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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

#331

Post by AllegedAlec »

dloy wrote: post #320
nurettin wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people including you were oblivious to this significant re-entry event until it appeared in the news. So off-hand dismissals and taking this personal will not help your case. Also, since you brought him up, where are the studies of the environmental impact of satellite launches and space debris funded by Elon Musk? Is the argument "planet big satellite small defund NASA"? In that case I'm going with the arti…

Are we going to debate him on his argument or only on his character? Shoot the messenger I guess.

What character?

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

#333

Post by HanClinto »

gambiting wrote: post #222
HanClinto wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because providing infrastructure to remote regions is incredibly difficult through other mechanisms. I don't believe it's hyperbole to say that -- for the goal of improving infrastructure access in some of the most remote and challenging places in the world -- Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years. Starlink is easily o…

>>Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years. Better than gates' effort to eradicate malaria? Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have, because it's slightly easier than paying OpenReach to connect them to proper network. And it's hard to imagine anyone else being their clients,…

> Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have

Yeah, so our perspectives may differ a bit. My personal focus has primarily been with Africa, where Starlink is truly transformative. Demand for Starlink may be underwhelming in developed countries (such as your "rural England" example), while in underdeveloped countries, the demand regularly outstrips the supply [0]. I love that it's affordable enough for my African colleagues to use. In the last couple of weeks, I've had more than one full-motion screen-sharing video call to northern Nigeria (I.E., not the capital city) to do collaborative engineering. Even just a handful of years ago, this would not have been possible before Starlink was available.

I'm not casting any shade on malaria eradication -- that is awesome as well. I can love both things, but the subject here is Starlink, and I want to underscore how truly impressive and effective Starlink has been for advancing infrastructure in a quantum leap.

Improving African infrastructure has been an extremely difficult problem for a very long time (for a quagmire of reasons -- regulatory, power, cost, distribution, etc etc etc). I think most people in the developed world simply don't understand how challenging it is to live day-to-day without solid and reliable infrastructure, or how effective Starlink has been in improving that. Very few other projects have been THIS successful at THIS scale. I think more people should be aware of the good that it does.

It has been a disruptive technology in so many of the best ways.

* [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408457

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

#334

Post by advisedwang »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
advisedwang wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The launches are probably significantly worse!

> launches are probably significantly worse Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.

True. But getting outside of starship there's still Solid Rocket Boosters burning, insulating foams, explosive bolts and ablative parts dropping all over the place, and farings sitting in oceans waiting for recovery. It's not that much mass, but neither is the worrisome parts of a burning up satellite parts

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

#335

Post by j45 »

runarberg wrote: post #58
j45 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about percentage. Economic opportunity is largely shifting towards not only having internet access, but performant internet access. Costs will come down. There will be alternatives. But they might have taken much longer to come to market without something like this. I'm not a fanboy, but there's obviously a lot of people who have worked hard to make Starlink a reality.

Traditional infrastructure is a proven method of bringing both the availability to uderserved areas, as well as bringing the costs down for those already served. StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.

In some ways, where we're used to seeing borders of countries, the new borders of opportunity largely are performant and accessible internet access.

Depending on the area of the world, wireless and other options that exist that are likely sub par. It is on every continent including North America.

Some regions of the world have aggressively invested in fibre in rural areas.

We can see in parts of the world where there is a lot of investment (and interactions with govt for permits, etc) in physical infrastructure, whether its coax for cable tv and internet, copper for phone lines (and ADSL), wireless doesn't always have a nice way in.

There are places in the world that didn't get as much wired infrastructure put in and were able to jump up to much better wireless.

Satellite based internet as a category provides an additional coverage where "traditional" infrastructure hasn't made it yet. This can be wires or other wireless.

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

#336

Post by leptons »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #180
leptons wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transport…

> Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony Could this reflect your media diet? > never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis. >…

>Could this reflect your media diet?

It could reflect SpaceX's bad PR. I read plenty of news sources, and the most that makes it out there is how the latest Starship blew up, yet again. Not great PR. And beyond that, the scope of the thing is to go to Mars. It's up to SpaceX to get the PR out there, not for me to seek out niche news sources. But thanks for trying to make this about me failing instead of SpaceX failing at PR.

>That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.

Not wild at all. And let's be real, I seriously doubt you read "newspapers".

I did a Google search for "SpaceX Starship" and nowhere in 8 pages of results did I see anything mentioning Starlink. In fact, one of the results was for the SpaceX Careers page, which says:

>"Work on the Starship program developing the vehicles that will enable large groups of people to travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Life at SpaceX. At ..."

So even SpaceX is selling it as going to Mars, and not about launching Starlink satelites.

