We have never seen the actual release of the Starlink satellites.
During every launch the hosts on the stream state that an unfortunate unexpected loss of signal happened but since the stream is stable before and after payload separation, this would be surprising. One might have thought that the vehicle was just at an unfortunate point in the trajectory where no connection was actually possible but today's payload separation event was far earlier and the video cut off anyways.
It is a bit surprising since the mechanism does not seem that sophisticated.
I thought this was because video was provided by line of sight antennas and as Starlink satellites are released the 2nd stage flips end over end while releasing them thus breaking the line of sight.
Putting Starlink launches on different screens and letting them run synchronized from the time that the video cuts off:
the confirmation of tension rod release and payload separation and the video coming back happens almost at the same time.
From my understanding, the second stage starts spinning just before the release of Starlink satellites to give the stack the momentum necessary for the clean separation. This could explain the loss of camera feed. Internal SpaceX telemetry is likely being transmitted over a separate channel and remains uninterruptible.
Yes, they spin it to disperse the satellites. The loss of video depending on the rotation is a good idea and indeed it looks like the video is failing frequently before the separation event as well. See https://youtu.be/HwyXo6T7jC4?t=4286
very interesting. I don't believe the rotation to be the cause though, the angle towards the ground doesn't change much.
I thought maybe it's the shock from the release, but I think the release happens quite a bit after the video cuts off (judging from how close the satellites still are when it comes back)
Vibration. The deployment probably disturbs the telemetry connection for a second. The same thing used to happen for landings. The camera would always cut out right as the booster reached the barge because the vibration interrupted the telemetry connection temporarily.
Like we never saw the actual landing of the F9 on a droneship until very recently. I remember being very surprised when the camera suddenly DIDN'T stop working and you could actually see the F9 actually land.
Right the tension rod release mechanism isn't shown. The tension rods are chucked away as space junk which the announcer probably doesn't want to talk about. Also agree it's kind of secret sauce. Much simpler than oneweb's corncob dispenser.
Pretty much all of them? Certainly, I remember watching realplayer streams of the first-generation Iridium satellites being launched, way back in the late 1990s.
Doing very cool stuff is not a reason enough to be disrespectful towards your audience.
During one of the first booster landing attempts a presenter lady was staring at her monitor, saw the booster crash and then proceeded to blatantly lie that the feed was lost... while the jumbotron behind her back was showing the whole thing in real-time and the audio picking up the crowd in SpaceX going "Oooooh".
Then, there are their inane explanations that they keep losing the feed from the landing platform because the sea is rippled. The heck. If you are going to lie, come up with something a bit more plausible. A plasma ball interference from the plume or something.
Better yet, just say that we are going to delay the feed by 10 seconds and we may withhold any part of it as we wish. Everyone would be perfectly fine with that. It's their feed and it's awesome when they share anything at all. Just don't BS. There's literally no need to do that.
I'm guessing it might be censored for national security reasons. The same mechanism that successfully deploys 60 satellites could probably also successfully deploy 60 warheads. Or 60 nefarious spy satellites.
It's a good question about something that is probably not a coincidence! But immediately moving to speculating about a conspiracy theory seems like hiding a good question with a fake answer.
It seems better to keep it unanswered and remain curious.
"Conspiracy theory" is an exaggeration. Lots of things rocketry related are covered by ITAR and are not allowed (by law) to be shown to non-green-card holders. SpaceX is pretty careful to comply with ITAR restrictions. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the US government had decided that satellite deployment mechanisms were one of those things covered, or if SpaceX's legal department decided that they weren't sure they weren't covered.
I tend to agree, but that doesn't mean keeping quiet about ITAR is "conspiracy theory" level of ridiculousness.
Possible advantages could be avoiding looking like they are putting pressure on the US government to change it, avoid getting into debates about whether or not ITAR prohibits it, avoiding looking like they are a workplace that is heavily bogged down by security clearance issues, etc.
I said "conspiracy theory" when I should have more accurately said "to keep a secret." But it's still just a bit of speculation; we don't know that there is a secret.
If I remember correctly, SpX is one of the few (only) who doesn't use explosives for their fairing separation or sat releases. Just some springs, because "they can be tested before the flight".
And even though very reliable, explosive bolts do fail, sometimes spectacularly. Just a few years ago an Indian PSLV fairing separation failed, yet released the sattelite inside the closed fairing, which did reach orbit. As it could not get out, this was a failed launch & IIRC the failed fairing separation mechanism was pyrotechnic.
Given the nose cone fairings cost $6 million [0], I don’t think anything in space tech can be non-complicated and useful at the same time.
[0] If it were literally any other company in space, I would accuse them of porkbarrelling. SpaceX looks like it is genuinely concerned with cost, so I don’t think that’s happening in this case.
They are actively working on reducing reflectivity but there will always be an impact and honestly any effort to improve it will be well appreciated by me. However, even though I love the work astronomers do and the view of a clear sky into the stars, I must say I prefer global Internet availability over making astronomers clean their data from satelite datapoints.
