SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks
techcrunch.com
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Speeds are 10-15x faster, she’s having an easier time with her online community college course and her job KPI is up by double digit percents [1]. She was worried that IT wouldn’t be OK with it when I said it was satellite (They’d been burned too many times), but the IT guy was incredibly excited because he’s also waiting to get Starlink.
Looking forward to the service only getting better, really incredible execution.
[0] My dad went on the roof in the cold Wisconsin winter to put it up.
[1] Lines transcribed per hour, as a medical transcriptionist working from home.
It’s noticeably high so I assume at some point it’ll be reduced unless it’s caused by continuous “transmission” so the satellite doesn’t lose the connection.
Anyhow, just hoping they can figure out how to get the average power draw down over time.
If you start running low you can stop letting it idle.
> More solar could be added, but there are some space and weight limitations on a vehicle.
It can be a problem if you're off-grid and moving around, yeah.
For general off-grid use it's annoying but not a big deal to set up an extra panel or two.
[0]-https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the...
100W of microwaves according to another comment here. By contrast your microwave oven might emitting 800W for a few minutes.
Unlike the few watts of a Wifi router or phone, it emits high power electromagnetic radiation.
It's definitely something you attach to your roof and pointed at the sky, not something you want to be sitting in front of for hours.
I could say the same thing about a light bulb, couldn't I?
It heats your skin slowly, and it can't get far enough into your eyes to hurt your retina or anything.
Microwaves penetrate your skin and even your skull. It's heating your brain like cooking food in a microwave. Yes, it's non-ionizing, but there's a relationship between heating, inflammation and cancer. And it's wrong to ignore it.
Just take simple precautions like not sitting right in front of a 100W space antenna, but instead mount it on your roof.
Also the actual signal from that antenna is 20 watts or less. If it heats you, that's going to be because it's warm.
Any interesting people behind what is happening at SpaceX ?
someone I know (coincidentally in wisconsin) is getting 100m down 20m up
There's always (the other) Linus: https://youtu.be/Fh1a2K9ZgNA
I'm in exurban Wisconsin. Speeds are fine, but Charter has terrible routing that pushes everything out to Minnesota before routing back down to Chicago. 40ms to 60ms latency on EVERYTHING.
Just space alone isn’t enough to say the latency will be worse.
so 3.6 milliseconds raw speed-of-light round trip when overhead.
I don't know what it would be like as it reaches the horizon, and how much latency each hop takes.
That's kinda sad, isn't it?
https://qz.com/1627570/how-autonomous-are-spacexs-starlink-s...
It's really unfortunate that this company unlike most companies treats all the brain drain as an ego trip.
Look at any FAANG presentation. The VP of the department introduces a PM, who may have a senior engineer with them. The other 98% of the team isn't mentioned.
> That's kinda sad, isn't it?
Why don't you start a thread about it. Poll workers and see if they find themselves upset by it or not. Don't just borrow offense on their behalf.
That said, I recall he has not only explicitly credited lead engineers by name but also discussed their technologies with them and given them stage time to discuss their tech with the audience. [see the automation day videos for example]
Starlink are the least likely satellites to create "eventual junk" since they orbit so low. The biggest criticism is probably that there are so many they present a visual hazard for astronomy
If SpaceX has room on a launch vehicle or an empty launch vehicle, they stuff it with Starlink satellites. Since Starlink will require constant refreshes, SpaceX has a constant client, it becomes far easier for them to offer smaller payloads at good rates. This is SpaceX's way of commoditizing launches and keeping their launch service running regularly.
It's extremely clever use of complimentary resources.
They are a headache for astronomers. Its debatable which is the bigger public good.
If Apple were to start selling CPUs, you could argue that they had a similar model, but they don't (and won't because their CPUs are a competitive advantage).
What Amazon and SpaceX are doing isn't vertical integration in the classic sense. While Amazon sells AWS, they also have an online retail platform. Their retail platform consumes AWS services. Similarly, SpaceX is both the supplier of launch services and the consumer of launch services.
Amazon's retail operations are profitable, but by being their own best customer, they help Amazon drive profitability and demand for AWS.
Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time with new companies in new markets. The space launch market though has been around for a long time. To me it seems unusual for an industry that's been around for half a century or so to not be big enough to absorb the excess capacity of a newcomer.
I love how undoectacular their flights have become, and wonder how long it will take until they stop commenting their live streams. I still watch them, but I started to skip forward or just listen to it in the background while programming.
