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SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

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Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#241

Post by PostThisTooFast »

ogre_codes wrote: post #228

Starlink is SpaceX's way of guaranteeing SpaceX has a launch client. It increases the number of launches they make, and drives down the cost per launch, both for themselves and for their other customers. They are creating a business model which is both profitable and drives profits to their launch business. This is similar to the synergy Amazon's online store and AWS have with each other. If SpaceX has room on a laun…

Unfortunately it's also littering the sky with a shitload of eventual junk, and immediate astronomical blight.

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#242

Post by neaanopri »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #187
easton wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink already said they will comply with whatever is needed from a specific government, including selling through local resellers and routing through things like the GFW. It’s not designed for censorship resistance, the only real way around it would be to get a foreign dishy/modem.

I would be surprised if it was that simple. Countries like Russia and China are going to want a very visible method of knowing whether a given ground dish is the normal version or their countries specific version. Anything that is just cosmetic would be too simple to fake. The biggest problem is that if any other entity controls the satellites themselves; they could turn routing the the GFW on and off which would be…

Bent-piping to a GFW ground station makes a lot of sense

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#243

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #223
biotinker wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind turbines don't kill enough birds to be more than a drop in the dead-bird bucket. It's a talking point used by people who were looking for reasons to be against wind turbines, but housecats kill four orders of magnitudes- not 4x, 10,000x- more birds each year. The percent of human-caused bird deaths due to wind turbines is smaller than the percent of Americans dying in airplane crashes each year, compared to all…

The species of birds that get killed are different. Wind turbines kill bigger birds, cats kill small songbirds. Both are a non-negligible factor for their respective species.

Windmills generate more than 1% of power. Thus if you scale up the wind turbines by 100x (to cover more than all power generated over the world), they still kill over 100x fewer birds than cats.

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#244

Post by neaanopri »

kjrose wrote: post #168

Could someone explain to me how/if this resolves the speed issues that all satellite internet has had since its inception.

"Speed" is latency and bandwidth.

Bandwidth is solved with phased-array antennas at a high carrier frequency (Ku/Ka?). The high carrier frequency allows for high (literal) bandwidth. However, the phased-array antennas are physically the same size as some smaller, lower frequency antennas are, and thus transmit/recieve more power. This stuff in general is called a link budget and is standard in satcom.

Latency is just satellites at a lower orbit. This is only possible now because: 1. Chip manufacturing can produce a cheap phased array antenna that's electronically steered to follow the satellite in low orbit. 2. Launch costs low enough it's economical to launch tons of satellites

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#245

Post by DC1350 »

dillondoyle wrote: post #72
joezydeco wrote: post #15

So where is Amazon in relation to all of this? I got pinged by a recruiter from Kuiper the other week and all I can see is that there's no way they're on track to be working in 5 years. They don't even have a stable launch platform. Would Musk sell Bezos the ride?

Would there be potential AWS synergies that make any sense? Besides having the money to basically give it away for free, that could be a big value add if so. idk maybe enabling the blanketing of the earth in ever expanding ring/echo surveillance. or a cdn though uploading huge video files to a satellite hard drive might not make any sense or actually save any MS given the inherent satellite -> earth delay.

I can’t think of any but it’s a cool marketing point to have literal cloud computing

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#246

Post by gpm »

bombcar wrote: post #227
state_less wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s some large continuous power consumption for off grid use. Curious if they’ll come up with a way to put it into some sort of low power idle mode during low utilization?

Yeah https://conversation.sevarg.net/t/starlink-satellite-based-i... talks about it - 100 watts idle is too high if you’re on battery. It’s noticeably high so I assume at some point it’ll be reduced unless it’s caused by continuous “transmission” so the satellite doesn’t lose the connection.

Depends what sort of battery you're on. The cheapest car Tesla sells (or at least that is displayed to me when I visit their site), for example, has a 54 kwh battery. It could run a 100 watt load for ~22 days between charges (not counting driving). Or to put it another way, if you charge every day, and you never turn the dish off, this would only drain 1/22nd of your range.

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#247

Post by ogre_codes »

gonehome wrote: post #238

The service is awesome. In Placerville California our service went from Calnet 10mbps down at 28ms latency to Starlink 160mbps down at 24ms latency. This is a really big deal and will disrupt a lot of these shitty ISPs that have done nothing for years. Also, still tracking for my 2021 predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25601473 Edit: Price is only $99/month with one up front cost for the hardware ($500…

Many of these ISPs are shitty because they service the hardest to reach places. Comcast and Verizon have gobbled up billions in government aid to bring service to rural areas and end up delivering only to fringe areas which they can reach easily. The small companies end up struggling to get the government cash and end up underfunded providing service to the absolute-most difficult to reach consumers. It's a real crappy deal.

Arguably satellite service erases all of this and is a hard reset on rural telecommunications. Unfortunately, it's not a industry small businesses can participate in.

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#248

Post by p2t2p »

fuoqi wrote: post #217
p2t2p wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's, easy, just like they do it in Russia - jail time and fines for having Space X antenna.

You either intentionally lying or you simply don't know what are you talking about. Not only the law in question only has administrative fines, no jail time, but also it has not been even accepted yet. Also it may not even apply to simple citizens, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460626

That doesn't really matter, the point is that an authoritarian regime has an easy solution. In Russia they may or may not limit it to fines (I'm not sure if it can be converted into criminal charges if you accumulate too many fines?). In China they may go for jail time right away and given China's past performance I don't see that as a too wild assumption.

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#249

Post by grecy »

bombcar wrote: post #120
robbiet480 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dishy will actually intentionally heat up to melt snow. I’ve seen YouTube videos of it melting a good amount of snow per hour and service remaining stable.

Dishy also seems to continually pull 100 watts even when not in melt mode.

Elon has said more than once reducing the power needs is a goal. (so it can be more easily used on small boats, RVs, etc.)

Re: SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

#250

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

missedthecue wrote: post #149
jiofih wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably about half a suburban town’s worth of iPhones.

But all the components of an iPhone can technically be recycled to one degree or another (even if they aren't at present). Once a satellite has been incinerated, that's it. And there will be thousands of these, and several providers. That's thousands and thousands of pounds of material disappearing for good, every year.

Not really. You know what happens when a satellite burns up in the atmosphere? Hint: It's not a nuclear reaction. All the components end up back on earth (just vaporized and oxidized).
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