My mother was raving about the service the other day.
Speeds are 10-15x faster, she’s having an easier time with her online community college course and her job KPI is up by double digit percents [1]. She was worried that IT wouldn’t be OK with it when I said it was satellite (They’d been burned too many times), but the IT guy was incredibly excited because he’s also waiting to get Starlink.
Looking forward to the service only getting better, really incredible execution.
[0] My dad went on the roof in the cold Wisconsin winter to put it up.
[1] Lines transcribed per hour, as a medical transcriptionist working from home.
> Unfortunately it's also littering the sky with a shitload of eventual junk, and immediate astronomical blight.
Starlink are the least likely satellites to create "eventual junk" since they orbit so low. The biggest criticism is probably that there are so many they present a visual hazard for astronomy
I was thinking it might generate enough heat to keep it warm. But the comments in this thread appear to think it has a heater inside of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JSq6xB591M
Lightbulbs are visible light and infrared. It heats the surface of your skin.
Microwaves penetrate your skin and even your skull. It's heating your brain like cooking food in a microwave. Yes, it's non-ionizing, but there's a relationship between heating, inflammation and cancer. And it's wrong to ignore it.
Just take simple precautions like not sitting right in front of a 100W space antenna, but instead mount it on your roof.
Starlink terminal transmissions are 14+GHz. It all converts to heat within a millimeter or two. It can't heat your brain. (And even if it could, "like cooking food" is a bad way to describe the fraction of a degree you'd get.)
Also the actual signal from that antenna is 20 watts or less. If it heats you, that's going to be because it's warm.
Depends on your definition of a heater, certainly there's no separate heating module but here's[0] a SpaceX team member saying it has 'self heating capabilities' in their reddit ama.
Dishy will actually intentionally heat up to melt snow. I’ve seen YouTube videos of it melting a good amount of snow per hour and service remaining stable.
That’s some large continuous power consumption for off grid use. Curious if they’ll come up with a way to put it into some sort of low power idle mode during low utilization?
It’s noticeably high so I assume at some point it’ll be reduced unless it’s caused by continuous “transmission” so the satellite doesn’t lose the connection.
Depends what sort of battery you're on. The cheapest car Tesla sells (or at least that is displayed to me when I visit their site), for example, has a 54 kwh battery. It could run a 100 watt load for ~22 days between charges (not counting driving). Or to put it another way, if you charge every day, and you never turn the dish off, this would only drain 1/22nd of your range.
Tesla batteries are sweet, but ~22 days isn’t long enough if you’re off grid full time. I am trying to keep power generation 100% solar rather than burn diesel/gas to charge batteries when I can. So 2.4kwh per day might require roughly 500 watts of additional solar panels in a sunny locale. More solar could be added, but there are some space and weight limitations on a vehicle. I’m at 1400 watts of solar now.
Anyhow, just hoping they can figure out how to get the average power draw down over time.
Faster than? Also, does anyone know who's behind this effort? Other leaders would celebrate the people behind the development but at spacex and tesla it's only ever news about Musk?
Any interesting people behind what is happening at SpaceX ?
From what I see he's been working at SpaceX since he graduated college. I don't see where his satcom knowledge comes from, which is arguable the most interesting part of Starlink. Not the vehicle design.
It's really unfortunate that this company unlike most companies treats all the brain drain as an ego trip.
Musk never claims credit for the work of his team. The burden of proof is on you.
That said, I recall he has not only explicitly credited lead engineers by name but also discussed their technologies with them and given them stage time to discuss their tech with the audience. [see the automation day videos for example]
I haven't heard anything about NDAs that prevent you talking about the general area of your work at any of Musk's companies. There are certainly people on LinkedIn talking about what they do.
Look at any FAANG presentation. The VP of the department introduces a PM, who may have a senior engineer with them. The other 98% of the team isn't mentioned.
> That's kinda sad, isn't it?
Why don't you start a thread about it. Poll workers and see if they find themselves upset by it or not. Don't just borrow offense on their behalf.
I feel like there are also some jobs is rather not be too public about. I got customers finding me and trying to reach out directly in much more mundane scenarios. If I worked at SpaceX in an engineering role, I think I'd be keeping it pretty private (not secret).
I'm in Wisconsin, just got it, and am seeing 65-115 down, 15-40 up. I was hoping it would be better than Hughesnet, but I didn't expect it would be quite this good. I did have about a five minute downtime yesterday. Not too shabby!
I'm in exurban Wisconsin. Speeds are fine, but Charter has terrible routing that pushes everything out to Minnesota before routing back down to Chicago. 40ms to 60ms latency on EVERYTHING.
It's varied from as low as 30ms up to almost 80. Latency is just not going to be great with satellites, seeing that we're pushing it out to fricking space.
Starlink is SpaceX's way of guaranteeing SpaceX has a launch client. It increases the number of launches they make, and drives down the cost per launch, both for themselves and for their other customers. They are creating a business model which is both profitable and drives profits to their launch business. This is similar to the synergy Amazon's online store and AWS have with each other.
If SpaceX has room on a launch vehicle or an empty launch vehicle, they stuff it with Starlink satellites. Since Starlink will require constant refreshes, SpaceX has a constant client, it becomes far easier for them to offer smaller payloads at good rates. This is SpaceX's way of commoditizing launches and keeping their launch service running regularly.
It's extremely clever use of complimentary resources.
Yes, and they reuse the rockets more often than they would do with just external customers while proving to them that it's safe to use the same rockets uo to 10 times.
I love how undoectacular their flights have become, and wonder how long it will take until they stop commenting their live streams. I still watch them, but I started to skip forward or just listen to it in the background while programming.
AWS and the Amazon.com store may have synergy now, but for many years the store was its own thing. Amazon.com only finished migrating off Oracle DB in 2019:
The last Oracle DB migration was just for one part of internal retail operation that was particularly difficult or just needed more resources. Most of retail had been using AWS for quite some time before that (earlier than 2009). Source: worked there and knew the team that did that migration.
In Planetes an old anime series of hard scifi which I loved there is an episode of exactly that, the protagonists need to recover a "space burial" coffin launched into deep space which accidentally after decades does a flyby of low earth orbit
So yeah, maybe, look forward to billionaires launching their dead bodies into space, after all that tesla car is still somewhere out there floating about heh
+1 Planetes is amazing. It is not available on streaming service in the US though. If someone has $100k lying around, they should aquire US distribution rights. Could probably make it back easily if it gets a million views an episode on YouTube.
Why is this special to Amazon and SpaceX? Literally every vertical integrated company does what you said. That's the definition of vertical integration.
A vertically integrated company owns increasing amounts of production of their end product. Apple is vertically integrated, they have products where they make the CPU, the device, the OS, and retail the devices. But ultimately they only sell the end products.
If Apple were to start selling CPUs, you could argue that they had a similar model, but they don't (and won't because their CPUs are a competitive advantage).
What Amazon and SpaceX are doing isn't vertical integration in the classic sense. While Amazon sells AWS, they also have an online retail platform. Their retail platform consumes AWS services. Similarly, SpaceX is both the supplier of launch services and the consumer of launch services.
Amazon's retail operations are profitable, but by being their own best customer, they help Amazon drive profitability and demand for AWS.
Flywheel integration is probably a better term. I.e. not vertically integrating for the supply of your current product, but in such a way that demand for both is increased.