Your typo of `unspectacular` is almost as spectacular as a Starlink mission has become.
So yeah, maybe, look forward to billionaires launching their dead bodies into space, after all that tesla car is still somewhere out there floating about heh
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
Two balloons, about 46 hours of endurance, limiting factor apparently being running out of battery power.
That said, there very well might be a couple small and maybe one medium class missions picked. Don't think it would be a blimp, more likely an Orbiter.
Priority might end up being an lander for Europe style moon as a flagship. And further Moon and Mars exploration.
My hope honestly is that we do a serious rethink and go back to the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter but for Neptune or Uranus. A flagship mission, multiple launches, large nuclear reactor, massive amount of propellant, launched on specialised Starship to get there faster. With some real large radar on it, and maybe multiple smaller landers. Should be able to operate for 20-30 years in those systems.
This is how we need to think now for flagship missions.
I also hope for further study of a Dark side of the moon radio telescope built from moon resources.
They seem to produce these sats at almost unbelievable rates. They are truly mass production. No like 'we build 70 over a couple years' mass production but more like motorcycles or something like that.
SpaceX is doing like 70+% of global transportation to Orbit and launching most of the world sats. Its actually insane.
And its really only been taking of since 2017, people will be suprised where they are in 2024. Not landing on Mars, but probably launching private unmanned missions to Mars.
For the moon the have DearMoon and hopefully get selected as a NASA partner.
The goal of this design of Falcon 9 is to handle 10 flights with minimum refurbishment. Right now, it looks like they're within a couple months of achieving that goal for the first time, with booster 1049 close as well, at 8 flights.
SpaceX is soon going to reach a point that they don't need to build more Falcon 9 boosters.
(It looks like they have very few customers anymore that insist on a new-build booster -- the fussiest had been the US government, but at this point, NASA is accepting reused boosters for human spaceflight, and the NRO has also accepted one for a mission last year. As far as I know, no one has publicly said they'd rather their booster has a test flight yet.)
https://spacenews.com/iridium-open-to-reused-falcon-9s-if-it...
If they can go significantly beyond 10, say 20, they have years of booster left if they want to.
I think they might only need to produce like 5ish or so more and that should mostly be fine until Starship destroys the market for the F9.
In Placerville California our service went from Calnet 10mbps down at 28ms latency to Starlink 160mbps down at 24ms latency.
This is a really big deal and will disrupt a lot of these shitty ISPs that have done nothing for years.
Also, still tracking for my 2021 predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25601473
Edit: Price is only $99/month with one up front cost for the hardware ($500).
Upload is currently only 15mbps, but should improve.
Elon says we should see 300mbps soon and less than 20ms ping (iirc).
Oh no they did do a lot. They lobbied for hundreds of billions of dollars from congress to upgrade infrastructure, then gave themselves bonuses and bought back company stock.
Arguably satellite service erases all of this and is a hard reset on rural telecommunications. Unfortunately, it's not a industry small businesses can participate in.
From a policy standpoint as a citizen - I think it’s terrible the telecom monopolies took public money and did nothing, but I think they’ll start feeling competitive pressure from Starlink too, hopefully this will force them to adapt or die (I don’t really care which).
In SF with Google webpass fiber, Comcast is not competitive.
I guess it depends on what you mean by bad service. If by "Bad service" you mean don't return calls when your service is down, then I agree. If you are referring to bandwidth or latency, you are likely getting the best they can afford to give you for the price. It's the price you pay for living in the sticks. (I suffered with crap small ISP "high speed" internet for years so I sympathize).
I'm not suggesting anyone should stick with an inferior product to bolster small business. Their run at being internet providers is coming to an end.
Running fiber isn't really any more expensive than running copper, and they managed to afford to run the copper.
Mini rant: Can we stop calling that guy by his first name as if you were his acquaintance?
Does that work better for you?
Musk just has a weird mouth feel (has the same strange feeling like saying "Moist", to me), Elon just flows of the tongue better, (both literally and metaphorically in the "thought voice" sense), and also is rather unique (unlike Jack, Tim, Mark or Jeff, Elon is a far less common name)
if it gets the point across, why quibble over such minor details?
Also, on a seperate point, Elon has rather created that familiarity by his constant Twitter updates, we FAR more about Elon, both personally and professionally, on a MUCH more regular basis, than like the next thousand billionaires combined. It's not strange that people DO genuinely believe they are acquainted with him in some way.
