I want to tell you a little bit about what we want to achieve with satellites and why that's important. Satellites constitute as much or more of the cost of space-based activity as the rockets do. Very often actually the satellites are more expensive than the rocket. So, in order for us to really revolutionize space we have to address both satellites and rockets. The first step is that we need to earn enough money to keep going as a company. So we have to make sure that we're launching satellites. Commercial satellites like broadcast communications, mapping, government satellites that do scientific missions, Earth-based or space-based missions, GPS satellites, Earth observation for better understanding of crops and climate and any natural disaster information, that kind of thing. Then also servicing the Space Station, transferring cargo to and from the Space Station, which we've done a few times. Then taking people to and from the Space Station. We've got to service the sort of Earth-based needs to launch satellites and that pays the bills, but in doing that keep improving the technology to a point where we can make full reusability work and we have sufficient scale and sophistication to be able to take people to Mars.
In LA we have the rocket development and our Dragon spacecraft, but SpaceX Seattle is going to be the center of our satellite development activities. It's going to be the focus of SpaceX's satellite development activities. It is intended to be a significant engineering campus.
I think competition is always a good thing. Now, the US has actually done relatively speaking much better competing in terms of the satellite market than in the launch market. The US actually does have a dominant share, or at least a substantial share, in the commercial satellite market with Loral Space Systems in Silicon Valley, and Boeing Space Satellites, which used to be Hughes in Southern California, Orbital Sciences in Virginia. So the US has done reasonably well in the commercial satellite front, and does very well in the defense satellite side of things. But I think the US needs to look at this as a constantly evolving market where European, Chinese, and other satellite makers certainly want to take that market share away from the American companies.
What we want to do for satellites is revolutionize the satellite side of things, just as we've done with the rocket side of things. It's not exclusively one or the other, I should also say it's possible to do a bit of both. So if you end up working at SpaceX Seattle, you can also work on rockets and manned spacecraft as well as satellites, but in terms of the center of gravity for satellites will be in Seattle. The reason for it is pretty straight forward. There's a huge amount of talent in the Seattle area and a lot don't seem to want to move to LA, it has its merits by the way. So instead, we're going to establish a significant operation in Seattle.
The long term goal is to create a comprehensive global communication system that provides high bandwidth, low latency, connectivity anywhere in the world, and provides cross-links through the satellites, so that you can have improved long distance Internet. We're going to start off by building our own constellation of satellites, but that same satellite bus and the technology we develop can be also be used for Earth science and space science, as well as other potential applications that others may have. We’re definitely going to build our own, but it's something we're going to be able to offer to others.
One of the things that you realize when you look at this is that you can actually have a more direct path through space and photons move faster. The speed of light in vacuum is somewhere 40% to 50% faster than in fiber. Depending on what fiber optic material they are running through, photons actually move about forty to fifty percent faster in vacuum than they do in fiber optic cables. So you can actually do long distance communication faster if you route it through vacuum than you can if you route it through fiber.
It can also go through far fewer hops. If you look at way that the fiber optic cables go, they trace the outlines of the continents, and they go through many repeaters and routers and everything. If you look at the actual path it takes, it's extremely convoluted. Let's say you want to communicate from a server in California to one in South Africa, it's a very, very long route, and sort of a very round about path, and it's high latency, low photonic speed. It'll go through 200 routers and repeaters and the latency is extremely bad. Whereas if you did it with a satellite network you could actually do it in two or three hops, maybe four hops, it depends on the altitude of the satellites and what the cross-links are. But basically, let's say, at least an order of magnitude fewer repeaters or routers, and going through space at 50% faster speed of light. So it seems from a physics standpoint inherently better to do the long distance Internet traffic through space. There's a lot of potential for space-based communications.
Then space is also really good for sparse connectivity. If you've got a large mass of land where there are a relatively low density of users, space is actually ideal for that, so in terms of the low Earth orbit stuff on the commercial side, I think there’s a lot of opportunities in the global Internet capability to providing internet to parts of the world that either don't have it or where it's very expensive and not very good. Space is very good for providing internet connectivity for sparsely populated or low populated regions.
It's something that would both provide optionality for people living in advanced countries and economies as well as people living in poorer countries that don't even have electricity or fiber or anything like that. It's a real enabler for people in poor regions of the world and it gives optionality for people in wealthier countries.
