Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Amazon stacks satellites in layers
Starlink's swarm
Starlink is a swarm that grew by brute force in its early days. SpaceX applied for 42,000 satellites and has launched about 10,000 across 72 planes, with a strategy of saturating the orbit and putting quantity over everything.
Amazon's nested shells
Amazon Leo aims for 3,000-plus Gen 1 satellites and 7,000 Gen 2 satellites, spread over three orbital altitudes like a nested Russian doll. Depending on the curve of the Earth, the shells overlap continuously and form a 3D web instead of a single crowded layer.
Space lasers
The satellites also carry optical inter-satellite links, which amount to space lasers. Infrared lasers move 100 GB of data per second, so information can be zapped straight from one satellite to the next.
Why fly satellites at different altitudes?
A satellite's height sets how much ground it can see and how long a signal takes to reach it. Lower satellites sit closer to users, which cuts delay, but each one covers a smaller patch of Earth. Amazon's filings with the US Federal Communications Commission described shells at 590, 610, and 630 kilometers.
Why are space lasers faster than fiber?
Light travels more slowly through glass than through empty space, because glass has a refractive index of about 1.47. Light in a fiber cable therefore moves at roughly two thirds of its vacuum speed. A laser link between satellites crosses near-vacuum at close to full speed. Over long distances, a path through orbit can beat a cable despite the longer route.
What happens when orbits get too crowded?
In 1978, NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais described a cascade in which collisions create debris that causes further collisions. The scenario became known as Kessler syndrome. Debris at orbital speeds of roughly seven kilometers per second makes even small fragments destructive. In 2009, an active Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite collided, producing thousands of tracked fragments.
More from Lightspeed Venture Partners
