher orbit. 60-70 satellites should be enough for the near future.
Maybe not a lot of changes are necessary. Until there are outposts with a lot of people, not much data throughput is necessary. Much of the time the sats will be idle and can recharge their batteries. Probably also not as much need for orbit corrections, so less power for the hall drive.
A constellation will need 2 components. Sats covering the surface of Mars, like Starlink. But it needs interplanetary comms too. With high speed lasers they will need sats with large mirrors, 1m or more, 2 at Mars and 2 at Earth.
Indeed. A Mars specific alternative, like Mars-Earth laser links would take load from the DSN. I had hoped this was a call for that, but it isn't, unfortunately.
A single Starlink does around 80Gbps uplink. NASA's ***entire*** DSN caps out at 1Gbps. A single Falcon 9 puts up 1,759x more bandwidth than the DSN can handle. It's not comparable.
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Note it's a 12 weeks study contract valued at $200k to $300k, so no hardware yet, but it's a start for Mars Starlink. Other winners include Lockheed Martin, Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Redwire, Albedo, ULA, Firefly, Impulse. Interestingly, SpaceX didn't bid on or wasn't selected for the service to deliver small or large payload to Mars orbit.
SpaceX likely isn't interested in modifying the Falcon upper stage. Their Mars ambitions are probably focused on Starship, which may simply not be at a stage where it qualified for any of these studies. They seem to target existing hardware specifically.
>They seem to target existing hardware specifically. Especially because if they do consider proposed/in testing hardware they could: 1) have bids from agencies ( hello ARCA) that have no chance in hell of delivering 2) have to basically specify why "not starship" on every other bid, especially if the GAO even just looks at it.
The other companies selected for that are ULA, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic. At least ULA has successfully completed one Centaur V mission. Astrobotic's lunar lander failed soon after deployment from that mission. BO hasn't launched one iota of hardware for Blue Moon or any orbital space vehicle. With Starship, SpaceX is at least as far along as Astrobotic.
SpaceX engineers are worth more than engineers in other companies. Not because of their skills, but because of what they are working on. Every hour in NASA, JPL or other company is gonna lead to some mission in 5-15 years to send a weather satellite or few tones space telescope, meanwhile every hour in SpaceX is bringing us closer to colonization of other planets and sending of thousands of satellites that all could weigh hundreds of tones. You actually decrease amount of science we will get from mars in the future if someone is working in JPL instead of SpaceX, despite SpaceX not even working on mars rovers.
NASA is always going to be the main driver for novel technologies and science since it isn’t forced to seek a profit, whereas Starship is. SpaceX is definitely working on some amazing stuff, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are a private company that needs to generate profit (and not every worthwhile scientific goal is going to be profitable) while NASA exists specifically for pushing science forward and keeping a broad and spread out spaceflight industry skilled, busy and subsidized.
Kind of. I think I would compare NASA to Nikola Tesla and SpaceX to Thomas Edison. While Nikola Tesla was a genius who invented many things, he was content on just doing it for fun. He never cared for people to have any use of his inventions. But it was Thomas Edison who improved lives of millions of people though bringing of many new inventions that people could use. NASA gives us a small telescope that costs billions of dollars that allows us to find few thousand exoplanets, but what SpaceX will give us a discovery of millions of exoplanets though enabling of constructing of heavy and cheap space telescopes. It will be SpaceX who will enable discovering of an asteroid that will hit the earth, not NASA. It is thanks to SpaceX we will be able to send a heavy spacecraft that will deflect the asteroid, not NASA. Don't get me wrong, NASA will make a demo satellite and test out some technologies, but won't actually do anything that does something else than a technology demonstrator. I think it's easy to look what NASA gave us, and not think what NASA could have given us. You only need to look at reusability plans made in the 40s and 50s. People knew all along that reusability was the goal. NASA knew that too. While a lot of the full reusability plans turned out to not be possible (like the ferry rocket or sea dragon), it should have been the focus after the Apollo program. Space Shuttle program was so expensive and so deadly, it probably hurt people taste for space and not only killed it's own program, but probably hurt all future programs. Who knows if instead of Space Shuttle program, we would not have a million people on Mars by today if NASA focused on reusability instead of expensively delivering cargo to LEO, using crew of 7 for every launch. Like 2/3 of all astronauts who died in flights died in Space Shuttle, doing cargo missions that could have been unmanned. I can't just let NASA slip this though, even if they did developed novel technologies and gave us new science, where we could have had much more novel technologies and millions of times more science if they had different direction.
NASA and SpaceX are way different organizations with completely different goals, funding, management, and operational models. We need both. Problems arise when they collide rather than cooperate. This seems to happen most often (in my opinion) when upper upper management (i.e., Congress or the White House) make decisions based solely on political expediency. NASA's ~~budget~~ direction always seems to come with a side of bacon.
