Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm
spacex.com
spacex.com
Shortened excerpt: "These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase.... speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent.... The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag...
Preliminary analysis show the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric reentry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground."
So they perished “with” geomagnetic storm, not “of” geomagnetic storm?
It's not the direct nor the first cause.
Starlink lost 40 satellites following geomagnetic storm
Saying the satellites were lost because of the geomagnetic storm could imply that the satellites suffered some sort of electronic damage. Which, as I understand, is not what happened. That is why the nuance here is important.
In your case, there is no other reason for the boat to be lost but because of the wind and waves.
The nuance isn't that important. The implication that a geomagnetic storm can only cause magnetic/electric damage is just wrong. It's like implying a hurricane can only cause damage through wind and rain.
Would you say your jet was lost "with" the storm, or "because of" the storm?
It is important here because one could assume, only reading the title, that the satellite were lost due to electronic disturbances caused by the storm. Which is not what happened (if my understanding is correct).
From my understanding, they are the biggest existential risk to modern humanity, slightly ahead of rogue AI. From that context, whether misguided or otherwise, you can imagine that my heart skipped a beat when I read the link title.
It has already irrevocably caused the extinction of lots of species, and while certainly humans will continue to live, "modern humanity" will be replaced by something else.
1. Solar flares
2. Rogue AI
3. World war
3. Water scarcity (tied to war above)
5. Pandemic
6. Climate disasters
My naive perception heavily weighs future possible technological progress. Solar flare collapse is basically unmitigable due to a combination of unpredictability and deep systemic interdependence and dependence on susceptible technologies. Some governments paid lip service to this risk in the past, allegedly pushing to plan for this risk. Ultimately, only some organizations will have the resources to sustain the acute impact of a solar flare, but what good is Google if they're the only ones with working computers?
With climate, I'm very optimistic about the innovation that will result from economic and social pressures. I think 10 years ago I would have rated it at #2.
Edit: What are the chances. As I wrote this, JET started live-streaming an announcement about fusion energy...
Of course we're human and have a tendency to ignore large scale risks that haven't occurred in recent history as evidenced by the fact that no major electric grids have implemented this kind of protection. If we do get an 1894 level solar flare, many of the high voltage transformers will be fried. Some of them take months to build, so it would take years to recover from that kind of damage.
In my opinion, the reserve is cheap at 3x the price. $500mil is 7 F35 raptors, and we are buying ~130/year at this point. There are plenty of defense spending justifications for establishing the reserve - it would protect against EMPs and small targeted attacks. We are already seeing small arms attacks on high energy transformers, and last year someone tried to use a drone to take out a substation.
Not surprisingly, the biggest hurdles identified in the report were the needed land acquisitions and the logistics of transporting the large transformers.
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/04/f34/Strategic%20...
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R43604.html
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43015/likely-drone-att...
Having a full set of spares requires zero re-engineering of the existing grid, and will turn a multi-year grid failure catastrophe into a few days to restore critical components and some weeks of restoring full function.
Since our solid solar observation capabilities now give several days notice before arrival of such storms, some could even be pre-positioned at critical substations.
And you are absolutely correct that the DOD would have very good reason to do this - losing the grid nationwide would be an insane level national security risk.
Also, this would mean proactively shutting down the entire grid for days, at the first warning, then requiring days to restore power. So one warning would require a full week of zero power for the continent, and (I expect) saving only part of the grid.
But yeah, putting in some planning to do that would be a smart idea.
They could end up at war over this, and they both have nukes. They have relatively small stockpiles with relatively small nukes so you might not think this would be a big deal globally--a terrible tragedy still but just a regional tragedy.
Not so. Here is an article [1] and a paper [2] that looks at global consequences of India and Pakistan exchanging 100 nukes (about 1/3 of what they have) each the size of what the US used on Hiroshima at the end of WW II and directed at major population centers in the two countries.
Based on the amount of combustable material in those areas, they estimate that the resulting firestorms would put 1.8 Tg of soot aerosol into the upper atmosphere.
Climate models say the effect of that would be a 1.8℃ temperature reduction and an 8% precipitation reduction lasting for many years.
They then apply state of the art crop models to predict the effect on agriculture. The result would be a serious reduction in yield which would be largest in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10-15 years.
There would be food shortages and famine in rich countries that normally do not see famine. That can be pretty destabilizing and it is not a stretch to imagine some first world countries might go to war over food--including countries that have a lot more than small stockpiles of Hiroshima-sized nukes.
[1] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-...
I know Elon is screaming at his engineers right now to increase the amount of krypton in each and if this happens again, they're fired.
- i used to work at tesla.
You would say "the low-flying jet was lost due to 6 foot swells caused by a storm"
Aluminum is not a "heavy metal". Not only is it of low density, it's not toxic in the way actual heavy metals like lead are.
Your inclusion of the adjective "heavy" was misleading as that wasn't in the source you referenced.
I just want to add that the term "heavy metal" associated with toxicity is not really a good choice, even if it has been used for a long time.
The so called toxic "heavy metals" are not toxic because they are heavy. They are toxic because their ions have a large size (when compared with metals like magnesium or iron).
The large size of their ions makes them interfere with the functions of the ions having a similar large size and which have important uses in all living beings, i.e. calcium or potassium or ammonium or sodium. Large ionic size is also associated with good solubility, which enhances the chances of those ions to be absorbed after ingestion and enter living cells.
"Metals with large ions" is longer and more inconvenient to say than "heavy metals", but it would be much more accurate. Saying "heavy" does not make you understand why e.g. cadmium (same ionic size as calcium) is very toxic, while indium and tin, which are heavier (but which have smaller ions), have low toxicity.
https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/
"Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago. As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this...
...we will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.
The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.
In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise"Frankly, I have issues with someone who defied every forseeable risk inherent in operating an LEO satcom network. There is a reason most long term comm infra tends to go to GEO... Replacing stuff in LEO because the atmo ate it is expensive.
