As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)
We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity.
I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoon and night (if we had a sunny day and our batteries were full). That lasted about 8 months until someone built a barn or something and installed some electricity poles. We weren't able to connect anymore.
After that we drove almost daily to the village and spent a couple of hours in a café with a flaky 2Mbps connection but it became unpractical. We went back to civilization 2 months later or so.
If Starlink would have been available back then maybe we'd still be living in the mountains!
This was 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure even today nobody offers WISP in that area.
One of our neighbors who lived a couple of kms from us had a point-to-point Motorola antenna connecting with the closest village. We considered doing that but there was a mountain between us and the village which complicated things. Also connectivity in the area was so bad the only ISP available hadn't been signing new contracts for years. The region was difficult to access and wasn't particularly rich, it didn't make sense for ISPs to invest in upgrading 15 years old ADSL.
Yeah, if it really does deliver ~25ms latency and up to 1GBPS, work from anywhere becomes much more literal. Currently a lot of remote work and things like multiplayer games are limited to areas with reliable broadband.
But if you can get that anywhere... it'll be amazing and have a profound effect.
v2 most likely. The currently launched satellites do not have cross-satellite links so the satellites can only provide service while they are within range of a ground station. The cross satellite links were originally planned for v1 but are behind schedule and nobody outside SpaceX knows what the current schedule is.
I don't know anything specific a out starlink, but I have hundreds of days of experience trying to hit iridium sattelites while hiking in the wild. You need direct line-of-sight to sky.
If it becomes available i buy or restore an 18 century cannon-ship, over the day i sail and play captain sparrow, and in the night i play StarTreckCrew-VR in my captain quarter's ;-)
Absolutely. Many places in rural Canada don't have great, if any, options for high speed internet and sometimes even reliable cellular. That's great if you want to escape the connected world, but for those of us who would like to at least spend more time away from the city and who don't have the ability to just leave our jobs... it could be a game changer.
Sadly, you don't even need to go very far out of some major metro areas in the United States to find ZERO options besides either, as you say, 'unlimited' cellular data with intermittent service, or capped satellite with latency too great for anything like video conferencing. When I say zero, I mean not even DSL is available. Even options like "Fixed WiFi" don't reach a lot of properties due to hills and forest cover, and even if they did they'd also be capped similar to satellite.
I didn't know the space shuttle reused it's boosters. Apparently the two solid rocket boosters deployed parachutes after separation and were refurbished. Interesting! However the main booster could not be reused...
Yeah, IIRC they reused the steel segments holding the fuel, not sure about the rest (parachutes, nozzle, thrust vectoring hardware & the APU powering that, etc). And indeed, if you go the SRB way, a modern carbon fibre single use booster would likely be much more efficient (fuel ammount vs weight of construction to hold it) and cheaper. But still not cheaper than a reusable rocket of course. :)
I believe it was actually one of the more strongly limiting factors on the frequency with which space shuttle launches could be conducted because the factory producing them could not turn them out particularly quickly.
Engines had to be totally rebuilt after each flight. SRBs cost around $70M each IIRC. The tank was extremely expensive because it had to be as light as possible, while keeping Hydrogen super chilled without leaking. They came out with lighter tanks later in program made out of more exotic materials.
Reused booster ruptured under improper launch criteria revised for management and public relations reasons.
Would it have been okay if it weren’t for the wrong go? Maybe, but still the potato quality refurbishment of flown boosters could have done it sooner or later.
AFAIK the SRBs were made in segments to make them rail transportable from the factory (in a state with a friendly congressman ;-)) to the launch pad. There should be pictures of the segments being transported on rail from that one time the train derailed due to trestle collapsing under it.
SRB separation happened when the shuttle reached ~3,100 mph. The external tank was jettisoned at ~17,500 mph, more than 5 times the speed (or 25 times the kinetic energy that would need to be dissipated in the atmosphere to recover).
AFAIK there were some studies for that - it was doable delta-v wise. I wonder about the mess caused by the isolation foam deteriorating over time though.
The main booster (all three of them) were attached to the orbiter and were re-used, though not without refurbishment. (Falcon 9 is also refurbished after each launch).