If you're curious about both the positives and negatives of Starlink I highly recommend the mini documentary "Is this the END of Astronomy?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TifUa8ENQes
Most things in life are like this. Wind turbines are a great way to supply green energy, but building them takes a lot of energy. So it is important to also think about things like using low co2 concrete, and making them more efficient. They also kill many birds, but this is nothing compared to the amount of birds that cats kill. And engineers are working on ways to get fewer birds killed.
Maybe Starlink constellations will be an incentive to finish the JWT, and other space telescopes...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/black-paint-on-wind-...
The study you're citing was only studied 4 wind turbines, while the evidence does point towards this working, I wouldn't say that the existing evidence is conclusive. Also, the turbines with the darker blades still killed birds, just less bird than the turbines with standard blades.
The percent of human-caused bird deaths due to wind turbines is smaller than the percent of Americans dying in airplane crashes each year, compared to all US deaths each year.
Both are a non-negligible factor for their respective species.
not saying i disagree with your point overall but not a fan of that stat
Turbines are bad for birds. Period.
FWIW, turbines may be worse than cats in terms of harming large birds of prey. You won't see neighborhood cats killing eagles. I'd still agree that it's probably a reasonable tradeoff though, and that it could be further reduced with better engineering.
They have their drawbacks, but that aint one of 'em.
>Using mortality estimates adjusted for searcher detection and scavenger removal rates, we estimated the annual wind turbine–caused bird fatalities to number [...] 2,710 (80% CI =-6,100 to 11,520) birds.
That's 1/2 a bird per turbine per year. Or one bird per 110 nameplate KW per year.
That means that they're a bit safer than the average building, assuming that the number of buildings in the US doesn't exceed the number of people by a large amount.
>We estimate that between 365 and 988 million birds (median = 599 million) are killed annually by building collisions in the U.S., with roughly 56% of mortality at low-rises, 44% at residences, and <1% at high-rises.
But if people create a constant stream of excess feral cats, then pretty soon cats decimate songbirds.
E.g. the estimate is that the Altamont Pass installation kills ~440 burrowing owls per year, when there's likely to be fewer than 10k breeding pairs of owls left. That's a 2% kill rate (or more, counting the disruption to breeding pairs) from one (larger) installation.
Reminder : we only have one sky.
Things offer both positives and negatives, but
a) generally those things are decided by local powers and authorities that can be influenced by local populations -- not corporations from specific countries that may or may not be far away and without local permission
(those decisions that are made by foreign corporations that modify local attributes is generally frowned upon -- very few like the oil rigs scattered around the ocean, they tolerate them due to the profits associated)
b) very few of these decisions create global impacts, the ones that do (say, environmental issues) have many confounding factors and influence groups working with them, representing many different people and locales.
In just so happens that in the case of 'the sky' we're all 'locals' -- but very few people, with respect to 'the world', had a say in the matter.
I think if Elon had gone to, say, the UN and tried to start a discussion about this stuff more generally to establish some ground rules for SpaceX and others, it would have been much better received. It would've given a forum to those affected - communities around the world and astronomers and other satellite operators - where none exists. Some discussions around things like target albedos, orbital parameters, and constellation sizes could've been had before a single bird went up. This would've also made life easier for other operators now working out how to dodge the Starlink constellation on the regular.
But Elon is not that sort of person, which is the great tragedy in all this. Maybe you have to be a screw-the-rest, I'm-going-to-do-it kind of person to succeed as he has (or just inherit a huge pile of cash, or maybe both). But it strikes me that as a strategy he's opted to go it alone until regulators start to step in, which is unlikely in this industry for a while given the global nature.
I think it will take something akin to the blocking of satellite uplinks (that brought the UN into international satellite operations somewhat, and effectively designated such jamming as an offensive act of war) to actually bring regulatory scrutiny to bear. The loss of ground-based astronomy isn't a big enough issue - yet - to justify the engagement. But if these constellations get bigger and bigger and the impact gets larger and larger, then that impact will add up. All we've had so far is the "early warnings" from those paying attention to the early deployments.
I think Starlink and its competitors are a very important short-term part of the global internet access discussion, but it's not a long-term fix; constant satellite launches, maintenance, and deorbiting will not be viable cost-wise over the 20-40 years most fibre installations expect to be around for at a minimum. Fibre will eventually reach everywhere - wireline operators across the globe are seeing Starlink as a short-term thing which may paradoxically make it much harder to justify rolling out a proper fix to the hardest to reach, and which may cause governments to deploy subsidy to offset the risk. In the USA it's a bit mad and distorted because of the insane market that regulators have allowed, but in the EU/UK and most of Asia, govts are making sure full fibre gets to everyone (slowly, in many cases, but it is speeding up rapidly these days).