Musk clarified that stance on Twitter. They are not in fact close to bankruptcy. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465793233729069063
Was this an expected condition, or a new discovery?
I only have a layman's understanding of space, but like the idea that we (as a species) just learned something new.
Sorry I asked. I'll try to be less interested in science in the future.
Unintentional pun on "orbits", perhaps?
It's incredible to me that launching satellites is so easy now that a failure of 40 satellites can be tolerated. On the bright side, I guess this gave SpaceX a chance to talk about their debris-limiting strategy!
Capital City, Earth – Satellite Starlink XB-4590 has shut down yesterday, February 8, 2132, following a geomagnetic storm that irreparably crippled its circuits. XB-4590 was 5 months old. It is survived by the 32,008 other active Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk IV declined to comment for this article.
Her friends call her IV.
This reads: Sigma Integral Pi-Squared Infinitiy.
There are worse names ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The last name: Musk.
And he tries to clean it.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Elon-Musks-family-got-...
>‘My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.’
Doesn't really sound like he's trying to say all the Musks were wonderful.
So the loss of a batch of starlink or GPS or glonass is not a tragedy like the loss of Webb would have been.
The important part of this news is how those 40 sats deorbit and leave no junk either in orbit or on earth.
The carbon impact of just one launch is pretty obscene.
Same goes for carbon impact, etc.
1.700e3 rounded -> 2e3
1.660e3 rounded -> 2e3
Put another way: if your bill for lunch is $16.60, wouldn't you just as easily call it $17? Or even $20, if you're feeling a bit imprecise?
It really isn't. It's what, 15 aeroplane flights' worth? For the sake of bringing internet to hundreds of thousands of people? By letting people shop online or stream entertainment they've probably paid for themselves in reduced car journeys already.
Also, these are consumable - much more so than cable plants.
Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure. As witnessed by the very high cost of Starlink service, which is likely losing mountains of cash despite that.
> For the sake of bringing internet to hundreds of thousands of people? By letting people shop online or stream entertainment they've probably paid for themselves in reduced car journeys already.
That's not how that works.
Also, the point of Starlink is to fund SpaceX's goal of a methane rocket. Methane was chosen because it can be generated from atmospheric gases and solar power. The logistics around scaling it up remain to be solved, but once it is solved, rocket launches will be basically zero carbon.
So what should people who dont have access to the ground-based infrastructure do?
Well you opened up by talking about "just one launch".
> To provide internet service to ~250,000 people - about one quarter the population of a major east coast city.
But people who are currently very hard to supply internet to and extremely car-dependent. Building housing in cities would probably be a better solution, and I'm all for efforts to make that legal, but realistically it's going to be extremely difficult to overcome upper-middle-class opposition to that and so other ways to mitigate the impact of those people's lifestyles are very much worthwhile.
> Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure. As witnessed by the very high cost of Starlink service, which is likely losing mountains of cash despite that.
On the contrary, running cable to many of these places would be overwhelmingly environmentally damaging (in many cases you'd have to build a road through a forest or blast through a mountain), and that's reflected in the high (sometimes infinite) cost of internet services. People are buying Starlink because it's cheaper (in the places they live) than ground-based alternatives, and as you've observed, the environmental cost is generally closely correlated to the monetary cost.
> That's not how that works.
That's exactly how it works. You've got to look at the net impact. For people who don't travel internationally, reducing car usage is the most effective single lifestyle change they can make to reduce carbon impact; if Starlink reduces trips to the extent that e.g. people shift from a two-car to a one-car household, that's huge. (And note that if it's reducing travel into towns or cities then that's benefitting the rest of us as well, by reducing congestion and parking usage, which in turn lets us turn more land over to productive uses).
How so? How do this people landed in this place without a road and electricity? Rural homes must have roads to reach the city to buy fuel and food. There are also wireless terrestrial ways to transmit internet too.
They might rely on generators for electricity, and access might involve a boat, or a quad bike trail that would need enlarging before you could bring construction equipment in and run a cable along it.
> There are also wireless terrestrial ways to transmit internet too.
I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding; if it were practical to run internet some other way they would already get it that way.
Who are this people? ARe they poor farmers or rich dudes on islands?
>I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding; if it were practical to run internet some other way they would already get it that way.
It might be practical but not obscenely profitable. I double that Elon sells his stuff only to the above people, the people living in isolated environments with no roads and electricity are too few. In many places it is legal to put cables on the electricity polls and connect a village 25Km away in 1 single day, from what I read this is not allowed in US so you have no internet or a monopoly.
You know, there are poor dudes that live on islands too.
Like one of my friends. It's a river island, it's only about five kilometers to the nearest cellular tower, and as you might guess running fiber across a major waterway is out of question.
So we built a 20-meter tower with a 1.5-meter parabolic dish on top just to get 3G-ish speeds on the site.
Quit the condescension, please.
There are a LOT of people living in such environments. Hell, when we were doing rural cellular in Africa, it was like three days over non-existing roads to get to the installation site. No electricity, only satcom, and that with 1-second rtt. Starlink is the best thing that could've ever happened for those applications.
It's $99/mo for 100+ megabit service. Sure, it's moderately expensive if you're comparing to cable service in cities. It's downright cheap compared to the cost of connecting the extremely rural customers Starlink targets with physical cables. You don't think running a new set of physical cables to every rural residence in the world (or even cell towers to cover the same) would be expensive or have any environmental impact? Starlink wins on both and not by a small margin.
And then of course there's the prospect of bringing service to the remote mountains and jungles and deserts and polar regions and oceans where nobody lives and which will never (and should never) have ground-based infrastructure. And a bit of sorely needed competition to keep the ground-based monopoly service providers in check. And service for disaster areas or war zones where infrastructure is destroyed.
This might all seem reasonable in rural America but it’s hugely expensive for internet in Europe.