The shuttle had two boosters, not three. It also had an external tank that burned in the atmosphere.
The boosters were technically reusable, but refurbishing them after the corrosive bath they've taken by their landing in the ocean was much more expensive than making new ones from scratch.
You'll note that SpaceX lands their rockets on a barge, instead of landing them on water and fishing them out later - that's because they want to keep the salt water out of the rocket.
The Sovirt Buran shuttle had 5 boosters - the main Energia hydrolox core stage and 4 modified Zenit boosters. There were even plans to land the boosters and reuse them, the main issue being how to get the massive boosters back from the endless wateland around Baykonur.
Also unlike the Space Shuttle, the 5 boosters did all the orbital boosting, Buran only had small orbital correction engines on board (like Shuttle OMS), all big engines were down on the boosters.
Over the life of the program, dividing total program R&D + flight operations cost by number of flights, each space shuttle launch cost between $900m to $1.5 billion. Not exactly an affordable reusable vehicle.
i suspect the cost to refurbish a shuttle + tank + boosters is more than the start-to-finish cost of a brand new Falcon9 let alone re-flying a recovered Falcon9.
More like 1/50th the cost. A Falcon 9 launch sells for a range of $50M to $90M depending upon extras/expend ability, but a reusable launch likely costs less than $30M.
Total cost of Space Shuttle program (in 2000 cost mind you) was $200B for 134 launches, or $1.5B each.
And an expendable Falcon launch actually can put nearly as much payload into LEO by weight as the Shuttle, and costs around $45M (priced $63M).
Shuttle had an advantage since the orbiter was both first and second stages.
The orange fuel tank was lost on each mission, and the solid rocket boosters were recovered and refurbished after a swim in the ocean.
So by some measures the Shuttle system was very reusable, but the complexities of the system resulted in high costs to tear down, inspect, and refurbish between flights.
The number I can find is 76 feet per second, or about 50mph. They had parachutes.
My understanding is that refurbishment meant basically stripping them for parts and using them to build new boosters, but still a significant amount of percentage re-use of parts.
It just highlights how important the amount of type of required refurbishment is to making re-usability actually practical. Falcon 9 is noteworthy because it's relatively inexpensive up-front compared to traditional boosters, relatively simple in design and part count (compared to STS) and relatively quick and inexpensive to re-use.
No. The shuttle boosters were expended every single launch. The Falcon 9 booster comes back and lands. Ironically, the Falcon 9 second stage is expended every single launch, but that will not be the case with Super Heavy / Starship that is in development.
Something that's often overlooked here is how extensive the required refurbishment is.
The "reusable" shuttle boosters and orbiter engines took substantial time (https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584723main_Wings-ch... says 4-5 months), money, and labor to get ready for the next launch. SpaceX is still making noise about trying out a same-day reflight sometime soon; it's clearly a much less involved process.
There has been a lot of discussion about light pollution from the 1500+ planned Starlink satellites. However much of the discussion is based on the assumption that the world will collectively let Starlink operate as monopoly.
How much will light pollution increase when the next competitor launches 1500+ satellites?
How much will light pollution increase when a Chinese competitor launches yet another 1500+ satellites?
"Light pollution" for naked eye viewing of the sky is not a big concern for Starlink anymore. SpaceX has designed a sunshade which should make the satellites completely invisible to the naked eye in their service orbits. The sunshade has been designed in collaboration with astronomers to ensure that even the most sensitive telescopes will not have problems with it either.
Will the Chinese do the same? We'll see. But it's definitely possible to mitigate these concerns. There's not much to discuss until a credible competitor to Starlink emerges.
I'm more concerned about the space junk aspect of it. My understanding is that as satellites collide they produce millions of tiny deadly particles. If we have enough of those in orbit then it will effectively trap us on earth.
I'm all for faster internet, but not at the cost of making space travel impossible.
SpaceX moved the satellites to lower orbits, so any broken satellites or debris will fall out of the sky within a few years due to atmospheric drag. And they are specifically designed to burn up completely in reentry. The real concern is in higher orbits where debris would persist for millennia. This is not a concern for Starlink.
