Source: Yuanchuan Technology Review Author: He Luheng At the beginning of this year, after releasing the 14 Ultra and introducing its imaging function for more than an hour, another protagonist, "Jinshajiang Battery," arrived late. Xiaomi 14 Ultra's super-large camera module is 20% larger than the previous generation, but the whole machine is 3g lighter and the battery life is improved by 17%. [1] The hero behind the scenes is "Jinshajiang Battery." In recent years, domestic mobile phone brands, such as vivo's "Blue Sea Battery," oneplus's "Glacier Battery," honor's "Qinghai Lake Battery," and Xiaomi's "Jinshajiang Battery," have suddenly risen to prominence. Behind these famous mountains and rivers is actually the underlying technology from the next new energy ships-silicon-carbon batteries. Before the emergence of "Dongting Lake Battery" and "Qinghai Lake Battery," it may be necessary to clarify what silicon-carbon batteries are and what technology can make both the new energy vehicle and consumer electronics industries flock to them.
Author: Shen Danyang.

In September 2021, ITU (International Telecommunication Union) received an amusing application:

Rwanda, a small African country slightly larger than Zhejiang Zhoushan, has announced the construction of two large satellite constellations, with a total of 0.327 million satellites.

ITU is a specialized agency under the United Nations, responsible for allocating and managing satellite and radio resources. In recent years, the global satellite frenzy has left ITU increasingly at a loss.

It should be noted that from the launch of the world's first satellite in 1957 to November 2022, a total of only 14,450 satellites have been launched by all of human society [3].

However, from 2017 to 2022 alone, ITU received applications for launching millions of satellites. Not only Rwanda, but also major countries and aerospace companies are engaging in a "arms race":

At the end of the year, Canada announced loudly that it will launch another 0.1 million satellites in the future; French company E-Space did not want to be outdone and registered 0.116 million; and in May of this year, Shanghai Blue Arrow Hongqi Technology also submitted a plan for the construction of 0.01 million satellites to ITU - this is already China's 3rd plan to build tens of thousands of satellites.

In the "Handbook on Small Satellites" released by ITU in 2023, over 90 countries and regions have satellite launch plans.

The reason why various countries are so aggressive is that man - Elon Musk - is the culprit.

While everyone was still busy planning, Musk's SpaceX had already launched about 6,100 Starlink satellites into Earth's orbit. These satellites make up a huge "communications network" that can provide network services to every corner of the Earth.

Nowadays, even Brazil's isolated primitive tribes have set their sights on yellow websites through Starlink; and on the battlefield of the Russian-Ukrainian wars, Starlink has become the only communication tool and has been hailed as the "god of war" by frontline soldiers.

A 21st century "Star Wars" is quietly unfolding around the "god of outer space".

The "God" in Low Earth Orbit

It can be said that Starlink has nothing to do with the "god".

As we all know, Musk founded SpaceX to move to Mars one day. The dream is grand, but the reality is quite thin: in the early days of the establishment of SpaceX, it hovered on the brink of bankruptcy many times, and survival was a problem.

In the most difficult year of 2008, Musk was unable to pay his salary and finally borrowed 0.5 million from Sergey Brin, founder of Google [4]. "Poverty-fearful" Musk has been trying every means to raise funds for Mars immigration.

At the end of 2014, he suddenly realized that there was a gold mine in space.

Due to factors such as economic backwardness and natural environment, many areas actually do not have base stations. Currently, about 80% of the land and 95% of the sea are not covered by ground networks, such as Brazil's primitive tribes. Musk believes that using communication satellites to provide network services can make up for this huge market gap.

"The communication industry earns about $1 trillion a year. If we can have a 3% market share, that is $30 billion, which is more than NASA's budget," he said internally [5].

In the field of aerospace, satellite communication is not a new concept.

There are three orbits suitable for satellite operation in space: low earth orbit (LEO), medium earth orbit (MEO), and geosynchronous orbit (GEO).

In the past, major aerospace institutions focused on placing satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

The advantage of geosynchronous orbit is that it has the highest orbit height and the coverage area of a single satellite is large. Only one satellite is needed to cover the local area, while three satellites can cover the entire globe, with low construction costs. The disadvantage is that it is too far away from the earth, and the communication quality is not high with high time delay. For example, China's Tiantong-1 is a communication system composed of three geosynchronous orbit satellites. The "satellite call" function promoted by domestic mobile phone manufacturers is mostly implemented based on Tiantong-1.

However, what Musk is betting on is low earth orbit. Due to its proximity to the earth, low earth orbit satellites can achieve high-speed network services similar to 5G. However, due to the low orbit height, the coverage area of a single satellite is narrow, and in order to ensure coverage, a huge satellite cluster must be built with high construction costs and difficulties. In Musk's vision, the ultimate goal of Starlink is to establish a super cluster composed of 42,000 satellites.

Previously, most of the satellites launched by major space agencies were concentrated in geosynchronous orbit.

