from Hacker News

SpaceX is buying communications smallsat operator Swarm Technologies

by caiobegotti on 8/8/21, 2:52 AM with 25 comments

• by walrus01 on 8/8/21, 5:23 AM

  I have a theory they're buying it more for the engineering talent and personnel, than any intention to run a narrow-bandwidth cubesat M2M communications network as a separate thing to starlink.

• by whoknowswhat11 on 8/8/21, 5:51 AM

  Very complementary.

  They are going to have synergies obviously around launch (swarm sats are relatively tiny so cost now with spaceX for launch is going to be very low).

  Product is also differentiated. You want global low bandwidth (primarily M2M but can also be search and rescue etc) along with the higher bandwidth / power / footprint starlink stuff. Businesses often strugle with being competed against from the bottom - I hope SpaceX keeps the swarm idea going.

  Obviously a way to pick up capable engineering talent. If they can do sat to sat comms (I think still an area of some development to really dial in). that's going to be big for everyone - and if swarm can interoperate / get backhaul in space from starlink - amazing.

• by lgats on 8/8/21, 6:26 AM

  Some details on the technology/licenses being acquired: https://fcc.report/IBFS/SAT-T-C-20210806-00096/12345289

• by NelsonMinar on 8/8/21, 3:32 PM

  Very curious about the price. And whether this is a hopeful acquisition to expand on what Swarm is doing, a fire sale of a company that couldn't make the financials work, or some monopolistic move to snuff out a competitor.

• by matttrotter on 8/9/21, 5:19 PM

  The Swarm Tile looks easily integratable into PCB designs. And, it's very low power. Although, I wonder why they need about 3 Watts power consumption when transmitting. At their low transmit frequencies (148-150 MHz), I would think they could lower that number to less than 1 Watt since the wavelengths are so long. But hey, if you deploy your sensor in a sunny location with solar panels, then why not?