That's going to average out to less than $10 a month pretty quickly.
Also your post doesn’t take into account the life span of the antennae, that could be less than 5 years. It doesn’t take into account any competing services that you might want to switch to (eg some internet contracts in the U.K. typically run for 2 years and you’re encouraged to shop around at that point). Nor does it take into account any other personal circumstances that might lead one to cancel Starlink.
For some that cost is still reasonable for what they’re getting. And that’s fine. But from a purely mathematical standpoint the GP was significantly off in terms of the price they quoted.
You can all argue about whether that matters or not but that’s really just a subjective matter. Some folk cannot afford a $500 sign up cost. Whereas for others it will be an absolute bargain for what they need. It really depends on their income/savings, what other internet providers are available to them and how dependent they are on the internet. So the answer to the point you’re discussing is going to vary depending on the individual.
Lifespan certainly matters, but the financial structure doesn't.
It’s the same reason some people with high end phones pay a larger monthly phone bill. They want a phone they cannot afford to buy so they pay in instalments as part of their mobile contract.
So yes, it absolutely does matter to a lot of people.
So you're worrying about that way too early.
You'll be able to get starlink without a big upfront fee later, I assure you.
It's an issue but it's a separate issue from "high cost of service".
Not entirely true. The hardware is sold at a huge loss. If I recall correctly the dishes cost a grand to make. Musk expects those costs to come down but the fact remains he’s losing money with every sign up.
My point wasn’t about whether the cost is worth it though. It’s that the service costs 6 (!!!) times more than the GP claimed.
It’s really not a complicated point I’m making here either. I’m not judging the service, just correcting an error in someone’s post.
> So you're worrying about that way too early.
I’m not worried. Why would I be worried about how much an ISP I don’t need costs?
> You'll be able to get starlink without a big upfront fee later, I assure you.
I could afford it now if I wanted it. But I’m also socially aware enough to see that most people aren’t as privileged as we are.
> It's an issue but it's a separate issue from "high cost of service".
I’m skeptical this will ever become economical for low income families or lesser developed counties. The latter being a group that could really benefit from this.
Regarding cost of service, we moved on from the environmental impact a while ago and now just discussing the financial cost of service.
You and everyone else.
Is that implication not obvious?
You're so locked on to the privilege issue and misreading the word "you" that you're completely ignoring my point, which is that the privilege of paying a big upfront fee will not be necessary.
Just like dozens of other services, you'll be able to sign up for a contract and the equipment fee will become either a small monthly amount or get waived entirely.
I say that because my point wasn’t to say that Starlink is uneconomical for the poor and always will be. My point was just that the GPs post was factually incorrect because he left off a hugely significant sum (relative to the first month) for the cost of Starlink right now.
The point about privilege only came about after others handwaved that $500 as loose change and I only really made that point to illustrate how ridiculous it was to say “it’s fine to get a payment wrong by half a grand because we’re wealthy”. It just smacks of being out of touch with reality (or perhaps they were just Starlink/Musk fanboys and defending factually incorrect posts if it looks favourably on Starlink?).
My personal opinions of Starlink is that it looks really promising. In fact I nearly signed up 9 months ago myself when I moved house. The kicker was I needed it a available within a week and didn’t really want to run two service providers. I’m guess given that Starlink is still beta I was asking a little much there. The problem is my current ISP locks me into a 2 year service and as much as I can afford Starlink there’s other things I’d rather spend my money on than paying for two ISPs just for curiosities sake. I’ll probably review that decision when the contract for the current ISP has > 12 months remaining.
I’m sure I’m 5 years time the cost of Starlink will become a lot more attractive to lower income families in the west. Or at least those that might need to depend on it might find it easier to gain access to the service. But I’m skeptical we’ll see the service affordable for most rural communities in Africa, India or South America, to name but a few large regions that could really benefit from such a service. Maybe Musk does have a plan here. He certainly doesn’t owe these people any charity; however it does feel a missed opportunity if some arrangement couldn’t eventually be found.
Anyway, that’s my 2c worth of opinions :)
That was discussed elsewhere in this thread. This discussion in this fork is very specifically about monitory costs.
Hence all the dollar signs. ;)
It does however possess two chief advantages - the appearance of being novel and speed of construction. To build a cellular network to cover the areas that starlink does would take a decade - where it can be done at all. The aforementioned novel appearance also gets it largely free spectrum, which I believe starlink didn't have to go thru auction for.
To be clear - it's not novel, it's more or less a cellular network where the cell sites move about instead of the subscriber - which is something iridium did. I'm still not sure it can make money however.
Starlink is a miracle for people with shitty or no cellular infrastructure. There are places in Australia that have exactly one cell tower for signal and they get 3G speeds at best. And if that tower has a fault, they'll be out of access for days or weeks.
$99 per month for Starlink is a no-brainer.
The opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network (and Starlinks opex is certainly more than a convention geosynchronous satellite system). Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining.
Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper - this on top of the inherent launch costs, and the much much much larger fleet, implies that there may be a disconnect in pricing.
Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites.
Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof)
Except no-one can provide you with low latency, high speed satellite internet. If you have alternatives (I do where I live) - Starlink is probably not for me.
You seem to paint as if starlink is something trivial, as some years ago people were thinking CRAZY - they can't possibly put that much satellites up there. Not to mention that people were really surprised they could put 60 satellites on a single rocket. That they established mass production of satellites. Etc.
This kind of comment reminds me of the Dropbox introductionary post [1]: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
Iridium has been running sat-to-sat communication links since 1998?
Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths.
Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining.
Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper.
The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.
Try a single aeroplane?
> An estimated 40,000 ± 20,000 tonnes per year (t/yr) of cosmic dust enters the upper atmosphere each year of which less than 10% (2700 ± 1400 t/yr) is estimated to reach the surface as particles.
The entire total carbon emissions of producing and flying the second stage is non-trivial.
