We all know that besides Tesla, Elon Musk owns another famous company, SpaceX, which was established 20 years ago and has launched 2,400 small satellites for various purposes to date. Just recently, Geely Auto in China has successfully launched the first batch of nine satellites, which provide high precision navigation for ground vehicles and will be applied to new technologies such as autonomous driving. The company has also announced that it will have launched 72 satellites by the end of 2025 for the Geely Future Mobility Constellation to cover the entire Chinese Mainland in preparation for the advent of a new age of automobiles. Geely is the first traditional automaker that has space business in the world. In addition, Hon Hai is planning to launch an LEO satellite next year to be used in the experimental field of real-time networking environment for EVs and even for the future needs of a self-driving system. As the automakers extend the battle over new automotive technology into space, one can't help but wonder: Why do they bother with launching their own satellites instead of using the off-the-shelf GPS system or China's existing BDS (BeiDou Navigation Satellite System)?
First of all, the satellites launched by the automakers are all LEO satellites, which are between 50 and 2,000 km above the ground, while the well-known U.S. military GPS is higher, an MEO (medium Earth orbit) satellite. Because of its proximity to ground receiving stations, the LEO satellite has the inherent advantage of low signal latency and low transmission loss. Moreover, the advancement in rocket launch and propulsion technology in the past five years has led to a continuous decrease in manufacturing costs, making LEO satellites much more commercially competitive. The LEO satellite, meeting the three major needs of "enhanced mobile broadband" (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), is a key complementary technology for the future generation of B5G/6G (B5G: beyond fifth-generation) interconnection. Compared with the existing terrestrial networking facilities, the LEO satellite is not susceptible to natural disasters or noise interference while providing coverage without a dead angle and higher information security. It can undoubtedly make up for the biggest technical blind spot of V2X (vehicle-to-everything, such as vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-person, vehicle-to-infrastructure, etc.) for self-driving cars and collect environmental data for the system to interpret and make decisions in places where sensors cannot "see" so as to achieve the goal of vehicle-road collaboration.
Currently, there are four constellations of commercial global LEO satellites: SpaceX's Starlink, Amazon's Project Kuiper, the UK-India partnership OneWeb, and Canada's Telesat. These companies have been launching satellites intensively since 2019, and Starlink and OneWeb are already in commercial operation. The constellations, spanning the global sky, will surely gain great business opportunities when the autonomous driving technology is in place in 2030 as expected. However, the most insurmountable challenge in the commercialization of LEO satellites is probably the investment cost. The cost of one single satellite is low, but its low altitude means that the surface coverage is restricted, and therefore, it takes the deployment of a "galaxy" (a colossal number of LEO satellites) to deliver specific results. In addition to acquiring sufficient finances, companies need to jostle with others for dedicated frequency/orbit resources. So, the dust may settle in the space warfare before long.