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Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

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Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#441

Post by dev_tty01 »

mort96 wrote: post #167
theultdev wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm immensely interested in people commenting how they are disinterested in X thing. Please go on! I'd love to know the motivation of posting, it makes no sense to me. Seems to be a self-fulfilled prophecy.

I guess I just wish the HN timeline wasn't so full of his garbage.

It is not HIS garbage. He is involved in numerous companies. Starlink is a product of SpaceX and that is full of thousands of great engineers. To be disinterested in SpaceX technology because of Musk is to be completely dismissive of the amazing accomplishments and effort of those thousands of great engineers. Would you like to have your work dismissed because the head of your company was a bizarre jerk? By any rational measure, SpaceX is NOT producing garbage tech.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#442

Post by wrboyce »

pests wrote: post #347
belthesar wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the GP is saying that we already deal with these problems with downlinks, so accounting for similar problems on crosslinks is a known, and expected quantity.

Yes thank you, forgot to link everything together. We already have point-to-point optical and deal with these issues.

Yeah, I completely misinterpreted your comment, sorry about that!

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#443

Post by pxmpxm »

joenot443 wrote: post #422
aetimmes wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the things he's done are amazing The things he's _purchased_ are amazing.

It's amazing the mental gymnastics otherwise intelligent people reach for just to allow themselves to feel superior over someone whose politics they disagree with.

It's a self defense mechanism after all - someone demonstrably successful and accomplished holding different views forces you to introspect the narratives you were sold... so it's easier to just argue against the former.

I would venture a guess that the bulk of Elon animosity started exactly at twitter acquisition time, when the people selling the narratives lost their merchanting channel and so they made sure to poison the well beforehand.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#444

Post by mort96 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #441
mort96 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I just wish the HN timeline wasn't so full of his garbage.

It is not HIS garbage. He is involved in numerous companies. Starlink is a product of SpaceX and that is full of thousands of great engineers. To be disinterested in SpaceX technology because of Musk is to be completely dismissive of the amazing accomplishments and effort of those thousands of great engineers. Would you like to have your work dismissed because the head of your company was a bizarre jerk? By any ratio…

Those thousands of great engineers at SpaceX decided to dedicate their lives to do Musk's bidding. Not my fault.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#445

Post by bcrl »

mrb wrote: post #225

So that is "432 Mbit/s per laser, and 9000 lasers total". I don't know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than "42 PB/day". Interestingly, they also say each laser "can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link" (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit/s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is p…

I'm seeing about 6Mbps per customer during peak hour on my own network, so 1.7Mbps over a longer period of time sounds like it's in the right ballpark.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#446

Post by lobocinza »

Shocka1 wrote: post #431
robbiep wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past performance is a piss poor indicator of future performance. You can’t deny (I don’t think) that the things he’s done are amazing. He’s in the zone where he’s smelt too many of his farts though, and believes he can do no wrong, which is historically a very bad place to be. I hope, for all of the awesome things he’s said he’d like to do, that they don’t come agutsa due to that

> Past performance is a piss poor indicator of future performance. Really? It's my understanding Elon isn't popular anymore (I could care less), but this point does not help whatever it is you're trying to say. I deal a lot with statistics and making predictions from past performance, and you most definitely can determine future performance with a high amount of accuracy. This shouldn't really need said. You are prob…

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance but not a bad indicator.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#447

Post by schiffern »

try_the_bass wrote: post #418
schiffern wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I believe Starlink (like Iridium) doesn't even try to establish connections "across the seam," ie the one place the satellites in the adjacent plane are coming head on at orbital speed. This make side-linking easier because the relative velocity is comparatively low, but in general you unavoidably still need to switch side-link satellites (on one side) twice per orbit. Hence 49 minutes: this average must be…

I believe Starlink (like Iridium) doesn't even try to establish connections "across the seam," ie the one place the satellites in the adjacent plane are coming head on at orbital speed. The slide showing the multiple possible paths traffic can take seems to disagree with this statement?

Impossible to tell from the slide, because such a seam only occurs at one longitude, and moves over the day.

However looking at other sources, it seems Starlink (having more satellites) actually wraps the orbital planes 360° around the Earth (vs Iridium's minimalist 180° configuration), overlapping both North-moving and South-moving satellites in the same sky simultaneously. This means the Iridium seam disappears entirely. Neat! TIL.

Another problem that vanishes simply by being "hardware rich."

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#448

Post by mlindner »

weregiraffe wrote: post #349
mlindner wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the person you replied to somewhat incorrectly. They're not targeted re-entries because the on-board propulsion of Starlink is too low to precisely control the re-entry location. However instead the satellites are designed to be intentionally "demisable" meaning that every portion of the satellite should vaporize/turn to char/dust during re-entry. Put another way, every kilogram of Starlink spacecraft has as…

You mean 4-5 kg of TNT. Starlink is not relativistic yet.

I mistyped the comment. It should be 4-5 tons of TNT for the entire satellite.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#449

Post by mlindner »

qayxc wrote: post #424
mlindner wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the person you replied to somewhat incorrectly. They're not targeted re-entries because the on-board propulsion of Starlink is too low to precisely control the re-entry location. However instead the satellites are designed to be intentionally "demisable" meaning that every portion of the satellite should vaporize/turn to char/dust during re-entry. Put another way, every kilogram of Starlink spacecraft has as…

> Actually the person you replied to somewhat incorrectly. They're not targeted re-entries because the on-board propulsion of Starlink is too low to precisely control the re-entry location. SpaceX says otherwise, see [1] SpaceX spokesman James Gleeson, when asked about the 10 satellites, said SpaceX is “performing a controlled de-orbit of several first iteration Starlink satellites,” using onboard propulsion. There's…

And I'm telling you that the statement is incorrect. Starlink is not equipped with propulsion capable of doing that. They use electric propulsion, which means they can't target a re-entry. They can de-orbit it on a time scale, but they cannot do what is conventionally described as a controlled de-orbit. Meaning they cannot precisely target a general area of the Earth. They can target re-entry within a couple hours to days, but that's still all over the world.

Now, none of this is an actual problem as they're entirely demisable, but the statement that they can achieve controlled de-orbit is false.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#450

Post by mlindner »

lucubratory wrote: post #333
mlindner wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something commonly misunderstood. Kessler syndrome is a statistical process that happens over many years. It is not a sudden cascade like is seen in movies like Gravity. Statistical processes are not what militaries are interested in. It's actually thought that Kessler syndrome is kind of already happening right now, which is why there's a lot of push right now to try to de-orbit the very large pieces of debr…

It happens as fast as it happens. Any actual projection would depend on the specific orbits, masses, volumes, materials, and numbers of satellites - Starlink's orbits have a lot of satellites now. There's a very big difference between "everyone trying to avoid it" and "one of the world's largest space programs trying to cause it" in terms of how much we should be worried about it happening for any given orbit in the…

There's already significant amounts of debris that transits through Starlink's orbit.

And I'm telling you, your "image" of what this looks like is just incorrect. The kessler syndrome is likely already occurring. Yes creating more debris will make it happen more, but it's not like lighting a match to a pile of tinder.

And it's not in fact exponential in the sense that people commonly imagine when they hear that. It's an exponential that's very close to flat, i.e. an exponential with an exponent barely above one. Given enough time, yes it can destroy all satellites in Starlink's orbit, but it's not on time scales that's relevant to a war.

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