It’s not a threat to Telcos, it’s going to make Telco’s lives easier because a lot of customers are very hard to serve, where like you're digging a fiber cable for 2 miles. They’ll never pay off the investment to get to one house type of thing, but from space you can really serve those customers at economically sensible rates.
The satellites we have in mind are going to be quite sophisticated. They'd be a smallish satellite but with big satellite capability. By smallish I mean, in the few hundred kilogram range. Most satellites are really quite primitive. Normally the way satellites are done is they're like Battlestar Galactica, there's like one of them, and it's really giant, and if this thing doesn't work it's terrible, like the whole business collapses. You’d sort of think that satellite technology would be really advanced, but if you look at how the big satellites are done, all the geostationary stuff, they really want something that's flight proven or that's space proven. If you start your design process saying you want proven technology, it's not going to be new technology. You design it with, essentially old technology, it takes a while to build that design and then you've got to go launch that design. And so by the time the satellites is actually launched they're typically really outdated technology, like 5 to 10 years old. And then if we're talking about a geostationary satellite that's up there for 15 years, by the end of its life it's a quarter of a century old technology. In terms of electronics it's super-ancient stuff. People go with the Battlestar Galactica strategy of packing everything into one giant satellite because they're petrified that if anything goes wrong their whole business could collapse, so you end up with old technology.
If you have a large constellation you can afford to lose individual satellites and it doesn't affect the constellation very much. And if you instead go with smaller satellites that you launch more frequently you can use present day technology.
Even with cutting edge stuff that isn't even necessarily in the hands of consumers you can take a chance on the satellite not working. Since we're launching frequently and testing it out frequently we can verify that it's going to work in space and actually have technology that's a decade or sometimes two decades more advanced. An analogy might be between say mainframes and PCs. If you want to have a big data center serving millions of people it's way better to have an array of cheap PCs then it is to have a few mainframes. Basically that's how the Internet is served, with millions of PCs on racks instead of mainframes.
In terms of the production waste produced, it would be similar to the way a car is produced or consumer electrics. If we take things even a step further, if a satellite didn't work you'd just take it out of the constellation and de-orbit it, as opposed to going through this super-intense acceptance procedure to make sure the satellite works.
I wouldn't worry too much about the space junk thing, at the altitude in question there's really not a lot out there. We're talking about something about the 1100 km level and there's just not a lot up there. Actually, we should worry about ourselves creating the space junk. The thing we need to make sure of is that we obviously don't want to create any issues. We're going to make sure that we can deal with the satellites effectively and have them burn up on reentry and have the debris kind of land in the Pacific somewhere. That's what we need to make sure of, because the number of satellites we're talking about here is ultimately around 4000. Actually, technically the number under discussion was 4025 but there's probably false precision there. That's kind of what we're thinking right now. There's less than half that number of active satellites currently in existence. So this will be more than double the number of currently active satellites.
It's also worth saying that a lot of companies have tried this and kind of broken their pick on it. I think we want to be really careful and deliberate about how we make this thing work and not overextend ourselves. We're being fairly careful about it. In our case the communications technology would be substantially more advanced. In the past, with say attempts like Teledesic, the electronics of the day were very low bandwidth, I mean really analog or barely digital, and they weren't very high bandwidth. It didn't really compete with say terrestrial phones. In the case of Teledesic they were looking to compete with or to address cellular needs. The system we're talking about would not attempt to compete with cellular needs. For example, it wouldn't compete directly with, say Iridium, which can talk directly to a handset. Our system would seek to talk to a small user terminal that's about the size of a pizza box or much like current satellite dishes, but it would be flat because we have a phased array antenna that's tracking the satellites. You could mount it in a window or just anywhere outside. As long at it can see the sky it would work.
I think it's important to assume that terrestrial networks will get much better over time. You know, one of the mistakes that Teledesic made was not assuming that terrestrial networks would get much better over time. So we need to make sure that the system we design is good, even taking into account significant improvements in the terrestrial systems. The important difference between what we're doing and say Teledesic, in the case of Teledesic they were trying to talk to phones and that gets back to that problem of a roof penetrating situation and particularly with a signal that's coming from space. If you're in a skyscraper it's got to go through 27 floors to reach you, it's not going to happen. There's nothing that will, you know short of like a neutrino, you’ll have to do a neutrino phone. In the case of Teledesic, I think they had some fundamental issues there.
