A Techno-Economic Assessment and Tradespace Exploration of Low Earth Orbit Mega-Constellations
Kevin T. Li, Christian A. Hofmann, Harald Reder, Andreas Knopp
Abstract
As part of “New Space,” low Earth orbit mega-constellations are gaining increasing popularity as the instrument for delivering broadband Internet from space. Apart from technical requirements, the necessity of lowering satellite communication costs to provide access to everyone will be the key to success. This article introduces a techno-economic assessment of the costs of constellation ownership and the costs of service delivery to the customer. Based on the tradespace exploration of our framework, we identify key performance indicators and their techno-economic relationship. We observe that the best cost-per-capacity performance was achieved by many low-complexity satellites in low orbits. Therefore, valuable insight can be offered to further understand and guide design choices in such vast and complex systems.