Same here. I'm guessing it's a term that's come up in a few popular posts here (especially considering Jeff Bezos left Amazon a few weeks ago and he talks about it a lot in his book and in general) and is not part of the vernacular of commenters here. Similar idea for other circles that you might have heard it in.
What's different is that the entire commercial space launch business isn't very big. I think it's been somewhere in the ballpark of a couple dozen launches a year. SpaceX could conceivably satisfy it just by building one rocket and flying it over and over again. (Granted they don't have upper stage re-usability yet, and the Falcon 9 boosters have a limited lifespan, but they're working to get there with Starship.) So, if they want to have a viable business that involves a large fleet of reusable rockets they need to become their own customer to make sure the rockets don't just sit idle.
Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time with new companies in new markets. The space launch market though has been around for a long time. To me it seems unusual for an industry that's been around for half a century or so to not be big enough to absorb the excess capacity of a newcomer.
Continuing to say it doesn't make it true. They deorbit the satellites that stop working and their reliability thus far has been high other than the first two or three launches which had a higher failure rate. Even if they do fail completely and become uncontrollable, they're designed to deorbit within 5 years from operational altitude. They're relatively low mass and have very large solar panels for their size.
Amazing times, when a private company can launch 3 flights in two weeks, not even counting the Starship tests :). It is faszinating to see, how quickly Starlink is progressing, we are on the brink of global satellite broadband internet. This could be a substantial change especially in all the countries without a wide broadband availability. It will be interesting to see whether SpaceX can generate enough revenue to be able to finance large space projects on their own. Of course there is Mars, but also the Moon, perhaps a space station or asteroid mining.
I'm more excited about the sustainable capability to put so much stuff in orbit than for Starlink itself! This feels like a step towards a mega-scale space industry.
Interestingly we are now moving into a situation where producing the terminals seems to be the limiting factor.
They seem to produce these sats at almost unbelievable rates. They are truly mass production. No like 'we build 70 over a couple years' mass production but more like motorcycles or something like that.
SpaceX is doing like 70+% of global transportation to Orbit and launching most of the world sats. Its actually insane.
And its really only been taking of since 2017, people will be suprised where they are in 2024. Not landing on Mars, but probably launching private unmanned missions to Mars.
For the moon the have DearMoon and hopefully get selected as a NASA partner.
Would be cool, but SpaceX is not gone finance something like that. The next decadal survival is happing pretty soon. Unfortunately its unlike a large scale Venus mission will be picked.
That said, there very well might be a couple small and maybe one medium class missions picked. Don't think it would be a blimp, more likely an Orbiter.
Priority might end up being an lander for Europe style moon as a flagship. And further Moon and Mars exploration.
My hope honestly is that we do a serious rethink and go back to the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter but for Neptune or Uranus. A flagship mission, multiple launches, large nuclear reactor, massive amount of propellant, launched on specialised Starship to get there faster. With some real large radar on it, and maybe multiple smaller landers. Should be able to operate for 20-30 years in those systems.
This is how we need to think now for flagship missions.
I also hope for further study of a Dark side of the moon radio telescope built from moon resources.
Worth also pointing out: That's the 9th flight of Booster 1051. And it had a perfect landing.
The goal of this design of Falcon 9 is to handle 10 flights with minimum refurbishment. Right now, it looks like they're within a couple months of achieving that goal for the first time, with booster 1049 close as well, at 8 flights.
SpaceX is soon going to reach a point that they don't need to build more Falcon 9 boosters.
They have occasional landing failures (one this year, two last year), and still do launch expendably every once in a blue moon, so they'll likely need to build a new one every once in a while until the end of the program is in sight.
(It looks like they have very few customers anymore that insist on a new-build booster -- the fussiest had been the US government, but at this point, NASA is accepting reused boosters for human spaceflight, and the NRO has also accepted one for a mission last year. As far as I know, no one has publicly said they'd rather their booster has a test flight yet.)
Iridium was very important in their booster reuse program, they were early supporters. Matt Desch (thier CEO) was a big supporter. https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss
If we assume 10 as the max. The have at least 40-50 flights left in the boosters the have. Now some of those a reserved for NASA/DoD and while they can be reused, they will likely only be reused for those costumers. So in practice its a bit less.
If they can go significantly beyond 10, say 20, they have years of booster left if they want to.
I think they might only need to produce like 5ish or so more and that should mostly be fine until Starship destroys the market for the F9.
Wouldn’t they want to continue building them to some extent just so they don’t lose the institutional knowledge of how to build them? Or is the expectation that Starship will render it obsolete soon enough?
Some clients request brand new boosters, and some mission profiles require losing the booster. I think there is no danger of them ceasing to build booster.
They produce a new non reusable second stage for each launch which is constructed in a similar manner to the first stage (just far smaller) so they are keeping their skills current.
Many of these ISPs are shitty because they service the hardest to reach places. Comcast and Verizon have gobbled up billions in government aid to bring service to rural areas and end up delivering only to fringe areas which they can reach easily. The small companies end up struggling to get the government cash and end up underfunded providing service to the absolute-most difficult to reach consumers. It's a real crappy deal.
Arguably satellite service erases all of this and is a hard reset on rural telecommunications. Unfortunately, it's not a industry small businesses can participate in.
I guess as a customer I don’t really care why they suck, I just know that they do. I also don’t care about small business if they provide bad service.
From a policy standpoint as a citizen - I think it’s terrible the telecom monopolies took public money and did nothing, but I think they’ll start feeling competitive pressure from Starlink too, hopefully this will force them to adapt or die (I don’t really care which).
In SF with Google webpass fiber, Comcast is not competitive.
> I guess as a customer I don’t really care why they suck, I just know that they do. I also don’t care about small business if they provide bad service.
I guess it depends on what you mean by bad service. If by "Bad service" you mean don't return calls when your service is down, then I agree. If you are referring to bandwidth or latency, you are likely getting the best they can afford to give you for the price. It's the price you pay for living in the sticks. (I suffered with crap small ISP "high speed" internet for years so I sympathize).
I'm not suggesting anyone should stick with an inferior product to bolster small business. Their run at being internet providers is coming to an end.
So much this. The ground playing field has been controlled by comcast and Verizon. And now space will be spacex. This will be just as bad, if not worse for the people
Oh no they did do a lot. They lobbied for hundreds of billions of dollars from congress to upgrade infrastructure, then gave themselves bonuses and bought back company stock.
Musk just has a weird mouth feel (has the same strange feeling like saying "Moist", to me), Elon just flows of the tongue better, (both literally and metaphorically in the "thought voice" sense), and also is rather unique (unlike Jack, Tim, Mark or Jeff, Elon is a far less common name)
if it gets the point across, why quibble over such minor details?
Also, on a seperate point, Elon has rather created that familiarity by his constant Twitter updates, we FAR more about Elon, both personally and professionally, on a MUCH more regular basis, than like the next thousand billionaires combined. It's not strange that people DO genuinely believe they are acquainted with him in some way.
Why do you care so much? Did you complain about the same thing with Steve Jobs, that we should be saying "Apple said" instead of "Jobs said"? Or Bill Gates? Mark Cerny? Or.. Well, in many situations where the CEO or other management of a company says something, where it's absolutely normal to mention who said it?
