When the inevitable Kessler Syndrome cascade sweeps Starlink and its competitors from Low Earth Orbit in what will doubtless be a spectacular meteor shower of debris, the people behind Sceye and its competitors are going to be laughing to the bank. That’s because they’re putting their connectivity rather lower than orbit — in the stratosphere, with high-altitude dirigibles.
The advantages are pretty obvious: for one, the dirigible isn’t disposable in the way the very-low-orbit satellites Starlink and its planned imitators use. For another, the time-of-flight for a signal to get to a dirigible 20 km up is less than a tenth of the time it takes to get 480 km up — and that affects latency. Thirdly, the High Altitude Platform System (HAPS) concept won’t require any special transmitters. Regular cellular modems using ordinary 4G and 5G bands and speeds are usable, which eliminates a big barrier to rollout.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, and even dated, perhaps that’s because it is — Google tried to beam internet down from the stratosphere with its Loon project, before shutting it down in 2021. One of Loon’s major shortcomings was reliance on the shifting winds of the upper atmosphere, something the new generation of dirigible stations won’t have to worry about.
Of course, until the positive feedback loop of satellite collisions creating debris that begets yet more collisions that we call a Kessler Syndrome — which we’ve written about in arcade form, oddly enough–one could also use these HAPS stations as a bridge between space-based and ground-based networks.
Airships deserve a comeback because:
1.) They don’t re-enter after being a nightmare for astronomers like mega-constellations.
2.) If a terrorist does try to ram it into a building like we saw a quarter of a century ago with twinjet WMDs—-you don’t have 9/11, just a recreation of Christo’s art
https://christojeanneclaude.net/artworks/surrounded-islands/
I expected the wrapped Reichstag when you named Christo…
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=Wrapped+Reichstag&ia=images&iax=images
I agree. They’re the lowest power way to be in the skies and stay in the skies. Ignored for years because of a silly disaster back in the day when people still argued if bloodletting was a viable cure or not, and cough syrup had hard drugs in them. Well not exactly but you get my point
I would go as far as to say hydrogen isn’t the worst option for this, considering we have hydrogen cars now with hydrogen “gas” stations to refuel them. If a hydrogen based cars can store and combust hydrogen safely, why can’t we make large balloons that are up tens of kilometers in the sky where they can safely destroy themselves in case of a catastrophic failure without much collateral damage.
Green, even blue hydrogen is cheaper than ever. We have no batteries to store the extra power
I don’t even have problems with hydrogen balloons. I could make my own with a battery as a kid anyway. Helium needs to stay in MRIs
Didn’t they had to scrub a launch several times due to hydrogen leaks? That stuff is hard to contain and a static spark can set it off.
A small solid canister in a car is also quite different from a giant thin balloon in the volatile atmosphere filled with electric charge.
In other news: Boeing and SpaceX are eager to build them together it’s rumored, they predict a giant boom.
Hydrogen doesn’t scare me…. because it goes up. Now, the solid rocket canvas doping of Hindenburg may or may not have been debunked, but we certainly don’t need cow-bits any more for cells.
Oh, well….as the gangstas say….blimpin’ ain’t easy.
If hydrocarbons required cryogenics, and pure hydrogen had handling characteristics of water…dense…room temperature…we’d have that hydrogen economy right now.
But the laws of physics loves messing with us. A gallon of gasoline has more hydrogen than a gallon of….pure hydrogen.
Cryogenics can only store it mechanically, not chemically, like carbon.
Carbon is the P-Diddy of elements and will bond with anything. Strip hydrogen from it and it gets all controlling and fastens on an O or two with a death grip.
And hydrocarbons just go everywhere…not just up.
Take a look at video #1 here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g8U-E-JQbO4&pp=ygUHRWVyaWVmeQ%3D%3D
While Net-Zero is a fantasy… let’s give the H bashing a rest.
Better than Musk’s starlink, and much more cost effective too, and they can have extra blimps on standby so when they need to bring one down for maintenance or refurbish work they can send one up as quickly as they bring one down so downtime is not an issue
I hope Elon Musk is green with envy
Blimps, to my knowledge, don’t take well to high altitude winds, how would they manage?
From a quick search: Goodyear speed 70mph, winds 110mph.
Wouldn’t they just drift away?
At an altitude of 20 km (about 65,000 ft) in the lower stratosphere, wind speeds are typically low and relatively steady, often serving as a minimum wind zone ideal for high-altitude platforms. An altitude around 20 km is often favored by airships and balloons because it sits above the jet stream and below the stronger, higher-altitude winds.
