201–210 of 347 posts
Yes, most of us are pretty angry at/disappointed in Elon these days but there are better places to focus than this.
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…
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> launches are probably significantly worse Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.
Hold on, are you saying that burning rocket fuel produces little to no pollution? As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments? That's pretty surprising to me assuming I'm understanding correctly.
There are high-atmosphere effects we don't yet understand. RP-1 produces soot, particularly when burned fuel rich. And methalox still releases methane since again you're not burning your fuel perfectly.
But the simplicity of non-hypergolic non-kerosene rocket fuel chemistries like the ones SpaceX uses is they burn remarkably clean. You don't get a bunch of additives producing weird neurotoxins, or incomplete combustion inventing organic compounds in the high atmosphere.
(I'm ignoring cryogenic fuels, which literally produce water vapour as an exhaust because liquid hydrogen is a bastard.)
> As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments?
No. Starship releases like 360 tons of CO2 per launch [1].
That said, nobody is launching a million rockets a day. We might get to like 3 or 4 a day in our lifetimes. Barring some novel economic opportunity in space, launch emissions are likely to remain negligble for the foreseeable future.
[1] https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/news/elon-musk-rocket-emitte...
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Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to…
> Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations. So there is demand :) > As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time Are you arguing that everybody reporting successfully using it far away from land is part…
Hawaiian Airlines - very interesting. Sadly wrong side of the planet for me to test it myself :)
It very well might be possible that the intra-links are only used for special customers like airlines for now, and not for consumers, and that this is the reason that all people I know who use Starlink still handover downtime...
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> If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities Running cables across out land is less impactful than lofting satellites?
Per the article, Starlink runs 8k satellites with an average life of 5 years. They launch in payloads of 20-40 satellites. That's 50+ launches per year if everything goes perfectly. About a million pounds of kerosene per launch. Plus everything else that goes into the rockets and satellites. Then the pollution impact from the launches and reentries. Then the eventual need to clean up LOE to avoid Kessler Syndrome. So…
Quarter of a million pounds kerosene per Falcon 9. Zero for Starship, which burns methane. (And thus emits pure methane, CO2 and water vapor.)
> the eventual need to clean up LOE to avoid Kessler Syndrome
Not a thing. (Search this comment thread for the term. There are good answers on the current state of research.)
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Search term: "low earth orbit satellite effects on astronomy" first result: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01904-2
OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness." These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or…
This 2023 paper is also issuing a warning, that if this continues without mitigation, ground based astronomy will be affected. They have the calculations to prove that. What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise.
Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy. I seriously doubt we will ever have one. And that the predictions of worse astronomy will become true, externalized into a type of internet you could have gotten with traditional cable, fiber optics, or a 5G radio tower.
EDIT:
> But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options.
The paper I cited does that. In the abstract they say:
> We present calculations of the potentially large rise in global sky brightness from space objects in low Earth orbit, including qualitative and quantitative assessments of how professional astronomy may be affected.
and inside the paper they devote a whole chapter (chapter 5) to possible mitigations which is titled:
> Mitigations: potential gains and risks
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Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
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Analysts that I've seen estimate that Starlink is already profitable and will remain so. Unless you can explain the differences between your math and their math, this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory.
Gimme your source URL, please. As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece,…
Yes, for example, via a battery-operated "Mini" terminal a month or so ago in extreme rural Finland, ~1km from the Russian border, while photographing wolves & bears.
It worked great.
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> Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations. So there is demand :) > As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time Are you arguing that everybody reporting successfully using it far away from land is part…
No conspiracy, but let's say that it is rather hard to get proper benchmarks done by actual users, and one has to rely on a lot of anecdotical data. Have you seen any real-life benchmark reports with traceroutes, measure downtime, handover time etc that impressed you in a positive way? If so, please share. Hawaiian Airlines - very interesting. Sadly wrong side of the planet for me to test it myself :) It very well mi…