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Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

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Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#341

Post by ascar »

jrockway wrote: post #187
Victerius wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New York Times Capital City, Earth – Satellite Starlink XB-4590 has shut down yesterday, February 8, 2132, following a geomagnetic storm that irreparably crippled its circuits. XB-4590 was 5 months old. It is survived by the 32,008 other active Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk IV declined to comment for this article.

My main takeaway here is that Elon Musk's grandson, "∑∫π²∞", decided he was tired of the escalating unicode name game and just named his kid Elon Musk IV.

> ∑∫π²∞

This reads: Sigma Integral Pi-Squared Infinitiy.

There are worse names ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#342

Post by dikei »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #81

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 don't think there will be a monopoly for SpaceX, at least not a global one.

It's a matter of nation sovereignty / media control: governments need local service providers that they can controlled. There's no way China will allow its citizens to freely use SpaceX, just like how Americans probably won't use satellite internet from a Chinese company.

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#343

Post by Brave-Steak »

johnwalkr wrote: post #230
wilg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I have a big collection of “why don’t they just” comments from HN. It’s pretty amusing to look at them in aggregate.

No post body was provided.

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#344

Post by sgtnoodle »

nine_k wrote: post #118
oxplot wrote: post #20

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.

If you earned $100k, that would be $2000. Would you write it off as a rounding error?

Maybe rounding error isn't the best term, but it seems below the threshold to worry about. Here in California, probably at least 30K of it would go to taxes anyway, and I wouldn't know how much within $2000 of accuracy unless I paid a tax accountant $300 to type the numbers into their software. Notably, the IRS requires you to be within 90% of your tax liability over the year to avoid penalties. 0.1*30k is $3000, so the IRS seemingly agrees that $2000 on $100K is below the threshold of being substantial.

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#346

Post by jve »

Aloha wrote: post #269
KennyBlanken wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog. It does however possess two chief advantages - the appearance of being novel and speed of construction. To build a cellular network to cover the areas that starlink does would take a decade - where it can be done at all. The aforementioned novel appearance also gets it largely free spectr…

> To be clear - it's not novel

Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites.

Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof)

Except no-one can provide you with low latency, high speed satellite internet. If you have alternatives (I do where I live) - Starlink is probably not for me.

You seem to paint as if starlink is something trivial, as some years ago people were thinking CRAZY - they can't possibly put that much satellites up there. Not to mention that people were really surprised they could put 60 satellites on a single rocket. That they established mass production of satellites. Etc.

This kind of comment reminds me of the Dropbox introductionary post [1]: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#347

Post by samwillis »

rklaehn wrote: post #306
samwillis wrote: post #295

I wander if Starlink launches are more susceptible to this than a normal launch with a single satellite? With there being a higher ratio of launched objects surface area to kinetic energy, I would assume they experience a higher effect of drag. It’s a bit like the difference between a shot gun and a rifle, both release a similar amount of energy but the shotgun shot has a much higher surface area and experiences more…

Yes. SpaceX intentionally launches the sats into an extremely low orbit. That way, sats that can not be controlled due to a manufacturing defect or whatever will immediately reenter, and pose no threat to other spacecraft. Normal satellites are directly launched into much higher orbits, so if there is an issue they will be space debris for decades.

Yes, I understand they are injected to a particularly low orbit. My question is, if you launched a single larger satellite into the same orbit would it be less susceptible to aerodynamic drag due to the effects of a similar geomagnetic storm?

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#348

Post by saint-loup »

coffeeblack wrote: post #291
yzydserd wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It must be noted that the satellites were not directly damaged by the geomagnetic storm. The storm warmed the atmosphere which caused it to expand, leading to additional drag that prohibited the satellites from leaving their low "safe mode" orbit. So they perished “with” geomagnetic storm, not “of” geomagnetic storm?

The storm was the only cause, so it is in fact “of”.

Useful terms and distinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causati...

Re: Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

#350

Post by rablackburn »

erulabs wrote: post #285
mlindner wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is sad because if you were to limit choices to picking individual people on the planet, I think Musk may be doing more to fix real existential problems in the world more than anyone else alive today. People are jealous creatures and like to hate on successful people.

I think it's a bit more complex than that. If you genuinely believe that society is a zero-sum-game, where any winner comes at the expense of some loser somewhere, then ultra-successful people must make you sick. You can hear a few whispers like "Tesla factories aren't the safest places to work at" or "An Amazon worker had to pee in a bottle" and it all lines up: these are horrible people who only got ahead because t…

> I think it's a bit more complex than that.

Because we can always go one level deeper...

When I ask people why they dislike Musk, the answer I get is usually not for some bleak, reasoned belief but because of his internet persona. He makes shitty, immature jokes. People think he's a bit of a dick.

Interestingly, engineers I know tend to be a bit more positive on him. I wonder if it's because they're exposed to more of his YouTube persona than his Twitter one.

> If you genuinely believe that society is a zero-sum-game...

The rest of this is strawman-ing pretty hard. I'm sure there are some people as described, but I think there's a larger more nuanced population who are uncomfortable with the huge growth of wealth inequality that's been going on. Some of their ire with the system is directed at those doing best under it.

That's probably not entirely unjustified either, what group in human history did nothing to preserve the status quo when it worked for them?

Society may not be a zero-sum game, but it's not a zero-harm game either.

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