I agree, but the post I was responding wasn't talking about CO2 emissions.
And the oxidizer to fuel ratio is 2.5, so basically this doubles the impact.
(And let's not get started on the rest of energy intensive things involved in space launch).
Yes, space launch isn't ridiculously energy intensive, but it does put the 777 to shame.
The big difference, I guess, is that a Falcon 9 might only make it through 10 or 20 flights while a 777 might do thousands. That is a big difference in energy usage but I don't feel competent to try to quantify it.
Second rockets reach higher parts of the atmosphere and the impact is higher compared to the lower flying planes.
The apparent purpose of this is pretty much a tech-demo for mars. In terms of minimizing environmental impact on earth it would pretty clearly be better just to send the solar energy to the grid and divert natural gas that would have gone to generating electricity to launching rockets.
Every rocket to Mars carries hydrocarbon that will never come back.
We're not discussing "massive deforestation" here. Germany's biofuel mandate does not affect rockets in Texas.
There is a decent writeup on wikipedia[1] on how difficult this would actually be to do ISRU on mars. The TL;DNR is 56,200 meters squared of thin film solar panels. Granted, solar power is roughly half as effective on mars as it is on earth, but still. For reference, an American Football field is 7,140 meters squared.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_program#Mars_prope...
It isn’t really. Checkout Everyday Astronaut’s take on it: https://youtu.be/C4VHfmiwuv4
"up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric reentry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground."
The satellites are deliberately inserted into a low orbit so that any that fail to initialize properly will get pulled down by atmospheric drag. After successful initialization, they travel to a higher orbit (where presumably deorbiting under failure is more of an issue).
Would you write it off as a rounding error?
Paying for lunch? No
62M to launch. 250-500k per satellite.
That's $72M to $82M down the toilet. Given median per-person income is around $36k, that represents over 2,000 man-years of loss.
There are less than 30,000 people out of 7,900,000,000 in the entire world worth more than 100M.
You could buy around 20 windmills and power 15,000 entire homes per year with that money (or around 40,000 homes with natural gas).
This had 48 satellites, so definitely a dedicated launch.
I didn't find a quick # of lift capacity of Falcon 9 to LEO in reusable mode, but SpaceX has stated >= 60% capacity in reusable mode. LEO in non-reusable mode has about 23,000kg, so there could be a fair bit of headroom for extra mass in LEO reusable mode even with 48 starlink sats. Admittedly, probably not enough to really change the magnitude of the GGP's calculations.
Here's a snapshot for after that post eventually falls off: https://archive.ph/dxEAo
https://www.google.com/search?q=starlink+space+junk&rlz=1CDG...
If you genuinely believe that society is a zero-sum-game, where any winner comes at the expense of some loser somewhere, then ultra-successful people must make you sick.
You can hear a few whispers like "Tesla factories aren't the safest places to work at" or "An Amazon worker had to pee in a bottle" and it all lines up: these are horrible people who only got ahead because they abused others.
The absolute iron-jaw of that concept is that it explains ones shortcoming in life instantly. Any success you missed? Well that was just due to the lack of evil in your heart. If you were ruthless, surely you'd be just like "the rich".
It's a genuinely scary line of argument, and I have yet to be able to cure anyone of it, even a little. Taken to it's ultimate logical conclusions "Eat the Rich" can be taken literally. It's terrifying. Unfortunately, history is full of grey areas. Actual evil and wealthy people - and their possibly justified consumption by the mobs do exist.
Which is an unfortunate myth that needs to be better educated out of people.
And thank you for the rest of your post. It puts into words thoughts I've had for a while in a constructed form better than I have done.
Because we can always go one level deeper...
When I ask people why they dislike Musk, the answer I get is usually not for some bleak, reasoned belief but because of his internet persona. He makes shitty, immature jokes. People think he's a bit of a dick.
Interestingly, engineers I know tend to be a bit more positive on him. I wonder if it's because they're exposed to more of his YouTube persona than his Twitter one.
> If you genuinely believe that society is a zero-sum-game...
The rest of this is strawman-ing pretty hard. I'm sure there are some people as described, but I think there's a larger more nuanced population who are uncomfortable with the huge growth of wealth inequality that's been going on. Some of their ire with the system is directed at those doing best under it.
That's probably not entirely unjustified either, what group in human history did nothing to preserve the status quo when it worked for them?
Society may not be a zero-sum game, but it's not a zero-harm game either.
People, however, don't care about nuance.
See that doesn't make sense though. If he were a normal person you met at a party then yeah you'd say "whatever" about him and not talk to him any more. But he's not at all so saying people dislike him just because of a few personality quirks doesn't make any sense.
There was a G1 warning posted until 21:00 UTC on the launch date:
Space Weather Message Code: WARK05
Serial Number: 1635
Issue Time: 2022 Feb 03 1428 UTC
EXTENDED WARNING: Geomagnetic K-index of 5 expected
Extension to Serial Number: 1634
Valid From: 2022 Feb 03 0555 UTC
Now Valid Until: 2022 Feb 03 2100 UTC
Warning Condition: Persistence
[0]: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/homepage
(Warning citation: search for the serial on the warnings and watches page: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/alerts-watches-and-warnin...)
That data probably isn't worth the cost of the satellites they lost though...
The increased drag was caused by the storm.
I think it's entirely possible that this type of warning would _only_ be relevant to SpaceX, because their satellites are so low and so small. They're going to notice atmospheric drag to a much higher degree by virtue of size and orbital insertion point, compared to other interested Space Weather parties. G1 is relatively minor for most space weather customers, but there are obviously times when G1 conditions aren't observed that they can launch during too.
I'm just asking questions -- I would be genuinely curious if SpaceX has a system for determining and evaluating risk when it comes to a situation like this. It does seem absurd that they wouldn't review the active warnings prior to launches. What is indisputable here is that they've announced the loss of 40 satellites during an active warning. I think it's valid to wonder what the criteria is for a launch, given that the cost of the launch + payloads is quite high, and the cost of delaying the launch is (relatively) low.
