Comments are due to the FCC on Mon for Blue Origin's copycat of SpaceX's fucking stupid orbital data center idea. Comments were due yesterday for the first SpaceX copycat: Starcloud (I hate everything about it, including the name). I was in chaotic travel mode for most of that and so had to rely on colleagues.

Now I have to read these fucking docs to see what bullshit Blue Origin is serving up, so time to rant about it.

Blue Origin wants 51,600 satellites, all in sun-synchronous orbits. That means they'll follow the terminator line around the Earth and be sunlit ALWAYS. They want to distribute them between 500-1,800 km altitude, which means some of them will be sunlit and visible all the time. Fanfuckingtastic.

This is also the exact same set of orbits that both SpaceX and Starcloud want. Sun-synchronous orbits are about to get ridiculously crowded.

"BLUE ORIGIN BACKGROUND" a.k.a. the grandiose greenwashing section. Oh they named this Project Sunrise?! Project Sunrise sounds like a billion times worse than Reflect Orbital...

Whatever it is, at least they didn't name it Project Sunshine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SUNSHINE

You just never fucking know with these techbro companies...

The shitweasels are also asking for waivers! Because the few rules that are left are just too much.

Please don't ask Jeff Bezos to pay a measly million dollar bond in case they don't launch 50% of their sats within 6 years. That would be unfair! Also please don't worry about what radio spectrum we'll use, because we totally promise not to have any interference at all, even though we provide absolutely zero information about how our satellites work!

Oh another one too: Please don't ask us about our debris mitigation plan because the "satellite design is currently being matured" (in other words, they have no fucking clue what the satellites will actually look like or how they will work).

Oh yet another: we totally can't upload our orbital parameter date because the FCC's web form is too crappy! (This part I actually believe. The FCC's website blows.) But come on guys, no orbits?

Oh yeah, didn't submit to the ITU yet either. Of course.

That was the Narrative, now on to the Technical Annex. Whoopee.

Ok, so they want 300-1,000 satellites per plane, separated by 5-10km, ranging from 500-1,800km altitude. All in sun-synchronous. Like I said, super crowded.

There's a bunch of info about spectrum use, I will leave this to my radio colleagues to interpret. (dBW/m^2/MHz units... flux, I guess? Eeek.) It's probably bad.

ORBITAL DEBRIS MITIGATION this part will be the most "fun"

But a reminder that they asked for a waiver for their debris plan, so I guess that this is just... for funsies?

Here's the first and only information I've seen about the satellite sizes. They will be bigger than 10cm, so they will be easily tracked! No shit!! A fucking data center needs to be bigger than 10cm! What useful information!!

To nobody's surprise, they will burn all their satellites up in the atmosphere, because that's what all the cool kids do. They don't actually say their operating lifetimes anywhere. But if they're 5 years like Starlink, then that's a bit more than one satellite burned up per hour.

And will they burn up completely? Well, they say they'll use the same NASA debris model to assess that said that the SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk would burn up. So I'm not worried at all!!

"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!

They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)