Features

The
space-wide
web
Tech billionaires are racing to build an orbiting internet
that is accessible anywhere on Earth, says Mark Harris

A
ISHTAN SHAKARIAN knew there was another machine that could be anywhere in
money to be made from the internet. the world. Most of those connections are via
So she took a spade into the woods cables. Even smartphones only use radiowaves
near where she lived, about 50 kilometres to connect the last few hundred metres to
outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The a cabled cell tower. But longer stretches are
75-year-old hoped to dig up copper wiring to possible. Satellite internet today often uses
sell for scrap. Instead, she cut through a fibre- relay stations far enough from Earth that they
optic cable – worthless to her, but priceless remain in a steady “geostationary” orbit:
to the millions of people in neighbouring as seen from the ground, they are in a fixed
Armenia left staring at blank screens for position. Pinned 35,000 kilometres above the
12 hours. She had cut off the country’s internet. equator, they can serve a wide swathe of land.
The 2011 incident shows how easily this can But the 70,000-kilometre round trip adds
happen with underground cables, and those a lag of half a second or more to signals, an
under the sea are even more vulnerable. Every annoyance that disrupts voice calls and makes
few days, an earthquake, anchor or boat multiplayer online gaming or high-speed
damages one of the roughly 430 sea-floor financial trading impossible. On top of that,
cables. Tonga went offline for nearly two weeks download speeds are slower than modern
in January after an underwater cable was cut. cable connections and subscriptions are
In some ways, as an isolated island nation, pricier. The set-up also requires a large dish
Tonga is lucky to have this connection. and a clear view of the sky.
The cost of laying cables to remote places One alternative that tech companies have
means only about 10 per cent of the planet’s recently considered is the stratosphere. From
surface has terrestrial communication links. around 10 to 50 kilometres up, this layer of the
According to the UN, nearly half the world’s atmosphere is high enough for a transmitter
population has never been online. there to serve a city‑sized area below, yet low
To reach them, and ensure everyone has enough that a phone could communicate
a reliable connection, billionaires like Elon with it without the need for a receiver dish.
Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson plan Better still, putting things in the
to reinvent the internet – to free it from its stratosphere is easy compared with space.
Earthly roots and build a wireless web above Hungry for extra customers, Facebook and
our heads. Balloons in the stratosphere, Google built prototype solar-powered drones
constellations of satellites, cruising drones – that could loiter about 20 kilometres up for
there is no shortage of ideas. Pull this off and weeks, beaming down the internet. But these
humanity’s greatest information repository projects are now on hold following crashes
would find a dazzlingly futuristic home. To and damage when landing the feather-light
make it work, we just need to deploy some old aircraft. Other companies, including Boeing
technology, albeit in a highly unusual way. and Airbus, are working on similar drones,
The internet is a gigantic network of but the technology is far from proven.
JASON RAISH

computers. When you type an address into a Google’s next idea sounds kookier still:
browser, you are instructing it to connect with a train of gracefully floating balloons

44 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

 delivering data to those below. The balloons,
which provided connectivity following
natural disasters in Peru and Puerto Rico,
have been spun out into a company called
Loon that plans to launch a commercial 4G
service in Kenya soon. However, balloons are
unlikely to do much for most of the offline
billions as many places lack reliable winds or
convenient launching places. If you are a tech
billionaire with a global vision, only a truly
worldwide service will do.
Luckily, there is a middle way. What if
we put transmitters lower than the lonely
geostationary orbits with their unpleasant
lag, but higher than the stratosphere with
its fickle weather?
There is a price to be paid for using this low
Earth orbit (LEO). From the surface, satellites
in LEO appear to zip from horizon to horizon
in about 10 minutes. For continuous service,
then, you need multiple satellites flying in
quick succession and enveloping the globe,
all sending signals from one to another in a
smooth relay. The firms Iridium, Globalstar
and Orbcomm each have a few dozen LEO

“Only about 10 per cent of

the planet has terrestrial
communication links”
satellites that already offer basic, slow
internet services. Get the tech right and
turning these limited services into something
transformative becomes a numbers game.
And if there is one thing tech billionaires
think they understand, it is scale.
This occurred to Bill Gates years ago. In the
1990s, he backed a start-up called Teledesic
that envisioned a mega-constellation of
840 LEO satellites relaying radio signals from
one part of Earth to another. The company
had big plans: to deliver affordable broadband
to 95 per cent of the world’s surface.
It never happened. Teledesic folded in 2002
without launching a working satellite, having
neither developed the technology, nor raised
the billions of dollars required. But a fresh
generation of billionaires is ready to try again,
buoyed by cheaper launch costs and new,
more powerful technologies.
Take OneWeb, a company backed by Airbus,
computer chip-maker Qualcomm and
entrepreneur Richard Branson. It put its first
six satellites – costing $1 million apiece – into
orbit in February. The firm says 600 satellites
connecting users to 40 or so ground stations
should be in place and providing a service by
2021. Yet OneWeb’s satellites only plug gaps in
cable internet. The last leg of each data packet’s
journey to the user may be through space, >