Also curious if atmospheric warming is a predictable side effect of one of these storms or if we’re just learning about it.
Being pseudo-anonymous and safely behind a screen depersonalizes the experience enough that we get tempted to take swipes for some reason (I do too), and it diminishes the experience on places like HN especially where we aspire to do better than reddit or /.
The best test for this kind of thing is "If I were speaking to the responsible person face-to-face, would I say it this way?" Because then the question becomes "Do I want to hurt this person?"
> Who Is A United States Person?
>United States Person. United States person means United States citizens (including minor children); United States residents; entities, including but not limited to, corporations, partnerships, or limited liability companies created or organized in the United States or under the laws of the United States; and trusts or estates formed under the laws of the United States.
The way you framed your question comes off, to paraphrase the wiki, as an attempt to make a wild accusation socially acceptable. Given your response here, I don't get the impression that this was intentional, but given just your original post I absolutely did get the impression that it was intended as an accusation.
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To attempt to answer the question, the launch weather report [1] does take into account solar activity, and rated it as a low risk. SpaceX takes a more detailed look at the weather than what's in the public report too. However that report almost certainly only counted solar weather during the launch itself - I don't know of public documentation either way towards them looking at post-launch weather as a launch criteria.
[1] https://www.patrick.spaceforce.mil/Portals/14/Weather/Falcon...
> I think it's valid to wonder what the criteria is for a launch.
It's so weird. Anyway, let me have a go. Initial points:
- Lots of marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors. This does not mean that ALL marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors.
- Many companies have marketing 'as a function', but other companies have marketing as quite literally their only source of revenue. These companies would know that digital marketing doesn't work as they wouldn't have revenue. It is that simple.
- I have never worked for a CEO that has accepted smoke and mirrors as answers, and I would never work for a CEO like that. The CEO of my company has a Stanford PhD in Physics. He was one of those child geniuses you used to see in the newspaper, before you stopped reading newspapers. This guy is not an idiot.
Some marketing - a lot of marketing - cannot be directly attributed to revenue, but we know it works. How? Because we can, and do run isolated tests of that exact tactic and test if it works in isolation.
Take the example of banner ads. I have run them in isolation (ie - I have run campaigns where literally the ONLY way you could have known this information was to see a banner ad) and have achieved spectacular results despite noone ever clicking on the ad. (People emailed and called asking to take up the offer.)
I have also have achieved horrifically bad results. Same tactics, but everything else was different - audience, market, placement, product being sold etc.
Every product has a better or worse way of being marketed. It takes a TON of experience to learn how to adapt; many junior marketers think they're experts because they crush it in one job, and then go to the next job and have the exact same tactics fail. Why? Because business is hard. Marketing is about so much more than just running ads.
I run marketing right now for a very young startup. A year ago, we were adding around $5-15k in ARR each month (we only bill annually.) Now, we are adding around $80-100k in new ARR each month. Our marketing spend, inc salaries, is around $40k/m and our sales are growing wayy faster than our marketing spend. The results would be even better if I could convince my CEO to raise our prices.
(I can't complain - at least I got an unsolicited salary increase a few months ago.)
Marketing is the only form of lead generation for us. So much so that I had to plead with the CEO and head of sales to stop relying on my function and to go out and actually set up proper outbound sales processes.
Just because Uber's head of marketing was dropping - and wasting - hundreds of millions on programmatic advertising, doesn't make us all idiots.
/endrant.
(oh. One last thing. This is really the cherry on top: our market is devs. We're literally marketing to devs.)
I think my hesitance towards the ad world is coming from my personal experience. I’ve worked at marketing agencies and as digital strategist for a company, so I saw both sides of the chain. My guess is there are a lot of companies that don’t know how to get the highest value out of online ads, and these can be fooled easily by marketing agencies or ad sellers (that a lot of time also don’t really know how to optimize).
I guess as always: don’t blame the tool.
In my opinion it's pretty clear the jist of his message is "how did this happen when there was a freely available warning"
To ask why "Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" instead of asking "why did Space-X choose to launch when there was a warning" are two drastically different questions. The first has an assumption that checking for the warning is the problem while the second does not make an assumption of the problem.
I think it's a pretty poor assumption that an organization like Space-X would not check the warnings before launch. They likely have an NOAA rep advising their decision. It's silly to assume a highly regulated multi-million dollar discipline that has little tolerance for failure (space flight) would be so haphazard. Even pilots of small airplanes are required to check government notifications before each flight. So I'm curious, why did they launch when that warning existed?
There are two options:
1) They don’t monitor the warnings.
2) The warning doesn’t matter. Move fast and breaking things.
Both options are bad.
4) The severity of the situation was misjudged
5) They decided to try a real-world experiment to determine whether their expectations were correct
Seeing how the satellites were taken down not by the storm itself but the atmosphere slightly expanding to make the low-orbit to high-orbit move physically impossible, I wonder if this is something that hadn’t been encountered before, or is a known phenomenon but with unknown consequences.
Known phenomenon with unknown consequences tends to be the kind of stuff SpaceX likes to hurl headfirst into to see what breaks.
I don’t know how to summarize my feelings, but I work in aerospace, primarily in hardware, in Asia, often as a manager. I see a lot of comments that simplify and often criticize those topics based on the simplification. I’ve also said “just do this” to software engineers so I want to emphasize that this is not a dig at certain types of engineers or people but maybe most of us can do better at recognizing where our expertise starts and stops.
So, what were the reasons? Hubris could be a reason.
Spacex will probably IPO soon and needs Starlink to look like it could actually make money at some indefinite time in the future.