Not really. The only way a collision could truly raise an orbit is if a resulting piece of debris had far higher velocity than either incoming satellite which, while maybe not theoretically impossible, seems exceedingly unlikely. Furthermore, the way orbital mechanics works, all orbits resulting from a collision go through the point of the collision, so the collision of two objects in circular orbits can never result in an orbit with higher perigee. The orbit of debris may turn from circular to elliptical with a higher apogee, but those orbits will almost certainly have lower perigees and decay faster.
I'm so excited for Starlink! As a solo founder I do all of my support, but I like to frequently go off-roading and camping outside of cell service. I have a satellite messenger for critical things, but it still leaves me feeling quite anxious to go on extended trips. If I can toss a starlink dish in a briefcase and get fast affordable internet in the Sierra's, life will be good.
I wanted to move to rural OR/WA a couple of years ago, but couldn't find a single property with high-speed internet. This is (hopefully) a game-changer.
You didn't look hard enough - for example big chunks of rural Okanogan county are covered by WISP services from a company called NCI. Same in many other areas.
Wow, fascinating website. When you are selecting Atlas or Falcon, are those the orbits of the leftover second stages? If so, why are some of their orbits so large? Were they placing a satellite that far out?
Even for those of us living in a suburban area, it will be great having another option to use as a bludgeon against Comcast. Right now they can just laugh if you say you're going to cancel due to a rate hike, because they know the next-fastest provider is 4 Mbps.
My parents live in the rain forest in the mountains of Panama. They struggle with slow ADSL that goes to hell whenever moisture gets into the lines or it rains. It's the rainy season now, and you can imagine it rains often in the rain forest. Their internet is awful, we try to time or Skype calls for when it is not raining. They can boost the signal slightly by leaving their phone off the hook. Sometimes they tether with a weak signal on 3g. They are so eagerly awaiting the public availability of starlink.
I think in the cities of the developed world we don't realize how big this going to be for rural dwellers and people in the developing world.
Yes, for a week or so, if they happen to fly over your location within an hour or so after sunset or before sunrise, not in the middle of the night. After that they will start rotating to reduce their visibility and become more difficult to see. After a few weeks they will reach higher orbits and become invisible to the naked eye from most locations.
One satellite in this batch has an experimental sunshade which should make it completely invisible to the naked eye regardless of the location, once it reaches its final orbit. This sunshade will likely be on every satellite in subsequent launches.
In November I was tramping remote mountains in New Zealand, staring into the sky, then there was an extra bright satellite, then another, then another.
I just laid there in awe. After about a dozen in the train, it occured to me that it must be starlink or aliens due to the number of coorbital satellites.
I actually teared up, not because the sky was "ruined" but because humanity had become part of the stars, and more than just a blip. My imagination ran forward to Gibson's detuned TV skies.
One of the satellites in yesterday's launch has a test visor system that should make it invisible to the naked eye once it has precessed into it's final orbit (which takes a couple months). If successful they'll apply it to all satellites so only the small portion of the constellation launched to date will be visible during dawn & dusk. The lifespan of these satellites is 5 years.
I'm kinda bummed Starlink is not going to lead to cheaper consumer internet and replace cable internet. Sounds like it is mainly for rural areas which is great but I hoped it was going to bunny hop fiber.
In any urban area, they'd be super oversubscribed. I haven't been following Starlink super closely lately, but IIRC each satellite is really only capable of supporting 20 users at the full advertised speed. Even though there's a handful of satellites visible from a given location at a given time, it's not enough to support urban (or perhaps even suburban) areas.
Googling this suggests we are seeing 100gbps per satellite... at 100mbps that's enough for 1000 saturated connections per satellite and a decent multiple of that number of users by oversubscribing/multiplexing. It's still not enough bandwidth to compete with city-ISPs in cities.
That reddit comment doesn't go into much depth, do you know if that 100gbps number is actually the sat to ground budget? IIRC, the majority of the starlink satellites' bandwidth is for sat to sat transmissions (routing data from other sats to the nearest ground station).
