Orbital shells as distinct economic regimes

Assembled from 12 blocks · 2 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. Altitude is not a continuum for a satellite business; it is a small set of regimes with sharply different economics. Geostationary orbit, at roughly 35,786 km above the equator, gives one satellite a fixed position over about a third of the Earth's surface — so a broadcaster needs three spacecraft for near-global reach, and a receiving dish never has to move. The price is a round-trip signal delay of roughly a quarter of a second and a launch energy requirement that makes each spacecraft large and expensive. Medium Earth orbit, around 20,000 km, is where every global navigation constellation sits: high enough that two or three dozen satellites give continuous worldwide four-satellite visibility, low enough that the spacecraft stay manageable. Low Earth orbit, from roughly 300 to 2,000 km, gives low latency and cheap individual satellites but sees any one satellite for only minutes at a time, so continuous service requires thousands of them and continual replacement as atmospheric drag pulls them down. The three regimes are not competitors so much as different products, and the assets in each are effectively unmovable between them. Not a terrestrial place — no latitude and longitude apply.
3. Knowledge
4. Orbital shells as distinct economic regimes
5. Connections
6. Global navigation satellite systems
7. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
8. Intelsat I (Early Bird) becomes the first commercial geostationary satellite
9. OneWeb completes its first-generation constellation
10. Evidence
11. Establishes the treaty framework under which national administrations file satellite networks, priority follows filing date in non-planned bands, filings lapse unless brought into use, and non-geostationary constellations must meet staged deployment milestones. V55 verification basis: the Radio Regulations were not retrieved in this session; the mechanism is described and the specific milestone percentages and deadlines are named as a gap.
12. Supports the catalogued and modelled debris population magnitudes, the altitude dependence of orbital decay, and the fragment contributions of the 2007 Fengyun-1C test, the 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision and the 2021 Cosmos 1408 test. V55 verification basis: esa.int was refused by the network egress proxy in this session and no search was available, so counts are given as ranges and no edition-specific number is quoted.