Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX delivers 3rd batch of Starlink satellites in two weeks

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 343 posts

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

#251

Post by systemvoltage »

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…

Why is this special to Amazon and SpaceX? Literally every vertical integrated company does what you said. That's the definition of vertical integration.

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

#252

Post by mlyle »

adamjb wrote: post #219
mlyle wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2193/200...

>The Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (APWRA) began operations during the 1980s and by 1998 included about 5,400 wind turbines of various models, each rated to generate between 40 kW and 400 kW of electric power, or 580 MW total >Using mortality estimates adjusted for searcher detection and scavenger removal rates, we estimated the annual wind turbine–caused bird fatalities to number [...] 2,710 (80% CI =-6,100 to 11…

More like one bird per 210 nameplate kW. It was already pointed out by the grandparent comment that cats are a bigger problem for birds in general. But still, wind turbines kill enough eagles and other larger birds for it to be a significant concern deserving of mitigation.

E.g. the estimate is that the Altamont Pass installation kills ~440 burrowing owls per year, when there's likely to be fewer than 10k breeding pairs of owls left. That's a 2% kill rate (or more, counting the disruption to breeding pairs) from one (larger) installation.

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

#253

Post by state_less »

gpm wrote: post #246
bombcar wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla batteries are sweet, but ~22 days isn’t long enough if you’re off grid full time. I am trying to keep power generation 100% solar rather than burn diesel/gas to charge batteries when I can. So 2.4kwh per day might require roughly 500 watts of additional solar panels in a sunny locale. More solar could be added, but there are some space and weight limitations on a vehicle. I’m at 1400 watts of solar now.

Anyhow, just hoping they can figure out how to get the average power draw down over time.

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

#254

Post by anchpop »

mempko wrote: post #24

On my early morning walk I can see the satellites as very bright (much brighter than the stars) line across the sky. It's clear they didn't do enough about the reflectivity issue. Edit: Already downvoted for stating a fact. Amazing. Edit: Changed 'did nothing' to 'didn't do enough' Edit: Looks like experts still believe reflectivity is still a problem: https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-a...

> Already downvoted for stating a fact. Amazing

"Didn't do enough" is an opinion, and the satellites you saw were ones that hadn't reoriented themselves and so aren't representative of how they'll look in the long term as you implied they are

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

#255

Post by sigstoat »

zbrozek wrote: post #199
sigstoat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like there's an opportunity to produce an open-source SpaceX compatible antenna that someone could build themselves. you'd need at least $400 of test equipment to check that the >$100 of parts were working right, and to diagnose any problems. not cost effective.

I'd be amazed if it's that little in test equipment.

indeed. i'm leaning on that "at least" pretty hard. i figured establishing that you'd have to spend as much as the prefab'd hardware cost in order to get something that isn't warrantied, and would be the first thing starlink customer service would blame your problems on, would be enough to make this completely unreasonable.

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

#256

Post by andrewljohnson »

systemvoltage wrote: post #251
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…

Why is this special to Amazon and SpaceX? Literally every vertical integrated company does what you said. That's the definition of vertical integration.

Vertically integrating space logistics with space products is pretty cool.

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

#257

Post by ogre_codes »

systemvoltage wrote: post #251
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…

Why is this special to Amazon and SpaceX? Literally every vertical integrated company does what you said. That's the definition of vertical integration.

A vertically integrated company owns increasing amounts of production of their end product. Apple is vertically integrated, they have products where they make the CPU, the device, the OS, and retail the devices. But ultimately they only sell the end products.

If Apple were to start selling CPUs, you could argue that they had a similar model, but they don't (and won't because their CPUs are a competitive advantage).

What Amazon and SpaceX are doing isn't vertical integration in the classic sense. While Amazon sells AWS, they also have an online retail platform. Their retail platform consumes AWS services. Similarly, SpaceX is both the supplier of launch services and the consumer of launch services.

Amazon's retail operations are profitable, but by being their own best customer, they help Amazon drive profitability and demand for AWS.

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

#258

Post by m463 »

brianwawok wrote: post #202
JasonFruit wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's varied from as low as 30ms up to almost 80. Latency is just not going to be great with satellites, seeing that we're pushing it out to fricking space .

Except it’s low space. And signals travel faster in air than in glass. And the path is likely more direct. Just space alone isn’t enough to say the latency will be worse.

yes, just 341 miles.

so 3.6 milliseconds raw speed-of-light round trip when overhead.

I don't know what it would be like as it reaches the horizon, and how much latency each hop takes.

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

#259

Post by alextheparrot »

iso1210 wrote: post #90
alextheparrot wrote: post #46

My mother was raving about the service the other day. Speeds are 10-15x faster, she’s having an easier time with her online community college course and her job KPI is up by double digit percents [1]. She was worried that IT wouldn’t be OK with it when I said it was satellite (They’d been burned too many times), but the IT guy was incredibly excited because he’s also waiting to get Starlink. Looking forward to the se…

Any issues with snow etc?

None that she has mentioned, though I don't think they’ve had any really really bad storms this year.

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

#260

Post by viraptor »

Rule35 wrote: post #200
rjzzleep wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster than? Also, does anyone know who's behind this effort? Other leaders would celebrate the people behind the development but at spacex and tesla it's only ever news about Musk? Any interesting people behind what is happening at SpaceX ?

I haven't heard anything about NDAs that prevent you talking about the general area of your work at any of Musk's companies. There are certainly people on LinkedIn talking about what they do. Look at any FAANG presentation. The VP of the department introduces a PM, who may have a senior engineer with them. The other 98% of the team isn't mentioned. > That's kinda sad, isn't it? Why don't you start a thread about it.…

I feel like there are also some jobs is rather not be too public about. I got customers finding me and trying to reach out directly in much more mundane scenarios. If I worked at SpaceX in an engineering role, I think I'd be keeping it pretty private (not secret).
Post reply on HN