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Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

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Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#61

Post by bArray »

popol12 wrote: post #42
sjducb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5200 tonnes of micrometeorites hit the earth each year. Star link isn’t going to make a difference. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-s...

"I'm commuting every day to work with my private jet. 5200 tonnes of micrometeorites hit the earth each year, so my action isn’t going to make a difference." See how your argument is wrong ?

"It's simple. I started a charity with $10 million that convinces 1 million middle/low class people to keep their heating off during the winter, meaning my jet is now carbon negative. Sure a few people die each winter, but that's another win for the earth."

This is basically the reality of government leaders jetting in to global climate change conferences.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#62

Post by dotnet00 »

complex_exp wrote: post #9
vasco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article you can answer both of your questions. The Sun has no intentions, and solar flares don't choose cohorts of satellites.

How do solar flares burn satellites? I thought they just mess up the ionosphere and inhibit communication.

As one example, IIRC earlier this year they lost some freshly launched satellites in a batch because of a flare, which made the atmosphere expand in density by up to 50% at their altitudes and didn't allow those satellites to point their solar panels at the sun in time.

Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch.

So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#63

Post by mavhc »

panick21_ wrote: post #54
mavhc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX posted a Q1 2023 profit of $55 million on $1.5 billion in revenue And the spend about $2 billion on Starship per year. So $6 billion in, $2 billion on Starship, $4 billion in other costs. In 2022 they launched 61 times, which is $65 million per launch on average, they charge $67 million per launch. They got $2 billion from NASA for 2022. In 2022 they launched 3 crewed missions, 2 for NASA and 1 private.

They don't charge for their own launches.

They got $4 billion from Starlink users, that should cover it

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#64

Post by wkat4242 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #32
eunos wrote: post #21

Speaking of Starlink, what piqued my interest is that Huawei Mate 60 incorporated satellite call module without being bulky. It is not yet able to do data transfer but in case they can, isnt that practically a portable starlink equivalent?

Starlink is low earth orbit, around 550km up, adding best-case latency of under 4ms (550km*2/c ≈ 3.67ms). That allows an excellent service. Satellite phones (and I’ve confirmed this applies to the Huawei Mate 60) connect with satellites in geostationary orbits, meaning an altitude of about 35,786km, adding latency of around 240ms (35786km*2/c ≈ 238.74ms). This can be acceptable for some purposes, but harms things far…

The mate 60 uses beidou sats which are not quite geostationary but also in a pretty high orbit.

But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#65

Post by sjducb »

popol12 wrote: post #42
sjducb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5200 tonnes of micrometeorites hit the earth each year. Star link isn’t going to make a difference. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-s...

"I'm commuting every day to work with my private jet. 5200 tonnes of micrometeorites hit the earth each year, so my action isn’t going to make a difference." See how your argument is wrong ?

We’re talking about the risks of satellites burning up in the upper atmosphere. The satellites deposit lots of material when they burn up. People are worried that this might be bad.

Lots of people incorrectly think that the upper atmosphere is pristine and you would never normally get metal up there. In fact thousands of tons of micrometeorites hit the earth each year, depositing lots of rock and metal up there.

This means that the burning satellites cause an increase in metals deposited in the upper atmosphere. We’re not going from nothing to many tones. We’re going from many tones to slightly more tones.

There is an open question if the increase is a problem, but it’s less likely to be a problem than if we were going from nothing to something.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#66

Post by chrismorgan »

wkat4242 wrote: post #64
chrismorgan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink is low earth orbit, around 550km up, adding best-case latency of under 4ms (550km*2/c ≈ 3.67ms). That allows an excellent service. Satellite phones (and I’ve confirmed this applies to the Huawei Mate 60) connect with satellites in geostationary orbits, meaning an altitude of about 35,786km, adding latency of around 240ms (35786km*2/c ≈ 238.74ms). This can be acceptable for some purposes, but harms things far…

The mate 60 uses beidou sats which are not quite geostationary but also in a pretty high orbit. But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.

I’m out of my depth here, but my research said Tiantong-1 and that that’s geostationary. Adding the keyword BeiDou I do get a few results too, but it looks like BeiDou is GNSS, so I think those might be errors?

Anyway, my point was just that this stuff isn’t equivalent to Starlink. For what satellite phones do, GEO or whatever similar is fine, but the appeal of Starlink certainly requires that it be LEO.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#67

Post by onethought »

justapassenger wrote: post #58
onethought wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship is substantially bigger than falcon 9, with significant more mass to orbit capability. And runs on a cheaper propellant. Also Elon has publicly stated starlink s long term viability requires starship. Which data are you looking for?

Elon publicly stated many, many, many things… Starship is part of economic equation (or just a diversion when it comes to starlink, as they were suppose to go bankrupt already if starship wasn’t flying biweekly last year, and people didn’t cancel their holiday plans to report to work, according to the Musk himself), but saying that it solves the profitability of the business, is like saying that low price of fuel sol…

I don’t think anyone said that. It’s just intuitively obvious it makes starlink much more viable when you can launch more/bigger version of it with more fuel for less cost.

Not sure about the rest of that axe you wish to grind.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#68

Post by sjducb »

Brybry wrote: post #50
mattashii wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 22.8 tonnes per Falcon 9 launch, and 50 of those per year? That's 1140 tonnes /year of new debris in the upper atmosphere, a 21% increase. I'd say that is quite a significant change.

So in ~5 years they've launched 5113 satellites[1]: 2 * 400 kg + 60 * 227 kg + 1665 * 260 kg + 2987 * ~300 kg + 399 * 800 kg = 1663 metric tons So if they all burned up today it would be around a 6% yearly increase, globally? (1663 / 5200 * 5). And that's probably the most forgiving estimate I could come up with, I think your ~20% number is more accurate for future projection purposes given most of the mass was launc…

There are two more things to consider. 1) The whole satellite doesn’t burn up. Most of it crashes into the ocean. 2) much of the burning up happens in the thicker lower atmosphere where we’re already putting lots of material from jet engines and factory chimneys.

Re: Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

#69

Post by justapassenger »

onethought wrote: post #67
justapassenger wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon publicly stated many, many, many things… Starship is part of economic equation (or just a diversion when it comes to starlink, as they were suppose to go bankrupt already if starship wasn’t flying biweekly last year, and people didn’t cancel their holiday plans to report to work, according to the Musk himself), but saying that it solves the profitability of the business, is like saying that low price of fuel sol…

I don’t think anyone said that. It’s just intuitively obvious it makes starlink much more viable when you can launch more/bigger version of it with more fuel for less cost. Not sure about the rest of that axe you wish to grind.

> I don’t think anyone said that

It’s exactly what op said and caused me to engage in this thread. “Seems to me like the long term viability of Starlink (if it's not already profitable) will be assured if Starship meets its goals”

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