SpaceX Launch: Starlink 12 [video] | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Launch: Starlink 12 [video]

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92 pointscjnicholls51 comments

Everyone is commenting saying how mundane it has become to see the landings. Hence you might enjoy this official SpaceX Blooper reel from 2017 that shows the numerous spectacular failures that they worked through.

Innovation is a type of gamble. People forget that.

"SpaceX: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

(and regular reminder that these things are 12-storey high explosive tubes)

but that is what is so amazing about these landings. SpaceX has made them expected so the question becomes why is everyone else crashing boosters on purpose?

To put this into perspective, at one time we thought each plane taking off and landing was amazing and even the same just for launching a rocket. Now only the mishaps are event worthy

It is becoming mundane. I was in bed when I heard the launch. I didn't bother getting up to look since thy just launched one from the Cape a few days ago. I'll catch the next night launch. Those are spectacular.

If the Falcon 9 landings feel mundane, I would recommend to follow Starship development. Starship SN6 might do a 150 meter hop later today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5l9ZxsG9M

Musk can take decisions that a board of directors would never approve. :)

The true beauty of SpaceX is that they've made landing their boosters boring (almost). This makes their competitors throwing them away seem stupid.

It also shows how clever it was to livestream so much of what they do. So many people have seen a rocket booster land. Children today will hear that ULA doesn't land their boosters and ask "why not?".

Yup they've done such a good job of explaining exactly what's going on, live.

It's been interesting to see them improve too. It used to be that the video compression always used to ruin the final moment when the boosters landed at the sea platform. But now, they've even solved that.

From what I've heard, the reason for the signal loss during the landing was the drone ship losing its satellite data uplink from the shaking and interference caused by the landing booster.

Amazing how fast it became the new normal.

I remember the first booster landing. I was literally jumping up and down in my living room, even though I was just a spectator. I've dreamed of reusable rockets my entire life, and to see it happen was pretty incredible. Now I'm looking forward to stage 2 reusability.

Likewise... and when the Falcon heavy boosters landed side by side I was convinced that I was watching the making of history, but I’ve a feeling now that there’s so much yet to come from SpaceX over the next few years anything from the Falcon era is likely to be unimpressive by comparison.

We were watching it at work (remember offices?), had several people around someone's monitor. Somebody walks by, and asks what movie that is that we were watching. Couldn't convince them that it was real.

i watch the video of the first landing any time i need a boost of enthusiasm or motivation. It's just amazing.

My three year old and I have been watching rocket launches since he was 18 months old. He expects all rockets to land back on earth now.

I love that he's growing up with the idea that we don't need to throw away giant piles of metal just to launch something into space.

Let's talk about the "why not" for a second.

The incumbents have 200 years of collective head start over SpaceX, which started from scratch in 2002. They had 18 years to use that advantage to beat everyone else to reusable space access while remaining in the cherry procurement positions. Instead, they mismanaged, wrecked their quality culture, and lobbied for more handouts.

Unable to compete on merit, schedule,or price, ULA is reduced to buying another congressman, who's implying SpaceX is a security threat via the China card.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-s...

Innovator's dilemma. For quite awhile the only way ULA could make more money was by convincing congress to perform more launches. It makes sense that that is exactly what they became good at.

Even though consolidation is natural in this type of industry, the lack of competition is why there was no creative or progressive development. Why burden yourself with risk and investment if the current system pays you as-is?

> Unable to compete on merit, schedule,or price, ULA is reduced to buying another congressman, who's implying SpaceX is a security threat via the China card.

That's quite the leap, although I can see your logic.

Ultimately Musk should have seen this coming because it's obvious. He's tied a huge amount of his net worth to the favour of the CCP and involved himself with a program of national importance to a country that is at odds with the CCP.

What's worst, Musk has zero respect for any sort of arms length separation between his companies, so it's almost guaranteed that the CCP has some level of access to SpaceX IP as they expand their grasp on Tesla through Shanghai.

This was all easily avoidable if Musk didn't insist on thinking that if he didn't personally come up with the idea, the idea must be idiotic.

If some separation between companies is lacking, perhaps that's a contributing factor to the successes of all of them. It's very hard to argue against success by using an ad-hominem.

Could you outline what you felt like was an ad-hominem?

Yes, the topic of arms-length vs IP sharing in a global setting would be a fascinating discussion we should have!

But after opining there should be separation, instead of arguing the merits of that plan, GP uses a personality characterization instead, leaving the comment lacking support.

IMO the level of seperation between Tesla and SpaceX is both material and heavily influenced by Elon Musk's decisions here. They aren't saying something like "Elon Musk is a narcissist so we should assume he'll give CCP access". That would be an ad-hominid.

