The private space industry company space X, filed to register a trademark on the name Starling. What will Starling b and how is it a big deal? This is tech Stuff Daily. As I'm Jonathan Strickland. SpaceX has been working on a design for a network of satellites that could collectively provide a network circling our planet. This satellite network, also known as a constellation of satellites, would have many jobs. One of those jobs is aerial surveying. That's a fancy
way of saying. The satellites will contain sensors that will allow them to gather data about the geography of the Earth and spatially relevant information. Such a network could be useful to measure ongoing changes, such as how coastlines might transform over time, him as a result of climate change or in the wake of massive storm systems. A comprehensive constellation network would allow for a truly big picture look at the status of the Earth, and could prove invaluable
when developing scientific projects or government policies. These remote sensors are likely various types of cameras that can capture images through different wavelengths of light, including infra red or the visible spectrum. This alone is pretty cool tech, but the other purpose of starlink is even more interesting. That purpose is to provide global broadband access to the Internet. In other words, no matter where on Earth you might find yourself,
with the proper tech, you could access the Internet. This could be transformative technology for countless regions that have limited or no Internet access due to a lack of infrastructure. It's undeniable that the Internet has changed the way the world works in a dramatic fashion. From communication to commerce. The Internet shapes the way we interact with the world. Extending that capability to every part of the Earth could provide enormous benefit, not only to the people living in
remote regions, but to everyone. And satellite Internet isn't exactly new. We've been launching communication satellites into orbit for decades, but your typical Internet communication satellite flies high above the planet in geo stationary orbit. That means the satellites orbit the Earth along the equator, moving at a speed that keeps them in the same relative position in the sky over
a reference point on the planet. As the Earth rotates, the satellite whizzes through space to maintain that relative position. This provides stable coverage of a particular area of the planet, but it requires going out to a very high orbit, and there's limited real estate to deal with, as an overpopulated orbit would open up the possibility of collisions. Rather than rely upon those few large and ex pensive satellites, space x is strategy is to create a whole boatload
of small, relatively cheap satellites. The SpaceX network could consist of up to four thousand of these satellites orbiting closer to the Earth in low orbit. That means the satellites wouldn't maintain a relative position above a specific reference point on the Earth, but that's not necessary if you have enough devices to cover the globe. The low Earth orbit positioning also translates to savings. It's not as expensive to launch satellites into low Earth orbit. It will still cost
a pretty penny. Elon Musk once estimated the cost of the network's development and deployment would hit somewhere in the ten billion dollar range and take five years to complete, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not as costly as launching a few massive satellites much further out. Yet another benefit of using low Earth orbit is the decrease in latency. Latency is the delay between when you initiate a command and when a system completes that command.
In other words, it's the time it takes your computer and the Internet in general to send messages back and forth to each other. With satellite Internet latency tends to be an irritating problem, particularly with traditional communication satellites. That's because the enormous distances involved. Data can only travel as fast as the speed of light. With traditional communication satellites, the distance between users and the satellites is great enough
that this becomes a noticeable lag in communication. Satellites in low Earth orbit are by definition, closer to the ground with less distance to travel, you see a decrease in latency. Whether that decrease would be low enough to truly work for real time applications without a noticeable delay, such as video conferencing, remains to be seen. As a side note, we often talk about Internet communication in terms of speed. That's a little misleading. What's more accurate is it to
dicussion about data capacity. Data traveling through a ten megabit per second connection versus traveling through a one gigabit per second connection actually moves at the same speed. If all other things are equal, it's just that the gigabit per second connection allows more data to pass through in that
same amount of time. Another way to think about it is if you and four of your closest friends are walking down a pathway that's only one person wide, and you're all moving at about four miles per hour toward a big open space. It's going to take a while for that last person in line to join everyone else, simply because the path's capacity only allows for single file.
But if that same group we're walking down a pathway that allows you to walk ten people abreast, it would take less time for the entire group to enter the wide open area because the path's capacity for people is greater. It's not that the second group moved faster, just that the path could hold more people across. That's sort of the same thing with internets eats. But back to SpaceX, the large number of satellites also means space x's systems
would have redundancy built into it. That means should one satellite fail, it wouldn't result in a catastrophic loss of service. If a geostationary satellite goes down, that's a big deal. It's very far out, much further than the International Space Station, and fixing such a problem is often not feasible, or
it is extremely risky and expensive. Relying on smaller, less expensive satellites allows SpaceX to make sure coverage on the Earth isn't interrupted if a single satellite goes down, neighboring satellites can pick up the slack until SpaceX can launch a replacement or repair a misbehaving satellite. SpaceX isn't the only company looking to provide Internet coverage through satellites. It will likely be a few years before we see any of these systems become fully operational in the Star Wars
sense of the phrase. Assuming everything goes smoothly in a few years, it may be possible to log into your social media accounts even if you find yourself on a deserted location. I suspect the twenty twenty reboot of Gilligan's Island will have to address this in some way. To learn more about how the Internet works, be sure to subscribe to the podcast tech Stuff, a deep dive show that publishes on Wednesdays and Fridays. That's all from me for now, See you next time.