[HN Gopher] ESA advances its plan for satellites around the Moon
___________________________________________________________________
ESA advances its plan for satellites around the Moon
Author : marsokod
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-05-23 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.moondaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.moondaily.com)
| helgee wrote:
| _Disclaimer: I am one of the (many) engineers working on the
| project._
|
| Before COVID I worked for a European lunar exploration startup
| and access to a constellation like this would have changed
| everything. The plan was to provide an end-to-end payload
| transportation service to the lunar surface and we wanted to fly
| our own two rovers as a demo mission.
|
| While you can accomplish all communications (TM/TC, HD video) and
| navigation (orbit determination, surface nav) tasks with
| terrestrial ground stations, it is hellishly expensive.
|
| Just as an example, the good thing about the Moon (in contrast to
| Mars) is that it is very close and you can drive a rover almost
| in real time due to the comparatively low latency (that's what
| the Russians did with the Lunokhods:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme). That means you
| can cover more ground than on Mars which was also very important
| to us because the plan was to drive to one of the Apollo landing
| sites (where you must land outside the exclusion zone) and we
| would have had only 10-12 days of daylight for our operations
| until the lunar night would have killed our electronics. For that
| you need good video feeds from the rover's cameras which again
| required downlink via X band antennas due to the Moon's distance
| from Earth. There are not that many X band ground stations and
| all the interplanetary missions are constantly fighting for the
| limited capacity.
|
| We would have then needed even more ground station time for
| ranging operations, i.e. performing orbit determination during
| the transfer and prior to landing and determining the rovers'
| exact positions on the surface. In the end, we would have needed
| to pay several million EUR for ground station time alone. A
| reasonably priced Project Moonlight constellation would have been
| a godsend and significantly reduced the complexity of our
| operations. Cash-strapped startups are not the best customers,
| though...
|
| I can only assume that all the companies in the NASA CLPS program
| are facing the same issues. The problem is that they are planning
| their missions and are designing their spacecraft now. If this
| constellation becomes a reality, it will certainly be too late
| for the first batch.
|
| As for the ideas about Starlink, satellites are designed around
| their payloads, i.e. all subsystems (power, thermal, comms, on-
| board computer, propulsion) are designed to fulfil the
| requirements of a specific payload and its mission with some
| margins. Very rarely can you swap or add additional payloads
| without redesigning the whole system especially if your starting
| point is as streamlined a design as Starlink's is. I am a huge
| fan of all things SpaceX but they are not miracle workers. Also
| Starship has not reached orbit (yet) and Super Heavy has not
| flown (yet).
|
| Finally, the costs. As some others have commented, this is a
| paper study right now which is comparatively cheap (no idea how
| much exactly but my educated guess would be single digit
| millions). Whether this will be funded for real and becomes an
| actual program will be decided at ESA's next ministerial. In the
| grand scheme of things this is not a lot. Compared to of ESA's
| annual budget of ~6 billion EUR it is almost negligible. That
| again is a joke compared to NASA's annual budget of ~22 billion
| USD. Which still pales in comparison to the up to 1.3 _trillion_
| EUR that the German federal and state governments alone spent on
| the mitigation of the pandemic
| (https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/corona-novemberhilfen...)
| or the economic cost of climate change which is also in the
| trillions. Yes, space hardware is too expensive, there is too
| much red tape, and frankly too much nepotism in OldSpace. But
| taking the few billions spend on space every year away and
| spending them on the "big problems of our time" would accomplish
| very little.
|
| _TL;DR: The technical benefits are real whether it becomes a
| reality and is commercially viable remains to be seen. SpaceX is
| great, Starship is great, Starlink is great, but it is also not
| magic. Space sounds expensive but really isn 't when you do the
| math._
| Havoc wrote:
| Not quite clear on how this will be "commercial"? Not much demand
| for netflix on the moon I suspect
| valuearb wrote:
| " a commercially viable constellation of lunar satellites"????
|
| " Commercial bodies could use innovative technologies developed
| for the Moon to create new services and products on Earth, which
| would create new jobs and boost prosperity."
|
| You know what the engineers working on this project could have
| been doing instead? Work on projects that directly benefit earth
| even more. Instead of this pork barrel project without a direct
| use.
|
| The biggest factor by far in making lunar exploration and
| development cheaper is mastering in-orbit refueling. That enables
| hundreds of tons of cargo to be cheaply delivered to the lunar
| surface.
|
| That means easily building lunar satellite constellations when
| needed. It also means we won't need the bloody sores of the
| Gateway to Nowhere and SLS bleeding exploration programs dry.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I will never understand this attitude. Large nation states are
| able to work on more than one thing and expanding capabilities
| on and around the moon will directly benefit the Earth one day.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's not guaranteed by any measure. Projects can just be a
| complete waste of time.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's a zero sum game though. Every dollar spent on some far
| away possibility somewhere in space is a dollar less spent on
| issues that exist here and now and need crazy amounts of
| money to solve.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| You can always makes the argument that money can be better
| spent elsewhere. It's just not a compelling argument.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't understand the parent response: I'm sure you know
| that money, time, and talent are all constrained, and
| everyone, from a child with an allowance to the CEO of Google
| to the President of the U.S. has to choose priorities. All of
| economics is about allocating those resources. Even within
| NASA, they have to choose some project and reject many more.