Just like nuclear, this is a perfectly good stop-gap. But the right answer is renewables - everyone knows it - it's just a matter of timing.
If he was, SpaceX and Starlink wouldn't exist. Have you ever tried to handle anything at UN level? That a 10-20 year discussion and even then must likely nothing will be agree on.
The Outer-Space treaty has been argued about for 50+ years and not a single revision has been made.
SpaceX is fully in line with the current interventional space regulation. Nothing SpaceX is doing is qualitatively different then what anybody else does. They just do it more.
In fact, in many way SpaceX fast adjustment and dialogue with astronomy community is forward thinking. The reality is, its not UN and treaties that are gone solve these problems, but the actual stack holders working together.
SpaceX is working with ESA on LEO consolation safety (as ESA has multiple sats in the same region) and work with astronomers to find good compromises and give them the data they need to plan operations.
> constant satellite launches, maintenance, and deorbiting will not be viable cost-wise over the 20-40 years
The cost of accessing to space will drop 10x at least in the next 10 years and likely go down more after that.
> Just like nuclear, this is a perfectly good stop-gap. But the right answer is renewables - everyone knows it - it's just a matter of timing.
Actually nuclear would have been the right answer and the only reason 'renwables' (nuclear is practically renewable as well) are considered is because terrible global handling of nuclear has made it unpractical.
In 100-200 years people will be using nuclear, not renewables, they are the stop-gap for now.
But by playing its part in SpaceX's goal of driving down the cost of access to space, it also creates real increased opportunities for space-based astronomical observations.
Laying down optics is a much better solution to this selfish problem.
Very eager to ditch my patchwork of expensive cellular and traditional satellite.
It's probably all moot as China would probably simply halt Tesla Sales, as they are not bound by the logics of legality.
Musk's biggest risk in China is the CCP confiscating the Tesla factory in Shanghai.
Not with rockets, but maybe with lasers? What damage can a single one do? Could a country deploy them at specific orbits to have enough coverage to destroy a sufficient amount?
They told me this about 20 years ago and I don’t know what’s changed since then. Presumably someone here knows if it’s still hard or if it became easy since 2001?
you'd need at least $400 of test equipment to check that the >$100 of parts were working right, and to diagnose any problems. not cost effective.
The SpaceX receiving dish (dishy) will just be on that list for certain countries.
The reality distortion field around musk is insane...
First of all, SpaceX will not sell Firewall circumvention in China. They are an ISP and need to follow the rules if they want to officially sell there.
Second, even if somehow people got terminals and try to use them, SpaceX could block them. And even if they didn't, the government could locate these people, relativity easily.
Third, even if you assume the CCP is so 'diabolical' to attack Tesla, because of SpaceX. The are not a universal power, China has big plans to have their own car companies be exporters of EV and export batteries and be a major player in the battery supply chain. If they went after Tesla will some BS rules, I would suspect it would cause an international issue on the highest level and would lead to tit-for-tat style destruction on all sides potentially.
SpaceX will never be beholden to China, neither will Boring or Neurolink.
And if CCP simply starts attacking foreign auto-maker based on pretences based on pretences. Then the US have a significant interest in paying back China auto and battery makers in equal measure. And European car makers and companies also have to seriously ask them-selves when its gone happen to them.
The deals about how the car market is set up, is being made between countries and are part of international agreements.
That's true for the Model 3 for the first half of 2020 only, they were a long way behind in 2019 and were outsold by the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV in the second half of 2020. Most of their competitors sell multiple models as well meaning that in some of those months they sold more EVs than Tesla overall.
The Model 3 smashed it for a few months last year, but they're not the largest selling EV maker in China.
In terms of revenue generated overall Tesla easily beats everybody else. And Tesla just added the Model Y and they will likely be 1&2 on the market.
Of course only since 2020 as that is when the factory opened.
SpaceX may or may not decide to bring Starlink to China. But either they will bring it to China following the Chinese government's rules, or they will geofence it so it can't be accessed from Chinese territory.
More interesting than China though are regional communications shutdowns. Will India be able to turn off communications in Kashmir? Will various countries be able to turn off the internet on national school entrance exam days? Will democracies for show be able to turn off the internet when the votes aren't as expected?
