It sounds great. Internet from space! It's a concept that involves using a series, or constellationm of satellites to beam down continuous internet coverage everywhere across the world, providing widespread internet access to, potentially, billions. SpaceX has a plan for it. Google does too, and upstarts like OneWeb.

But over at SpaceNews, Jeff Foust reports on a potential problem with that: satellites in the all important geostationary orbit (an orbit exactly at the equator that stays exactly above a given spot) but get some undue interference from the fleet of satellites below. This means that weather satellites could get cut off from their ability to communicate with ground stations.

Some communications satellites, television satellites, and other probes live in geostationary orbit, which at more than 22,000 miles up is not an ideal working spot for Internet satellites – there's a small communications delay due to relativity that could still dramatically slow down speeds on the ground, causing problems with video conferencing, streaming, and other high-bandwidth activity. It's also a protected orbital real estate. That's why most "Internet by space" concepts use a series of probes at lower orbits to keep coverage continuous while driving down lag time.

While many of the constellation-style satellites are within already existing rules about interference with the satellites higher up, new advances in the geostationary sats leave them operating at lower power to save energy. But the trade-off is that this makes them more suspectible to interference. While this isn't a problem typically with our current satellite fleet at lower orbits, a constellation of satellites could pose a continuous problem.

So depending on the number of start-ups, there could be a number of satellite constellations with altruistic-ish purposes below causing a lot of headaches for a very protected orbit above. The extent of the interference isn't yet known – and won't be until the objects are actually in orbit. But it could change how OneWeb operates almost as soon as it launches, and require new software or hardware changes, or risk hobbling important weather information.

Source: SpaceNews

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