So if I fall your logic correctly then Boeing, which is part of ULA, is also in CCP's pockets. They produce planes there, a lot. Just one example.

This. Embracing level of argument. Lets ignore the fact also that the US had a 50+ year standing relationship with China and it encouraged its companies to work there, including China in the WTO and so on.

It really is quite incredible how boring this has become. I was chatting with a friend who used to follow all of this stuff closely with me at the beginning of the landing attempts. He wasn’t tuning in this morning (US east coast) because he didn’t find it exciting without the almost 50/50 chance the Stage 1 booster would RUD on landing.

Starhopper 150M hop window opened today. Hoping to see some action there as that seems to be the new hotbed of SpaceX excitement. Not that I wish for a RUD but it’s far more likely to see something crazy on these early experiments making it more fun to watch.

The booster landing is getting to be more like a golf clap at the end, even with the internal team. Wow.

Last hop there was no RUD but the raptor did quite a job to the launch mount it was definitely entertaining if not unexpected.

The “small fire” around the raptor engine pipework also added to the tension, even though we knew it was a success by the time we had that footage.

It definitely had that prototype feel to it.

Live stream for the 150m SN6 hop[1] ~(might scrub)~

Edit: didn't get scrubbed

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKA-r2lt8uc

An interesting detail mentioned during the webcast was that SpaceX have already performed initial testing of inter-satellite links on a pair of Starlink satellites.

Was that laser or radio links?

The commentator called them "space lasers" on stream

I love that the presenter is a female engineer. How inspiring this must be for millions of girls around the world. Hopefully it encourages more girls to take on engineering to help provide a better balance of gender in the field.

So is SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell.

You might be interested in her TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THQPNDNulVc

Thats becoming one massive constellation https://space-search.io/?search=starlink

Is it even possible to take them down without scattering debris all over the orbit later on?

Also, is orbit considered to be a free real estate? Does the first one to call dibs just take it or what? It's sure slowly getting a bit crowded over there.

orbit is so low it decays in a few years max. the lowest orbits may decay under a year.

yeah as @baq said these orbits are so low they fall down to earth without active acceleration.

Of course at the current time that means these orbits are 'taken'. I'm not sure exactly how those regulations work although each launch does require approval from the nation where the launch takes place I assume.

They already deorbit Starlink sats regularly. The "prototype" birds from the first launch are being decommissioned. SpaceX could hit a button (well, run a script, probably) and Starlink would disappear within 2-4 weeks.

Earth orbit is kinda first-come, first-served, though there is some coordination for GEO and large constellations via FCC and the ITU. It's really not particularly crowded. Starlink in particular basically occupies only one orbital shell at the moment, and not a particularly popular one, though it'll eventually have three or so.

>SpaceX could hit a button (well, run a script, probably) and Starlink would disappear within 2-4 weeks.

Make me wonder what kind of security is in place to prevent a bad actor from doing that.

Is there some 'field' of CS that deals with this? I would love to read about it.

I've had so many outages this month with Cox. Can't wait for this project to start rolling out to consumers.

my wife and i are looking at property in the mountains of SE Oklahoma. I'm hoping starlink comes online in the next 2-3 years.

They nailed the landing of the booster and I yawned.

Amazing.

At 9:33 she says "100 Megabytes/second". Probably megabits/second. Still cool.

Haha, yeah when I heard that I thought for a second there was some major new news with Starlink that it would offer gigabit internet, but I'm guessing she meant megabits too.

Still an incredible upgrade for almost anyone outside a metro area (and heck, judging by my 20 mbps upload speeds in a city, an upgrade there too most likely).

Eric Berger confirmed with SpaceX that it is 100 megabits.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/spacex-launches-12th...

Yeah... That's a pet peeve of mine, too.

There's an 8x difference between a megabit and a megabyte. Come on, people!

What will be the speed of the internet down and up link when fully operational? The video said 100Mbps at low latency. Do they expect more afterward?

The satellite deployment seemed a bit wonky at the end of the video. Like they were tangled. Hope it went ok.

SpaceX hosts said during earlier launches that these satellites are built to be able to bump into each other after payload separation. SpaceX chose to stack the satellites on top of each other to save mass and volume that a larger payload adapter would have required. The stacked satellites are held together by 'tension rods' which are released to let them separate. In today's launch, you can actually see a rod being released [0]. Normally they lose the video feed around that time. They separate relatively easily because the second stage spins up to 'throw' them out. It didn't look worse than during other launches.

https://www.starlink.com/ has an image carousel with renders of the satellites and the stack if someone wants to have a closer look.

[0] https://youtu.be/_j4xR7LMCGY?t=1780

So, what about upload speeds?

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