Comment by sxp
14 days ago
YT video going into the math and physics involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkjyeI0ykGM
TL;DW: not practical in it's current design.
14 days ago
YT video going into the math and physics involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkjyeI0ykGM
TL;DW: not practical in it's current design.
I did a bunch of my own math on this a while back related to this.
1. On of the big tradeoffs is the sun sync orbit altitude chosen. The higher up you are, the slower you have to tilt to track, the longer time possible on a given customer, and bigger range of possible customers you have as the sat goes around. But, as you are higher, the size of sunlight you send gets bigger and bigger. A 5km by 5km circle is going to waste a lot of energy on not-solar panels all but the largest solar installations. If you double the light radius, you quarter the intensity.
2. Most of the earth is water. Of that land left, most of the land is quite uninhabited. This means that most of your time orbiting is going to be over areas with no paying customers.
3. I think the EEVBLog video overestimates the cost per sat, but I still didn't get the economics to work out to something profitable.