For the people talking about space pollution and problems for astronomers. Yes, it is definitely an issue, but this constellation is also a way for many people to have access to education and information that will help them and their community.
If you're curious about both the positives and negatives of Starlink I highly recommend the mini documentary "Is this the END of Astronomy?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TifUa8ENQes
Most things in life are like this. Wind turbines are a great way to supply green energy, but building them takes a lot of energy. So it is important to also think about things like using low co2 concrete, and making them more efficient. They also kill many birds, but this is nothing compared to the amount of birds that cats kill. And engineers are working on ways to get fewer birds killed.
>Most things in life are like this. Wind turbines are a great way to supply green energy, but building them takes a lot of energy.
Reminder : we only have one sky.
Things offer both positives and negatives, but
a) generally those things are decided by local powers and authorities that can be influenced by local populations -- not corporations from specific countries that may or may not be far away and without local permission
(those decisions that are made by foreign corporations that modify local attributes is generally frowned upon -- very few like the oil rigs scattered around the ocean, they tolerate them due to the profits associated)
b) very few of these decisions create global impacts, the ones that do (say, environmental issues) have many confounding factors and influence groups working with them, representing many different people and locales.
In just so happens that in the case of 'the sky' we're all 'locals' -- but very few people, with respect to 'the world', had a say in the matter.
Starlink does create some real increased difficulties for Earth-based astronomical observations.
But by playing its part in SpaceX's goal of driving down the cost of access to space, it also creates real increased opportunities for space-based astronomical observations.
This is an excellent summary of a lot of the kickback and risk for Elon.
I think if Elon had gone to, say, the UN and tried to start a discussion about this stuff more generally to establish some ground rules for SpaceX and others, it would have been much better received. It would've given a forum to those affected - communities around the world and astronomers and other satellite operators - where none exists. Some discussions around things like target albedos, orbital parameters, and constellation sizes could've been had before a single bird went up. This would've also made life easier for other operators now working out how to dodge the Starlink constellation on the regular.
But Elon is not that sort of person, which is the great tragedy in all this. Maybe you have to be a screw-the-rest, I'm-going-to-do-it kind of person to succeed as he has (or just inherit a huge pile of cash, or maybe both). But it strikes me that as a strategy he's opted to go it alone until regulators start to step in, which is unlikely in this industry for a while given the global nature.
I think it will take something akin to the blocking of satellite uplinks (that brought the UN into international satellite operations somewhat, and effectively designated such jamming as an offensive act of war) to actually bring regulatory scrutiny to bear. The loss of ground-based astronomy isn't a big enough issue - yet - to justify the engagement. But if these constellations get bigger and bigger and the impact gets larger and larger, then that impact will add up. All we've had so far is the "early warnings" from those paying attention to the early deployments.
I think Starlink and its competitors are a very important short-term part of the global internet access discussion, but it's not a long-term fix; constant satellite launches, maintenance, and deorbiting will not be viable cost-wise over the 20-40 years most fibre installations expect to be around for at a minimum. Fibre will eventually reach everywhere - wireline operators across the globe are seeing Starlink as a short-term thing which may paradoxically make it much harder to justify rolling out a proper fix to the hardest to reach, and which may cause governments to deploy subsidy to offset the risk. In the USA it's a bit mad and distorted because of the insane market that regulators have allowed, but in the EU/UK and most of Asia, govts are making sure full fibre gets to everyone (slowly, in many cases, but it is speeding up rapidly these days).
Just like nuclear, this is a perfectly good stop-gap. But the right answer is renewables - everyone knows it - it's just a matter of timing.
> But Elon is not that sort of person, which is the great tragedy in all this.
If he was, SpaceX and Starlink wouldn't exist. Have you ever tried to handle anything at UN level? That a 10-20 year discussion and even then must likely nothing will be agree on.
The Outer-Space treaty has been argued about for 50+ years and not a single revision has been made.
SpaceX is fully in line with the current interventional space regulation. Nothing SpaceX is doing is qualitatively different then what anybody else does. They just do it more.
In fact, in many way SpaceX fast adjustment and dialogue with astronomy community is forward thinking. The reality is, its not UN and treaties that are gone solve these problems, but the actual stack holders working together.
SpaceX is working with ESA on LEO consolation safety (as ESA has multiple sats in the same region) and work with astronomers to find good compromises and give them the data they need to plan operations.
> constant satellite launches, maintenance, and deorbiting will not be viable cost-wise over the 20-40 years
The cost of accessing to space will drop 10x at least in the next 10 years and likely go down more after that.
> Just like nuclear, this is a perfectly good stop-gap. But the right answer is renewables - everyone knows it - it's just a matter of timing.
Actually nuclear would have been the right answer and the only reason 'renwables' (nuclear is practically renewable as well) are considered is because terrible global handling of nuclear has made it unpractical.
In 100-200 years people will be using nuclear, not renewables, they are the stop-gap for now.
So many ISPs have gone bankrupt trying to make fibre work. Not even Google with all its massive resources could make it economically viable in mid-size cities.
> Yeah, apparently just paint one rotor blade differently to make it stand out and birds will stay clear [1]
The study you're citing was only studied 4 wind turbines, while the evidence does point towards this working, I wouldn't say that the existing evidence is conclusive. Also, the turbines with the darker blades still killed birds, just less bird than the turbines with standard blades.
Wind turbines don't kill enough birds to be more than a drop in the dead-bird bucket. It's a talking point used by people who were looking for reasons to be against wind turbines, but housecats kill four orders of magnitudes- not 4x, 10,000x- more birds each year.
The percent of human-caused bird deaths due to wind turbines is smaller than the percent of Americans dying in airplane crashes each year, compared to all US deaths each year.
Windmills generate more than 1% of power. Thus if you scale up the wind turbines by 100x (to cover more than all power generated over the world), they still kill over 100x fewer birds than cats.
>The Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (APWRA) began
operations during the 1980s and by 1998 included about
5,400 wind turbines of various models, each
rated to generate between 40 kW and 400 kW of electric power, or 580 MW total
>Using mortality estimates adjusted for searcher detection and scavenger removal rates, we estimated the annual wind turbine–caused bird fatalities to number [...] 2,710 (80% CI =-6,100 to 11,520) birds.
That's 1/2 a bird per turbine per year. Or one bird per 110 nameplate KW per year.
That means that they're a bit safer than the average building, assuming that the number of buildings in the US doesn't exceed the number of people by a large amount.
>We estimate that between 365 and 988 million birds (median = 599 million) are killed annually by building collisions in the U.S., with roughly 56% of mortality at low-rises, 44% at residences, and <1% at high-rises.
More like one bird per 210 nameplate kW. It was already pointed out by the grandparent comment that cats are a bigger problem for birds in general. But still, wind turbines kill enough eagles and other larger birds for it to be a significant concern deserving of mitigation.
E.g. the estimate is that the Altamont Pass installation kills ~440 burrowing owls per year, when there's likely to be fewer than 10k breeding pairs of owls left. That's a 2% kill rate (or more, counting the disruption to breeding pairs) from one (larger) installation.
Why exactly is it a problem with cats killing birds? All sorts of animals kill all sorts of animals. Why are you specifically bothered by this pairing?
> They also kill many birds, but this is nothing compared to the amount of birds that cats kill.
FWIW, turbines may be worse than cats in terms of harming large birds of prey. You won't see neighborhood cats killing eagles. I'd still agree that it's probably a reasonable tradeoff though, and that it could be further reduced with better engineering.
