I’m not sure that Starlink is supposed to make money. I think it’s another part of the get Musk to Mars plan. If you are going to a planet with unknown resources what is the easiest way to bootstrap communications. Is it bury 100k of km of wire? Or just plug a bunch of “cheap” satellites into a low Mars orbit? Makes total sense in that light to try it here. I’m not convinced these plans and products are designed to make money as much as bootstrap humans living on another planet.
SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
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Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they had planned ahead, they could have had a system to lift a bunch of satellites off together, then take off/replace the bad one, and then put all the rest back again.
> If they had planned ahead, they could have had a system to lift a bunch of satellites off together, then take off/replace the bad one, and then put all the rest back again. My guess is that they did a cost benefit analysis of doing this, and realized it was worth more to them to launch a dead satellite and verify it deorbits as planned than it was to miss a launch deadline, take apart the stack, fix the bum satelli…
All of that, then, testing the entire stack again. Unstacking and manipulating them after packaging is a nonzero risk to all of them.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
So theoretically the more remote a location the faster the starlink will be because it is shared by fewer people. Which is the exact inverse for wired infrastructure.
Except that the more remote your location the further you likely are from the nearest ground station, which means more hops through the satellite network before you get back down to the ground, higher latency, and reduced total throughput of the system. The system Starlink is trying to beat is BGAN and regional Ku/Ka providers. If you're expecting them to beat the pants off of your terrestrial wired service you're pr…
You want to downlink near the server, not near the client. Packets will move 40% faster through vacuum than through fiber.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#74Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage. Global coverage with decent latency! I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet…
> Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. The Starlink receiver is the size of a pizza box (and cannot get smaller, since that is the size of the necessary antenna) - and doesn't work while moving. So it's impractical to use on cars. What Tesla probably could do is put a receiver at every Supercharger and broadcast wifi there. It would be especially useful at the more rural location…
Phased arrays have been used in moving vehicles for decades with things like AESA radar systems. So what you're saying is ahistorical.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that the more remote your location the further you likely are from the nearest ground station, which means more hops through the satellite network before you get back down to the ground, higher latency, and reduced total throughput of the system. The system Starlink is trying to beat is BGAN and regional Ku/Ka providers. If you're expecting them to beat the pants off of your terrestrial wired service you're pr…
You want to downlink near the server, not near the client. Packets will move 40% faster through vacuum than through fiber.
Except if the terrestrial fiber backbone is cheaper and less congested you want to downlink near the client.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#76When is Twitter going to ban that spammy Elon bot?
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#77One off the satellites where apparently already dead and would not respond to commands when they got it mounted on the rocket. But they launched it anyway.
What's the source on this information? I haven't seen anything that says one was dead.
SpaceX's twitter and also mentioned during the webcast.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also first re-use of a faring as well, which is awesome because they're apparently not that cheap to make.
I do wonder if that fairing endeavor will come out net positive over the lifetime of Falcon. They paid for a specialized boat to catch the things, and iterated on the boat design several times. Starship is the real reusability project; Falcon is now just holding on to revenue while they get Starship ready to take over the entire launch market (including their own). The fairing is passive, I really wonder if it would…
I had read that the fairings were the limiting factor on launch frequency, because of how long they have to be cured for. So it's not just the direct cost that's relevant. Of course it's always possible to build a bunch more curing ovens, but at that point you're probably rearranging the factory layout and so on.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy for start, just blast satellites passing over with comparably big amounts of rf. Or just require spacex to not provide service in your territory "or else". If those phased antennas are very good, they may block point sources of jamming by "muting" that small area, but if you pump enough energy into rf, antenna will be overwhelmed and will degrade fully. But that requires tracking each of satellites passing overh…
That is definitely not how China would enforce it. You need a Starlink terminal in order to communicate with the satellite. China will most likely just block the sales of Starlink terminals in the country if they want to enforce a ban.
That seems reasonable, but easier still is putting your thumb on the Gigafactory 3 from Tesla. As long as Tesla understands that things will go smoothly as long as Starlink happens to not work there, it won't.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#80Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage. Global coverage with decent latency! I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet…
> I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Google stopped deploying fiber for several reasons: a) they weren't able to get reasonable access to poles for deployment. b) incumbents started large rollouts of gigabit capable services (FTTH from telcos and DOCSIS 3.1 from cablecos) in markets Google had announced, but hadn't built out c) maybe? lots more LTE deployment
Also, they weren't very good at it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl... "When you're walking around the neighborhood, [the lines are] popping up out of the road all over the place," resident Larry Coomes said at the time. "People are tripping over it." ... "AT&T has been using various forms of shallow trenching since 2009 and hasn't seen similar issues."