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One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

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Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#151
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok? Anyway, yes, I am a human. And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel... v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.

Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?

[deleted]

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#152
post #130

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended? It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats. Quoting a older post i made on the subject: ------- Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting…

They keep the satellites relatively low for latency, and that means they still need a lot of them for line-of-sight coverage, right? They have plans to add 15,000 more satellites. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/starlinks-ambiti...

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#153
post #116

> Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to 5 satellite reentries per day Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].) “Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not a…

I hear 10% increase on a global constant and that doesn't sound like peanuts. If we increase 10% each few years that might be a problem? I don't know anything about whatever field studies this but given that LEO constellations born yesterday even that 2% increase in stuff coming from the skyes sounds significant to me.

edit: okay I misunderstood what everyone meant

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#154
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically. The satellites need to actively work to stay up. That means no Kessler syndrome there. How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.

> Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically. It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.

> They can't all orbit on exactly the same level.

Sure they can: Leading/trailing each other is quite common. Intersecting orbits are riskier, but also possible without inevitable collisions.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#155

[Disclaimer: Not a hater, just a Nerd looking at data.] And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up. On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable…

>are funded with tax-payer money

This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.

>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle

Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?

>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s one single estimate, and the problem is much more nuanced. For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches. Conversely, collisions at much higher geosyn…

I don't know the specifics of starlink satellites but a rupture of any pressurized line has a chance of causing an unintended ascent. Thankfully in most cases the satellite is stabilized, so there is a good chance the satellite just gets a huge amount of rotational velocity added to it with no increase in altitude.

Whatever you do to launch an object higher, it will return to its original altitude once per orbit. If you want to stay high you first have to boost up and then you have to boost again half an hour later, which will happen just about never with debris.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#157
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of a re-branding. How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Not that much, I think, but maybe you have some inside scoop that the rest of us don't know about.

> That's a bit of a re-branding No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO. > How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communicat…

Bullshit. Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony. I've never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites. They even made movies about it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+movie+mars&oq=spacex+...

Google tells me exactly this:

>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."

It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.

Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.

There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.

It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#158
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years. They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic. > there is always one which is on the highest level Highest level?

> Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years. > They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic. I think there is a misunderstanding about the whole term. If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition. So there must be some threshold where they aren't problem. What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite am…

Why would there be a single numeric threshold?

You can pack many, many satellites into the same orbit without any danger, for example – as long as they move in the same direction. Let's make it 1000 for this thought experiment.

On the other hand, just two moving in opposite directions are obviously going to crash.

So is the number of "safe satellites in all of LEO" 1000 or 1?

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#159
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok? Anyway, yes, I am a human. And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel... v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.

Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?

Here is an example thread of someone having done the measurements of v3 vs mini:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_...

Have a look at the downtimes of the system.

A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?" Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.) (EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.) Was this AI generated? > The cable itself costs virtually nothing Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk? > due to their Satellites now being massively o…

Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok? Anyway, yes, I am a human. And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel... v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.

> I believe that YOU are a bot

I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)

> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too

Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.

You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.

Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).

You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.

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