As someone stuck on old (HughesNet) satellite internet and waiting on my Starlink pre-order, this is great news. I didn’t get into the beta sadly, though I was signed up and in the eligibility area since day 1.
Yep, did so the day I was able to. I was pretty bummed not to get into the beta, especially after torturing myself by periodically checking /r/Starlink which was just wall-to-wall posts of people celebrating their invites. Just glad to have a spot in line at this point.
I'd like to point out that I'm a big astrophotography nerd. And these satellites are regularly showing up in my long exposure images. It's really quite a nuisance, and I don't look forward to it getting worse.
I'm keen to see Starlink deals with government censorship requests. Can a country even effectively enforce their requests? How will China enforce the Great Firewall for instance?
By pressuring Tesla. One thing making me nervous with Tesla's China business is that it will become too big for Tesla to let it fail, at which point Tesla (and every other Musk company) will be beholden to the CCP.
Concerns like this are why I think he considered taking it private again. He can personally not give a fuck and decide to pull out of China anytime, but being a public company and “acting in shareholder’s interests” might get in the way of ethics...
Wait, are you implying Musk would move out of China, but the shareholders would want him to stay? You do realize he's done nothing but praise China right? Let alone that much of Tesla's funding would dry up if he "went private".
The reality distortion field around musk is insane...
Even if Musk didn't own Tesla, I don't think SpaceX wants to pick a fight with the Chinese government unnecessarily. It would be a distraction from their core mission – which is to drive down the cost of access to space. Starlink's role in that is to provide a guaranteed customer to increase scale, and to provide profits which can be directed into further space ventures. Picking a fight with the Chinese government doesn't serve that mission in any way. If Starlink gets a reputation for being a thorn in the side of the world's governments, that's going to damage its success in countries other than China, by reducing the likelihood those other countries' governments will approve it.
SpaceX may or may not decide to bring Starlink to China. But either they will bring it to China following the Chinese government's rules, or they will geofence it so it can't be accessed from Chinese territory.
Maybe it will be moot since CCP might likely fund, steal, push for - whatever it takes - their own internal 'ip' & supply. Maybe batteries are difficult though.
totally! this is one area i am 100% fine with theft all around - it should be called sharing & cooperating together in a world wide fight to reverse climate catastrophe!!
I understand people panicking about this, but lets cool your horses a bit.
First of all, SpaceX will not sell Firewall circumvention in China. They are an ISP and need to follow the rules if they want to officially sell there.
Second, even if somehow people got terminals and try to use them, SpaceX could block them. And even if they didn't, the government could locate these people, relativity easily.
Third, even if you assume the CCP is so 'diabolical' to attack Tesla, because of SpaceX. The are not a universal power, China has big plans to have their own car companies be exporters of EV and export batteries and be a major player in the battery supply chain. If they went after Tesla will some BS rules, I would suspect it would cause an international issue on the highest level and would lead to tit-for-tat style destruction on all sides potentially.
SpaceX will never be beholden to China, neither will Boring or Neurolink.
Tesla is literally the largest selling EV maker in China.
And if CCP simply starts attacking foreign auto-maker based on pretences based on pretences. Then the US have a significant interest in paying back China auto and battery makers in equal measure. And European car makers and companies also have to seriously ask them-selves when its gone happen to them.
The deals about how the car market is set up, is being made between countries and are part of international agreements.
> Tesla is literally the largest selling EV maker in China.
That's true for the Model 3 for the first half of 2020 only, they were a long way behind in 2019 and were outsold by the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV in the second half of 2020. Most of their competitors sell multiple models as well meaning that in some of those months they sold more EVs than Tesla overall.
The Model 3 smashed it for a few months last year, but they're not the largest selling EV maker in China.
Russia already has law in works to make possession of StarLink hardware illegal. There was some coverage in January: https://m.slashdot.org/story/380606
While you can often see the claims that simple citizens can be fined under the proposed law, I could not find an official confirmation. Here is the law in question: https://sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/1086353-7
The relevant part can be translated like this:
> (not complying with the law) entails the imposition of an administrative fine on officials in the amount of ten to thirty thousand rubles; On legal entities - from five hundred thousand to one million rubles.
For some reason the part about officials gets applied to simple citizens, which is completely incorrect in my understanding of the law.
So my guess is that you will not be able to legally to import Starlink receivers into Russia unless some kind of agreement will be achieved, but simple citizens owning such receiver will not be prosecuted (well, at least in the near future). Though they may be prosecuted under a different law if they'll try to share the unrestricted Internet access with other people. It's quite similar to VPNs, currently it's not illegal in Russia to use it to visit blocked resources, but it's illegal to provide such service (though any sane person would not use a VPN-service based in Russia to work around those blocks in the first place).
I imagine China will apply pressure to the company/officers. If that fails, they will track RF emissions and disappear users. If that fails, they will start RF jamming. If that fails, accidents in space.
More interesting than China though are regional communications shutdowns. Will India be able to turn off communications in Kashmir? Will various countries be able to turn off the internet on national school entrance exam days? Will democracies for show be able to turn off the internet when the votes aren't as expected?
> How will China enforce the Great Firewall for instance?
By filing legal complaints through the ITU (which is a UN agency), probably. I expect some international treaties probably come into play. Basically, China complains to the UN, the UN tells the US they can't provide Internet service in China unless they follow China's rules, and then the FCC tells SpaceX that if they don't comply the FCC will shut them down.
Of course, the US government could just decide to ignore China and let SpaceX do whatever they want. (This is all assuming that SpaceX wants to be the Robin Hood of the global Internet and take censorship from the powerful and give access to the poor and not worry about the geopolitical or economic consequences. They might just want to be a regular internet service provider that follows all the rules in whatever country they operate in and doesn't make waves.
They could also just not offer service in China.)
You either intentionally lying or you simply don't know what are you talking about. Not only the law in question only has administrative fines, no jail time, but also it has not been even accepted yet. Also it may not even apply to simple citizens, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460626
That doesn't really matter, the point is that an authoritarian regime has an easy solution. In Russia they may or may not limit it to fines (I'm not sure if it can be converted into criminal charges if you accumulate too many fines?). In China they may go for jail time right away and given China's past performance I don't see that as a too wild assumption.
Enforcement on the ground is one way to do it, but by going through the legal route they may be able to prevent SpaceX or anyone else from even offering a service in China. No need to hunt down rouge dishes in China if the FCC in the United States does not allow SpaceX to violate other country's laws.
It's kind of a weird situation. I mean, it's space, so you'd think you'd be outside of any legal jurisdiction and be able to get away with whatever, but actually satellites and radio communication are heavily regulated and subject to international agreements and treaties.
It would only take blowing up one satellite to let the world know they're serious about it, at which point SpaceX would almost certainly be forced to comply with China's demands, if only because SpaceX would have to acknowledge that the debris from even a handful of destroyed satellites would cause serious danger to the operations of the rest of the constellation.
All satellite dishes are easily detectable when they are in operation - they have to transmit RF radiation which can be detected and pinpointed to source anywhere from low-altitude all the way up to space. Anyone of a certain age who lived in a country that required TV licenses remembers the enforcement trucks that would detect RF emissions from vacuum-tube TV sets using directional antennae.
