Hi, my name is Anne Lee Steele.
I'm a community manager at the Alan Turing Institute
and today I'll be talking about initial outcomes
from a research project on low earth orbit satellites and Internet supply
chains, especially as they apply to questions of global connectivity.
Thank you so much to the Internet Society for supporting this work over
the course of the past couple of months.
Really what I want to emphasize about the world of LEOs is that it's
very much an emerging landscape.
We've seen them used in the context of earth observation and satellite imagery,
as well as for reconnaissance purposes involving an entire suite of
military and defense actors that have long been associated with the
space industry more broadly, but as they've been increasingly been used
for Internet connectivity, we see a number of private actors, really
emerging as leaders in the space.
Most notably Starlink associated with Elon Musk SpaceX as
well as Amazon's Project Kuiper.
Really though the question that this project sought to answer, at least
unpacked more fruitfully, was what futures do LEOs actually imagine for
us. We've very much seen the narratives closely tied to closing the digital
divide or connecting the unconnected.
Reaching into geography is into areas, not previously reachable through
existing Internet infrastructure.
However, in order to imagine or understand how LEOs are
really reimagining connectivity, it's important to reconcile or
reckon with what the realities of what this might actually mean.
And that's led to really three key findings that we've seen over the
course of the past number of months.
One is this notion of connectivity as strategic.
This isn't necessarily new space has long been a place of
replicating geopolitical tensions.
And we've definitely seen this in the landscape of LEOs.
We've also seen it become very much a new frontier for warfare with the testing
of anti-satellite weapons as well as evolving notions of sovereignty.
Really asking questions of who will have access to whose Internet through
what satellites and at what point, one example of course being Starlink's
recent use in Ukraine. We've also seen connectivity very much becoming
this means for market consolidation, LEO satellite companies are very
unique and they really seek to cut across the entire suite of existing
infrastructure, really seeking to become full stack Internet providers.
And this means
the same company, designing, manufacturing, creating and launching
satellites as well as selling Internet directly to consumers.
And this is incredibly disruptive and we don't know the full implications of
what this may mean for private public community actors that currently supply
Internet in different contexts.
And finally, and this is probably the question that I've spent the most
time thinking through and trying to understand is really this notion of
connectivity as an acceptance of an inherent kind of precarity, meaning
disposability is very much the norm.
The average lifetime of an LEO satellite is roughly five to 10 years.
We haven't actually experienced the full lifetime or life
cycle of an LEO satellite.
And we don't necessarily know what this may mean in the future.
We do know, especially as LEOs burn up within our atmosphere,
that this will create a lot more space debris and will lead to much more crowded skies.
And this has implications for scientific research, especially for the work
of astronomers, but also really big implications for climate change
as we know it now.
So very much we see this kind of narrative of common good, of
global connectivity confronting head on the realities of commercialization.
And I really wanna leave you all with this question of asking, you know,
will this Internet supply chain, this Internet infrastructure only
really become visible when it breaks.
We've seen this over the past couple years of pandemic
induced lockdowns and our supply chains
being shown as much more fragile than we had ever thought them to be.
And we similarly have seen this increasingly with other forms
of Internet infrastructure.
Most recently, undersea cable affecting Tonga after a volcanic
eruption showing in real time how fragile the modern Internet
and its infrastructure actually is.
I also wanted to show you all this kind of design preview of a visual
rendering of these ideas, really trying to compare the existing kind
of undersea cable infrastructure, low earth orbit satellites, and the
existing research or reporting that has been done on the subject.
Very much in this kind of public visual and playful format.
I invite you all to check out the link and I
really welcome any feedback
that you may have on this format.
Thank you so much.
Collaborators are definitely welcome.
Please get in touch.
And thank you again to the Internet Society for supporting this work.