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A comment on “Internet in Space” Will Transform the Satellite Imagery Industry. Parent comment

Re:“Internet in Space” Will Transform the Satellite Imagery ... by jvanderbot on Sunday January 01, 2023 @01:26PM (#34209090)
The bottleneck for orbital edge isn't software, it's hardware that can tack into an optical terminal and tolerate radiation. The edge analogy breaks down because the consumer isn't on the edge, the sensor is, and it's just a problem of doing heavy compute next to the sensor, then sending back a summary data product.

After that, networking is well understood.

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Re:“Internet in Space” Will Transform the Satellite Imagery ... by theptip on Sunday January 01, 2023 @02:08PM (#34209582)
IoT sensor aggregation is already a major edge-compute use-case, it's not just for reducing latency for end-users. In this analogy you're just co-locating the edge compute on the same LAN as the sensor. All of the orchestration, runtime, and framework concerns from existing edge compute systems still apply.

Edge compute isn't solved; it's an area under active and aggressive development. The Cloudflare Workers wasm runtime for example. And if you're selling satelite edge compute, what's your control plane? You need a config store etc.

Put differently; if I'm a satelite operator writing first-party software to run on my satelites, sure, there's no framework code to write, and I can just tailor the software to my satelite platform's hardware. However, if I'm selling colocated compute with ultra-low latency to third parties, then I need to build something that (IMO) looks very close, if not identical, to a current-generation edge-compute platform.

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Re:“Internet in Space” Will Transform the Satellite Imagery ... by idiotsecant on Sunday January 01, 2023 @04:30PM (#34211161)
Why are we selling colocated processing on a piece of mass-constricted ultra-expensive hardware we have to launch into orbit again? That seems like a solution in search of a problem.
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Re:“Internet in Space” Will Transform the Satellite Imagery ... by ohyoutravel on Sunday January 01, 2023 @04:46PM (#34211320)
Bandwidth to send down results vs raw data? Ability to relay instructions directly from that data to the next satellite without a downlink and uplink?
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Re:“Internet in Space” Will Transform the Satellite Imagery ... by theptip on Sunday January 01, 2023 @05:44PM (#34211874)
Sibling thread provides some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34210236
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