Basically: dear SpaceX, please switch off your sats over our territory, or we will do it for you.
I wouldn't be surprised if China just started their own state sponsored low orbit satellite internet.
Another decent, cheaper middle ground would be operating just the 'first-hop' satellites that ground units communicate with and adjusting the technology such that the dish units used in china are substantially different in terms of the actual RF. Then these China run satellites enforce the GFW and then route traffic to Starlink and other 'non-china' satellites.
The biggest downside I see to that setup is that this satellite technology has to in a non-geostationary orbit which means you need a lot more satellites to get 24 hour coverage in a specific location. This isn't a problem if you want to provide service to the entire planet but for country specific networks; the extra satellites are a bit redundant.
The even safer option is to make running a ground dish itself a government enterprise. Private/non-state ownership remains illegal but the state uses Starlink et al. as just another backbone in their state network. This is probably the most likely since it is far simpler to integrate and control.
Starlink's stance on the issue is probably enough to satisfy countries like the UK that have some unique internet laws but are still satisfied with using the normal western legal process to enforce their needs.
The relevant part can be translated like this:
> (not complying with the law) entails the imposition of an administrative fine on officials in the amount of ten to thirty thousand rubles; On legal entities - from five hundred thousand to one million rubles.
For some reason the part about officials gets applied to simple citizens, which is completely incorrect in my understanding of the law.
So my guess is that you will not be able to legally to import Starlink receivers into Russia unless some kind of agreement will be achieved, but simple citizens owning such receiver will not be prosecuted (well, at least in the near future). Though they may be prosecuted under a different law if they'll try to share the unrestricted Internet access with other people. It's quite similar to VPNs, currently it's not illegal in Russia to use it to visit blocked resources, but it's illegal to provide such service (though any sane person would not use a VPN-service based in Russia to work around those blocks in the first place).
By filing legal complaints through the ITU (which is a UN agency), probably. I expect some international treaties probably come into play. Basically, China complains to the UN, the UN tells the US they can't provide Internet service in China unless they follow China's rules, and then the FCC tells SpaceX that if they don't comply the FCC will shut them down.
Of course, the US government could just decide to ignore China and let SpaceX do whatever they want. (This is all assuming that SpaceX wants to be the Robin Hood of the global Internet and take censorship from the powerful and give access to the poor and not worry about the geopolitical or economic consequences. They might just want to be a regular internet service provider that follows all the rules in whatever country they operate in and doesn't make waves. They could also just not offer service in China.)
It's kind of a weird situation. I mean, it's space, so you'd think you'd be outside of any legal jurisdiction and be able to get away with whatever, but actually satellites and radio communication are heavily regulated and subject to international agreements and treaties.
I'm guessing there will be Starlink ground stations located in China that are subject to the same conditions as all the other local ISPs?
I'm not sure if China will let them operate though – nothing to do with censorship, to do with protectionism. They might want to reserve the Chinese market for a future Chinese controlled constellation.
Until such time as they are approved by the Chinese government to operate in China, they are going to geofence their satellites to refuse connections from terminals located on Chinese territory.
I got pinged by a recruiter from Kuiper the other week and all I can see is that there's no way they're on track to be working in 5 years. They don't even have a stable launch platform. Would Musk sell Bezos the ride?
For example, they intentionally swap hardware components between reflown boosters to better understand their behavior after multiple reuses, to the point they have individual modules that have flown more times than the current maximum number of reuses of any booster as a whole (currently at 9).
Another example, they've stopped having static fires for flight proven boosters first for Starlink, then for customer payloads too, unless the customer explicitly requests it.
It's unbelievable that "flight proven booster" turned out to be really what it says on the tin, and not just a piece of marketing speak.
That's a thing to love about SpaceX. When they first started using this phrase, it was tongue-in-cheek in a pretty obvious way. Three years later, it was no longer a joke.
First of all, why wouldn't they? They are confident that their satellite tech is superior.
And second, SpaceX is dominating the commercial launch market to such a degree that they would run into antitrust issues if they were to use their launch dominance for antocompetitive behaviour.
But Bezos would probably be too proud to launch on SpaceX...
I've been ok with the tesla-only superchargers, because they are good. But it is a self-serving infrastructure and a competitive advantage.
I wonder what the reality would be about sending up bezos's satellites? It could also be a PR problem, PLUS it would undermine the bezos employees working on their launch platform.
