171–180 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.
If you earned $100k, that would be $2000. Would you write it off as a rounding error?
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Yup, spacex stuff is all LEO. Without input it all crashes into the atmosphere in a few years (3 I believe)
I don’t think this is true. Looking at this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/pMchk.jpg from UN, objects above 500km take ~25 years to decay from orbit. They reportedly start at 550km, so I wonder how they hope to achieve 3 years of deorbit without active control.
http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm
The Starlink "0.9" batch was launched in May 2019. Most reached operational altitude; those that did not decayed quite early, as expected. Those that remained operational have by now been deliberately dropped, but some 5 seem to have become unresponsive at a more-or-less operational altitude.
See dashboard at https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=49936.200
Starlink-43 is the first of those to fully decay, reentering around 26 January. https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44257
Starlink-24 is probably going to be the slowest of that cohort. It might have a couple years left. https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44257
Natural decay in <5 years is really quite fast as these things go.
What's crazy to me is that 50 years ago, losing 40 satellites would have been a significant portion of all satellites ever launched . Today, it's a temporary setback for a company that launched nearly one thousand satellites last year.
> 50 years ago, losing 40 satellites would have been a significant portion made me think "100 years ago, it would have been (40/0)*0.01 = infinity percent", which probably means i need to lay off the coffee a bit.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/an-early-history-of-sa...
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"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.
It is really up there with the HN classic "Does anyone else think the entire multi billion dollar targeted advertising industry is a scam that doesn't work?"
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Would spacex be liable if one of their satellites hits your car or house?
Yeah, I mean to be specific your homeowners' insurance would pay you directly for "falling debris", but then they would go sue SpaceX to get their money back.
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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?
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This isn't quite a fair comparison, though, because it doesn't consider the energy requirements to refine lox.
It takes about .7 MJ to refine a kg of lox, compared to 43 MJ released by a kg of kerosene. So that's not really a significant fraction.
And the oxidizer to fuel ratio is 2.5, so basically this doubles the impact.
(And let's not get started on the rest of energy intensive things involved in space launch).
Yes, space launch isn't ridiculously energy intensive, but it does put the 777 to shame.