Starlink already said they will comply with whatever is needed from a specific government, including selling through local resellers and routing through things like the GFW. It’s not designed for censorship resistance, the only real way around it would be to get a foreign dishy/modem.
I would be surprised if it was that simple. Countries like Russia and China are going to want a very visible method of knowing whether a given ground dish is the normal version or their countries specific version. Anything that is just cosmetic would be too simple to fake. The biggest problem is that if any other entity controls the satellites themselves; they could turn routing the the GFW on and off which would be a huge security risk for these countries. (i.e western countries pressure Starlink to turn GFW routing off).
I wouldn't be surprised if China just started their own state sponsored low orbit satellite internet.
Another decent, cheaper middle ground would be operating just the 'first-hop' satellites that ground units communicate with and adjusting the technology such that the dish units used in china are substantially different in terms of the actual RF. Then these China run satellites enforce the GFW and then route traffic to Starlink and other 'non-china' satellites.
The biggest downside I see to that setup is that this satellite technology has to in a non-geostationary orbit which means you need a lot more satellites to get 24 hour coverage in a specific location. This isn't a problem if you want to provide service to the entire planet but for country specific networks; the extra satellites are a bit redundant.
The even safer option is to make running a ground dish itself a government enterprise. Private/non-state ownership remains illegal but the state uses Starlink et al. as just another backbone in their state network. This is probably the most likely since it is far simpler to integrate and control.
Starlink's stance on the issue is probably enough to satisfy countries like the UK that have some unique internet laws but are still satisfied with using the normal western legal process to enforce their needs.
I think if they want to operate in China, the Chinese government will tell them all traffic from Chinese customers has to be routed through a Chinese government controlled backbone operator, and the surveillance and censorship will be applied there. So Starlink won't have to directly apply any censorship. They will not be able to use laser links to route traffic of Chinese users to other countries. (Possibly the Chinese government might make an exception to that restriction for business use, such as low latency connections for financial markets.)
I'm not sure if China will let them operate though – nothing to do with censorship, to do with protectionism. They might want to reserve the Chinese market for a future Chinese controlled constellation.
Until such time as they are approved by the Chinese government to operate in China, they are going to geofence their satellites to refuse connections from terminals located on Chinese territory.
I think the "if Amazon/Google/FB don't comply, someone else will take their place" argument is weaker when replacement requires a constellation of thousands of satellites.
> I don't think anyone has the ability to shoot down enough Starlink satellites to make a difference.
Not with rockets, but maybe with lasers? What damage can a single one do? Could a country deploy them at specific orbits to have enough coverage to destroy a sufficient amount?
We are very very far from that happening. Even with most satellites being in the same torus around earth, if every single one in orbit right now were to instantly shatter, each piece would have something like a 1000sqkm volume to roam in.
Seems like there's an opportunity to produce an open-source SpaceX compatible antenna that someone could build themselves. I wonder if at some point SpaceX could allow this on their network?
I’m not an electrical engineer, but (both) family members who got electronics qualifications have told me RF phase matching circuits are a PITA to build right, and this antenna is a many-element phased array.
They told me this about 20 years ago and I don’t know what’s changed since then. Presumably someone here knows if it’s still hard or if it became easy since 2001?
indeed. i'm leaning on that "at least" pretty hard. i figured establishing that you'd have to spend as much as the prefab'd hardware cost in order to get something that isn't warrantied, and would be the first thing starlink customer service would blame your problems on, would be enough to make this completely unreasonable.
FWIW, there was a video with I believe Gwynn Shotwell saying every country, including the USA, required an “off switch” to receive approval. Nothing about line item censorship was mentioned.
ADV China did a video segment about this. It's already illegal in China to get satellite dishes, they really are afraid of their citizens knowing what's really going on.
China has started building their own satellite broadband constellation (up to 12,992 have been applied for) that is routed to comply with their policies.
I got pinged by a recruiter from Kuiper the other week and all I can see is that there's no way they're on track to be working in 5 years. They don't even have a stable launch platform. Would Musk sell Bezos the ride?
First of all, why wouldn't they? They are confident that their satellite tech is superior.
And second, SpaceX is dominating the commercial launch market to such a degree that they would run into antitrust issues if they were to use their launch dominance for antocompetitive behaviour.
But Bezos would probably be too proud to launch on SpaceX...
Musk's stated goal for Space X is to colonize Mars. His stated goal for Starlink is to fund said colonization. I 'm not so sure that he would enable any competition that he saw as having the potential to pose a real threat to his ultimate goal.
I've been ok with the tesla-only superchargers, because they are good. But it is a self-serving infrastructure and a competitive advantage.
I wonder what the reality would be about sending up bezos's satellites? It could also be a PR problem, PLUS it would undermine the bezos employees working on their launch platform.
Bezos is in it only because he too has a rocket company. If he wanted to be in the business of feeding on the scraps of others he'd release his own terrestrial internet service.
That’s why Elon’s in it with Starlink. From Elon’s perspective, if Starlink merely breaks even, it will be more than worth it as it has drastically increased launch demand, enabling high flight rate reusable rockets.
Not just increased launch demand, Starlink launches serve SpaceX as a testbed for reusability and refurbishment techniques they want to experiment on themselves without risking customer hardware.
For example, they intentionally swap hardware components between reflown boosters to better understand their behavior after multiple reuses, to the point they have individual modules that have flown more times than the current maximum number of reuses of any booster as a whole (currently at 9).
Another example, they've stopped having static fires for flight proven boosters first for Starlink, then for customer payloads too, unless the customer explicitly requests it.
It's unbelievable that "flight proven booster" turned out to be really what it says on the tin, and not just a piece of marketing speak.
> It's unbelievable that "flight proven buster" turned out to be really what it says on the tin, and not just a piece of marketing speak.
That's a thing to love about SpaceX. When they first started using this phrase, it was tongue-in-cheek in a pretty obvious way. Three years later, it was no longer a joke.
AWS has also created satellite ground stations in the last few years. A commercial satellite internet service running from the ground stations would probably justify scaling out, and having a larger network of ground stations would help AWS attract more commercial space customers. Bezos has been working this from a few angles, not just from a keep up with Musk attitude.
Given that Starlink will do links between satellites that's actually an interesting idea. From what I've read one of the problems with it is heat management. Space is chilly but it's not a great heat sink and servers generate a lot of heat.
RocketLab just announced they intend to build a rocket they're calling "a purpose-built megaconstellation building machine", but they're not planning to launch until 2024, and reportedly still are evaluating options for engines.
Would there be potential AWS synergies that make any sense?
Besides having the money to basically give it away for free, that could be a big value add if so.
idk maybe enabling the blanketing of the earth in ever expanding ring/echo surveillance. or a cdn though uploading huge video files to a satellite hard drive might not make any sense or actually save any MS given the inherent satellite -> earth delay.
Unfortunately storage or compute in space likely don't make much sense at least for now. Its more about direct point to point speed of light access. Where the downlink is directly onto of the cloud datacenter.
There was always the hypothesis that servers in orbit would lower latency since you wouldn’t have to bounce back to Earth, but given the maintenance and power requirements I don’t think that’d be very doable. A CDN would work I think, provided you could power the hard drives.
> ...servers in orbit would lower latency since you wouldn’t have to bounce back to Earth... A CDN would work I think, provided you could power the hard drives.