Besides having the money to basically give it away for free, that could be a big value add if so.
idk maybe enabling the blanketing of the earth in ever expanding ring/echo surveillance. or a cdn though uploading huge video files to a satellite hard drive might not make any sense or actually save any MS given the inherent satellite -> earth delay.
But doing it all solid state with RAM + SSD could totally make sense, especially if you cache only the highest access items in space... Something like this could also make sense to do custom silicon/ASICs to keep the power and weight requirements down.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-expands-its-space-...
Unfortunately storage or compute in space likely don't make much sense at least for now. Its more about direct point to point speed of light access. Where the downlink is directly onto of the cloud datacenter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk
And Bezos launching his satellites on someone else's rockets would be a pretty bitter pill...
These launch costs are investments.
Join me in rural Brazil, for example!
When starlink sats are fully using laser interconnects then their long-distance (london-NY or further) latency should be considerably less than anything else available. The speed of light in fibre is about 1/2 the speed of light in a vacuum.
Bandwidth is solved with phased-array antennas at a high carrier frequency (Ku/Ka?). The high carrier frequency allows for high (literal) bandwidth. However, the phased-array antennas are physically the same size as some smaller, lower frequency antennas are, and thus transmit/recieve more power. This stuff in general is called a link budget and is standard in satcom.
Latency is just satellites at a lower orbit. This is only possible now because: 1. Chip manufacturing can produce a cheap phased array antenna that's electronically steered to follow the satellite in low orbit. 2. Launch costs low enough it's economical to launch tons of satellites
I see this same argument repeated in every Starlink discussion thread.
Each sat is designed at end of live to have enough fuel on board to deorbit itself safely.
The 5 year self drop is only relevant in case a sat a has a failure. In such a case it is in a known orbit and can be avoided.
The US and soon Europe are actively tracking object and multiple companies are working on it. Europe is also working on a laser to measure with high accurate move dead objects.
The first garbage truck missions are already planned for dead objects.
Space junk is a problem and need to be taken seriously. But people need to seriously stop with the panic and bringing up Kessler syndrome in every single discussion as some sort of thread for global civilisation that is imminent.
1. very little rare earth materials are actually used. 80%+ are in magnets / motors, a good chunk in screens and sensors
2. solar panels might have cadmium/silver which despite the name are not rare at all
440g is the average amount used in a modern car. Let’s extrapolate to 1Kg for a satellite. Earth has an estimated 120 million metric tons of rare earth deposits. If you start burning ten thousand of those satellites every year, it will take twelve million years to go through the stock.
The difficult part of producing rare-earth elements is separating them from everything else. Tiny pieces of spacecraft dust scattered over a large area don't make very high grade ore...
Rare earth elements are so named because their earths are rare: there aren't many places on the crust where their concentration is significantly above the average. Mining depends on the existence of mineral earths.
GP raises a valid point -- although a weak one.
Concerns about space junk aren’t about these low orbits, they are about orbits where things stay up hundreds of years or much longer.
In I were in that spot, I'd happily trade a few bright spots in the sky for catching up with the developed world.
also: is the dark coating working? without it those are quite visible, and make radio and optical astronomy much harder (especially large sky surveys).
Do you want to prevent satellites existing completely or just keep it at some threshold that has been crossed?
Most importantly, what's the actual problem here? You haven't pointed out any downsides of having increased mass in LEO.
there are a lot of useful satellites: for instance for Earth monitoring, it happens we are on a climate transient, those are very relevant. not saying that ppl in rural areas do not deserve internet, but Musk was clear that Starlink was more to finance his mars dream first and foremost.
the problem is pollution and deregulation. and kessler syndrome that might knock out essential satellites in the long run.
So that's all as it should be, and Switzerland agrees that the mechanism of regulation is the operant one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#Responsibil...
This whole fantasy of "rights" that people like to engage in is just that - a fantasy.
The best you can hope for is that the strongest is also a benevolent philosopher king.
I could still see the trail of them before dusk so it appears it isn't working.
edit: the experts agree that spacex didn't do enough to reduce reflectivity and that it's still an issue. https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-a...
edit: looks like it's still a problem according to experts. https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-a...
Example, I believe over 90% of rural china has high speed internet and they pay less than $10 a month.
Edit. Anyone have a good argument why we can't get $10 per month high speed internet in rural areas in the USA? If spacex can get there costs down to $10 per month, then I will be impressed. Otherwise it isn't cheaper than laying fiber.
