Low-orbit satellites could soon offer millions of people worldwide access to high-speed communications, but the satellites' potential has been stymied by a technological limitation -- their antenna arrays can only manage one user at a time.
The one-to-one ratio means that companies must launch either constellations of many satellites, or large individual satellites with many arrays, to provide wide coverage. Both options are expensive, technically complex, and could lead to overcrowded orbits.
For example, SpaceX went the "constellation" route. Its network, StarLink, currently consists of over 6,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit, over half of which were launched in the past few years. SpaceX aims to launch tens of thousands more in the coming years.
Now, researchers at Princeton engineering and at Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan have invented a technique that enables low-orbit satellite antennas to manage signals for multiple users at once, drastically reducing needed hardware.
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