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 45

 but at other times it travels through the same Traffic in the sky
wires as the rest of the internet. Companies have tried to provide internet infrastructure from distant orbits
Other companies are trying something and the stratosphere – with mixed results. But a new wave of projects at
more ambitious (see “Traffic in the sky”, right). mid-altitudes could finally deliver planetwide broadband
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Canadian company
Telesat and Luxembourg-based LeoSat all 35,000 km
plan to create an end-to-end, space-based Geostationary satellites
internet system in the early 2020s. Each of Provide an internet signal from space,
their fast-moving satellites must be able to but this takes a long time to travel,
communicate with others in their respective creating a communications lag

Medium Earth ortbit 2000-35,000 km

networks, relaying data in hops from one side
of the world to the other. All three companies
Teledesic
have the same idea of how to do it: lasers. 2000 km
In the 1990s, a firm called Teledesic
Theoretically, lasers are a smarter way to
aimed to deliver the internet from a
communicate in space than radio waves, lower orbit. However, it folded before
says astronautics engineer Kerri Cahoy at launching any satellites
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They
1400
are more energy efficient, so transmitters and
receivers don’t need to be so large. “Physical OneWeb
size can be smaller with a laser system,” she This company has already launched
says. Lasers also sidestep the issue of working its first few satellites, but without
within the increasingly crowded radio inter-satellite links, its internet service
could be slower for some users
1200
“SpaceX is aiming to have
Telesat
40 million subscribers to This Canadian firm is planning faster
its space internet by 2025” laser internet satellites. It recently
signed a deal with rocket company
Blue Origin to get them launched
1000
Low Earth ortbit below 2000 km

spectrum. Radio transmissions are highly

regulated and the frequencies that would be
most practical for small receivers are already Iridium
taken. In contrast, laser beams, with their tight Internet services have been
focus, almost never cause interference with available from this firm for years,
other services and are largely unregulated. but they are slow and pricey
They are also fast. Imagine a financial 800
trader in London wanting to access the latest
Amazon
from the New York Stock Exchange. If her
Secretive project Kuiper was
connection were routed through SpaceX’s
recently revealed to be a plan
planned constellation of nearly 12,000 for 3200 internet satellites
Starlink satellites, data might reach her in
45 milliseconds, according to calculations 600
by computer scientist Mark Handley at
University College London. That is half the
? Starlink
SpaceX’s venture aims to create a
time it currently takes via fibre-optic cable, an network of nearly 12,000
advantage that could be worth millions. SpaceX satellites linked using lasers.
expects its laser internet to attract 40 million Many will fly in a very low orbit, to
minimise communication delays
subscribers and $30 billion in revenue by 2025,
with the surface
with Starlink eventually helping to fund Musk’s
other dream – of colonising Mars. 340
But lasers have their own problems. The
Drones
Stratosphere 10-50 km

main one is successfully pointing a beam

Separately, Facebook and Google built
with the thickness of a human hair at another
solar-powered drones to provide the
satellite speeding past at thousands of internet. Both projects are now on hold,
kilometres an hour. though others are planning similar drones
Still, this isn’t totally virgin territory. As
early as 2001, the European Space Agency
established the first inter-satellite laser link, Loon
between large satellites in low Earth and A sister company of Google, Loon
geostationary orbits. And in 2013, NASA used is planning to provide the internet
lasers to beam a picture of the Mona Lisa 20 via its balloons to people in Kenya,
Earth
starting this year
from Earth to a spacecraft circling the moon.