Also, if you think $100/month is expensive, you don't go shopping for rural internet very often. There isn't an ISP on the planet that offers the speeds or latency that Starlink has right now, and believe me, I've tried to find one. $500 for installation and $100/month is reasonably appropriate for the services they're providing, especially if they're taking a $1000-2000 loss on each dish they ship to customers.
Google tried to make fiber cheap and ubiquitous with Google Fiber and failed. If an organization with the power, resources, and clout of Google can't get it done, I don't know who can short of the federal government getting involved (which, thanks to lobbyists, is unlikely).
LEO constellations bypass these issues almost entirely and ironically enough may motivate incumbent ISPs to try to compete and stop being so obstructive.
They have the money to do it, they didn't want to spend it. They thought everyone would start writing letters to their congressmen on their behalf and force the government into making the other big fiber ISPs play fair.
That's how fucking dumb so the so-called "smartest people in the room" can be.
Google should have budgeted $10 billion a year for 10 years for Google Fiber. And in 20 years' time, Google could have been the largest provider of fiber Internet service in the United States, possibly servicing almost every single address in the country. Instead, they did what they *ALWAYS* fucking do... it didn't "catch on" in a year or two's time and they abandoned it.
I can't wait to see Google utterly fail as a company, given how shit they are at execution of everything but the most obvious, largest, and easiest-to-enter markets.
Elon Musk entered the three hardest markets known to fuckin' mankind... automotive, orbital launch, and ISPs, and he's utterly destroying mother fuckers. If I was an executive involved with Google Fiber, I'd blow my brains out due to utter shame.
do you have any idea how much it costs to dig a trench? look up a calculator for figuring out the present value of a perpetuity that pays $10/mo. that will barely cover somebody digging a trench through your front yard, and laying fiber in it, let alone doing that down miles of rural street.
As for the rules about polluting space, the simple fact is that none of the rules makers expected that some agency would want to launch thousands of satellites. There are no rules covering this scenario.
AFAIK the nearest we have to rules covering the proliferation of communications satellites are ITU rules on access to spectrum. There’s no restriction on the number of satellites, just who is using what frequency in which part of the sky.
If you want to add rules about the number of satellites in orbit, better get in quick before StarLink becomes too valuable to ban.
i fear however no one wants to rule on that, at least for now.
Question is, why would one want it? It's going to look like an equivalent of someone in XIX century capping the maximum amounts of widgets a factory can produce per year to a level that can be matched by artisan production, because all those conveyor belts and precision parts are making production too fast.
Assuming one likes the idea of humanity spreading out past Earth's surface, and perhaps taking the dirtiest aspects of civilization upwell - we're going to need a proper space-based economy. Mining, manufacturing and all. Starlink's impact on LEO is going to look like child's play in comparison. So if one wants to see space being developed, then one has to accept and embrace that Earth's orbit is going to get way more cluttered than it is.
We do not need StarLink to industrialise space, and we do not need factories in low Earth orbit to maximally utilise space-borne resources.
This desire to pollute our skies with industrial light pollution will look to future humans as ill-guided and poorly motivated as draining the swamps (and later wondering why our ecosystems are failing).
The people elected the leadership which oversees the government agency which approved this project, so ultimately the people allowed this project to happen. This isn't a case of one person doing something alone.
Elon Musk has been dodging the question for the past years and never gave a clear answer about it aside of "Umbrella" joke...
Some astronomers are suggesting that with multiple space telecom companies ( US + EU + China ) it would potentially mean we would never be able to see space in plain sight ever. At least not without visual pollution.
[0]https://qz.com/1971751/a-flood-of-spacex-satellites-started-...
See https://twitter.com/ralfvandebergh/status/136999054076322611... for how the visibility of Starlink sats has changed over time.
For professional earth based astronomy, it is possible to remove the streaks digitally. But of course there is a slight impact. But what is the alternative? Just stop development of low earth orbit forever?
The future of professional astronomy is space based. Imagine what a telescope you can launch with a single starship launch...
NASA needs the SpaceX equivalent of an org that churns out satellites. The next bus to orbit leaves shortly.
I don't think NASA needs the SpaceX equivalent for satellites - SpaceX itself is causing a boom in satellite manufacturing, so commercial market is accumulating expertise and lowering prices. NASA should find it easier and cheaper to buy or subcontract pieces of satellites too, and focus on bespoke mission-specific hardware.
It's unbelievable that we don't currently have standard designs not just for observatories, but for communication, navigation, cartography and other satellite types. Cubesats took a step into the right direction, the same needs to happen for even larger payloads.
