241–250 of 508 posts
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.
I guess I'm being pedantic, but as a percentage of a whole, isn't 2% not a rounding error by definition?
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Yes. But they're designed to burn up on entry. I think it's been mentioned on HN that the delay in their laser link network was due to the need to redesign the laser component to ensure it would break up.
When people say something will "burn up on reentry", a phrase that I've heard almost all of my life but never really given much thought too, how burnt are we talking? Surely it doesn't just completely atomize?
And here's a timelapse in a hypersonic plasma test chamber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_AcG4ZQItg
(Keep in mind the pieces that come off are still going to keep being heated even after they seperate.)
It largely does atomize yes, depending on the material. Which is why they're designed out of materials that will do this.
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> The carbon impact of just one launch is pretty obscene. It really isn't. It's what, 15 aeroplane flights' worth? For the sake of bringing internet to hundreds of thousands of people? By letting people shop online or stream entertainment they've probably paid for themselves in reduced car journeys already.
You're citing the cost of 1% of the network against the entire network's function. It's more like 750 "flights worth." To provide internet service to ~250,000 people - about one quarter the population of a major east coast city. Also, these are consumable - much more so than cable plants. Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure. As witnessed by the very high cost of St…
So what should people who dont have access to the ground-based infrastructure do?
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.)
I'm not sure it will succeed, it's a "natural monopoly" type of market (high fixed cost, low marginal cost), and SpaceX has an incredible advantage in being really frickin good at launching rockets (though they do offer to sell those services).
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Based on Tesla’s history with FSD, I don’t think giving any Musk company the benefit of the doubt is warranted. There are two options: 1) They don’t monitor the warnings. 2) The warning doesn’t matter. Move fast and breaking things. Both options are bad.
3) The warning was missed due to 4) The severity of the situation was misjudged 5) They decided to try a real-world experiment to determine whether their expectations were correct
Seeing how the satellites were taken down not by the storm itself but the atmosphere slightly expanding to make the low-orbit to high-orbit move physically impossible, I wonder if this is something that hadn’t been encountered before, or is a known phenomenon but with unknown consequences.
Known phenomenon with unknown consequences tends to be the kind of stuff SpaceX likes to hurl headfirst into to see what breaks.
The title misrepresents things (people are posting this everywhere with this wrong title). The satellites were not lost to the geomagnetic storm. They were lost to the atmosphere expanding from the geomagnetic storm. The title implies some kind of electronic damage from the geomagnetic storm when in fact there has been none.
When my garage flooded during a storm, can I blame the storm?
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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…
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.
An entire launch worth of satellites is not a "rounding error." The carbon impact of just one launch is pretty obscene.
It isn’t really. Checkout Everyday Astronaut’s take on it: https://youtu.be/C4VHfmiwuv4
So…we have the Space Weather Prediction Center [0] and raw data from NOAA for this exact purpose. Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch? There was a G1 warning posted until 21:00 UTC on the launch date: Space Weather Message Code: WARK05 Serial Number: 1635 Issue Time: 2022 Feb 03 1428 UTC EXTENDED WARNING: Geomagnetic K-index of 5 expected Extension to Serial Number: 1634 Valid From: 2022 Feb 03 0…
"Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" is peak Hacker News pettiness. Try not to assume the worst, especially when it's pretty silly.
So, what were the reasons? Hubris could be a reason.