Plus: Don't put too much stock into 'flight heritage'
| By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
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In the face of governments shutting down internet access, such as in Iran last month, Starlink can play a pivotal role in providing internet access to people on the ground. But commercial firms stepping in and making these decisions raises serious questions about sovereignty and who, government, commercial or otherwise, has their hands on the flow of information.
This is the issue raised by Mustafa Bilal, a researcher at the Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies in Islamabad, who argued in a recent commentary that "This incident [in Iran] of privatized diplomacy raises troubling questions regarding accountability as a company responsible to shareholders, not voters, decides which beleaguered populations are to receive a digital lifeline."
The world may find itself at a turning point regarding Starlink and, by extension, LEO broadband companies, Bilal argued, as companies may think twice about extending licenses for the service.
"The Starlink phenomenon thus poses technical and philosophical dilemmas," he wrote. "Does it democratize the right to resist or corporatize digital sovereignty? On one hand, it gives citizens the power to challenge a state's monopoly on information flows, and is a powerful counterbalance to authoritarianism. On the other hand, it concentrates power in the hands of the private sector that creates dependency and leads to opaque lines of influence beyond sovereign control."
See the rest of the article here. | | | | |
The phrase "flight heritage" is a major selling point for spacecraft or their components, the logic being that a mission is more likely to succeed when using thoroughly vetted hardware. But Brad King, co-founder and CEO of Orbion Space Technology, wrote an opinion article saying that the term, or at least how it's commonly used in the space industry, can be misleading.
"In our industry, flight heritage is most often ascribed to something that is still on the ground. To say it has flight heritage is to say that it will work reliably in space because other units just like it have flown and backed up their developer's claims."
And that means that changes can happen along the way, and having a similar component fly once isn't the same as something that's made consistently, King argued.
"And that 'just like it' is doing a lot of work. Was the unit built from the same bill of materials? Did it come from the same production line? Were the same processes used in its manufacture? And was it tested in the same way, and qualified against the same criteria? If the answer to any of these questions is 'no, then flight heritage cannot be transferred cleanly from one unit to the next."
See the full article here. | | | | | |  | | Long exposure image of a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: SpaceX | | | |
The satellite communications industry has quietly moved toward implementing custom silicon in their products, a move that Elad Baram, product marketing director of the Mobile Broadband Business Unit at Ceva, said stands to save the industry lots of money in the overall cost of deploying a constellation, Baram wrote in a recent opinion article.
In his article, Baram broke down how the conventional wisdom of building something that works with off-the-shelf components may save money initially, but the cost of implementing custom components from the get-go can prove financially worthwhile, adding that he is seeing this trend emerge more broadly across the industry, even if major players are keeping their custom and proprietary developments under wraps.
See the full article here.
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