40 x $250k = $10m
1 falcon9 launch = $30m
------------------------
$40m
40 x $250k = $10m
1 falcon9 launch * (40 / 49) = $24.5m
-------------------------------------
$34.5mI don't think every Starlink launch could be replaced by a paying customer.
Imagine any other company on earth losing 40 satellites at a time and shrugging it off. That would bankrupt most space companies (except for maybe Planet).
SpaceX is really working at different orders of magnitude here.
Most companies could handle that fine. That's what insurance is for.
Do you think this was covered?
> However, a failure of the Blok DM-2M fourth stage left it stranded in a highly inclined (51.6°) and elliptical orbit, although still fully functional. It was declared a total loss by its insurers.
> The satellite was transferred to Hughes Global Services Inc., which was then a subsidiary of Hughes Space and Communications, with an agreement to share any profits with the consortium of 27 insurers.
> Edward Belbruno and Rex Ridenoure heard about the problem and proposed a 3–5 month low-energy transfer trajectory that would swing past the Moon and leave the satellite in geostationary orbit around the Earth. Hughes had no ability to track the satellite at such a distance and considered this trajectory concept unworkable. Instead, Hughes used an Apollo-style free-return trajectory that required only a few days to complete, a trajectory designed and subsequently patented by Hughes Chief Technologist Jerry Salvatore. This maneuver removed only 40° of orbital inclination and left the satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, whereas the Belbruno maneuver would have removed all 51° of inclination and left it in geostationary orbit.
> ...
> These operations consumed most of the satellite's propellant, but still much less than it would take to remove the inclination without the Moon-assist manoeuvres. With the remaining fuel, the satellite could be controlled as a geosynchronous satellite, with half the life of a normal satellite – a huge gain, considering that it had been declared a total loss. The satellite was then maneuvered to geosynchronous orbit at 158° West.
This ended up being the first lunar mission involving a communications satellite and the first lunar mission from a non-government entity.
Watching the orbit on the wikipedia page is wild.
Will space be too cluttered for competition? (I'm guessing space is really big and that we can have _a lot_ of small satellites up there.)
There will be other reusable orbital launch systems (although it looks like #2 will also probably be SpaceX, heh) but until that time everyone else is priced out of doing what SpaceX is doing.
It's got some analogs with TSMC and the latest process size microprocessors. Nobody else is prevented from doing it as well... it's just that they figured it out first and nobody else has developed equivalent technology yet.
There's room for more satellites. Space is pretty big, and with some careful automated coordination we can avoid collisions. But someone else needs to first figure out how to cheaply launch a competing fleet, and I doubt anyone will come close for years.
Behind, but it's there
Right now they have 9 launches planned using Atlas 5. That's not going to get them a usable fleet of satellites. If they want to launch anything beyond that, Blue Origin must finish the BE-4: a rocket engine years behind schedule. (Either using them for Vulcan rockets or for the New Glenn).
From Amazon's perspective, those 9 launches are money wasted if BO doesn't come through. I'd be ecstatic if they did, but my money is on yet another delay from them.
If I had to guess, by the time Kuiper is launching enough satellites to matter, SpaceX will be doing the same thing using Starship at an order of magnitude lower cost. And I don't even think Starship will be doing real launches for years.
The answer is: nobody.
What made Starlink financially possible was SpaceX's lower launch costs and high capacity.
What's the typical daily production of cars in the USA? And how much materials do they use?
The fact that "near misses" are too frequent is largely a result of inaccurate tracking and poor communication. (Next gen space traffic control will allow vastly higher densities.) And the fact that actual collisions are occuring too frequently is due to old uncontrolled junk, not a literal lack of room or inability to maneuver by modern sats.
Do you have more info on that? What can the people who track satellites do that they aren't already doing?
The govt still hasn't decided what agency will take the helm or what the system will look like. It hasn't been worth it to invest more until recently.
https://spacenews.com/from-space-traffic-awareness-to-space-...
Proposal for GPS-based sat transponders, analogous to radio-based aircraft transponders:
https://aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/GPS_Transp...
Also, who else were denied license to build the charging stations at that time to allow for Tesla monopoly? Or was it that everyone else amusingly laughed at the cute effort by an electric mobility upstart who didn’t know better?
There are a bunch of different kinds of services offered or soon to be offered by other companies. Some only handle small text messages at like 4800 baud (like Orbcomm) and some others are planning commercial cell towers in space (like AST). Everyone has different needs so not everyone is going to require a blistering fast, low latency, high availability link. So while I applaud SpaceX going for the gold to deliver such service, it's not for most people and is overkill for most applications required a satellite uplink.
I'm not sure it will succeed, it's a "natural monopoly" type of market (high fixed cost, low marginal cost), and SpaceX has an incredible advantage in being really frickin good at launching rockets (though they do offer to sell those services).
I think SpaceX might run into trouble if they would refuse to launch sats from a competitor, given their dominant position in space launch. But they would happily launch sats for e.g. Project Kuiper by Amazon/Bezos or OneWeb.
It's a matter of nation sovereignty / media control: governments need local service providers that they can controlled. There's no way China will allow its citizens to freely use SpaceX, just like how Americans probably won't use satellite internet from a Chinese company.
StarLink is trying to reduce ping by flying thousands of satellites at low orbit. The problem? No matter what you do, the ping will be worse, and cost more money, than broadband.
The developing world will never be able to pay for StarLink at a price high enough to replace thousands of satellites every 5 years. SpaceX will depend on users from rich countries to pay exorbitant fees, and users in those countries already have access to cheaper, faster broadband.
So, it may be that StarLink will go the way of SolarCity and need to be bailed out by another Musk company.
Cheaper, faster broadband is only available if Comcast and the other loathsome telecoms can get their acts together, and they have been failing to do so for 30 years.
A constellation of 4,400 satellites, every 5 years, each costing $250k in parts and $50k in launch costs, totals to $264,000,000 per year of opex dedicated to keep the constellation in orbit. A poor country with about ten million subscribers would have to charge roughly $2/month to keep up with satellite replacement costs, but unlike terrestrial utilities, the satellites conveniently circle the whole globe.