But doing it all solid state with RAM + SSD could totally make sense, especially if you cache only the highest access items in space... Something like this could also make sense to do custom silicon/ASICs to keep the power and weight requirements down.
I set up on my Starlink near Sacramento last week and it is fantastic. So much better than other rural Internet options. The one drawback to it now is it's a little unreliable, largely because there aren't enough satellites up in orbit yet. I'm papering over it with the Speedify VPN for now (using a second slower link). Every launch brings Starlink closer to 100% uptime.
While watching today’s launch, occurred to me the ratio of paying-client launches to Starlink launches is [whatever it is]. Profit margins on paid launches must be high, maybe amazing, to support so many Starlink launches.
Does SpaceX really have any capital constraints? I'd assume that in the current environment they can essentially raise/borrow unlimited capital just on Musk's brand name.
Just based on their reusable rockets, government contracts and potential they can borrow unlimited capital... Musk is an added bonus (that can also likely fund it himself fully)
That things that's clever is that it's a great way to test the limits of their refurbished boosters. A paying customer might be unhappy if SpaceX uses their launch vehicle to push the limits of minimal maintenance and reusability. But for their own payloads, that's not a big deal. Especially since if there is an oopsie, the Starlink payloads are much more easily replaced since they're mass produced
They won't.. It's a product that's only remotely viable in remote locations. So Australia, Canada and US. Most of the rest of the world has no need for it
I know parts of Europe which would definitely benefit from Starlink. There are plenty of rural areas even in the most well-off EU countries with shitty internet.
it's a few hundred miles up instead of 22,300. this means that it's not geostationary and you gotta switch your dish between satellites often as they go overhead, but latency is far lower.
Ok, that would make a huge difference. the biggest argument I"ve made against this with people is simply that the latency would be terrible (and it's still not great), but it's a helluva lot better than 22.3k.
Actually, current starlink latency is 20-40 msec, which isn't bad compared to DSL or fibre internet. Its usually better than 4g or 5g internet.
When starlink sats are fully using laser interconnects then their long-distance (london-NY or further) latency should be considerably less than anything else available. The speed of light in fibre is about 1/2 the speed of light in a vacuum.
The actual latency starlink customers are getting is on par with wired ISPs, and has the potential to be lower than ground based links once they add satellite to satellite laser links.
Bandwidth is solved with phased-array antennas at a high carrier frequency (Ku/Ka?). The high carrier frequency allows for high (literal) bandwidth. However, the phased-array antennas are physically the same size as some smaller, lower frequency antennas are, and thus transmit/recieve more power. This stuff in general is called a link budget and is standard in satcom.
Latency is just satellites at a lower orbit. This is only possible now because:
1. Chip manufacturing can produce a cheap phased array antenna that's electronically steered to follow the satellite in low orbit.
2. Launch costs low enough it's economical to launch tons of satellites
More junk, and no responsibilities of the companies whatsoever. The cleanup (or kessler syndrome-related catastrophe) will be payed with taxpayer money: https://platform.leolabs.space/visualizations/leo
Its not 'junk'. The sats are all under control, do active avoidance of SpaceX works with other sat providers (ESA, NASA and so on) to avoid crashes.
Each sat is designed at end of live to have enough fuel on board to deorbit itself safely.
The 5 year self drop is only relevant in case a sat a has a failure. In such a case it is in a known orbit and can be avoided.
The US and soon Europe are actively tracking object and multiple companies are working on it. Europe is also working on a laser to measure with high accurate move dead objects.
The first garbage truck missions are already planned for dead objects.
Space junk is a problem and need to be taken seriously. But people need to seriously stop with the panic and bringing up Kessler syndrome in every single discussion as some sort of thread for global civilisation that is imminent.
My high school daughter has really gotten into astronomy and space in the last few years, and is torn between celebrating the 9th use of the same first-stage rocket and hating the pieces of space junk it’s delivering to low earth orbit.
Starlink satellites will only stay up about five years without propulsion, and unless a satellite breaks hard it will be deorbited with propulsion much faster.
Concerns about space junk aren’t about these low orbits, they are about orbits where things stay up hundreds of years or much longer.
It’s not space junk. When they’re ready to be decommissioned or they fail, the thrusters turn off and the whole thing descends into the atmosphere and burns up.
I wonder how much rare earth material will get incinerated over the next few decades with thousands of these things burning up annually. Hope we figure out space mining quick.
Rare earth elements actually aren't that rare. For example, neodymium makes up over 30 ppm of Earth's crust. That's more common than lead, cobalt, tin, thorium, tungsten, molybdenum, and quite a few other elements with large-scale industrial applications.
The difficult part of producing rare-earth elements is separating them from everything else. Tiny pieces of spacecraft dust scattered over a large area don't make very high grade ore...
Rare earth elements are so named because their earths are rare: there aren't many places on the crust where their concentration is significantly above the average. Mining depends on the existence of mineral earths.
But all the components of an iPhone can technically be recycled to one degree or another (even if they aren't at present). Once a satellite has been incinerated, that's it. And there will be thousands of these, and several providers. That's thousands and thousands of pounds of material disappearing for good, every year.
1. very little rare earth materials are actually used. 80%+ are in magnets / motors, a good chunk in screens and sensors
2. solar panels might have cadmium/silver which despite the name are not rare at all
440g is the average amount used in a modern car. Let’s extrapolate to 1Kg for a satellite. Earth has an estimated 120 million metric tons of rare earth deposits. If you start burning ten thousand of those satellites every year, it will take twelve million years to go through the stock.
Not really. You know what happens when a satellite burns up in the atmosphere? Hint: It's not a nuclear reaction. All the components end up back on earth (just vaporized and oxidized).
I think terminology can mean different things to different people. Typically space junk refers to decommissioned or otherwise useless satellites. But if you’re a ground-based astronomer taking long exposure photographs, the trails of reflective satellites are of no use to you.
Yeah, and SpaceX has gone through extraordinary lengths to reduce the visibility of Starlink satellites. However, the astronomy community overall hates it and it’s kind of a meme now.
What's with this ridiculous new trend of calling active controlled satellites "space junk"? Your bias is a bit ridiculous and hopefully you educate your daughter as well... Is Hubble Space Telescope "space junk" now too?
I don't think most Americans are in a position to criticize or even care about light pollution - the light pollution caused by your cities is way above that of a tiny bit of reflection by Starlink.
am i the only person thinking that there should be laws to prevent rich individuals to increase the mass in LEO by a factor 10 in less than 10 years? i understand the enthusiasm but shouldn't these decisions let to the people, countries, for instance an intergouvernemental agency.
also: is the dark coating working? without it those are quite visible, and make radio and optical astronomy much harder (especially large sky surveys).
The dark coating isn’t used anymore, they have a visor/sunshade instead. The satellites people can see with the naked eye have not reached their service orbit yet, and they are not aligned to use the sunshade (they are instead configured to raise orbit as quickly as possible).
As for the rules about polluting space, the simple fact is that none of the rules makers expected that some agency would want to launch thousands of satellites. There are no rules covering this scenario.
AFAIK the nearest we have to rules covering the proliferation of communications satellites are ITU rules on access to spectrum. There’s no restriction on the number of satellites, just who is using what frequency in which part of the sky.
If you want to add rules about the number of satellites in orbit, better get in quick before StarLink becomes too valuable to ban.
