131–140 of 508 posts
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Yup, spacex stuff is all LEO. Without input it all crashes into the atmosphere in a few years (3 I believe)
Would spacex be liable if one of their satellites hits your car or house?
40 sats makes up about 2% of the current fleet - so a rounding error in cost and time. The important part of this news is how those 40 sats deorbit and leave no junk either in orbit or on earth.
SpaceX should build a satellite picker satellite to collect their dysfunctional Starlink satellites and bring them back on Earth. They could study their vulnerabilities and apply the lessons learned to shield future Starlink satellites against solar storms.
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Need third party analysis of that, personally
The search term "Gabbard diagram" should tell you all you need to know. Especially if you find some animated ones. Here's a particularly nice one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ijKirDjwOU The Gabbard diagram is a way of expressing the orbital locations and decay of the particles produced as a result of an orbital collision. Note how higher objects tend to stay high for a long time, but low objects (below about 600…
Also, the vast majority of SpaceX satellites will be at 350km.
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Well, "continued to work closely with the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron" was a bit on the nose.
We live in the future for quite some time now.
I have a genuine question, are we handing SpaceX a monopoly by allowing them to launch these satellites, or will competing companies be able to launch similar services? Will space be too cluttered for competition? (I'm guessing space is really big and that we can have _a lot_ of small satellites up there.)
There are a bunch of different kinds of services offered or soon to be offered by other companies. Some only handle small text messages at like 4800 baud (like Orbcomm) and some others are planning commercial cell towers in space (like AST). Everyone has different needs so not everyone is going to require a blistering fast, low latency, high availability link. So while I applaud SpaceX going for the gold to deliver such service, it's not for most people and is overkill for most applications required a satellite uplink.
40 satellites out of 49 launched by the rocket. Pretty heavy losses, but it's interesting that nearly 20% were spared, even though, or because, they fly in formation.
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If you read the article, SpaceX specifically designed the process to avoid orbiting junk.
Yup, spacex stuff is all LEO. Without input it all crashes into the atmosphere in a few years (3 I believe)
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Someday potentially we could buy/lease/rent our own satelites over satelites.com use it for personal research, photography etc.,
Launching a satellite is already sub $100k. Technology both miniaturizes and industrializes at an exponential rate. Think about how small and cheap computers have become in the span of a hundred years, from "occupies a building and costs a fortune" to "fits in your pocket and everyone can afford one". Sputnik 1, the first satellite ever launched cost 33 billion 1985 US dollars. 45 years later, you can get a cubesat i…
I have a genuine question, are we handing SpaceX a monopoly by allowing them to launch these satellites, or will competing companies be able to launch similar services? Will space be too cluttered for competition? (I'm guessing space is really big and that we can have _a lot_ of small satellites up there.)
We didn't hand them anything. SpaceX took the risk of being a first mover in a very difficult field and looks to have had their bet pay off. There's room for more satellites. Space is pretty big, and with some careful automated coordination we can avoid collisions. But someone else needs to first figure out how to cheaply launch a competing fleet, and I doubt anyone will come close for years.
