Welcome back to 【Geek time】. This is Brad. How are you doing, Lulu?

Hi, Brad. I'm fine. And I can't wait to hear more about Elon Musk, last time we talked about Space X .

Aha. Now we're gonna talk about something that's tangential to Space X, it's called Starlink.

Star Link.

And Starlink isn't a space program in the sense that space rockets and things like that, it's actually satellites, and Space X uses their rockets to put these Starlink satellites into space.

嗯, 中文叫星链, which really created a buzz in all types of media, really.

Haha, yeah.

What is Starlink about? You said Starlink is all about satellites, and one of the jobs of Space X is to send Starlink satellites into space. What are they used for and what is the coverage?

Starlink is basically trying to cover the world with internet service. And so oftentimes there's a lot of cables that connect internet around people's homes. People at home have WiFi and they can use cell phone service. But Starlink is going to bring basically internet service and wireless service now to people around the world using satellites.

Emm. I heard that the expectation at least is that it offers better internet connection than 5G.

Yeah.

If you look at the connection, the internet connection, while in some cases it won't be as strong. It depends on line of sight and just how close you are to one of the satellites. But in general, it is faster than 5G.

However, if you live in a city, because you're so close to the cell phone towers and there's a lot of connections around the city, you're probably going to get better service with mobile service than you would with Starlink.

However, when you're in a van in the middle of nowhere, and there's no cell phone service around, you could easily get access to Starlink.

I see. I have a question though. Are there worries about, because obviously it's still... Elon Musk is a private company. Right? It's not really like, for example, state owned or something in... akin to that, then don't people worry about when Elon Musk controls the internet?

Yeah, well, of course, you know, people will always be afraid of who is in control of it. in the US, you have all the internet is controlled by private companies anyways.

The internet is not something like power or water that's government controlled. Even in some cases, power and water has been sent off to private companies and that's kind of scary. But yeah, companies in the US are kind of in some ways limiting what access people have to the internet.

Okay. But perhaps I should rephrase it, because Starlink is aiming to install or to build better internet connection than 5G, then obviously people would probably opt for the faster option.

Wouldn't that bring with it some sort of monopoly issue, like if he's monopolizing the fastest internet connection, that sort of worries?

Definitely. Because if other companies start wanting to put satellites into space, there's gonna be a lot of interruption. They're gonna possibly smack into each other. It will create a lot of problems. And so if there's probably going to be some sort of laws built around what he can and cannot do with the internet connection.

But not yet.

But not yet, right. Because this is still in the infancy. And so no one has really looked at it and go OK, we can see some problems here, but as of yet, there's not been anything to stop him from doing this. Yeah.

But talking about these satellites, they're not very big satellites, are they?

No. They're actually not that big. They might sound like they're quite big, but in comparison to a lot of the other satellites out there, they're quite small.

Most of the satellites are, there about it a little bit further away than the ISS the space station we talked about earlier. They're almost 600 kilometers away from the Earth.

But there are two hundred twelve hundred kilograms, while there are smaller satellites, they're not really all that big in comparison to what is actually out there in space. But the whole reason that they want to keep them small is just because they're kind of creating like this, you can kind of think about it as in like a mesh or like a cluster, they're not connected with like lines or anything like that.

But they all connect to each other with lasers and line of sight, and because signals won't be as good, but they connect to each other in those ways and then can send data back to the earth. That's just like a bunch of cell towers.

Yeah. I was just gonna say, they're just like cell towers, but like in the space, right? And individually they're not that big, but they form a mesh, like you said, like a web.

Yeah. So when you are moving around, you might connect to one satellite and then once you get closer to another one, you'll connect to that one, same thing with the cell phone service.

Exactly.

So now this whole Starlink connection is already available, right? How do you like, say I want to access it? How do we access it?

Well. You have to buy a modem or a satellite dish modem basically. So people will buy them for their vans, or people will buy them for their homes. The bigger one you get, the better kind of signal that you can get from the satellites. More surface area makes it easier for you to to transmit data.

But for people who are in a van, they can put one of these dishes on the top of their van as they drive, and use the internet as they drive around.

Okay.

Now I was going to ask how is it different from, we have satellite TV, right, and how's that different from satellite dish?

It's not really any different. I think the kind of technology they use is more advanced, because a lot of the old satellite net or the old satellite networks, the signals they use are quite maybe a little bit different, but this is just basically a more advanced version of that.

I see. And so you install one of those satellite dish and then you can access.

Right.

Now that's not all it is. They also include...so there's a kind of signal that you people use for their internet on their phones that connects to the not internet satellite, but it connects to the cell phone towers. But they'll also be getting this type of signal from the satellites as well. So people could actually just use a regular mobile phone or tablet and connect to the satellite cluster.

I see.

Yeah. Now it is a little bit expensive right now. Oftentimes for someone living in the city, it would be much cheaper to just get a mobile phone and internet service at home.

But for someone who lives in the countryside, who doesn't have access to a good connection, this would be an optimum choice.

Okay. And I think in the future they're probably gonna optimize it even more as well.

Probably.

Emm, okay. But there are bound to be some problems right, apart from the whole monopoly thing, whether he's going to monopolize the internet connection, would there be any other problems the people are worried about?

Of course. There's always gonna be problems. Anything you do will always have some sort of disadvantages.

One of the big things is especially for astronomers. It's gonna create a lot of light pollution, because you're going to have all these satellites going around. And oftentimes if you look at the night sky, you might see something that looks like a star and you realize it's moving, what is that?

It's a satellite.

And it's actually a satellite. Yeah. And so that's just something you can see with the naked eye from time to time..

Yeah. I was gonna say.

But people who are using telescopes though they're trying to look into space, but then these satellites are gonna be getting in the way. And when you are trying to get the light from something light years away and you have a satellite that's bouncing light from the earth or from the sun, and it's getting in the way it's gonna make it... so you can't see those other things.

Yeah. Apart from the light pollution. I'm wondering because although these are small satellites, but they still need to be launched, right? They need to be launched into the orbit by rockets. Each time.... wouldn’t that creates some sort of rubbish like space junk?

When the satellites are operational and moving as they should, we can control them.

But these satellites will sometimes go out of commission. They could possibly drop in orbit and crash land onto earth.

Okay. That doesn't sound good.

Or they might just float off in space and they could be something that causes a problem for future space launches. And the more satellites we put into space, the more there is that we have to worry about when we send a rocket up there. So that does also cause problems.

I mean it's still in the early days. I'm sure that they're thinking about hammering out all of these problems.

Oh, for sure, definitely. But I mean like there's always people are worried. Oftentimes older satellites were put into one particular orbit. But with these satellites, they're being put all over like they're being put in orbit above cities and places, where there weren't satellites very much before.

And so they're covering most of the world orbits with satellites now. And so there's gonna be in the future more and more chance that one of those is going to fall to earth at some point, maybe it'll hit the water, maybe it'll bit at someone's house. We never know.

Wow. Thanks for the nightmare, Brad. And on that note, we're gonna wrap up here, so this episode and the previous episode, we were giving you a very brief introduction to Space X and Starlink. If you want to share anything else on the subject, leave us a comment in the comments section, and thank you Brad for coming to the studio.

No problem. Thank you, Lulu. Have a good day.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye everyone.