> If you want to add rules about the number of satellites in orbit, better get in quick before StarLink becomes too valuable to ban.
Question is, why would one want it? It's going to look like an equivalent of someone in XIX century capping the maximum amounts of widgets a factory can produce per year to a level that can be matched by artisan production, because all those conveyor belts and precision parts are making production too fast.
Assuming one likes the idea of humanity spreading out past Earth's surface, and perhaps taking the dirtiest aspects of civilization upwell - we're going to need a proper space-based economy. Mining, manufacturing and all. Starlink's impact on LEO is going to look like child's play in comparison. So if one wants to see space being developed, then one has to accept and embrace that Earth's orbit is going to get way more cluttered than it is.
In the surface of the Earth we have designated conservation areas, wilderness areas and “dark sky parks” all intended to reduce the impact of human industry on the natural environment.
We do not need StarLink to industrialise space, and we do not need factories in low Earth orbit to maximally utilise space-borne resources.
This desire to pollute our skies with industrial light pollution will look to future humans as ill-guided and poorly motivated as draining the swamps (and later wondering why our ecosystems are failing).
this applies to everyone but only the rich has the money. the technology almost didn't change since von Braun in 1940, go have a look at a V2 turbopump and compare with the latest Barber-Nichols models. sure metal alloys changed a bit, ball bearings are better, etc... "Rocket Science" is still the same as 80 years ago: fine engineering and a lot of testing.
there are a lot of useful satellites: for instance for Earth monitoring, it happens we are on a climate transient, those are very relevant. not saying that ppl in rural areas do not deserve internet, but Musk was clear that Starlink was more to finance his mars dream first and foremost.
the problem is pollution and deregulation. and kessler syndrome that might knock out essential satellites in the long run.
> i understand the enthusiasm but shouldn't these decisions let to the people, countries, for instance a intergouvernemental agency.
The people elected the leadership which oversees the government agency which approved this project, so ultimately the people allowed this project to happen. This isn't a case of one person doing something alone.
It doesn't work like that, "owning" and human laws in general are kind of a fantasy, to make an absurd hypothetical scenario to illustrate this: imagine the aliens landed on Earth, would you say they should first get a permit to anchor their spaceship somewhere before doing that? At the end of the day words on paper don't matter much, if Switzerland shoots those satellites down they could be deleted from the world map with some nukes, who has the power decides.
Under the International Treaty for Outer Space, each signatory nation is responsible for regulating that activity of those operating from within their territory. Switzerland signed the treat in 1967 [1]
So that's all as it should be, and Switzerland agrees that the mechanism of regulation is the operant one.
It could have been a non-profit operation no? I would expect rural internet to be cheaper than what SpaceX is charging. $100 per month is very expensive, especially for people in rural areas which generally are poorer.
Example, I believe over 90% of rural china has high speed internet and they pay less than $10 a month.
Edit. Anyone have a good argument why we can't get $10 per month high speed internet in rural areas in the USA? If spacex can get there costs down to $10 per month, then I will be impressed. Otherwise it isn't cheaper than laying fiber.
The whole point of this is that it isn't a non-profit, though. I'd love to live in a world where we can snap our fingers and motivate people to build $1/month internet, but that's not even a remote possibility. Starlink's big boon was that someone with money saw a problem and invested a ton of money into fixing it, hoping to turn a profit in the long-term. I'd love for someone to run fiber out to my house, but even getting it to my neighborhood would start at $30,000. Enter Starlink: cut out the landline companies and offer good internet, forcing the big players to offer better services in order to compete.
Also, if you think $100/month is expensive, you don't go shopping for rural internet very often. There isn't an ISP on the planet that offers the speeds or latency that Starlink has right now, and believe me, I've tried to find one. $500 for installation and $100/month is reasonably appropriate for the services they're providing, especially if they're taking a $1000-2000 loss on each dish they ship to customers.
Couldn't we have a publically owned ISP? Also Starlink is already subsidized with public money to the tune of $900 million. Seems we are getting the worst of both worlds. We pay to build the infrastructure with public money but as a public we don't own any of it.
Have you tried an LTE or 5G access point? They cover roughly 97% of the U.S. population. And you don't have to pay for Internet and also pay for mobile service.
I have an LTE access point, it's a pretty bad experience. For one, latency is very high. It's so laggy over SSH that it's basically unusable, and you can forget any VOIP apps with how choppy it is. Speeds are serviceable, but it doesn't really matter since I can't buy an LTE access point without a data cap.
The problem with laying fiber in the continental US (and I suspect also in Canada) is not typically cost. It's death by a thousand cuts with problems acquiring land rights, fighting incumbent ISPs and the local politicians and congressmen in their pockets, and simple will on the part of ISPs.
Google tried to make fiber cheap and ubiquitous with Google Fiber and failed. If an organization with the power, resources, and clout of Google can't get it done, I don't know who can short of the federal government getting involved (which, thanks to lobbyists, is unlikely).
LEO constellations bypass these issues almost entirely and ironically enough may motivate incumbent ISPs to try to compete and stop being so obstructive.
They have the money to do it, they didn't want to spend it. They thought everyone would start writing letters to their congressmen on their behalf and force the government into making the other big fiber ISPs play fair.
That's how fucking dumb so the so-called "smartest people in the room" can be.
Google should have budgeted $10 billion a year for 10 years for Google Fiber. And in 20 years' time, Google could have been the largest provider of fiber Internet service in the United States, possibly servicing almost every single address in the country. Instead, they did what they *ALWAYS* fucking do... it didn't "catch on" in a year or two's time and they abandoned it.
I can't wait to see Google utterly fail as a company, given how shit they are at execution of everything but the most obvious, largest, and easiest-to-enter markets.
Elon Musk entered the three hardest markets known to fuckin' mankind... automotive, orbital launch, and ISPs, and he's utterly destroying mother fuckers. If I was an executive involved with Google Fiber, I'd blow my brains out due to utter shame.
> Anyone have a good argument why we can't get $10 per month high speed internet in rural areas in the USA?
do you have any idea how much it costs to dig a trench? look up a calculator for figuring out the present value of a perpetuity that pays $10/mo. that will barely cover somebody digging a trench through your front yard, and laying fiber in it, let alone doing that down miles of rural street.
If you're seeing trains of satellites, those have not yet reached their parking orbits and have not oriented themselves or deployed their sunshades. Once they've gotten to where they're intended to be, they'll become far more dim and for the most part should only be visible during a brief period around dusk.
So they haven't solved the reflectivity issue? Solving it would mean they aren't visible at all with the naked eye. Since there are thousands of them, this is a problem for land based observation no?
I'm really concerned about the alarms raised by Scientific in regards to "Space Pollution".[0]
Elon Musk has been dodging the question for the past years and never gave a clear answer about it aside of "Umbrella" joke...
Some astronomers are suggesting that with multiple space telecom companies ( US + EU + China ) it would potentially mean we would never be able to see space in plain sight ever. At least not without visual pollution.
For professional earth based astronomy, it is possible to remove the streaks digitally. But of course there is a slight impact. But what is the alternative? Just stop development of low earth orbit forever?
The future of professional astronomy is space based. Imagine what a telescope you can launch with a single starship launch...
I agree, and this applies to satellite manufacturing in general. Starlink has demonstrated that the new launch cadence requires a switch from single unit and small scale to serial production.