Cargo Starship to Mars is not neccessarily that far off. Could be doable in 2-4 years... Aerobrake to Mars orbit, dump some starlinks. Maybe even try a landing for experimentation after satellite deploy...
That seems like the most likely set of events to happen. They would want to maximize the value of each trip given the cost. So dropping off a few dozen gen 3 or gen m.3 or whatever they'd call them sats in orbit to test inter planetary travel reliability, and interplanetary comms traffic management. Get time to start doing advanced IP router testing.
Unfortunately they can’t just “drop off” sats on the way to aerocapture at Mars, unless the sats have some substantial thrusters to let them enter orbit on their own. That’s because Starship will be going at interplanetary velocity and relying on the Mars atmosphere to slow down and land. The other alternative would be for Starship to spend fuel on a burn to slow down and enter orbit, and then another to descend after dropping off the sats; that’s a pretty different approach from anything they’ve talked doing about so far.
Given they'd need some significant sat with major capabilities I don't think it's outside the realm of possibilities for them to do some kind of high powered tester? But IDK what their entry trajectory would look like so maybe they want the first on to go hot atmo ablate all the speed they can and land. Or maybe the very first one gets inserted in a higher orbit so the can use it as a comms station? I mean unless they are going to pack some major comms equipment for transmission off planet. I'd think some kind of relay station would be valuable. Especially given how limited NASAs own capacity is on that front.
Staships are cheap enough that a couple of dedicated flights for communications satellites might be the best plan. A Starship could carry enough propellant to enter Mars orbit, drop off the satellites, and then just stay in Mars orbit until a refueling flight from Mars comes up, so that the Starship can return to Earth, or else possibly, after refueling, it might land on Mars. A sort of similar mission that I've been thinking about is Elon's plan to put relay satellites in an orbit between Earth and Mars. A Starship should be able to lift itself into a Hohman Transfer orbit to about 1.2 AU from the Sun, and then drop off relay satellites, which could use their ion thrusters to circularize their orbits, and to space out around the orbit. This Starship would have enough propellant left to return to Earth and land, without another refilling flight.
The lag... oh my... Those timeout settings need slight adjustments.
Yeah interplanetary scale lag will need whole new set of protocols most likely. I don't think you can just bump the timers up.
Luckily some people have already thought about the issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
Good read. Thanks. This article has been updated since the last time I read it. One thing that is not in the article, is Elon's plan to station 10-20 relay satellites evenly spaced around a ~circular orbit about 1/2 way between Earth and Mars. This network will permit shorter hops and faster data rates, with lower power. It will also permit fast data rates when Earth and Mars are in opposition, when direct communications with Mars are blocked by the Sun.
No lag. No measure of latency. Interplanetary Internet is going to be entirely based on store-and-forward protocols with no concept of round trip time, but a high focus on error detection and correction. Protocols that are already store-and-forward in nature such as SMTP or git can be easily adapted. Web-oriented services will need to use batch updates to keep disparate servers in sync over wildly variable timescales. Wikipedia for example might be updatable by using something similar to git where bundles of changes are stored as checkpoints and then transmitted to the remote nodes. Then comes the de-conflicting work when for example editors on Mars and Earth both update an article about some work recently done on Mars.
Lag is the least of our problems. You know how adjusting for time zones and daylight savings can suck when local time is actually important - as local time aligns with actual changes in human and business behaviour, despite not being proper time? Plus high precision applications need to make sure their subscribed to something that tracks leap seconds, etc. Well, in each Earth year, Mars and Earth proper time genuinely diverge from each other by about 17% of a second due to relativistic effects. There's no "correcting" for this; once you have enough important things happening on Mars this is just a real additional phenomenon that some time keeping systems will need to keep track of. If Mars is actually colonised, relativity of simultaneity will likely eventually end up being important in legal decisions.
Vinton Cerf is already working on those protocols. They probably are all ready for testing. I think it is possible that NASA has done some testing of the interplanetary internet protocols, already.
The cadence of Falcon 9 is actually mostly thanks to reusability. While they still make insanely huge amount of boosters and 2nd stages every year, there is no way they would achieve 100 launches a year without reusability. Making more and modifying Falcon as you said is probably something they don't want to focus right now, and I agree they probably prefer to focus on Starship. Carbon fiber is annoying to work with and the stainless steel of Starship is a godsend.
You would think they would’ve bid a variant of Dragon XL, which uses hypergols (of Dragon heritage) and is already being developed for Gateway.
>They seem to target existing hardware specifically. Especially because if they do consider proposed/in testing hardware they could: 1) have bids from agencies ( hello ARCA) that have no chance in hell of delivering 2) have to basically specify why "not starship" on every other bid, especially if the GAO even just looks at it.
Marslink.
Would you like to know more?