| mturmon wrote:
| Yes. Facilitating communications is just a general good
| thing.
|
| The improvised relay system we have around Mars has been
| important to fast relay of data from the rovers. It has also
| allowed us to more closely observe EDL sequences so that if
| something goes wrong, we will learn what it was so we can fix
| it.
| Shadonototro wrote:
| different teams for different tasks
|
| you know, there are more than 1 people on earth
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I don't know why people are automatically assuming you could just
| do this with off the shelf starlink sats instead. There's a
| _huge_ difference between an optical link in LEO that goes a
| couple 100 km, and the moon which is nearly 400,000 km away. The
| link has to be bidirectional and I don 't see how existing
| starlink sats would have anything close to the optics or antennas
| required for that.
|
| Let's not turn enthusiasm for starlink into poo poo-ing all over
| any other plan for something in space. The ESA just wants concept
| studies on what might work. That's perfectly reasonable.
| notahacker wrote:
| Even weirder to pooh-pooh government funded concept studies
| when SpaceX is literally the poster company for governments
| chucking money at private enterprises to come up with
| innovative new solutions to variants of space problems with
| already existent solutions (after a decade and three orders of
| magnitude more funding)
|
| Not only is the requirement highly unlike LEO satellites, but
| members of both consortiums have satellite tech of their own
| (which is arguably both more mature and more relevant to the
| requirements than Starlink)
|
| Just as well nobody decided it wasn't worth NASA wasting money
| evaluating the PayPal guy's ideas when off the shelf space tech
| existed, though...
| _Microft wrote:
| There are only two comments mentioning Starlink, one of which
| is mine. As the other one does not go into details, your
| comment seems to be talking about mine and seems to be based on
| a misunderstanding of what I wrote.
|
| Feel free to ask if there is still something unclear after
| reading it more closely.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I'm quite interested if orbiting satellites could handle the
| backhaul connection to Earth or if larger and more powerful
| ground stations or a Lagrange station would have a place.
| Clearly we communicate just fine with existing Mars and deep
| space probes, but the problem must change enormously when you
| want a 100 gigabit uninterruptible connection.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Just to confirm you are aware that spaceX will likely have the
| largest deployed fleet of satellites with optical links? They
| will have not just studies, but hands on experience operating
| these things at scale in space to space communication.
|
| Europe loves to come out with these white papers and industry
| studies and collaborations. It's basically an exercise to
| hoover up govt funding. The commercial side is very weak in
| most cases.
|
| They've been pushing Galileo as taking over the market AND
| making a ton of money in the GPS space. No way. "Due to be
| fully operational by 2008, Galileo would have "a four-year
| monopoly on the improved technology before Americans can catch
| up," making the 4 billion system a profit center for the EU."
|
| Arianspace is supposed to be launched Ariene 6 at half the
| price of SpaceX. ""Ariane 6 will have twice the mass and twice
| the volume of the Falcon 9, at less than twice the price,"
| Bonguet said. SpaceX is at $50M retail launch price, and cost
| like likely < $30M per launch internally. So this means Ariene
| 6 pricing is going to be in $25M range?
|
| It can get a bit tiring to hear these things.
|
| The one thing Europe is good at is putting attorneys and
| lawyers to take down US companies rather than actually
| competing with them.
| notahacker wrote:
| You are aware that some of the bidding companies were
| operating satellite constellations when Elon was at school?
| Think their collective hands on experience of satellite
| telecoms might even exceed SpaceX's beta program! And if I
| was going to bat for the superiority of SpaceX (and US
| programs) to the European space industry, accuracy of
| projections and the proportion of revenue coming from
| government really, really isn't where I'd focus...
| kiba wrote:
| I don't understand why we need concept studies? It's not like
| we're doing anything particularly new. It's just engineering.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Perhaps some vital ontology definitions, process mapping, and
| enterprise architecture will need to be done.
| slownews45 wrote:
| The EU has 22+ languages and most studies and results have
| to be translated. EU Charter of fundamental rights (art.
| 22) and in the Treaty on European Union (art. 3(3) TEU).
|
| So the EU is a pretty good spot for translators.
|
| Britan is not part of the EU, but outside of the official
| stuff, English is used in a lot of practical areas for
| technical work.
| morelisp wrote:
| This is a deep cut I expect will go over the heads of a lot
| of non-EU residents (though "enterprise architecture" might
| still clue them in).
