Eli5 Why can’t we use airplanes to create a starlink like internet?
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I’m sure we could, but why would we?
Rockets are expensive, sure, but planes require constant maintenance and fuel.
Over time, the rocket wins in value. Go drop a few hundred satellites in orbit and you’re done.
You need absolute predictability and stability.
From a weather perspective, that means no thunderstorms or hurricanes diverting flights.
From a political event perspective, that means no 9/11’s diverting planes or unexpected no-fly zones.
From a routine care perspective, that means no cancellations due to “maintenance” or “scheduling” or “passenger safety factor” issues.
From a passenger and personnel perspective, that means no reschedules due to “pilot got COVID” or “emergency medical issue” or “not enough seats sold to justify the flight” issues.
From a physics perspective, planes are too low, so they can’t deliver signal that far, honestly.
And finally, it’s a WHOLE LOT OF DIFFERENT COMPANIES and they’d all have to work together. StarLink is one company.
So, yeah, simply too complex to be achievably delivered.
The orbital decay of satellites can take quite a while. It might cost a few hundred thousand dollars to put a satellite in orbit, but it’ll stay there for at least a year with minimal cost/effort. Putting a plan in the air has a constant ongoing cost via fuel, and eventual wear and tear on the plain.
To explain it like you’re 5, building a house out of bricks costs a lot of money, but the house lasts a VERY long time. Building a house out of sugar cubes would be very cheap, but you have to rebuild every time it rains.
We can do that technically. The problem is the amount of airplanes you need and the cost to operate all of them. In a military context that might be a good option for an operation but not something for a permanent internet connection for the general public.
Another similar variant that works better is a threaded balloon, it will not get nearly as high but you do not need to use fuel to keep them in the air. The are really more comparable to a high tower.
There has been testing with high-altitude balloons with no theaters. The manouverd by changing altitude.
At a lower altitude an airplane doesn’t have a line of sight as great as a satellite, so you’d need many more of them. Airplanes would constantly use expensive fuel and need to replenish it by landing or a bigger plane. A satellite only needs a little bit of fuel to boost itself up and counteract minimal air drag. A plane also has to work against being pulled towards the Earth by gravity and experiences way more air resistance.
It might be possible to design a light plane that runs on solar power and doesn’t need to be refueled though, but only in ideal conditions where the sun shines on it directly, not around the poles in winter.
Facebook/Meta did do this, but ended the program in 2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/26/facebook-permanently-grounds-its-aquila-solar-powered-internet-plane/
We basically did at one point, if you replace wireless internet with atomic bombs. The United States Stretegic air command had planes capable of dropping nukes on Moscow in the air pretty much 24/7 for years. Eventually, ICBM’s and the fall of the USSR removed the need for it, but it’s not something that couldn’t be done today, it would just be prohibitively expensive.
It’s kind of like saying that the Pyramids would be impossible to build today. You could absolutely build the Pyramids today, it would just be expensive. The ancient Egyptians had a labor force that was regularly unoccupied while the Nile had flooded their fields. You could absolutely build the Pyramids today, but the cost of labor and materials make it undesirable for anyone to actually do so.
We could. In some ways, modern AWACS systems could be said to do something vaguely similar to this on a small scale.
The problem is that to cover the globe this way, or even just cover all the land, you’d probably have to keep hundreds of planes in the air at once, basically 24/7/365. That means you’d need to keep them constantly refueled, which carries a number of costs, economic and environmental. Satellites don’t need to be refueled once they’re in position, and you need far fewer of them: the Iridium voice network, for example, covers the globe with 66 satellites.
Seems expensive. It would work just fine, but you’d have to keep all of those airplanes in the sky nonstop, running those engines.
A satellite can stay up for a long time without using much fuel. An airplane would need constant refueling.
Having said that, [Google briefly used balloons to provide internet access](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC), but closed the project in 2021 after concluding it wasn’t commercially viable.
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