If these dirigibles have a skin reflective to RF they could be useful for communications as a side benefit completely unrelated to the electronics they have on board once they have been deployed. Meteor scatter and moonbounce communications practiced by Amateur Radio operators and the military have proven the ability to communicate by having radio signals reflected from small targets in the sky (the moon being small due to perspective: distance and percentage of the sky it occupies, not by actual size of course). Bouncing signals off of passing aircraft is possible and has been demonstrated and occurs even when undesired, causing multipath distortion of VHF/UHF broadcast signals lasting several seconds in duration. So intentional VHF/UHF radio signal reflection from a slow-moving dirigible skin really isn’t too impractical other than the high output power that would be required, as demonstrated by the meteor scatter and moonbounce ground stations when using reflective propagation modes. Passive reflectors on mountaintops used in point-to-point microwave communications systems is another example demonstrating the practicality of reflective communications modes.
If you think Kessler Syndrome is an issue with Starlink or anything else at that orbital altitude, it’s probably worth picking up a book or two.
As for disposability, helium is a finite resource and will find a way out through even a metallised envelope. Equally bad for its sustainability credentials is the material of said envelope; due to the low temperatures at altitude and the jet stream, the range of suitable materials quickly narrows and Sceye seems to be using Zylon for their envelopes. This was notorious as an aramid replacement in ballistic armour with at least one individual losing their lives to premature degradation of the fibre. Worse still, it’s particularly UV and moisture sensitive so I can’t see a Zylon envelope embarrassing a Starlink satellite in terms of lifespan.
I expect that a high speed collision would push at least some debris into a higher orbit.
And then the question is how much of it will hit stuff higher up, and how much of those will have debris going even higher et cetera.
Anyway, I’d be happy enough if a chain reaction cleared lower orbit in a one time short-lived event
There’s three main concepts to bear in mind:
1. The periapsis of a new orbit from a single energy-imparting event cannot be higher than the point at which the event occurs.
2. The Oberth effect dictates that periapsis is the most efficient point to apply energy to change an orbit. In this case, atmospheric braking rapidly lowering the apoapsis.
3. A broken up satellite will present a significantly higher cross sectional area for its mass than an in-tact one.
Kessler was aware of this, which is why he caveated minimum altitudes for Kessler Syndrome to realistically occur.
I’m unclear what you mean by being happy about clearing the lower orbit. Is that a Kaczynskiesque hatred of progress or it being the least bad option?
SpaceX works with the military.
If you wish to know what I mean check what they are doing in low earth orbit.
And if I’m kaczynski because I don’t approve of that kind of ‘progress’ then so be it.
I am of a view that right now any sane or half-sane or quarter-sane, or many more fractions of sane, person should not want the current version of the US to have any such ‘progress’.
In that case you really shouldn’t want a clean sweep of LEO because SpaceX would make money hand over fist repopulating it; not that it’s a realistic scenario and putting aside what a myopic humanitarian disaster the temporary loss of LEO would be.
I stand with my statements.
But I’m sure your cute catchphrases work most of the time. Plenty of people stop thinking as soon as they hear one, and clearly you it’s your thing.
Wishing for massive LEO disruption because you don’t like SpaceX is like wishing for a livestock disease pandemic because you don’t like people eating meat.
What are you talking about? I don’t care if it’s SpaceX or NASA or the toothfairy, if you do the military things I object.
And I think SpaceX could function perfectly fine without working with the military, and Musk would still have enough money left to buy a stick or RAM as well as a nice subway sandwich, or two..
There’s other things up there besides military satellites that many people rely on for their wellbeing, even if they’re not directly aware of it. I’m not sure how I can simplify it any further without losing meaning.
In regards to dependency on Starlink, GPS etc. in eg. Putin’s war against Ukraine I recently thought about if it were possible/feasible/practical (as a state) to have a bunch of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station on hand that can do localized GPS and high speed battlefield communication on demand.
Basically a temporary “Starlink” independent of any outside interference.
Probably not because even at 40-50km height they would be shot down and other reasons…
I guess HAPS aircraft are extensively used by both sides, since they can not only provide battlefield/drone communications, but are also in a good position to jam satellite comms and broadcast fake location services.
At a value of approximately one twenty-fourth of the time, calling it “less than a tenth” needlessly undersells the improvement in latency. That additional factor of 2.4 is nothing to sneeze at.
Seems like Starlink going all meteor shower could take out a blimp or two (if there are any bits left that far down in the atmosphere). That might create a decent light show.
If Starlink is an array of disposible satellites, I wonder if satellites could be selectively brought down at will.
Isn’t this just a rehash of Google’s “Project Loon”? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that “wireless coverage from balloons” is far from new.
I could see them used with kite-turbines.