|
| I was shocked to find RDF-era ontology "research" - already
| rightly a joke in my US-based undergraduate AI courses in
| _2003_ - going on _en masse_ when I moved to the EU in
| 2011. I 've gotten four job applications so far _this year_
| from people with MSc in whatever ontology trash their local
| university was doing.
| geertj wrote:
| Interesting tidbit about lunar orbits: due to mass concentrations
| in the lunar subsurface, there are only 4 stable low lunar
| orbits.
| valuearb wrote:
| There are many lunar orbits low enough and stable enough to be
| useful for crewed exploration. The HLS will be in one. That
| Gateway won't be.
|
| It's only the super low orbits that the masscons screw up.
| _Microft wrote:
| Maybe something like this could be created comparatively easily
| and inexpensively.
|
| NASA tested optical communication to Moon in 2013 already [0], so
| the technological readiness level of some highspeed transmission
| technology should be quite high already.
|
| If such an optical communications module were installed on a sat
| that could also talk to off-the-shelf Starlink sats, this
| satellite could serve as relay that connects Earth to a (very?)
| small constellation of Starlink satellites. Beside the bespoke
| relay satellite, this might be a rather inexpensive solution
| (Starlink satellites are cheaper than $500k per piece already, as
| far as I know).
|
| A counterargument I can think of is that Starlink satellites
| might not be hardened enough to work outside of Earth's
| protective magnetic field.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LADEE#Lunar_Laser_Communicatio...
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I know that most orbits around the moon are unstable because of
| uneven mass distribution. So I don't know how the shape of
| constellation will affect things.
| _Microft wrote:
| Lunar mascons (mass concentrations) are only an issue for low
| lunar orbits ("LLO") which we are not talking about here. In
| fact you would want to maximize distance, not minimize it, so
| each satellite can cover a larger area on ground.
| [deleted]
| nickserv wrote:
| Interesting that they mention observation stations on the far
| side of the Moon, when these satellites would presumably disrupt
| certain observations. Obviously the level of interference will be
| much much less than on Earth or even Earth orbit. But for really
| pristine observation it seems the Lagrange points are better
| candidates.
|
| In any case pretty excited about this. Having it run by the EU
| will hopefully make it more of an equal access than if it was run
| by the US or China.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Has the US been very stingy about its space science? I always
| thought NASA in particular was pretty internationally
| collaborative (or at least no less so than ESA)? In whichever
| case, I'm excited for other countries (or unions of countries)
| to join in on space science.
| nickserv wrote:
| The US specifically bans most cooperation with China.
| themgt wrote:
| Seems heavily over-hyped. Video I found was:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUI4YtG0xY
|
| Which links back to:
|
| https://www.sstl.co.uk/what-we-do/lunar-mission-services
|
| Looks like this is a better article:
|
| https://spacenews.com/esa-awards-study-contracts-for-lunar-c...
|
| _The European Space Agency has issued contracts to two European
| industry groups to begin concept studies of lunar satellite
| systems that would provide communications and navigation
| services._
|
| "to begin concept studies" ... afaict they have no satellite
| hardware built and no rocket launches booked. The NASA HLS
| Starship selection really has thrown the entire Artemis program
| and associated space pork into limbo. If you're landing 100 tons
| of payload on the Moon on a reusable/rapid launch rocket stack
| this entire sort of proposal "let's put together a working
| consortium to study launching one pathfinder lunar comms sat in
| 2023 and then study perhaps launching up to a handful more
| undefined years later [at a cost of $100 million per launch]" is
| just going to become "SpaceX dumped 100 spare Starlinks into
| lunar orbit as a rideshare on this week's mission, so now we have
| Moon internet"
| inglor_cz wrote:
| As far as paper studies of future tech developments go, we
| Europeans are the undisputed masters of the genre.
|
| Too bad that the actual implementation rarely follows. The can-
| doers mostly leave our shores with their diplomas still wet. I
| am not very optimistic about the future of tech here, even
| though the Common Market is pretty big.
|
| And as far as space goes, we are stuck with an obsolete
| technology which sorta makes sense for 6 launches a year, but
| cannot manage 60 or 600 launches without bankrupting the ESA.
| To be fair, the Russians are not much better off. The future of
| spaceflight will be a China vs. US competition.
| dougmwne wrote:
| And Starlink Moon edition will have a paltry 2.6 seconds of
| roundtrip latency to Earth. Mars colonization gets all the
| hype, but who in their right mind would want to be a 40 minute
| roundtrip ping from the nearest AWS location?
| oceanswave wrote:
| I guess it's going to be Microsoft landing a datacenter-in-a-
| shipping-container on Mars before AWS does something similar
| at the rate that Blue Origin is going.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I am legitimately jealous of the engineer that gets to
| design how that CDN cache operates.
| _Microft wrote:
| I will leave the following links here, just for the off-
| chance that you might find them interesting:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
| azernik wrote:
| The relevant RFCs are also fascinating
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4838
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5050
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-23 23:01 UTC)