Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

TaylorAlexander

It must be noted that the satellites were not directly damaged by the geomagnetic storm. The storm warmed the atmosphere which caused it to expand, leading to additional drag that prohibited the satellites from leaving their low "safe mode" orbit.

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."

> It must be noted that the satellites were not directly damaged by the geomagnetic storm. The storm warmed the atmosphere which caused it to expand, leading to additional drag that prohibited the satellites from leaving their low "safe mode" orbit.

So they perished “with” geomagnetic storm, not “of” geomagnetic storm?

The storm was the only cause, so it is in fact “of”.

The storm is a single event in a chain of events that caused the satellites to fail.

It's not the direct nor the first cause.

I'd probably use the term 'following' in that case.

Starlink lost 40 satellites following geomagnetic storm

There is a causal link though: without the storm, the satellites wouldn't have been lost (in this way at least).

That's like saying a ship sank not because of the hurricane, but because it was flooded and ended up capsizing. Sure, it wouldn't have sunk if it had stayed in port, but we still say the hurricane was the cause.

I assume you are making a case in good faith.

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.

So the difference is that the movement of water (i.e. waves) is implied in a Hurricane and that the atmosphere is expanding isn't implied in a geomagnetic storm? So your whole argument is based on our (meaning the general population) limited knowledge about the side effects of geomagnetic storms, while we do know about the side effects of hurricanes.

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.

Useful terms and distinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causati...

Imagine flying a fighter jet 4 feet above the ocean. Then a storm appears and causes 6 foot swells. Now your jet is on the bottom of the ocean.

Would you say your jet was lost "with" the storm, or "because of" the storm?

It was lost because, during the storm, it was flying too low. If the jet had been flying at a higher altitude, the storm would have still happen and the jet would have been fine. So the storm is not the direct and only cause of the crash.

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).

Right. I imagined some solar flare or something.

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.

Out of curiosity, where would you rank the climate crisis on this list?

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.

My list:

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...

Solar flares should be a lot lower on the list, as the bulk of the risk can actually be mitigated in the electric grid. Every few years the IEEE publishes an article on the risk solar flares pose to the electric grid, and how it can be mitigated by installing capacitors on the multi-ground neutral. Remember: solar flares induce current in long wires, not short ones, so the risk is not so great to individual electric devices were the electric grid protected.

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.

I'm a big proponent of the DOE's suggestion for a national strategic transformer reserve. They estimate $500mil (2017) would cover buying enough redundant transformers to resuscitate the power grid after a nationwide failure. Pre-covid, the typical lead time for a full scale transformer was ~2 years. I'm assuming it would take even longer now. I can't imagine how long it would take to replace our transformers if ~1/4 of the world also needed to do the same.

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...

THIS!!

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.

Why not just disconnect the working ones at the same time and then they don't get fried

That could definitely help. However, while I don't have the numbers, I'd expect that the required labor to disconnect them all would vastly exceed the 24-72 hour warning time.

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.

Part of the challenge is that transformers for individual homes are at risk. Throw a significant DC voltage across a transformer designed to handle 60 Hz AC, and the results are not going to be pretty.

IMO, climate change needs to be higher on the list since it is a major cause of water scarcity (and hence war).

this is it! water scarcity --> war will surely become a very large component of inter-country diplomacy in the near-ish future.

Climate disasters should get a boost because it can lead to war and water scarcity. Consider India and Pakistan. Both of them greatly depend on water from Himalayan glaciers, a source that is rapidly declining due to climate change.

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-...

[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7071

The difference is also important because if it’s an issue with altitude under certain conditions they may be able to take preventive measures with future storms. Whereas torm-related electronic disturbances could lead to satellite design changes.

Preventive measures could also lead to design changes.

well, at the end of the day they deorbitted because they ran out of fuel.

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.

That’s also the issue with those ground-effect vehicles, like the Ekranoplan.

Indirect causation is still causation, right?

It's a false dichotomy, we have the full English language at our disposal, so we can describe the nuances of the situation. I know the situation you're referencing, and it's frustrating to see the argument boil down to some kind of lexical 'gotcha!'.

>Would you say your jet was lost "with" the storm, or "because of" the storm?

You would say "the low-flying jet was lost due to 6 foot swells caused by a storm"

Yes. Of course you probably wrote this because people are saying that deaths with Covid are not the same as deaths from Covid.

You missed the joke, which was about covid.

They perished in a storm. You could call it a “geomagnetically induced atmospheric storm”, but I like the cognitive dissonance of space satellites getting hit by poor atmospheric weather.

Semantics…

That's quite funny but it's clearly wasted here.

It's even more fun as a pocket universe thread.

Humor can sometimes get through.

I don't think that's the distinction being made. It sounds like the commenter is making the distinction that the satellites' electronics were not damaged by magnetic fields (which is what a reader might assume from the headline).

Given Musk's email about SpaceX being close to bankruptcy, how will this affect them financially? Can SpaceX survive without a bailout? What would a bailout look like, another Solarcity?

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"

Then don't balls to the wall spool up terminal production, bump out your timescale, and shift your strategy to doing more launches, and hope there is enough interest to weather things.

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.

Their products don't seem too popular. E.g. Falcon heavy flew 2 missions in 2019, and 0 since then.

6 FH are scheduled for this year

https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceX/wiki/launches/manifest

Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy, and according to rumors did internally, but then Shotwell (SpaceX COO) reminded him that they'd already sold Falcon Heavy missions to the Air Force so it forced their hand. In reality it should've been canceled as it's not very profitable. What happened is that the Falcon 9 performance kept getting better and better and ate up the market segment that would have been put on to Falcon Heavy.

> Given Musk's email about SpaceX being close to bankruptcy, how will this affect them financially? Can SpaceX survive without a bailout?

Musk clarified that stance on Twitter. They are not in fact close to bankruptcy. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465793233729069063

I guess their hall-effect thrusters didn't have enough impulse to help or long enough fuel?

Oh I see seems like they literally could not rotate (against atmosphere) by reaction wheels to then fire the thruster

The storm warmed the atmosphere which caused it to expand, leading to additional drag

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.

... We have been launching satellites for a long, long time. The process is very well understood, scientifically. Also, your prior should not be that just because you personally haven't heard of something, it must be a new discovery. In fact, in this case it appears to be literally the second bullet point on the first page I could find talking about the risks of geomagnetic storms: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-are-hazards-magnetic-storms

your prior should not be that just because you personally haven't heard of something, it must be a new discovery

Sorry I asked. I'll try to be less interested in science in the future.

Don't worry about them. There's plenty of folks eager to teach folks about this stuff. Check out Scott Manley or Everyday Astronaut on YouTube. I'm sure Scott will have a video out in a day or two explaining what happened using language that most folks can understand.

A simultaneously terrible and informative response.

More interesting question is if the spacex risk management didnt hear about it or hand waved it

Except for a shower of heavy metal particles. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89909-7.pdf

"mostly aluminum"

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.

Maybe they meant "heavy, metal particles", as in that are both metal and "heavy" relative to other materials (so somewhat redundant adjectives); as opposed to, "heavy-metal particles".

What you say is correct.

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.

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