Click-bait headline. The article is actually about Greg Wyler's WorldVu company. If you haven't gotten around the paywall yet, here's the key quote...<p>"The people familiar with the matter cautioned the project is in a formative stage, and it isn’t certain Mr. Musk will participate."
Internet satellites meh, not technology where the round trip is counted in seconds is good for the internet, and that's a physical limitation just as the speed of light limits the latency you have to about 5MS per 1K/KM..<p>The round trip from a base station on the same longitude as the satellite is 250-300MS, under best case scenarios you will to pass trough about 2-3 satellites to get what you want from the other side of the world.<p>If you do not need to go outside of your intimidate geographical area and say only need to pull data from a server within a 5K radius than atmospheric high altitude platforms are far superior both in cost and maintainability.
You can't upgrade satellites not since the space shuttle is out of the picture and even that was only borderline cost effective on high end surveillance stations like the KH series which were the size of a school bus.<p>Using tethered high altitude balloons or extreme-long endurance self sustaining drones seems like a much better solution for that than spending 100's of millions of dollars per launch.<p>Even if what he's planning is an auto arranging auto healing mesh/cellular network of micro satellites doesn't seem to be feasible either. Micro satellites have an extremely short life span and have huge energy source issues, cant launch them with a nuclear power source(too heavy, and too short lived of a platform to be both safe and cost affective) and cant have expanded solar cell arrays on them due to atmospheric drag.
What you are left with is a small nice cube which doesn't have enough power to transmit communications at any bandwidth that will be sufficient for internet traffic.<p>Other than sounding cool and potentially farming quite a bit for work for SpaceX i don't see this venture of being of any value.
Musk is spread to thin. Period. Any one of his ventures is a full time job. Hard to understand what type of personality needs to branch out on in different areas as he has. And how can you make good decision, no matter who you are, or what capabilities you have when you only have so many hours in a day?
This sounds like an obvious vertical integration move. When you own a rocket company, the best thing for your company is a big market for launching satellites. When you own a satellite company, you want to get sweetheart deals on launches.<p>Musk isn't spreading himself too thin; this is what is called Business Development.<p>Despite having Musk's name on it for clickbait, the article seemed to me to be more about Wyler and WorldVu. The article calls it a "venture" and says they are "working with" each other, but I don't see any details about whether this is a joint venture, a new company, a deal between SpaceX and WorldVu, or what. I don't know whether to qualify this article as PR or industry gossip.
A couple things stuck out to me about the numbers: 700 satellites weighing 250 pounds and costing $1M each.<p>1. Is this being considered because it is the best way to make use of the excess capacity on paid Falcon launches? If you have, say, 50 CRS launches to the ISS planned, can you tack on one internet satellite to each and get a constellation, or would they all end up redundantly in the same orbit?<p>2. $1M / 250lbs is $250/ounce. That number seems high to me which just goes to show how optimized these things are - very little structural material is needed to hold together a pile of electrical components in space.
Aren't satellite communications a bit limited by the uplink connection? When are we going to have a small enough antenna that's able to communicate with a satellite while fitting inside a cell phone?