I can see it now. The tweets. The FaceBook updates. The miles high boasts. "I'm tweeting from space!!" Why? Because Virgin Galactic is looking to offer in-flight connectivity to passengers on its suborbital space tourism flights (they obviously won't need any seat-back entertainment for that ride).
RWG has learned that Sir Richard Branson is studying his connectivity options for SpaceShipTwo.
But what might he choose?
If you're going up and back to space, the aircraft would effectively serve as the satellite. In other words, it won't need to talk to a satellite, but rather a great big ground dish (a steerable antenna) that's talking to the aircraft.
Says a source: "The actual band used is X-band, which is in the gigahertz range. One of the big things of Ham Radio is you get a dish and bounce signals off spacecraft, or bounce them off the moon, so it's moon bounce communications."
Errr, anybody got a spare $102,000 laying around?
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