Why SpaceX Is Making Starlink | Hacker News Reader

Why SpaceX Is Making Starlink

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32 pointssamcday9 comments

Well, a better video title would be "How Starlink Works".

I think it's high time that communications gets disrupted. And this is Elon's brilliance yet again. Targeting the financial industry with a low-latency communications solution will put them on the best possible path to funding this for the masses.

Curious to hear what the biggest technical risks are to this project.

It seems as if most of the risks are derisked. The satellites are cheap and planned to be replaced often. If you lose a batch on the pad due to a vehicle failure, you just setup another launch. If you have a technical deficiency, your satellite lifetime is already expected to be low; you’re going to push a new batch out anyway. The launch vehicles have already been paid for by lift clients; they’re free besides sunk ops, refurb, and fuel costs.

As long as deorbit on command works, the only risk is buyers not buying the service. SpaceX is going to print money with StarLink.

Disclaimer: SpaceX investor by way of a Fidelity fund.

Probably colliding satellites

There's very little at that altitude except other starlink satellites.

As someone who lives in Mexico, where connectivity outside of big cities is severely limited, I'm super excited about this.

I lived 1 year in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz and the biggest issue was by far the lack of connectivity.

Do current satellite internet services not work?

Depends on the definition of working.

The current services are expensive and you are sharing your very limited and precious bandwidth with many other users.

I am really impressed with the quality of the content of Real Engineering, the video's YouTube channel. And they pump out content like this every week. That sounds like a lot of work.

I like that several companies are competing to do this, so nobody will have monopoly power for long. Probably SpaceX will have lower operating costs, but Musk wants to siphon off ROI for his Mars, er, project.

Probably the other players will be better capitalized, but have more pressure to get to break-even. Differences in peering arrangements could have big effects on usefulness, as will bandwidth capacity, which seems likely to be limited in SpaceX's first system. They will probably sell it, as the video suggests, on latency for low bandwidth traffic, meaning it is likely not to be cost-effective for video streaming. It is hard to guess whether any on-board cache would turn out to be useful.

The first to deploy will be a dancing bear: it will matter less how good it is than that it works at all. But the first will also get the first hard experience needed for their second system.

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