But this entire conversion is completely pointless, so I won't be responding to this thread anymore with anything but a canned lame response. You've been warned.

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

#337

Post by runarberg »

chermi wrote: post #256
runarberg wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made the statement: > It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties. Now it is up to you to show that this has outsized influence on impoverished communities. According to ITU[1] the number one factor for lack of internet access is economical. The price of internet access can be reduced with traditional infrastructure, but governments a…

You've mentioned the uber effect about 100 times now, I get it. I honestly don't know just how mad (I'd wager not very) the average city resident is that they have uber now instead of maybe some shitty transit system with two routes out of 20 promised in 15 years 500% over budget. I do VERY MUCH wish we built solid, modern, useful public transit on budget in a reasonable amount of time. But it's honestly wishful thin…

I’ve seen you post about the “last mile” problem before on this thread, and I think you may be misunderstanding the problem and the solutions to it. The last mile is a problem in public transit where people who live in sparsely populated area and commute to higher density areas, where high quality or high capacity public transit opportunities exist for every leg of the journey except the last mile to their home (think Edgewood WA. to the Sounder train station in Puyallup). In case of transit the infrastructure exists for most of the way, but it is costly to provide transit options to connect with the infrastructure, the last mile in that case can be a rideshares, park-and-ride, ride hail, dockless scooters, etc.

In telecommunication the last mile is when a high capacity wire extends to a nearby (sub)urban center, but not to your house because you live 10 miles away from there (I know about the issue in the USA of having a wire across the street and have to pay ridiculous sums to connect it to your house; but that is a different issue). If you solve it by bypassing the wire altogether and opt for satellite instead, that is not really the last mile is it. A last mile would be to put up a 4G tower (or a few 5G towers).

An analogy in the transit space would be that because of the last mile issue, you opt instead to drive the whole way.

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

#338

Post by tehjoker »

HanClinto wrote: post #179
tehjoker wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i still don’t understand why we need huge constellations of satellites at all

Because providing infrastructure to remote regions is incredibly difficult through other mechanisms. I don't believe it's hyperbole to say that -- for the goal of improving infrastructure access in some of the most remote and challenging places in the world -- Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years. Starlink is easily o…

I believe Starlink was used to guide Ukranian drones. I think this has nothing to do with poor people in rural areas and everything to do with ensuring deployed military devices work. Modulo of course the egotistical whims of an insane American billionaire hailing from aparteid south african descent.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...

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

#339

Post by lithocarpus »

prennert wrote: post #321
lithocarpus wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202... Apparently earth soaks up ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day. So with 1-2 starlink satellites producing 30kg each dissipate each day, that's adding about 10% to this figure. I'm not sure if the cosmic dust aluminum finds itself in the same places up there as the dissipating starlink aluminum. Maybe that could be figured out from the ab…

wow your post gave me a bit of perspective. The distribution might really matter here. Are those ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day uniformly distributed, and if not how big are those clouds of aluminum oxide that the earth is travelling through? Those 30kg from the satellites are going to be extremely concentrated and therefore take longer to "soak up".

Yeah, I didn't think much of it at first but you pointing out that the 400-800kg is likely spread widely (if not evenly) across much of the earth's surface while the 30kg is landing in one spot, is an interesting point.

I wonder how much aluminum oxide we get though from disintegrating meteors and other impacts every day. Quick search suggests 50-100t of mass from meteors on average each day - similar total to the dust. Those might be more concentrated and analagous to the starlink satellites.

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

#340

Post by chermi »

runarberg wrote: post #337
chermi wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've mentioned the uber effect about 100 times now, I get it. I honestly don't know just how mad (I'd wager not very) the average city resident is that they have uber now instead of maybe some shitty transit system with two routes out of 20 promised in 15 years 500% over budget. I do VERY MUCH wish we built solid, modern, useful public transit on budget in a reasonable amount of time. But it's honestly wishful thin…

I’ve seen you post about the “last mile” problem before on this thread, and I think you may be misunderstanding the problem and the solutions to it. The last mile is a problem in public transit where people who live in sparsely populated area and commute to higher density areas, where high quality or high capacity public transit opportunities exist for every leg of the journey except the last mile to their home (thin…

The last mile problem is a generic concept in any networked system with certain common, naturally arising topology. I do not misunderstand it in the least. You're right that that putting up towers would be a (recent) solution in many places. Satellite is also a solution that applies anywhere (maybe not the poles?) and which requires less built infrastructure, which, again, we're not good at (in the US). But given the assumption that I don't understand what I'm talking about, I don't see this conversation going anywhere productive so I'm stopping here.
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