Why does it work on the plane?
are the constant handoffs between satellites not enough to break connections or cause extremely high packet loss for it to suck?
is there a speed at which it would break?
Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
181–190 of 399 posts
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.
Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink. I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
It's probably what the UA CEO was talking about, trying to get competitors to sign contracts with other providers. Viasat was hot stuff for a long time, wouldn't be surprised if there's a noncompete preventing the change.
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#183I've only had it once, but inflight Starlink is a game changer. I was able to play a ranked AoE2 game over the Pacific Ocean.
That sounds somewhat unpleasant even if the connection itself is fine. How much space did you have for a mouse?
Hah, reminds me of learning to play Quake Live on my macbook trackpad. It was hard to go back to a mouse.
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area wh…
other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?
The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing.
So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The company was always about Wars not Mars. Such a cynical take! Starlink made Golden Dome possible. It is easy to make up conspiracies post-hoc while forgetting that they were ridiculed when they announced it and the "experts" opined that it is impossible to do. > SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI This is highly unfounded speculation. Griffin went to work for "In-Q-Tel" after SpaceX was already…
It wasn't In-Q-Tel directly... https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/11/the-pentagon-is-recruiting... https://web.archive.org/web/20241213051851/https://historyco...
Yea .. so new that I have only worked in the industry for 5+ years now. Your link doesn't support anything you said.
What passage in that interview says anything about "In‑Q‑Tel invested in SpaceX" or "CIA funded SpaceX"?
That interview is a NASA oral history of Mike Griffin’s career. It mentions his time at In‑Q‑Tel and later NASA, but it never says In‑Q‑Tel or the CIA funded SpaceX. You’re conflating "this guy once ran a CIA‑linked VC" with "he personally funneled CIA money into SpaceX," which simply isn't true. SpaceX’s early funding is well‑documented as Musk’s own money plus later NASA contracts as a customer, not a CIA equity round.
SpaceX (and Kistler Aerospace, Orbital Sciences etc.) was awarded contracts for commercial transportation to the ISS [1]. NASA’s role was as an anchor customer and partner under a publicly described program to get cargo (and later crew) to ISS via commercial providers. NASA’s commercial cargo program and SpaceX’s contracts are not secret. They were openly competed and publicly announced. That's the opposite of clandestine CIA startup funding.
DoD launch money for SpaceX (EELV/NSSL contracts, etc.) came much later, after Falcon 9 was flying and competing with ULA, and those are again launch service contracts, not "investment".
> Trump admin took this link down off NASA's website but it's archived just before the transition
That interview wasn't mysteriously "scrubbed". The website got updated and you found an old link that wasn't working anymore [2][3]. Not a conspiracy, just garden variety link rot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/griffinmd-1-...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either. > The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself. Or , we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the governme…
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I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart.
I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#187I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over the…
I don't think the math works.
There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house).
It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet.
By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either. > The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself. Or , we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the governme…
> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost. This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.
Sure, if we restrict the subsidy to farmers and others where we need them to live in rural areas, that's fine.
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities.…
>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area wh…
Decentralizing population seems at odds with goals like better public transport and infrastructure.
Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct. Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable. Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people i…
Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives.…
Generally agree. I live in a location that had (still has?) PSTN service, electricity, and natural gas services, but never got any kind of broadband besides the network I paid for and deployed myself, and subsequently of course StarLink.
I think the issue isn't so much that people are demanding internet service in
random places, more they're expecting internet service in the places you get all the other regular services.