Tangent: a few months ago there was a huge bonfire party at the beach in my town (Duxbury, MA), and my friends and I were treated to the trifecta of the conflagration plus a gorgeous blood moon rise, capped off by a starlink satellite train passing directly overhead. It was unforgettable.
US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
391–400 of 773 posts
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#392Starlink service is so obviously phenomenal to anyone who's used it, this isn't going to change that or effect SpaceX's success one bit. The FCC's actions here are just embarrassing their agency by exposing their petty ineptitude and harming whomever this program was supposed to help.
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Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
So to make the 2025 deadline they would have had to perfectly launch more rockets than they ever have before...sounds like the FCC made the correct choice.
SpaceX has done that every year since 2020. In 2020 they had 26 successful Falcon 9/Heavy launches, 31 in 2021, 61 in 2022, and 91 to date in 2023.
The calculation above assumes all satellites are available to provide bandwidth to the customers. That means essentially the 260 satellites need to be above the US (let's ignore that the visible horizon is different across the US). Now starlink are LEO, so 260 essentially we need to divide the 260 by the fraction the globe area the US is.
The 260 is a significant underestimate. It's likely 4-10x more
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
But he's the FCC? They are both the executive branch.
The President has a lot less control over independent agencies like the FCC. For example, the FCC commissioner currently attacking Biden is able to enjoy doing so from that position because Biden doesn't have the legal power to dismiss him.
Sure, but that runs against the argument that was being made, which is that Biden isn't the pentagon but he's the fcc...
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I_Am_Nous wrote: "Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch." From one of the dissenting opinions: > the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would be unable to launch enough Starlink s…
The Commission decision does address this. Unfortunately the section is redacted of specific details, but it appears Starlink argued that it's second gen satellites would be launched via Starship and address these issues. However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the i…
Given how much of the decision is blacked out, it's hard to give it any credibility, either.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#396Tangent: a few months ago there was a huge bonfire party at the beach in my town (Duxbury, MA), and my friends and I were treated to the trifecta of the conflagration plus a gorgeous blood moon rise, capped off by a starlink satellite train passing directly overhead. It was unforgettable.
It was Tetsuo and Matel.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is certainly better than a lot of existing options, but so is Starlink. I'd have expected an option that excludes Starlink to be something fairly future-proof. And, IME, people in those remote areas are using Starlink pretty successfully now. Instead, these standards are so low that it makes me wonder how Starlink doesn't qualify. The fact that they are just out of reach of Starlink in just enough areas to disqual…
Starlink, when originally launched, did hit the performance targets. It seems pretty clear that Starlink could've produced a plan that would've restricted user onboarding in a way that showed a commitment to continue hitting the targets. Instead, they added subscribers to the point that service deteriorated below the standards and was trending worse. I don't know whether this was a purely commercial decision to gener…
I can understand that, but are they measuring Starlink's competitors by the same standard? Overloading backhaul, at least temporarily, is hardly a new problem.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#398Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK? So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start pr…
To be fair, defense is an existential risk for the US and its allies. NATO can’t really afford to not have a reasonably up-to-date combat jet. They also need to continually feed money into the military industrial complex so that suppliers don’t go under/downsize too much/etc. Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.
> defense is an existential risk for the US
this is not a true statement for a huge country with oceans on 2 sides and nukes. it is a true statement about people relying on the us military to make money tho
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#400Tangent: a few months ago there was a huge bonfire party at the beach in my town (Duxbury, MA), and my friends and I were treated to the trifecta of the conflagration plus a gorgeous blood moon rise, capped off by a starlink satellite train passing directly overhead. It was unforgettable.
Tangent off a tangent: I'm new to the south shore area, do you have a favorite beach spot?