Another side of the problem is that NASA budget is heavily influenced by politics and PR. I'm sure there's plenty of smart people there who have realized that from purely scientific point of view, ten or twenty less capable and more disposable interplanetary probes or observatories could have advantage over unique absurdly expensive projects like JWT and Perseverance. But they are not as exciting and harder to sell to politicians and general public.
Launch costs tend to be a small part of mission costs for bespoke scientific hardware - but what makes those missions expensive is a feedback loop: rare and expensive launches -> need to make best use of the mass budget -> increased complexity -> need to make more robust -> increased complexity -> more expensive -> rarer launches -> more expensive launches. SpaceX just kicked that loop into reverse. With that much cheaper launches, people can afford less robust and less complex missions, and do more of them, which lowers the costs as scale kicks in.
SpaceX is making space cheap. That's already a great gift to everyone.
But for low production rate things like telescopes, launch cost is almost negligible even at current launch prices.
A replacement for hubble could be launched with a single falcon 9. Building it would cost more than a billion.
The James Webb Telescope is at 10 billion USD and counting. Launch with very expensive Ariane 5 will cost maybe 200 million USD, so ~2%.
Starship's payload is 8m.
When this controversy was started they addressed concerns by reducing the satellites reflectance and it seems to have worked.
1) 1200 is a small percentage of the tens of thousands of satellites that the full system, plus the other similar systems will eventually consist of.
2) Being able to go outside and point out a satellite has absolutely no relevance on the satellite's impact on professional astronomy.
3) It did not "seem to have worked". SpaceX experimented with reducing the reflectivity of their satellites, but only some satellites have that reduced reflectivity, and astronomers found them to be only marginally better.
or... Or... OR... Launching massive powerful telescopes into space using SpaceX rockets for professional astronomers to use?
Here, I'll demonstrate:
>high-speed Internet access for the entire planet
Musk himself has said that only a tiny, tiny fraction of the world will ever be able to use Starlink. It is not anywhere close to "internet access for the entire planet", and certainly isn't providing any more internet access than is already provided by existing satellite internet providers.
>or professional astronomers not being able to see into space as easily as they did 20 years ago?
In case you weren't aware, astronomy is responsible for some of the most significant scientific advancements since for literally millennia. If you really want an answer to your questions, it's this: professional astronomers being prevented from doing research is significantly more of a negative impact to humanity's advancement than the positive impact from 0.001% of the world having access to lower ping internet. It's not even close.
>or... Or... OR... Launching massive powerful telescopes into space using SpaceX rockets for professional astronomers to use?
Even with something the size of Starship, it's physically impossible to launch anything even remotely close to the size of telescopes needed by professional astronomers.
Or radio pollution causing constraints for radio-astronomy.
My guess is that cheap reliable worldwide internet connectivity will help science overall by far more than the costs of modifying terrestrial optical observations to mitigate the extra satellites.
SpaceX has done more to mitigate visibility of their satellites than any satellite maker/operator in history, with the possible exception of classified payloads. They installed sunshades that reduce the visibility of the satellites when fully deployed (in operational orbit) to below the visibility limit in almost all conditions. You have to have exceptionally good timing, eyesight, and dark skies to catch recent Starlink satellites once operational now. But a satellite like ISS is so bright and obvious, you can even sometimes see it in the daytime. (ISS is as bright as all new operational Starlink satellites combined.)
Read this article to see the significant changes they’ve made: https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink-update-04-28-2020/in...
Edit: Already downvoted for stating a fact. Amazing.
Edit: Changed 'did nothing' to 'didn't do enough'
Edit: Looks like experts still believe reflectivity is still a problem: https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-a...
No you do not. Satellites, when visible by the naked eye, are seen as point sources of light. Dots, not lines. One of two things has happened here: Either you saw meteor showers and mistook them for satellites (meteors move fast enough to be seen as lines, not points of light) or you saw long-exposure photographs of satellites online, assumed that is what it would look like through your eyeballs as well, and BSed your story about seeing them yourself.
> Edit. Already downvoted for stating a fact.
More likely you were downvoted for either being mistaken or for lying.
It was 60 satellites spaced together very closely after they were ejected from the rocket. From far away they look like a bright line just like the pixels of your monitor look like a line (even though they are just dots).
If you saw a tight line of satellites, those have just been launched and are not in their final (higher) orbit.
"Didn't do enough" is an opinion, and the satellites you saw were ones that hadn't reoriented themselves and so aren't representative of how they'll look in the long term as you implied they are