satellites--3/5/3036

05 Mar 2026

satellites--3/5/3036

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Today's selection-- from The Web Beneath the Waves by Samanth Subramanian. The modern communications satellite:

“A month after the volcanic eruption, SpaceX donated fifty Starlink terminals to Tonga—the country's first fat slice of connectivity. As Tonga's resident DHL agent, Sam Vea has photos on his phone of the momentous day he took delivery—the black cardboard boxes of terminals arriving on a small Air New Zealand cargo truck, shrink-wrapped in plastic and stacked on wooden pallets. If he was beaming, you couldn't tell; even in the afternoon heat, everyone wore masks. The Starlinks were distributed across institutions like ministries and banks but also to public spaces like community halls and restaurants; many went to the outer islands, including Vava'u. '’All the Wi-Fi was free, so anyone could come into range and use it,’ Ahio said. ‘It was always congested!’ People could also buy point-to-point radio links that could throw the Wi-Fi signal a little further, to reach their shops or bakeries or schools. On Vava'u, Brian Meikle gestured around the coffee shop where he and I sat talking—a lovely, airy spot with a pizza oven and a balcony that looked down upon the island's marina. In the summer of 2022, he said, the coffee shop fell within range of a Starlink signal, ‘and it became an internet lounge. The reliability wasn't the best, but it was better than nothing. You'd see masses of people come into town just for the internet.’ They would sit around for hours, working or studying, and if the cafe was full or shut, they'd loiter just outside, pecking at their phones. A foreign diplomat told me that she'd see Tongans in these Wi-Fi oases late into the night, trying to catch up on work: ‘One woman told me she was doing an online course at the University of the South Pacific, and that she had to sit in her car typing out her coursework.’ When another COVID lockdown was imposed in late March, shutting down even shops and gas stations, people from rural Vava'u often tried to sneak into town, past the guard posts, to get online. The Starlinks were simultaneously a blessing and not enough—but they were Tonga's only bond to the world until the snapped cable at the bottom of the ocean could be dredged up and repaired.

“The modern communications satellite is a remarkable device. A Starlink costs around a quarter of a million dollars to manufacture, weighs just 500 pounds, and can be carried into orbit a couple of dozen at a time. Elon Musk wants to have 30,000 of them circling the planet. Others are plotting to spray their own satellites into orbit as well. Amazon has approvals to deploy 3,236 satellites as part of its Project Kuiper. Three Chinese projects—one of them named ‘Qianfan,’ translating into the utterly romantic ‘Thousand Sails’—aspire to place a total of 38,000 satellites into space. Even in these teeming numbers, though, they don't herald any big transformations in how we send and receive data. A satellite can only offer data transfer speeds of a dozen gigabytes a second at best—far below the multiple tera-bytes per second that physical cables transmit. Satellites are invaluable in emergencies—as in Tonga—or war zones like the Ukrainian front, or for military installations or a ranch in the middle of nowhere. But to serve a community with fast, reliable, and voluminous internet, there's no alternative to a cable.

“Not that people haven't tried. The highest-profile attempt to dematerialize the internet—to shoot information through the air—was Loon, a project from Google's X research facility, popularly known as a moonshot factory. X's headquarters, set inside a former mall, is not far from the main Google campus in Mountain View. On a September day, I arrived early for my appointment, so I sat outdoors in blinding California sunshine, watching a Waymo autonomous car—another X project—make slow, endless loops around the parking lot.

“In a conference room, I met X's CEO Astra Teller, who wheeled in on a Segway. Teller was born Eric; ‘Astro’ was a high-school nickname, but it proved to be a fine and fortuitous one for the chief of a moonshot factory dedicated to envisioning a polished techno-future. That future included bringing the whole world online. Fiber connectivity is a no-brainer ‘if everyone lives in cities,’ Teller told me. ‘Except, like, three billion people don't live in cities—they live in extra-urban or rural places, or even in groups the size of cities but where the infrastructure isn't there. That seemed like one of the legitimate, huge problems facing the world.’

60 Starlink satellites stacked together before deployment on May 24, 2019

“Teller jumped up from his seat and went to the whiteboard to start drawing: a stick figure with a rectangular device in its hand, a circle right above her, another circle at the same level but off to the right. Each circle was a tennis-court-sized balloon made of polyethylene and filled with hydrogen or helium, floating 60,000 feet above the earth's surface—or, to be precise, not

so much floating as riding the currents of stratospheric air, rising and falling deliberately as part of a great, coordinated, circumplanetary matrix of such balloons. Aboard the balloons were

LTE and cellular radios powered by small solar panels, which could beam 100 megabits a second of wireless internet down to a patch of Earth fifty miles in diameter. The balloons also communicated with each other at one gigabit a second, high-frequency radio waves bouncing back and forth with the precision of hitting the nose on the head of a moving penny, until they could be transmitted down to a ground station that was connected to the internet by—of course—good old-fashioned fiber. There was no escaping the physical medium, Teller said; Loon depended on cables—submarine as well as terrestrial—just as much as any other network.

“X launched its first test balloons in 2013 from New Zealand, and for years, the launches, flights, and retrievals of these balloons were shepherded by a team led by Nick Kohli, who rapidly acquired the designation of ‘global balloon concierge.’ Kohli used to be an emergency medical technician with a pilot's license and a background in search-and-rescue, until he got headhunted by a mysterious team that quizzed him about his knowledge of radios and asked him questions like: ‘How would you plan a multi-day expedition to this set of coordinates?’ ‘It was on Day One, when I had orientation, that I realized what we were actually doing,’ Kohli told me. Through his time at X, Kohli super-intended the flights of thousands of balloons in tests and pilot projects. After each balloon reached the end of its lifespan, measured in the hundreds of days, it came back from the strato-sphere down to Earth, for Kohli's squad to collect. ‘We must have had a 95 percent success rate in collecting these downed balloons,’ he said. Kohli himself retrieved upward of six hundred balloons—sometimes under the strangest circumstances. Once, X negotiated a soft landing of a balloon with the Colombian government—except that the military didn't get the memo.’You can empathize with them, because they're looking at this balloon, going: ‘What is this, UFO?’” Kohli said. ‘There's this picture of two Colombian military guards that had captured our balloon, and they made a big PR moment out of it. They put it in jail! And they put it in a shopfront for people to see that they were protecting the community!’”