Canada desperately needs a national strategic internet constellation.

Edit to fix link.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.

      Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.

      • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        If you’re so far in the woods that you need a satellite connection for Internet, you don’t need a low ping. It’s not with ruining our sky, radio astronomy and our atmosphere for a few people’s convenience.

      • RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.caOP
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        2 days ago

        Correctamundo. You can’t speed up light. For low latency you need LEO, and since they don’t sit still for you (8km/s roughly) you need a bunch of them in some kind of formation or constellation, so that you generally have something to connect to at any given moment, or at least a chain that can relay to ground stations.

            • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
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              1 day ago

              And all those sattelites burning up on the atmosphere have absolutely no impact on climate?

              • RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.caOP
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                13 hours ago

                Assuming your question is not rhetorical…

                Some combustion products have climatic effects. For you to lean into this, the next step would be to calculate the relative effect of perhaps 80 tons of space junk burning up on reentry per year, versus perhaps 42 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. You’ll want to estimate the radiative forcing or climatic effects of the space junk combustion products to get there. I’ll save you the effort and tell you that space junk burning up on reentry is likely to be several hundred thousand times less impactful than terrestrial GHG emmissions.

                Which should not be surprising intuitively, just considering the volume of GHGs we produce globally each year.

            • Isaac@waterloolemmy.ca
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              1 day ago

              Yea I can see that, we can live comfortably on earth with Kessler syndrome but some carrington event and already struggling populace would probably set us back a century at least and wed be trapped on earth nearly forever, or until we can solve Kessler syndrome