Spectrum that is omni-directional and wall penetrating is extremely rare, and limited. Spectrum that is not wall penetrating and that is very directional is not rare. It's sort of the difference between a laser beam and a floodlight. Whereas there's high scarcity for cellular bandwidth, there is not high scarcity for space to Earth bandwidth, as long as it's not roof penetrating. So I don't see bandwidth as being a particularly difficult issue.
There's the ITU filings and the financial qualifications you need and we've done the filings associated with that. That says whether you can actually put the satellite network up. Then there's the - whether it's legal to have a ground link. Obviously any given country can say it's illegal to have a ground link. From our standpoint we could conceivably continue to broadcast and they'd have a choice of either shooting our satellites down.. or not. China can do that. So we probably shouldn't broadcast there. If they get upset with us, they can blow our satellites up. I mean, I'm hopeful that we can structure agreements with various countries to allow communication with their citizens but it is on a country by country basis. I don't think it's something that would affect the time line, at least, it's not going to take longer than five years to do that. Not all countries will agree at first, there will always be some countries that don't agree, that’s fine.
I do think this is something that should be built and would be quite good to have. At the same time, we also need to make sure we don't create SkyNet. Ironically, the server room at SpaceX jokingly was called SkyNet. Fate has a great sense of irony. We really need to make sure that doesn't come true. I think I can say that if there's some AI apocalypse it's going to come from some collection of vast server farms terrestrially based, not via the space based communication system. I did think about that though. I think we're going to have to pay a lot of attention to security. It would really be unfortunate if it got hacked and taken over. That would be bad, whether it was by AI or by some group of whatever. I think it's going to be important to have some sort of low level ROM chip that's got a code that you can like - go into a safe mode. So, it's like listening for a code, and then that ROM chip can't be updated. So we could always trigger a safe mode situation to regain control of the system, but it's going to require a lot of thought to make sure we are able to protect it from any hacking attempts. It's much like Google or Facebook, they handle these kinds of issues.
The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. It's something that I think definitely needs to be done, and it's a really difficult technical problem to solve. That’s why we need the smartest engineering talent in the world to solve the problem. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is in the long term like rebuilding the Internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of long distance Internet traffic go over this network and about 10% of local consumer and business traffic. So that's still probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10% business to consumer direct and more than half of the long distance traffic.
I mean this would cost a lot to build, ultimately over time the full version of the system we're talking about something that would be $10 or $15 billion to create, maybe more. The user terminals will be at least $100 to $300 depending on which type of terminal. This is intended to be a significant amount of revenue and help fund a city on Mars. Looking in the long term, and saying what's needed to create a city on Mars? Well, one thing's for sure: a lot of money. So we need things that will generate a lot of money.
I think there's the potential for doing a fair bit of long distance Internet activity as well as providing bandwidth broadly. It would also be able to serve like I said probably about 10% of people in relatively dense urban/suburban environments, and in cases where people have been stuck with Time Warner or Comcast or something this would provide an opportunity. I think that there's a huge amount of room for growth for having satellite communications systems that provide high bandwidth global coverage.
We’ll need the same for Mars. That same system we could leverage to put into a constellation on Mars, because Mars is going to need a global communications system too and there's no fiber optics or wires or anything on Mars. On Mars it’s actually comparatively easy to establish Internet, at least for local Internet, because you wouldn't be living everywhere on Mars. You would need maybe four satellites to have global Internet coverage because of how sparse civilization would be on Mars. Then some relay satellites to get back to Earth, we're definitely going to need high bandwidth communications between Earth and Mars. We're going to need tera-bit level communications between Earth and Mars, which necessarily means that you want a tight beam, like a laser communication system or something like that, and relays. With sort of satellites that relay it because sometimes Mars is on the other side of the Sun, so you gotta bounce the photons around the Sun, not through it. Yeah, the internet latency would be pretty significant. Mars is roughly 12 light minutes from the Sun, and Earth is 8 light minutes, so the closest approach to Mars is four light minutes away, and the furthest approach is 20. A little more because you can't sort of talk directly through the Sun. So I think a lot of what we do in developing an Earth-based communication system could be leveraged for Mars as well. Crazy as that may sound.
Anyway, I think that this is a fundamentally good thing to do. It seems it's an important thing to do. I can't think of any major downsides. It should happen and I think that it is something where, properly designed, it could give people gigabit level access, 20 to 30 ms latency, everywhere on Earth. That would be pretty great.