Alphabet and Facebook’s Stratospheric Internet Plans Get Tangled in High-Altitude Red Tape

High above the annoyances of weather and commercial air traffic, the stratosphere could be a great place from which to beam down Internet connectivity to places with poor communications infrastructure. Alphabet and Facebook are both working on drones to operate 18 kilometers or more above Earth, and this year Alphabet will start using balloons at that altitude to serve mobile subscribers in Indonesia.

But even the stratosphere, which at the equator starts at around 20 kilometers but varies by latitude and season, is within reach of Earth’s regulators. To work at large scale, Alphabet and Facebook's schemes will need significant changes to national and international rules. “This is all somewhat uncharted territory,” says Yael Maguire, engineering director at Facebook’s connectivity lab, which is working on a drone called Aquila that has the wingspan of an airliner (see “Meet Facebook’s Stratospheric Internet Drone”). “There are ingredients required beyond the technology for this to work.” 

MIT Technology Review: https://bit.ly/33k4Tic

 

SpaceX just lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm. There could be worse to come.

 "On February 4, a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun knocked up to 40 new SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit. Now experts are worried about whether mega-constellations planned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others will be resilient to such events in the future.

SpaceX had launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday, February 3. This was SpaceX’s 38th Starlink launch; in all, the company has launched more than 1,900 of the car-size satellites, and eventually it wants to have up to 42,000 of them in low Earth orbit to deliver the internet to all corners of the globe."

MIT Technology Review: https://bit.ly/3sBhzd1

[There needs to be an international agreement to regulate who, how many and where satelites are deployed. This has been obvious for a long time as a variety of companies plan to deploy large numbers of satelites.]