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Comment by vl | Hacker News Reader

What is even more impressive to me is that they were able to quite reliably stream all this through Starlink. This shows how mature and usable Starlink is. The fact that you can have live internet connection on re-entering space ship - truly the future is here.

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Incredible demo of great service. If you can get reliable video from space, it makes wifi on a commercial plane look like cakewalk.

What will viasat stockholders think now?

As long as they stay sane and reliable they will have nothing to worry about. Internet connectivity is too important to rely on service that can be taken away without notice by one irrational angry tweet or xhit or whatever they’re called now.

It was provided that way in the first place. Whims that provide can take away.

So pay for your services in full and don't leak negotiation documents.

To me,the bandwidth of the live telemetry data was the most impressive part of the whole thing. I think that's a bigger success than the whole launch.

According to Elons tweet, they had 11 internal cameras streaming. Add to that the 2 external cameras and all the telemetry, that's some damn good bandwidth.

Well, yeah it was reliable but with a lot of artifacts

I honestly couldn't make out much of what was being shown at those last moments. And I'm curious why SpaceX didn't have a ship there at the expected landing site to assess the landing (maybe they thought it wouldn't make it)?

It was a great event, surely, but it would have been nice to have a 3rd person view of the landing (you have the diagram at the bottom but it's not the same thing) .

They don’t have a ship there so burning rocket debris doesn’t kill people. Once they’re confident they can land it in a specific place in one piece, expect them to drop it with cameras present.

The issue at the end wasn’t as much artifacts as it was the camera housing getting blasted during the descent. It visibly cracked as the fin caught fire.

I hope someone recovers that fin. It kept working despite all the damage it took.

The video isn't really live. The original may have had buffering problems, etc.

Nothing is live, not even conversations with people in the same room, 1 ns per ft delayed.

Not even conversations in our own minds, as the thought that was shaped in part of the brain needs time to be transferred to consciousness.

Not to down play StarLink, but actually... this amazing impressive reliable video stream is capable from any orbiting satelite. What's different here is that Starship is so massively huge, something like several meters in diameter, like maybe 7~9 meters, or something like that. Anyhoo, that the interference from the plasma envelope... does not fully envelope the whole rocket. There is a bunch of surface on the backside of the rocket not subject to the plasma, which is something liek fire made of electrons stripped from their atomic nuclus, and so causes elctromagnetic effects. Since the plasma doesn't go all around, any satelite can communicate, not just Starlink.

The restricted geometry means that Starlink is the only constellation with enough coverage to keep the link up (and even then it can't get a connection for moments of the decent). It's completely accurate to say that only Starship and Starlink could pull this off. You would have to imagine a fictional constellation to say "any satelite can communicate".

Yes, a ship that big makes a big hole that physically allows the signals to escape the plasma envelope, but beyond that, it has to have a coherent signal with enough bandwidth for us to watch the video in high definition in near realtime, whilst thundering through the atmosphere at 20,000kph at the same time parts of the ship are being torn apart from the stresses of re-entry, which I find is astonishing.

I very much doubt that the same bandwidth and signal reliability is currently available from just "any orbiting satellite" outside of some military constellations.

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