Originally Posted by mixture
Satellites cost a lot of money to build, get into space and monitor....you can bet your bottom dollar that most of that capacity has been sold, if not even largely oversold on a contended basis !...
My previous post:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ml#post8801005
Was talking about NASA TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellites):
Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They are already built and flying and mainly just used for telemetry from space launches. They have over 1 gigabit/sec of capacity, so they are vastly over-provisioned for the initial intended use. Consequently NASA sells bandwidth on these to other agencies, including non-governmental entities.
I'm not saying continuous telemetry from commercial DFDRs is needed, nor that TDRS is the best way even if it was needed. I'm just responding to the post that there's no available satellite bandwidth.