SpaceX Sells 10% Stake to Google, Fidelity for $1B

Re:SpaceX Sells 10% Stake to Google, Fidelity for $1B by benihana on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @08:05PM (#8920852)

So if the orbital period is about an hour and a half to two hours, does that mean that you can expect to hold on to a single satellite's signal for about 40-50 minutes? Longer? I wonder how much power a cell phone will have to use to track a satellite that's moving through the sky - if the tracking will dominate power usage, or sending and receiving the signal will and we won't see much change.

I wonder how this will be different (if at all) from GEO satellites when it's cloudy. Could you presumably find a satellite near the horizon to use to bypass the clouds?

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Re:SpaceX Sells 10% Stake to Google, Fidelity for $1B by jacquesm on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @08:13PM (#8920883)

The magic words are 'phased array antennae'.

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Re:SpaceX Sells 10% Stake to Google, Fidelity for $1B by azernik on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @12:31AM (#8921648)

Much less - these satellites are low, so you're not going to have line-of-sight for anything near half the orbital period. Not sure about the precise numbers, but I know Iridium was really challenged by the requirement for clients to roam between satellites on the order of once a minute. As they demonstrated, though, it's a solvable problem.

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