SpaceX launches 60 more Starlink satellites
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoon and night (if we had a sunny day and our batteries were full). That lasted about 8 months until someone built a barn or something and installed some electricity poles. We weren't able to connect anymore.
After that we drove almost daily to the village and spent a couple of hours in a café with a flaky 2Mbps connection but it became unpractical. We went back to civilization 2 months later or so.
If Starlink would have been available back then maybe we'd still be living in the mountains!
That's impressive, but how did this work from the school's side? Wouldn't they need a huge wifi antenna too?
The huge antenna [1] was connected to an Alfa R36 hotspot which was fairly powerful. I guess that's why it worked.
[1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML...
So one can "hear" signals further away and "speak" softer than would.be normally necessary.
https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Directional-Parabolic-Connect...
One of our neighbors who lived a couple of kms from us had a point-to-point Motorola antenna connecting with the closest village. We considered doing that but there was a mountain between us and the village which complicated things. Also connectivity in the area was so bad the only ISP available hadn't been signing new contracts for years. The region was difficult to access and wasn't particularly rich, it didn't make sense for ISPs to invest in upgrading 15 years old ADSL.
But if you can get that anywhere... it'll be amazing and have a profound effect.
So "anywhere" would be limited to vanlife on up, in a place that doesn't have trees, in the markets initially served, which will likely be rural US.
But starlink v2? I'll be on a cute Panamanian island :)
I sail a bit, and I've always wanted to sail the world, but giving up a decent internet connection has always been the main deal-breaker.
What problems do trees cause for starlink?
The flag need's a change, the rest is just perfect!!!
Shuttle had an advantage since the orbiter was both first and second stages.
The orange fuel tank was lost on each mission, and the solid rocket boosters were recovered and refurbished after a swim in the ocean.
So by some measures the Shuttle system was very reusable, but the complexities of the system resulted in high costs to tear down, inspect, and refurbish between flights.
It would have been cheaper to build new ones.
My understanding is that refurbishment meant basically stripping them for parts and using them to build new boosters, but still a significant amount of percentage re-use of parts.
It just highlights how important the amount of type of required refurbishment is to making re-usability actually practical. Falcon 9 is noteworthy because it's relatively inexpensive up-front compared to traditional boosters, relatively simple in design and part count (compared to STS) and relatively quick and inexpensive to re-use.
Reused booster ruptured under improper launch criteria revised for management and public relations reasons.
Would it have been okay if it weren’t for the wrong go? Maybe, but still the potato quality refurbishment of flown boosters could have done it sooner or later.
Edit: This one is better: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17321/did-the-chal...
The boosters were technically reusable, but refurbishing them after the corrosive bath they've taken by their landing in the ocean was much more expensive than making new ones from scratch.
You'll note that SpaceX lands their rockets on a barge, instead of landing them on water and fishing them out later - that's because they want to keep the salt water out of the rocket.
But I think _you're_ referring to the SRBs.
In both cases (SSME and SRB) they were re-used in some fashion, though I agree the SRB re-use was not a good solution.
I thought you meant SRBs because they too were advertised as reusable, even though in practice, they weren't.
Also unlike the Space Shuttle, the 5 boosters did all the orbital boosting, Buran only had small orbital correction engines on board (like Shuttle OMS), all big engines were down on the boosters.
Space Shuttle Budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
Falcon 9 costs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Pricing
Not directly comparable but still show a large improvement in efficiency.
Total cost of Space Shuttle program (in 2000 cost mind you) was $200B for 134 launches, or $1.5B each.
And an expendable Falcon launch actually can put nearly as much payload into LEO by weight as the Shuttle, and costs around $45M (priced $63M).
Something that's often overlooked here is how extensive the required refurbishment is.
The "reusable" shuttle boosters and orbiter engines took substantial time (https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584723main_Wings-ch... says 4-5 months), money, and labor to get ready for the next launch. SpaceX is still making noise about trying out a same-day reflight sometime soon; it's clearly a much less involved process.
