461–470 of 508 posts
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Should be more than zero though, no? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/an-early-history-of-sa...
in the jpg from CalTech, I'm not seeing any satellites in orbit in 1922. is that what you're meaning?
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Then don't balls to the wall spool up terminal production, bump out your timescale, and shift your strategy to doing more launches, and hope there is enough interest to weather things. Frankly, I have issues with someone who defied every forseeable risk inherent in operating an LEO satcom network. There is a reason most long term comm infra tends to go to GEO... Replacing stuff in LEO because the atmo ate it is expen…
Their products don't seem too popular. E.g. Falcon heavy flew 2 missions in 2019, and 0 since then.
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I really don't think Sputnik cost more than the entire Apollo program, nor 8x the cost of the JWST. I can only find a couple of sites saying "33.000 million" for Sputnik's cost, unsourced.
That could be an EU/US issue. In the EU it is common to separate thousands (or millions) with dots, and decimals with commas. In the US it is the other way around. So those sources could be saying (or were read by GP) as 33 thousand million (33 billion) or it could mean 33 million and 0 thousands. The billion sounds linguistically more correct, but I have no idea if those are inflation adjusted dollars or whatever. I…
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. Shortened excerpt: "These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase.... speed and severity of the storm caused…
> 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?
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It might not be the full $62M though. SpaceX often launches other payloads at the same time. I recall one that sent off a couple of BlackSky says at the same time. I don't know what % of the payload that constitutes though, and as I write this out I realize that I'm probably splitting hairs...
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/01/06/spacex-deploys-49-more... This had 48 satellites, so definitely a dedicated launch.
I didn't find a quick # of lift capacity of Falcon 9 to LEO in reusable mode, but SpaceX has stated >= 60% capacity in reusable mode. LEO in non-reusable mode has about 23,000kg, so there could be a fair bit of headroom for extra mass in LEO reusable mode even with 48 starlink sats. Admittedly, probably not enough to really change the magnitude of the GGP's calculations.
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Amazon's Project Kuiper Behind, but it's there
Launching on what, exactly? Right now they have 9 launches planned using Atlas 5. That's not going to get them a usable fleet of satellites. If they want to launch anything beyond that, Blue Origin must finish the BE-4: a rocket engine years behind schedule. (Either using them for Vulcan rockets or for the New Glenn). From Amazon's perspective, those 9 launches are money wasted if BO doesn't come through. I'd be ecst…
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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…
Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths.
Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining.
Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper.
The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.
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I don't think it can be profitable at that price is the point.
Current satellite broadband (in the US) is in that same pricing ballpark, I don't see why Starlink couldn't be profitable at that price-- or even lower-- once it scales up.
The opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network (and Starlinks opex is certainly more than a convention geosynchronous satellite system). Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining.
Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper - this on top of the inherent launch costs, and the much much much larger fleet, implies that there may be a disconnect in pricing.
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These launches are getting SpaceX the money to advance to methane-powered rockets: they will literally make rocket fuel out of air and sunlight, making them absolutely carbon neutral.
Is the manufacture of biofuels actually carbon neutral? What about the massive deforestation of Indonesia - caused by Germany's biofuel mandate?
We're not discussing "massive deforestation" here. Germany's biofuel mandate does not affect rockets in Texas.
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I fully expect they will. But I want to actually see it happen instead of just blindly regurgitating corporate statements that it won't be a worry in the near future.
> blindly regurgitating corporate statements Unlike a lot of their claims, this is basic physics. Why would you need to see it happen? Like, you didn't answer my question. It wasn't about what you expect. I asked how anything else could happen.