It's unbelievable that we don't currently have standard designs not just for observatories, but for communication, navigation, cartography and other satellite types. Cubesats took a step into the right direction, the same needs to happen for even larger payloads.
Another side of the problem is that NASA budget is heavily influenced by politics and PR. I'm sure there's plenty of smart people there who have realized that from purely scientific point of view, ten or twenty less capable and more disposable interplanetary probes or observatories could have advantage over unique absurdly expensive projects like JWT and Perseverance. But they are not as exciting and harder to sell to politicians and general public.
Launch is not a constraint for... about a year now. Satellites have a bit more lag time.
I don't think NASA needs the SpaceX equivalent for satellites - SpaceX itself is causing a boom in satellite manufacturing, so commercial market is accumulating expertise and lowering prices. NASA should find it easier and cheaper to buy or subcontract pieces of satellites too, and focus on bespoke mission-specific hardware.
Maybe SpaceX should make it up to the scientific community by promising to (at no charge) put 100T of satellite telescopes in a high orbit every year once Starship is functional.
I don't know why you're being downvoted... maybe it's the "no charge" aspect of your post, but SpaceX offering to send up research telescopes for at-cost-of-launch, or maybe a little over, would be a great philanthropic endeavor.
It would be a great philanthropic endeavor indeed, but I personally have a problem with suggesting they have to do this to "pay back" to the community. They've already paid back to everyone who ever considers launching anything to space, by cutting off a zero out of launch costs - and they're about to cut off another zero.
Launch costs tend to be a small part of mission costs for bespoke scientific hardware - but what makes those missions expensive is a feedback loop: rare and expensive launches -> need to make best use of the mass budget -> increased complexity -> need to make more robust -> increased complexity -> more expensive -> rarer launches -> more expensive launches. SpaceX just kicked that loop into reverse. With that much cheaper launches, people can afford less robust and less complex missions, and do more of them, which lowers the costs as scale kicks in.
SpaceX is making space cheap. That's already a great gift to everyone.
Mirror size is the issue - until we can easily manufacture huge, incredibly precise mirrors in-situ, space based will never replace ground based astronomy.
It’s not manufacture. It’s assembly. And I think astronauts are faster and cheaper than robots for in space assembly. Or they will be once Starship is operational. NASA did a ton of work in EVA orbital assembly with Shuttle (and still chooses to do exterior work on ISS via EVA and not purely robotically) but it was always like 10 or 100 times too expensive. Starship ought to change that. In addition to its 8m diameter payload bay.
I don’t see how anyone who has read broadly on this topic could say with a straight face that SpaceX has been just dodging this.
SpaceX has done more to mitigate visibility of their satellites than any satellite maker/operator in history, with the possible exception of classified payloads. They installed sunshades that reduce the visibility of the satellites when fully deployed (in operational orbit) to below the visibility limit in almost all conditions. You have to have exceptionally good timing, eyesight, and dark skies to catch recent Starlink satellites once operational now. But a satellite like ISS is so bright and obvious, you can even sometimes see it in the daytime. (ISS is as bright as all new operational Starlink satellites combined.)
SpaceX is taking concrete steps to make their satellites as unobtrusive as possible without significantly compromising their design. Beyond that, this is really a choice between developing space and not. Quit with the FUD about Musk “dodging” questions, etc.—say what you mean, which is that you think pristine night skies should forever take precedence over the economic development of space. Or, if it doesn’t sound good stated so straightforwardly, don’t.
No different from city light pollution preventing optical telescopes being near cities.
Or radio pollution causing constraints for radio-astronomy.
My guess is that cheap reliable worldwide internet connectivity will help science overall by far more than the costs of modifying terrestrial optical observations to mitigate the extra satellites.
1) 1200 is a small percentage of the tens of thousands of satellites that the full system, plus the other similar systems will eventually consist of.
2) Being able to go outside and point out a satellite has absolutely no relevance on the satellite's impact on professional astronomy.
3) It did not "seem to have worked". SpaceX experimented with reducing the reflectivity of their satellites, but only some satellites have that reduced reflectivity, and astronomers found them to be only marginally better.
Yeah, and what's going to advance humanity as a whole more significantly, I wonder... high-speed Internet access for the entire planet... or professional astronomers not being able to see into space as easily as they did 20 years ago?
or... Or... OR... Launching massive powerful telescopes into space using SpaceX rockets for professional astronomers to use?
I have no idea who you're addressing. If it's me, that's quite a nice strawman you've built. Next time perhaps try to actually address the words written in my comment rather than inventing some boogeyman that nobody brought up except you.
Here, I'll demonstrate:
>high-speed Internet access for the entire planet
Musk himself has said that only a tiny, tiny fraction of the world will ever be able to use Starlink. It is not anywhere close to "internet access for the entire planet", and certainly isn't providing any more internet access than is already provided by existing satellite internet providers.
>or professional astronomers not being able to see into space as easily as they did 20 years ago?
In case you weren't aware, astronomy is responsible for some of the most significant scientific advancements since for literally millennia. If you really want an answer to your questions, it's this: professional astronomers being prevented from doing research is significantly more of a negative impact to humanity's advancement than the positive impact from 0.001% of the world having access to lower ping internet. It's not even close.
>or... Or... OR... Launching massive powerful telescopes into space using SpaceX rockets for professional astronomers to use?
Even with something the size of Starship, it's physically impossible to launch anything even remotely close to the size of telescopes needed by professional astronomers.
On my early morning walk I can see the satellites as very bright (much brighter than the stars) line across the sky. It's clear they didn't do enough about the reflectivity issue.
Edit: Already downvoted for stating a fact. Amazing.
They only adjust to an orientation in which reflectivity is reduced once they have reached their proper orbits. You most likely observed them while they were still boosting themselves to these orbits. The statement that you saw a "bright line" makes it sounds like they were launched recently as they spread out after a while. The boosting process takes a few weeks.
"Didn't do enough" is an opinion, and the satellites you saw were ones that hadn't reoriented themselves and so aren't representative of how they'll look in the long term as you implied they are
> On my early morning walk I can see the satellites as very bright (much brighter than the stars) line across the sky.
No you do not. Satellites, when visible by the naked eye, are seen as point sources of light. Dots, not lines. One of two things has happened here: Either you saw meteor showers and mistook them for satellites (meteors move fast enough to be seen as lines, not points of light) or you saw long-exposure photographs of satellites online, assumed that is what it would look like through your eyeballs as well, and BSed your story about seeing them yourself.
> Edit. Already downvoted for stating a fact.
More likely you were downvoted for either being mistaken or for lying.
> No you do not. Satellites, when visible by the naked eye, are seen as point sources of light. Dots, not lines.
It was 60 satellites spaced together very closely after they were ejected from the rocket. From far away they look like a bright line just like the pixels of your monitor look like a line (even though they are just dots).
Speeds are 10-15x faster, she’s having an easier time with her online community college course and her job KPI is up by double digit percents [1]. She was worried that IT wouldn’t be OK with it when I said it was satellite (They’d been burned too many times), but the IT guy was incredibly excited because he’s also waiting to get Starlink.
Looking forward to the service only getting better, really incredible execution.
[0] My dad went on the roof in the cold Wisconsin winter to put it up.
[1] Lines transcribed per hour, as a medical transcriptionist working from home.