How much will light pollution increase when the next competitor launches 1500+ satellites?
How much will light pollution increase when a Chinese competitor launches yet another 1500+ satellites?
I'm all for faster internet, but not at the cost of making space travel impossible.
Will the Chinese do the same? We'll see. But it's definitely possible to mitigate these concerns. There's not much to discuss until a credible competitor to Starlink emerges.
This latest launch should be in the dataset soon!
I'd say it's certainly good enough to use if your cable company wants to charge too much.
I think in the cities of the developed world we don't realize how big this going to be for rural dwellers and people in the developing world.
One satellite in this batch has an experimental sunshade which should make it completely invisible to the naked eye regardless of the location, once it reaches its final orbit. This sunshade will likely be on every satellite in subsequent launches.
I just laid there in awe. After about a dozen in the train, it occured to me that it must be starlink or aliens due to the number of coorbital satellites.
I actually teared up, not because the sky was "ruined" but because humanity had become part of the stars, and more than just a blip. My imagination ran forward to Gibson's detuned TV skies.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/duw4o4/starlink_1...
Edit: also IIRC, SpaceX said that Starlink will offer up plans up to 1Gbps
Sat to ground and ground to sat use different frequencies so I would guess it can do roughly that speed in both directions simultaneously. There are also separate frequencies for ground stations and for user terminals, and I believe the implication was this was for user terminals. The number was just obtained by someone implying around 20gbps on the 0.9 sats and later on someone else saying something about 4-5x the speed on these sats. It's not official or likely to be particularly accurate.
Combined with covid / unrest / remote work, starlink could dramatically enable population decentralization.
Maybe living in a world where a trip to the grocery store can have fatal consequences has warped mysense of risk, but this doesn't seem worth worrying about.
Slight risk of fatal debris collision vs benefit of Starlink? Probably worth the risk.
Slight risk vs cost of having Starlink design into more burnable bits? Probably worth having them redesign.
> git commit -m "lasers"
> Test failed: broken satellites > No debris found on earth on re-entry
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41142/do-the-lates...
(I had no idea what "laser comms" were, unfortunately they're not laser cannons but rather lasers for communications between satellites. Which is still pretty cool)
Low earth orbit satellites with global coverage seem like such a better approach than balloons that you have to handle in the air assuming the following is true:
- Latency difference between the two is negligible
- Satellites are not uniquely affected by weather
- Balloons are not better in some other unknown way?
I wonder if they're seeing this as the existential threat that it is.
What am I missing?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiEZfRh-h-s https://loon.com/
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18200879/alphabet-project...
Should be a fun few years watching this industry try to establish itself.
Balloons can be concentrated in the areas where they are needed most. The nature of non-geosynchronous orbital planes is you end up having to distribute satellites roughly uniformly around the earth (you get non-uniform effects with latitude but in very limited ways).
Balloons can be brought down and be serviced, satellites are basically throw it up there and replace it when it breaks.
Google already has experience with being an ISP with fiber and fi.
I tend to agree that starlink is winning, but balloons do have some advantages.
I think you're right on balloon concentration and there's a narrow use case here for things like congested events, but it's pretty niche. I think Starlink is trying to get uniform satellite distribution? Global coverage in the common case seems a lot more important than concentration as long as you can meet the minimum bandwidth required (which they probably can).
I think servicing is a good point, maybe the balloons can improve faster as a result, but it's also a negative (having to service/track them all of the time). It's also not global coverage - has Loon given up on this goal entirely?
Global coverage for Starlink means access to a global customer market which can help cover their increased costs (since I'd guess margins after launch are low). Without a global market even if Loon has lower costs it'll be harder for them to get the revenue to cover them.
> "Google already has experience with being an ISP with fiber and fi."
They abandoned Fiber and I hear Fi kind of sucks, but you're right that this is a point in their favor.
These feel like rationalizations of a losing position to me.
If I worked at Loon I would be worried.