Also, the current prices of either.
You're either a troll or you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. As a former Hughesnet customer, now on Starlink I can tell you first hand that literal 56k dialup would have been better than Hughes on many days. Starlink on the other hand is basically indistinguishable from the cable internet I had when I lived in what might be called civilization.
In the grand scheme of things, this initial set is more a prototype than anything else so I doubt the loss will have any serious permanence. Now getting starship to production on the other hand will really be what makes or breaks the starlink program (as it won't even be possible to deploy v2 if they were to dedicate every possible falcon 9 launch towards just deploying sats).
Also, leaded gasoline
I recall a story posted here that if you put an iPhone in helium it will break the MEMS components inside of it and it will fail to boot, and that's still at 1 atmosphere.
I suppose that a wider track would be useful in 1/3 G, but that is a mod that off-roaders have been doing at home for decades. Ditto ride height and wheel size.
I would not be surprised to see a Cybertruck offloading from a Starship someday, maybe even on a private mission after Artemis finishes.
I'd also imagine that at some point in this breaking-up-process the pieces are small enough to sublimate from the extreme heat, i.e. "burning up".
Think of that, but for, well, everything.
I wonder if anyone has ever tested the whole thing about field mice surviving a drop from any height due to their low terminal velocity... those bat bombs in WWII don't count.
And here's a timelapse in a hypersonic plasma test chamber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_AcG4ZQItg
(Keep in mind the pieces that come off are still going to keep being heated even after they seperate.)
It largely does atomize yes, depending on the material. Which is why they're designed out of materials that will do this.
The US is liable for any damage from space SpaceX causes in a different country. If it hits a house in the US, that's a completely different question.
(based on the fact these satellites are designed to burn up completely upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and so no 'chunks' reach the surface)
Here's a chart of deployment apogee and perigee.
https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1491256299002155012/ph...
Bear in mind that Starlink is much lighter and "draggier" than typical artificial satellites. Based on publicly available data, I get a ballpark figure of roughly 20 kg/m^2 for the ballistic coefficient of a tumbling Starlink satellite.
Just eyeballing the graphs in the link I provided, that corresponds to a lifetime of something like 2-9 years, depending on solar conditions.
http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm
The Starlink "0.9" batch was launched in May 2019. Most reached operational altitude; those that did not decayed quite early, as expected. Those that remained operational have by now been deliberately dropped, but some 5 seem to have become unresponsive at a more-or-less operational altitude.
See dashboard at https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=49936.200
Starlink-43 is the first of those to fully decay, reentering around 26 January. https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44257
Starlink-24 is probably going to be the slowest of that cohort. It might have a couple years left. https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44257
Natural decay in <5 years is really quite fast as these things go.
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/22175/spacex-starlin...
>SpaceX deploys its satellites into these lower obits so that in the very rare case any satellite does not pass initial system checkouts it will quickly be deorbited by atmospheric drag. While the low deployment altitude requires more capable satellites at a considerable cost to us, it’s the right thing to do to maintain a sustainable space environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ijKirDjwOU
The Gabbard diagram is a way of expressing the orbital locations and decay of the particles produced as a result of an orbital collision. Note how higher objects tend to stay high for a long time, but low objects (below about 600km) drift lower at an appreciable timescale, and once they're below about 500km they fall the rest of the way very very quickly.
Starlink satellites deploy to 550-km orbits.
Edit: Oh, these were launched into a 210-km orbit, which combined with the higher atmospheric density due to the geomagnetic storm, basically dragged them back down before they could raise to their normal orbit. Oof.
Also, the vast majority of SpaceX satellites will be at 350km.
They start off at a 350 km ( https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=50803 was launched earlier this year).
They then raise them to about a 550 km orbit for its operational lifetime ( https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45102 )
And then they lower it a bit, and it decays more rapidly ( https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44249 )
Another one that didn't go operational - https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44282 - you can see it go up, fail, get lowered, and decay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#cite_note-sn20170917-...
I am not aware of any Starlink satellites currently in either of those two orbits.
made me think "100 years ago, it would have been (40/0)*0.01 = infinity percent", which probably means i need to lay off the coffee a bit.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/an-early-history-of-sa...
is that what you're meaning?
I too probably should lay off the coffee.
People in the developing world are not going to pay a high enough price to float this business. The vast majority of people in rich countries have cheaper and better internet already installed.
[0] at the stated numbers at least, the final constellation will likely be much smaller than originally quoted Musk is familiar with embellishing and overpromising timelines.
The science fiction you're thinking of assumes satellites are difficult to make, expensive to replace, and create a hazard when they fail. That will become less of an issue in time. Even the expensive ones could have a temporary equivalent launched to cover their function while a new long-term satellite is built.
;-)
The billion sounds linguistically more correct, but I have no idea if those are inflation adjusted dollars or whatever. It could be an error that telephones around the internet as 33.0 million by the US system then converted to someone in the EU to 33.000 because they misread the number.
Somewhere this morning a low-level SpaceX engineer was apologetically skipping out of the house. A full breakfast—uneaten, except for the toast he grabbed—laid out on the kitchen table and now the focal point of his wife's muttering. In the background a TV has the morning news on, briefly mentioning the geomagnetic storm. "I promise I'll be back in time for Kaitlyn's play. ...Yes I know how much this means to her."
But he won't be, will he? Because by the end of the day, the entire world will have been transformed in ways nobody could have seen that morning. Except for the perennially-ignored news anchor on in the background.
EDIT: Yeah, https://xkcd.com/1387/
Impulse, by the way, is covered by the press release [1] and, I agree, would need to be a priority no matter which FTL drive is used to get the satellites to their final destination.
