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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#521

Post by CodeWriter23 »

redtexture wrote: post #300
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any given ship in the shipping industry probably burns that in fuel per day. Or half day. I think the value proposition is in line. I'll admit it seems expensive from the perspective of our dream sail around the world whilst coding and collecting benjamins from various hustles.

A Panamax container ship, not the largest, can burn 10 metric tonnes an hour of bunker oil, more or less.[2] Very Low Sulfer Fuel Oil (VLSFO) is running, depending on where the ship is loading up, 850 to 1150 USD a tonne.(July 7 2022)[1] In round numbers, say, USD 1,000 a tonne, USD 10,000 an hour, USD 250,000 a day, and for a 20 day trip, USD 5,000,000. [1] https://shipandbunker.com/prices [2] https://www.freightwav…

Thanks for the clarification; I didn’t want to overspeak. Next question though, how do they onboard 42x that much fuel for a 6 week transpacific journey?

Re: Starlink Maritime

#522

Post by walrus01 »

cycomanic wrote: post #514
sneak wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are charging $5k USD per month per customer for this per TFA. Depending on demand (and 350Mbps downlink can generate a lot of demand) that may still be feasible.

Cargoships have operation costs in the 10s to 100s of thousands per h. Sure you could bring that down for what's required here, but you'd still sink a lot of money into these ships. How many maritime subscribers would there be?

$5k USD a month is significantly less than the monthly cost for any usable bandwidth allocation to a current tech ku band geostationary maritime vsat terminal, such as for the smallest "expedition" cruise ships, nevermind a big one.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#523

Post by foobiekr »

vardump wrote: post #242
foobiekr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predictability and stability count a lot as well. I think the starlink-as-low-latency-trading-medium is sort of like "blockchain for real estate" - it's not actually a real thing.

You can simply use multiple links to send same data. The fastest one wins, so if there's a temporary hickup on one of the links, you still get somewhat bounded latency. When things work fine, you get to reap the latency benefit. So I think it's plausible for intercontinental links.

the spot still covers the same ground station much of the time.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#524

Post by Phlarp »

mlyle wrote: post #484
Phlarp wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way? Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.

> The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way? Here's the design 101 from base principles: In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both…

I was thinking of a gimbal to point the laser, but now that you've introduced mini telescopes and the jerk plus reaction control systems on the rx side of this equation I'm out. For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution. The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#525

Post by mlyle »

Phlarp wrote: post #524
mlyle wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way? Here's the design 101 from base principles: In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both…

I was thinking of a gimbal to point the laser, but now that you've introduced mini telescopes and the jerk plus reaction control systems on the rx side of this equation I'm out. For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution. The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.

> For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution.

You can't get the same degree of directivity. As wavelength decreases, you get more directivity for a given aperture. Light has 1/5000th the wavelength of plausible radio links, so both the sender and the receiver can have much higher gains. You also can have much more bandwidth, and thus you obtain many orders of magnitude higher data rates per unit of power used.

E.g. a 6cm telescope has 82dB of gain on each side for 1000nm light.

A 1 meter aperture (about what a 3.2x1.6x0.2m Starlink satellite can likely present to another satellite) has 53dB of gain on each side.

So for equivalent power, you have 6 orders of magnitude more signal strength, and you can occupy 10x the bandwidth, too, even if you have a very large phased array.

> The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.

This kind of system has very little in common with how I would build an anti-satellite laser system.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#526

Post by ncmncm »

thepasswordis wrote: post #175
dreamcompiler wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't solve the problem. Those ships would still need a backhaul.

The idea is that the ships go up to another starlink and then down to a base station.

You could have all the maritime subscribers participate in a sort of mesh network, pingponging packets toward the nearest on-shore hub.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#527

Post by Maursault »

This is great, because I've always wanted to surf the Internet while using the toilet on my yacht sailing around the ocean. Now all I need's a yacht and the great blue sea.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#528

Post by _Tev »

shaklee3 wrote: post #510
grecy wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much are spaceX paying for a launch? How much does Immarsat of Iridium pay for a launch?

SpaceX sells a launch to customers for $50-70M. they make an estimated 10-30% profit, depending on your source and whether the rocket is reused. that is nowhere near an order of magnitude.

Just FYI GTO sats' launch costs on the higher end of that range when buying from SpaceX (if not higher), while Starlink launches had internal cost 30M BEFORE current very high launch rate, which will bring costs down more.

So not quite an order of magnitude, but 5 times difference in launch costs should already be achievable.

And Starship will bring another 5-10 times cost reduction when measured per kg, even when you assume pessimistic mass margins and costs / launch rates.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#529

Post by shaklee3 »

_Tev wrote: post #528
shaklee3 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX sells a launch to customers for $50-70M. they make an estimated 10-30% profit, depending on your source and whether the rocket is reused. that is nowhere near an order of magnitude.

Just FYI GTO sats' launch costs on the higher end of that range when buying from SpaceX (if not higher), while Starlink launches had internal cost 30M BEFORE current very high launch rate, which will bring costs down more. So not quite an order of magnitude, but 5 times difference in launch costs should already be achievable. And Starship will bring another 5-10 times cost reduction when measured per kg, even when yo…

the only data I'm aware of has a starlink launch around $25M, and a geo launch is around $70M. if you have newer numbers please point to the source.

starship won't be around anyone soon, and they need the money now.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#530

Post by plq »

JoshCole wrote: post #470
plq wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He claims the terminal costs at least 3× the retail price and will never make a profit because of it He also claims that its product offering brings nothing new to the table compared to hughesnet and viasat which is wrong imo as offering 1/10th latency of these products is a gamechanger. Sorry, I'd do better but I'm on mobile, I think it's worth a watch at 1.5×

Your source is a liar. Some examples: - After lying about SpaceX launch costs, he later posts screenshots of articles. One of those articles had the true launch costs. The image was photoshopped to remove this launch cost. - When posting pricing information for competitor services, he uses their lowest cost tiers for their highest cost service provision. He also falsely implies that SpaceX and other satellite provide…

When I brought this video up, I just wanted to provide a voice from the other side of the debate. I did not really verify its contents and wanted to hear what other people had to say about it.

I'm familiar with the mobile satellite sector and I can say for a fact that he is right about the cost of the terminal being couple times higher than $500, though getting at the exact number would require a considerable amount of digging.

I got things to say about the attitude in this micro-thread though: I'm sure y'all heard the saying "If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed". I like that quote, but I always felt like some elaboration should follow.

By all means, do watch/read/consume anything and everything, and first use introspection, ie. ask yourself "Am I qualified/informed/sane enough to reach a conclusion about this matter?", and if your answer is yes then use your critical thinking neurons to reach YOUR conclusion. Then still try to verify it with your peers, or if you can find any, experts in that particular field. Personal attacks (along with other logical fallacies) have no place in a civilised discussion.

Basing on the above, if the Starlink opposers are as desperate as you say about distorting the facts to advance their narrative, it only increases my confidence in the project. You see, I did not end up being delusional, just reached a logical conclusion to the extent of my abilities.

So all in all, thanks for taking the time to write this up.

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