However, Musk's idea is to focus on low earth orbit. Due to its proximity to the earth, low earth orbit satellites can provide high-speed network services similar to 5G. However, due to the low orbit height, the coverage area of a single satellite is narrow. In order to ensure coverage, a huge satellite cluster must be built, with high construction costs and difficulties.

In Musk's vision, the ultimate goal of Starlink is to establish a super cluster composed of 42,000 satellites.

At that time, Musk's Starlink concept was actually a quite crazy idea. Because he was not the first one to be interested in low earth orbit satellites. However, almost all of the attempts in the past have ended in miserable failure.

Gates goes left, while Musk goes right.

In the 1990s, Motorola launched an ambitious plan to launch 77 satellites into low earth orbit to build a global network. Motorola named this project Iridium because the atomic number of the metal element iridium is exactly 77.

Motorola's gamble quickly attracted followers in Silicon Valley.

After hearing about it, Bill Gates excitedly drew in the father of the cellular phone, McVeigh, and the Saudi prince to form Teledesic; while Qualcomm teamed up with a defense contractor to establish Globalstar. At the time, there was also a rocket start-up called Orbital Sciences, which set up a satellite Internet company named Orbcomm.

However, all four of these companies collectively declared bankruptcy in the early 21st century, causing the industry to turn pale. Teledesic, which belongs to Gates, eventually closed its doors, while the other three were sold to different institutions.

A fundamental reason why the four star companies fell apart was the difficulty of low-cost mass production of satellites.

As is well known, traditional aerospace is dominated by state-owned institutions, with no market competition pressure. It is basically as high-end as it wants to be. Satellites are no exception: manufacturing is mostly done in laboratories rather than factories, and the process is expensive and complex.

At the end of the 20th century, the old aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin built 125 LM700 satellites for the Iridium project. These satellites cost about 0.7 billion U.S. dollars in total. On average, the cost of each satellite was as high as 5.6 million U.S. dollars.

After Iridium was put into use, it only attracted about 200,000 users and could not balance the early investment, leading to its bankruptcy. However, Musk found the key to breaking through. Today, Starlink is SpaceX's cash cow business.

In November 2023, Musk announced that Starlink had achieved a cash flow balance. According to Morgan Stanley's estimate, by 2024, Starlink will bring in 0.347 billion U.S. dollars in revenue and maintain high-speed growth; it is expected that by 2040, Starlink's revenue will reach 42 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 82% of SpaceX's revenue.

Building a God has the same goal for Musk and Iridium, but the outcome is vastly different.

Why did Musk and Iridium have such different outcomes when both were trying to 'build God'?

The success of replica rockets.

In fact, the Starlink project has also gone through a lot of twists and turns.

In 2018, Musk realized a big problem after calculating the cost: his own satellites were still too expensive. Only by reducing the cost of Starlink to 1/10 and increasing the production speed by 10 times, could this project achieve profitability. Obviously, Starlink has not been able to get rid of this bottleneck.

So, on a summer Saturday night, Musk flew to Seattle where the Starlink project was located without any warning and fired all the top management. The 8 senior rocket engineers, led by Mark Juncosa, took over the project.

In fact, the satellite production and manufacturing model is very similar to that of rockets, both of which are divided into four major parts: design, production, testing, and final assembly. In the past, SpaceX has successfully developed a set of ways to transform traditional rockets; and now, Musk is ready to replicate the success on Starlink.

The core concept of this rocket manufacturing method is to use industrial thinking to create aerospace components. Specifically, it can be roughly summarized into the following two points:

The first is vertical integration. In the automotive industry, vertical integration and self-production of components are common cost-reducing measures. When making rockets and Starlink satellites, Musk also produces parts himself.

The second is to question all traditions and iterate quickly. In Musk's view, any design that does not approach physical limits is problematic.

For example, in traditional satellite design, the antenna and flight computer are separated from each other. Because aerospace engineers assume that thermal insulation is required between the two. However, after Juncosa took over the team, he repeatedly questioned the aerospace engineers why thermal insulation was necessary and forced them to provide temperature test data.

After asking five times, the Starlink aerospace engineers were annoyed and immediately canceled the thermal insulation, turning the antenna and flight computer into an integrated component. After testing, it was found that this design had no impact at all.

Under the radical reform, the first generation of V1 Starlink satellites, with a cost of approximately 0.2 million US dollars per piece, only 1/28 of the cost of LM700 satellites, was born. The later V2 satellites increased in weight from 260 kg to 730 kg and supported direct connection to mobile phones, but the cost per piece was still only about 0.8 million US dollars [9].

At the same time, SpaceX's leading rocket recovery technology has reduced the launch cost of satellites by 70% [10]. Combined with each other, Starlink's commercial competitiveness is far ahead.

In May 2019, the first batch of Starlink satellites entered orbit. Four months later, Musk used Starlink to release a tweet. At that time, the outside world did not realize that a new space race in the 21st century was about to break out with the Starlink plan.