Edit: also IIRC, SpaceX said that Starlink will offer up plans up to 1Gbps
There are currently no sat to sat transmissions, so it's all sat to ground and ground to sat.
Sat to ground and ground to sat use different frequencies so I would guess it can do roughly that speed in both directions simultaneously. There are also separate frequencies for ground stations and for user terminals, and I believe the implication was this was for user terminals. The number was just obtained by someone implying around 20gbps on the 0.9 sats and later on someone else saying something about 4-5x the speed on these sats. It's not official or likely to be particularly accurate.
(I had no idea what "laser comms" were, unfortunately they're not laser cannons but rather lasers for communications between satellites. Which is still pretty cool)
Yes. They couldn't make them entirely burn up on re-entry so the FAA blocked them using them until they solve that. It is the risk of them falling on someone.
I'm curious what the level of risk actually is. The earth is struck by many small meteorites every day. We don't know how many, but based on how many are observed, it's probably on the order of 10/day. The last person struck by a meteorite was Ann Hodges in 1954. She was only bruised, since, like most people at any given time, she was protected by a roof. A woman named Lottie Williams was struck by part of a Delta rocket in 1997 and was also uninjured. The chance of hitting someone is tiny and even then, it's not necessarily fatal or even serious. And wouldn't SpaceX be able to de-orbit the satellites over unpopulated areas, except in rare cases where there was some sort of loss of command?
Maybe living in a world where a trip to the grocery store can have fatal consequences has warped mysense of risk, but this doesn't seem worth worrying about.
Somewhere in the FCC filings there's a NASA ODAR report on Starlink. The typical standard used is that the odds of death or injury when something reenters stay below 1 in 10,000. However I wouldn't be surprised if that gets adjusted in the future. Within a few years we will see constellations that are so large that statistically speaking they would be allowed to kill a few people
What's the plan there, it seems to be one of the primary features. Will they go up and add them retroactively or do they plan to just deploy so many satellites that have them later.
I don't know how Loon [0] (graduated Google X project) can look at this and justify their continued existence.
Low earth orbit satellites with global coverage seem like such a better approach than balloons that you have to handle in the air assuming the following is true:
- Latency difference between the two is negligible
- Satellites are not uniquely affected by weather
- Balloons are not better in some other unknown way?
I wonder if they're seeing this as the existential threat that it is.
Balloons can be concentrated in the areas where they are needed most. The nature of non-geosynchronous orbital planes is you end up having to distribute satellites roughly uniformly around the earth (you get non-uniform effects with latitude but in very limited ways).
Balloons can be brought down and be serviced, satellites are basically throw it up there and replace it when it breaks.
Google already has experience with being an ISP with fiber and fi.
I tend to agree that starlink is winning, but balloons do have some advantages.
SpaceX is developing the launch capability so this is even more concerning for Loon since they can't really compete on that reduced cost. Launch is also mostly an up front cost, balloon launch, tracking, and recovery is recurring.
I think you're right on balloon concentration and there's a narrow use case here for things like congested events, but it's pretty niche. I think Starlink is trying to get uniform satellite distribution? Global coverage in the common case seems a lot more important than concentration as long as you can meet the minimum bandwidth required (which they probably can).
I think servicing is a good point, maybe the balloons can improve faster as a result, but it's also a negative (having to service/track them all of the time). It's also not global coverage - has Loon given up on this goal entirely?
Global coverage for Starlink means access to a global customer market which can help cover their increased costs (since I'd guess margins after launch are low). Without a global market even if Loon has lower costs it'll be harder for them to get the revenue to cover them.
> "Google already has experience with being an ISP with fiber and fi."
They abandoned Fiber and I hear Fi kind of sucks, but you're right that this is a point in their favor.
These feel like rationalizations of a losing position to me.
Assuming SpaceX actually manages to build a sustainable business with Starlink, it will be interesting to see if anyone else is able to overcome the cost of launch services to build up their own. SpaceX seems to have a huge competitive moat here because they can launch on their own rockets at cost. Near as I can tell, the only other company that has even a chance of doing that is Amazon, assuming they can fly on Blue Origin rockets once those are operational.
Should be a fun few years watching this industry try to establish itself.