46 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

 Cahoy is now working on a mission called This skewers any claim that space internet
CLICK that will pack lasers capable of high- What goes up, systems are about getting the poorest people
speed communication over hundreds of
kilometres into satellites the size of Rubik’s
must come down online, says media scholar Lisa Parks at MIT.
Even the pizza-sized receiver that Musk says
cubes. These satellites will use wide-angle If all the planned mega-constellations SpaceX is developing will cost $100 to $300.
lasers as beacons to locate each other, then are built, there would be 10 times as This will be “prohibitive for unconnected
activate narrower beams for their high- many operating satellites orbiting users in much of the world”, she says. “While
bandwidth link. NASA is due to launch two Earth as today. When each runs out connecting the unconnected sounds good
of them in 2020 to test the idea and Musk of fuel, typically after around five from a marketing perspective, there is little
could be using similar technology for years, a nudge downwards from a clear evidence that such a model can deliver
Starlink. SpaceX already has two prototype thruster will send it to a fiery death profits to companies and investors.”
laser satellites in orbit – though each is the in the atmosphere. But some steel or There is also scepticism that many users in
size of a car. It plans to start deploying titanium components can survive all richer nations have an appetite for additional
commercial satellites this month, the first the way to the ground, with enough gadgets and subscription plans. “By the time
of hundreds of launches in the years ahead. energy to injure or kill. Up to 10 any of these constellations is fielded and ready
satellites might re-enter every day. to supply a paying service to real customers,
The US Federal Communications we’re going to have 5G infrastructure in
High-speed dance Commission calculates that the Western countries, and Africa is going to
Linking two satellites with lasers is one thing. fragments from SpaceX’s Starlink be covered in 4G towers,” says aeronautics
Maintaining connections between thousands, satellites alone would rival the engineer Zac Manchester at Stanford
24 hours a day, is another entirely. “Talking number of meteorites that naturally University in California.
to the satellite in front of or behind you in hit Earth’s surface each year. SpaceX However, some think that wireless
an orbital plane is actually pretty easy,” says has since redesigned its satellites companies will welcome mega-constellations
Cahoy. “When you try to go from your plane so that nothing should survive as partners rather than rivals, sharing satellite
across to another plane, that gets a little bit re-entry, but other operators have signals so that customers can access space
more challenging.” yet to follow suit. internet from their phones, without having
SpaceX’s planet-spanning constellation to buy an expensive antenna.
will feature criss-crossing orbital planes with Another potential benefit for those
satellites whizzing past each other at high down and burn up within weeks. Even so, each living in repressive countries is that satellite
speed. Choreographing this dance entails Starlink is expected to last just six years or so internet could theoretically skirt censorship
knowing exactly where each spacecraft is at before exhausting its propellant and heading measures such as China’s Great Firewall.
any moment, and where it is heading. In an Earthwards (see “What goes up, must come It is unclear how that would play out,
agreement signed last year, the company down”, above). To sustain its fleet, SpaceX however. When Musk raised this possibility
asked NASA for technical support in choosing will have to commit to the task of continually in 2015, he suggested that SpaceX wouldn’t
GPS hardware and in running the agency’s replacing all the satellites that re-enter the serve users in such countries. “Any country
orbital calculation software on Starlink’s atmosphere – as many as five a day after the could say it’s illegal to have a ground link,”
on‑board processors. first six years. he said. “We could conceivably continue
The company also plans to have more than An even bigger issue is how consumers to operate, but then they have a choice of,
7500 of its satellites orbiting at an altitude will access the LEO satellites from the ground. do they shoot our satellites down, or not?
of just 340 kilometres, far lower than any Although lasers are likely to operate at eye-safe China can do that.”
existing communications satellites. That will infrared frequencies, the beams would be Elsewhere, a space-based internet could
keep transmission delays to a bare minimum blocked by even mild cloud cover. So all the be simpler and more reliable than accident-
and reduce power needs, but it will also subject laser satellite projects plan to use radio waves prone cables. Invisible beams of light are
the satellites to increased drag from wisps of to communicate with the ground from orbit, largely immune to hacking or tapping, and
the atmosphere. Without regularly firing their which means using pricey steerable antennas if one or two satellites fail, replacements
thrusters, the satellites would be dragged (see “Cutting the cord”, below). could be quickly launched.
But betting on space lasers puts an awful lot
Cutting the cord of eggs into one basket. A powerful solar storm
or a cascade of satellite collisions, as depicted
SpaceX’s Starlink project
aims to create an almost in the film Gravity, might damage or disable
totally wireless internet LASER entire constellations in a blink. However, in a
world already dominated by a small number
of tech firms, perhaps the most disturbing
aspect of tomorrow’s mega-constellations
WEBSITE’S would be having power over such critical
SERVER infrastructure concentrated in just a few
RADIO
RADIO WAVES hands. If you thought the story of Aishtan
WAVES Shakarian’s shovel was worrying, imagine
having a few powerful individuals in control
COMPUTER of the space internet’s off switch. ❚

ANTENNA
Mark Harris is a technology journalist based in Seattle

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 47