Land Grab in Space

On June 14, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 22 Starlink satellites rose slowly from Florida, USA. As usual, SpaceX's social media live-streamed the rocket launch. Unlike the Starship, which has its own traffic, Falcon 9's launch did not cause much discussion.

In the first six months of 2024, Falcon 9 had launched 60 times, live-streaming once every 2.7 days, even more diligent than many live-streamers.

It is worth noting that there are as many as 43 launch missions for Starlink - Musk is accelerating the construction of Starlink for a simple reason: space resources are not unlimited.

First of all, the number of satellites that can be accommodated in low Earth orbit is limited.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Musk believed that low Earth orbit could accommodate hundreds of billions of satellites [11].

However, the industry generally disagrees with this statement. Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell mentioned that as the orbit becomes more and more crowded, satellite operation will become as dangerous as reckless driving on a rainy day without traffic lights, and the risk of collision will increase sharply. In 2021, Starlink satellites had almost collided with China's space station several times.

"I seriously doubt whether it can still operate safely when the number of satellites reaches more than 0.1 million [12]," said McDowell.

Secondly, the frequency resources required for satellite communication are also limited.

Simply put, transmitting information from space to earth mainly relies on the electromagnetic wave spectrum. According to the frequency from low to high, the electromagnetic wave spectrum can be divided into multiple different characteristic frequency bands. The low-orbit satellite height is mainly concentrated between 500-1500km, and the frequency bands converge in Ka, Ku, and V/Q bands, and so on.

The number of communication satellites that can be accommodated in a single frequency band is actually limited. Once overloaded, signal interference and communication quality degradation are likely to occur.

Currently, the mainstream Ku band is approaching saturation, and competition around the Ka band is becoming increasingly fierce. With the saturation of these few frequency resources, the bands suitable for satellite Internet business will be further reduced.

At present, the two key resources mentioned above are managed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU); and the rules it defines are quite rough: first come, first served. The competition around low-orbit satellites is essentially a space enclosure movement that competes against time.

For latecomers, this is destined to be an extremely difficult competition - when everyone is still warming up, Musk has run half of it.

Epilogue

In 2022, Bill Gates visited Tesla's Texas super factory. Since both of them have been the richest people in the world and have built satellites, Gates feels a great kinship with Musk. However, this visit was not pleasant. After learning that Gates had shorted Tesla's stock, Musk behaved very harshly.

He even posted an unflattering photo of Gates on Twitter, criticizing him for needing to lose weight.

Clearly, Musk is not an easy person to get along with; many times, he can't even be regarded as a person with a strong sense of morality.

His various commercial operations are no longer surprising to the public; as for personal morals, it is even harder to say. After the fourth test launch of the Starship, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Musk had inappropriate relationships with interns and employees of SpaceX and had repeatedly asked the other party to have children for him.

However, his promotion of technological progress is also difficult to ignore.

In addition to the well-known Starlink, rockets, and electric vehicles, Musk also participated in the early investment of DeepMind and founded OpenAI. The widely discussed general-purpose robot is also proposed by Musk.

Even if Musk criticizes Gates repeatedly, Gates still publicly said, "You can see Elon's approach however you want. But there's no one who's done more—except perhaps Steve Jobs— to push science and innovation in the direction he thinks we should go. [5]"

The progress of a society cannot be completed by "saints" alone; at least in technological innovation, we should allow pioneers to have some flaws.

References:

[1] Satellite operators criticize "extreme" megaconstellation filings, spacenews

[2] Over the past six years, governments proposed launching over one million satellites, but where will they all go, the conversation

[3] Space debris by the numbers, ESA

[4] Elon Musk’s Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla, bloomberg

[5] Elon Musk biography, Walter Isaacson [6] LM 700, astronautix.com [7] Iridium Fails to Find a Market: Satellite Phone Misses Its Orbit, The New Yorker Times [8] SpaceX: Prepare for Liftoff, Morgan Stanley [9] Starlink soars: SpaceX's satellite internet surprises analysts with $6.6 billion revenue projection, spacenews [10] In-depth report on satellite internet in the communication industry: The development of satellite communication is accelerating, and the future of star-ground integration is promising, CITIC Securities [11] Elon Musk rejects claims he is squeezing out rivals in space, FT [12] How many satellites can we safely fit in Earth orbit, space.com

[6] LM 700, astronautix.com

[7] Iridium Fails to Find a Market: Satellite Phone Misses Its Orbit, The New Yorker Times

[8] SpaceX: Prepare for Liftoff, Morgan Stanley

[9] Starlink soars: SpaceX's satellite internet surprises analysts with $6.6 billion revenue projection, spacenews

[10] In-depth report on satellite internet in the internet plus-related industry: The development of satellite communication is accelerating, and the future of star-ground integration is promising, CITIC Securities

[11] Elon Musk rejects claims he is squeezing out rivals in space, FT

[12] How many satellites can we safely fit in Earth orbit, space.com

Editor/Somer