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TeraWave Satellite Communications Network

124 points by T-A

by 0xbeefcab

3 subcomments

Interesting there is an optical networking option for end users (claims ~6TBps). Maybe a really dumb question, but how would the end user's ground station maintain connectivity during cloudy weather? Do they have cloud-penetrating lasers from the MEO satellites? Would that interfere with aircraft, astronomy tools, etc?
Some short googling says they have lasers that clear a path for a data carrying beam, but that seems wasteful/infeasible for commercial uses

by hbarka

0 subcomment

Looking forward to TeraWave. We need a minimum of two in critical services. Google and Microsoft and Apple. Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini.

by embedding-shape

8 subcomments

Assuming all these companies are interested in launching their own constellations of ~10K-100K satellites into L/MEO, how many companies could actually do this before cascading collisions starts becoming a real worry?

by mmaunder

1 subcomments

It’s like announcing you’re going to sell corn starting a year from now when your competition owns all the land corn is grown on, started selling their corn 6 years ago, and has gotten really good at making it cheaper and producing more, based on real world experience.

by everfrustrated

2 subcomments

Might be better to replace url with the full press release which has actual information
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-origin-introduces-teraw...
>The TeraWave architecture consists of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO).

by grvbck

7 subcomments

From a technical standpoint: amazing achievement, and the tech nerd in me is in awe. But it feels like a lot of people don't understand (or care?) how much these companies are polluting the space.
Before the "new wave", in 2010-2015 or so, Earth had around 1500 active satellites in orbit, and another 2,000-2,500 defunct ones.
Starlink now has almost 9,500 satellites in orbit, has approvals for 12,000 and long-term plans for up to 42,000. Blue Origin has added 5,500 to that. Amazon plans for 3,000. China has two megaconstellations under construction, for a total of 26,000, and has filed for even larger systems, up to 200,000 satellites.
We might be the last generation that is able to watch the stars.

by t1234s

1 subcomments

Looks like they are using lasers for backhaul down to ground stations. What happens if the beam is obstructed for a brief moment (plane, kite, ufo, etc..)?

by everfrustrated

1 subcomments

All those AI datacenters in space will need a way to get data to them.
Bezos can't even build his first constellation and already planning his second... Possibly the real play here is snapping up more frequency licenses on earth (we need them because we're launching any day now promise). They are the real constraining resource and could be used to keep others out of the market for a while.

by gordonhart

1 subcomments

Well, this shoots down the argument that Blue Origin is just Amazon's space wing. Strange to see them launching a direct Amazon Leo competitor but now that they have reusable boosters (on paper) it does make more sense for them to control the lion's share of their launch manifest with their own megaconstellation.

by gmuslera

0 subcomment

Latency may play a factor here, I'm not sure at which height they plan to put them.

by agentifysh

0 subcomment

this seems rather expensive but i get that its not competing with spacex here for consumer market

by Noaidi

1 subcomments