Hi, I watched Amir's keynote address at Meshcon on Spec 5's YouTube channel and I was really interested to hear his idea of launching a LEO satellite for the mesh. He mentioned that it would cost about $250,000. Has the company considered crowdfunding it? I'm sure a lot of people in the Meshtastic community would be enthusiastic about the idea.
Thank you, Michael. We are working on this right now. We are currently reaching out to put together a panel of radio, satcomm and space ops experts on our Space Advisory Board. We have also reached out to a couple of launch providers for details around costs, schedules and so on. As soon as we have enough information to credibly approach the community, we'll definitely engage. This will be a good thing for everyone!
You should try to get someone from AMSAT on your Advisory Board. They might have some folks with collateral meshtastic interest that already have experience launching ham satellites. I'm very excited to see how this goes!
We wrote to them via their website some time ago, but have not heard back. Do you know of anyone there in particular that might be responsive? Sounds like a great group.
We have actually been doing quite a bit of research on this idea of LoRa in LEO. For one, Meshtastic just won't cut it. It's not built for the kind of reliability you would need to deploy on a satellite. There aren't any remote management features of the type that would be required and there are very large firmware updates which are expensive to get across with the types of links one would have access to in an afforable context.
So, something else would have to be engineered to support reliable and multi-year LEO operations. We've conferred with a number of experts, and would welcome a discussion with the right people at AMSAT.