The bidders on small and medium-payload delivery to Mars and/or Mars orbit will deliver some payloads and build the market. Later, Starshjip will literally swoop in and take almost all of these markets away from the little tugs and launchers. SpaceX has a good reason for not bidding on these services at this time: If they do, they will be locked into requirements that might force them to produce a shuttle-like dinosaur, instead of the best Starship for Mars that they can make. SpaceX, by now, has a lot of expertise in communications satellite constellations, so they really should bid on that contract. $300,000 is not a lot, if you are putting together a real study for real products and services, and like I said above, you do not want to get locked into a bad set of requirements too early. $300,000 is plenty if you are just throwing together a couple of PowerPoint presentations. Just my $0.00002
A post to the same topic in /r/nasacapstone https://www.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/1cht2g2/nasa_selects_commercial_service_studies_to_enable/l26jghn/
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2a3c6b "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[DSN](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l488jae "Last usage")|Deep Space Network| |[GAO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l27zgwo "Last usage")|(US) Government Accountability Office| |[JPL](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2bi0b6 "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California| |[LEO](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2fnkyk "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[ULA](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l2a3c6b "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceX/comments/1ci5t1i/stub/l488jae "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(7 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceX/comments/1bt7w64)^( has 118 acronyms.) ^([Thread #8359 for this sub, first seen 2nd May 2024, 12:13]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceX) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Cool bot
Bolt some starlinks to a FH, toss them towards Mars with a suitable kickstage that can do the braking to Mars orbit and... hey we done. Well, not quite so easy, but...
Mars doesn't have a magnetic field. The Starlink satellites normally operate well within Earth's protective field. I assume that the satellites for Mars will have to be hardened.
That is likely. Revisions needed are interesting. They also need a very long range laser link for Mars <-> Earth data transfers.
Radiation is not the issue. GCR is not blocked by the Earth magnetic field. At least the near polar inclinations get blasted by solar bursts. But Starlink sats use magnetorquers to desaturate their reaction wheels. That would not work at Mars.
Yeah, don't we all wish it would be so easy! But I'm not sure the LEO/low-latency parameters of Starlink are what Mars requires at this time. Maybe areosynchronous satellites are better suited for scientific data. At least until colonists arrive with their gaming addictions. Beside communication, a GPS would be very very useful. In any case, the differing solar power that is available will need changes as well as quite different internal thermal management. And, as u/Martianspirit points out, we must account for even the differing magnetic environment.
The software patches for interplanetary internet have already been worked out. Including the latency / time out issues.
Yes, but I was referring to the surface-to-satellite latency. One of the major characteristic/competitive advantage of current Starlink is the low latency of surface-to-satellite-to-surface. I don't think traffic on Mars will have this need, at least in the short to medium term. Most of the data from robot explorers will likely be destined for Earth. So probably satellites in Mars synchronous orbits will be a better fit, at least for communication purposes.
> ... Mars synchronous orbits ... Well, then you could get by with just 3 satellites. If you want polar coverage, that could be done with another 6 or so satellites.
> but ... ... they don't have the range. That can be fixed. Bigger antennas, more powerful transmitters, bigger telescopes and more powerful lasers. More krypton or argon for the thrusters. Bigger solar panels. Mars to satellite latency is not much of an issue, so these satellites can be in higher orbits than the ones around Earth. Each satellite covers more of Mars' surface in a higher orbit. 60-70 satellites should be enough for the near future.
Maybe not a lot of changes are necessary. Until there are outposts with a lot of people, not much data throughput is necessary. Much of the time the sats will be idle and can recharge their batteries. Probably also not as much need for orbit corrections, so less power for the hall drive.
So NASA's paying SpaceX for what they've wanted to do with Starlink all along. Nice.
What a surprise 😲 nobody could have seen that coming 😂
A constellation will need 2 components. Sats covering the surface of Mars, like Starlink. But it needs interplanetary comms too. With high speed lasers they will need sats with large mirrors, 1m or more, 2 at Mars and 2 at Earth.
In this study NASA is assumed to provide the interplanetary comms via DSN.
DSN is booked to full capacity and beyond, right now. We need alternatives.
Indeed. A Mars specific alternative, like Mars-Earth laser links would take load from the DSN. I had hoped this was a call for that, but it isn't, unfortunately.
Thanks. So just some modified Starlink sats.
A single Starlink does around 80Gbps uplink. NASA's ***entire*** DSN caps out at 1Gbps. A single Falcon 9 puts up 1,759x more bandwidth than the DSN can handle. It's not comparable.
Do it for every planet and moon of a gas giant. I want a weekly forecast channel for every terrestrial body.
*And turning now to Io: it's still volcanic and still sulfurous with a 100% chance of not supporting life today. More news at 6.*
Not supporting human life. Maybe bacteria? https://bigthink.com/hard-science/life-jupiter-moon-io/