[1] > The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm”
With there being a higher ratio of launched objects surface area to kinetic energy, I would assume they experience a higher effect of drag. It’s a bit like the difference between a shot gun and a rifle, both release a similar amount of energy but the shotgun shot has a much higher surface area and experiences more drag.
(Not a physicist, probably missing something)
SpaceX intentionally launches the sats into an extremely low orbit. That way, sats that can not be controlled due to a manufacturing defect or whatever will immediately reenter, and pose no threat to other spacecraft.
Normal satellites are directly launched into much higher orbits, so if there is an issue they will be space debris for decades.
A single larger sat would usually have a higher sectional density. But as far as I am aware, nobody else is launching into such low initial orbits, no matter the size of the sat. Usually you want to launch into an at least somewhat stable orbit so you have some time for troubleshooting in case something goes wrong.
So we've heard from SpaceX about their LEO sats, but what about other ones further out?
Not a very good analogy. It's more like trying lay the blame for killing a piece of electronics on lightning that hit a mile from your house when in fact it was flooded by the rain.
Fun site to track this stuff: https://www.spaceweather.com/
Enough sats up there so that it doesn't ruin the entire system, yet early enough for learning and improving future ones
Are they saying the satellites start out lower and then go higher later?
They state "the low deployment altitude requires more capable satellites at a considerable cost to us" - the extra cost is in the extra fuel required to raise the satellite's orbit - this results in less fuel available for maintaining the satellite's orbit and thus a shorter lifetime.
With high risk that entails, it may not make sense now even with high premium but it might be a thing of future
(A quick google of NASA suggests: it can be several gigawatt-hours of power from one event, even accounting for the bulk of it being radiated back into space.)
How is this possible? Maybe I'm missing something, but the satellite parts have to go somewhere
In this context it also means none of that is left in orbit either, which may be the more significant advantage of their procedures.
Anyway, those speeds are so fast that once you get on course to finally not miss, the friction from even the extremely thin atmosphere, at those speeds, is incredible.
[EDIT] OK I made the wrong assumption that this was due to radiation, but it was due to the atmosphere being 50% more dense than usual due to the storm, which led to failure of the satellites. This makes good sense. Next time I'll read TFA before I comment!
These satellites had just launched, and had not yet raised their orbit, so they were lower than the rest of the constellation.
> SpaceX deploys its satellites into these lower obits so that in the very rare case any satellite does not pass initial system checkouts it will quickly be deorbited by atmospheric drag. ...
> Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday.
So, while Starlink's final orbit is lower than (almost?) all other satellites, these satellites were even lower than that. I would be very surprised if any other satellites were effected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_USA_satellites
Quite a number of satellites listed as "failed."
It does explain all this in the article.
...the higher up orbits are more problematic
Kinda strange to make your prediction on this story.
* how many are functional+orbiting
* how many are nonfunctional+orbiting (i.e. space junk)
* how many are nonfunctional+deorbit(ing|ed)
1. The storm caused the atmosphere to expand
2. which increases drag on satellites.
3. The satellites were in safe mode because of the storm, so…
4. some satellites fell out of orbit because they couldn’t produce enough thrust to recover after the storm
No satellite was ever even at risk of becoming space junk. This is pretty read TFA stuff.
Several governments have space-object tracking systems that work on stuff far smaller than starlink satellites - the US, the EU, Russia, probably China. I doubt that’s open enough for you, though.
Frankly it doesn’t seem to me like there much to hold spacex accountable for. They’re out ~$35mm, but it’s harmless to the rest of us.
> Several governments have space-object tracking systems that work on stuff far smaller than starlink satellites - the US, the EU, Russia, probably China. I doubt that’s open enough for you, though.
I think it’s entirely reasonable to ask for data to back up SpaceX’s assertions and to feel concerned about it not being furnished. This is how proper science and engineering works. We don’t merely take press releases at face value.
You can get the data via several public websites. Here for example are the current orbital elements of all starlink sats in JSON format:
https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/gp.php?GROUP=starlink&F...
This is raw data. If you want somebody that processes this data into easily digestable graphs, that also exists.
Follow Jonathan McDowell ( @planet4589 ) on twitter, or read one of these Nasaspaceflight threads:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=49936.200 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50307.0
It is not even that hard to display it yourself. Propagation libraries for most major language exist. Here is a display of all active sats, using wasm and rust that I did as a toy: https://rklaehn.ddns.net/allsats/
Unlike a lot of their claims, this is basic physics. Why would you need to see it happen? Like, you didn't answer my question. It wasn't about what you expect. I asked how anything else could happen.
These orbits were an intentional choice by SpaceX. One of intentional effects benefits is to not contribute to space junk concerns.
Your litter in comparison would be a totally different kind of problem, and evidently, it is a problem at human scale. That's why there are fines.
Well the elements from both arrive the same way.
> I'm never gonna use Starlink and not only because it's super pricey, but because the idea is just stupid.
It's cheaper and better than the competitors. If HughesNet and Viasat can serve customers, why can't Starlink and do it better and cheaper than either.
I watched a bit of the Common Sense Skeptic video and heard several completely incorrect claims in the first couple of minutes. It not even remotely close to an impartial look at starlink. Just for a start, they can't use the list cost for falcon 9 launches as the internal cost to SpaceX, and then add in estimated SpaceX costs such as employee salaries.
And as for laser interconnects between starlink satellites - Its already happening. The last few launches have been starlink sats that utilize these laser interconnects.
But then he goes off with these screeds like the Starlink one as if like they are going to scale up v0.5 without any revision or cost improvement. In the name of "skepticism" or "rationality". But a real rational look at the situation would maybe give the ops and biz folks at SpaceX a bit more benefit of the doubt that they can project out profit/loss over multiyear timeframes.
He is the same as Thunderf00t in video content. Exactly the same type of video alarmism and selectively picking outdated data or extrapolation assuming no progress/changes.
Someone did a write-up on all the problems with the CSS video.
https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-deb...