Most discussions about this leave the goal of Starlink out of the picture. If this can bring Internet access to every spot on Earth, the immediate benefit for humanity is clear.
On the other hand, Starlink is going to make use of their next-gen Starship, and with a viable amount of business space launches will become cheap enough for launching lots of cheap specialized space telescopes.
> However, even though I love the work astronomers do and the view of a clear sky into the stars, I must say I prefer global Internet availability over making astronomers clean their data from satelite datapoints.
That’s great because apparently nobody but SpaceX has any say in what happens.
Are you unaware of the federal licenses required for these satellites to be deployed, or do you just mean they were granted without taking astronomers' wishes into account?
Edit: This is a sincere question. Several comments on this story indicate people don't believe there's any regulation as to what happens in space.
Edit 2: While I'm editing things, here's the FCC Record for the original Starlink proposal in case you're curious what some of the objections brought up during the original comment period were. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-38A1.pdf Mostly it looks like other satellite operators worried about interference, orbital debris concerns, and there was a note about potential impacts on radio astronomy.
To be clear, I'm not actually saying this is all the fine. I think there are discussions to be had about the obviously worldwide impact. However, the point that I'm making was that "nobody but SpaceX has any say in what happens" is not true.
Certainly people can complain that current international treaties, federal regulations and so on aren't sufficient, that the decisions reached by regulatory bodies were incorrect, or ill informed, etc. But first they should be aware those decisions existed and did take into account input from a variety of sources, and it's not just 'if you can get it to space, do whatever you want'.
Not sure if you're aware, but it's widely publicized that SpaceX was granted licenses, waivers, and extensions that other companies were not, nor have been in the past. So yes, they have licenses, but it seems lobbying and Elon's fame has far more to do with this than anything.
Radio astronomers were all over it well before the first Tintin test satellites launched.
The optical astronomers weren’t in the habit of commenting on satellite launch licensing and got caught on the back foot. Now the media campaign is basically optical astronomers complaining that “there is no process” because they didn’t get involved in the process in time.
The same process the other people use: respond to the applications while they are open for comment. Just write a letter with pen on paper if that’s the level of funding you have.
30 minutes away from Microsoft main campus in Redmond WA, (and just a bit further away from Google/Amazon campus' in the area)
Best available internet is a 3mbit down, 1-if-you're-lucky-mbit up DSL connection from CenturyLink with latency that jumps into the 2.5+ second range when it rains hard. Which, fortunately it never does in the pacific northwest. :-D
And no, traditional satellite is a no-go, even if it was an affordable option. We have these things called "mountains" you see, and the satellites are only at certain spots in the sky, sadly occluded by a couple billion tons of rock and tree.
To reiterate, this is within commuting distance of "big tech" HQs.
Starlink can't come fast enough. Existing ISPs need to feel the pain of screwing their customers so bad for so long.
I'm within line-of-sight of Google HQ (I can literally see their campus from my porch, less than six miles away) yet my only wired internet option is AT&T DSL. Comcast offered to add my home to their network for a paltry $22,000. I look forward to Starlink creating a universal competitor even if I'm not a customer. It'd be even better if rockets needn't be involved in creating a competitive marketplace, but that doesn't seem likely.
I don’t understand, why is it not feasible to bring faster internet connectivity to suburban America with traditional infrastructure? Why do we need an entrepreneur to launch a constellation of satellites into low earth orbit—ruining the night sky for astronomers globally?
Countries like Finland and Iceland can bring decent speed internet to rural populations where it rains as much (or even more) then in the pacific north west. So I don’t know what makes America so exceptional that they can’t bring good internet to their population.
Since the problem is lack of internet infrastructure, as the market has failed in providing decent internet to a significant portion of the population, I suggest that the government subsides (or even funds) the infrastructure projects required for bringing the portion of the population a decent internet connection that the marked has failed.
That seems like a pretty obvious policy change that a mere layperson can come up with in their couch. I’m sure a civil engineer can do better though.
I don't know how much you can say it's a market problem as such, a role is clearly played by regulatory capture combined with/leading to/reinforcing monopolies. Local american governments granting big ISPs de jure or de facto sole rights to law down cable in a town means it's very hard to break in to the market as a hypothetical newer, smaller ISP.
I don't know that monopolies and rent-seeking wouldn't show up anyway with laxer regulation, but it's something to be taken into account.
Like I indicated, I’m not a civil engineer and am in no position to be coming up with a policy my self. I can say though—and I might be wrong—that America has some policy that might be hindering traditional infrastructure being build to provide decent internet connectivity to some parts of the population. I’m sure there are civil engineers though that can provide examples of better policy that may help solve this issue.
Claiming that the market has failed in a industry that has been utterly dominated by government and that was never actually a real market is pretty rich. This started out as basically a state monopoly that was then partially privatized but local monopoly laws were held in place.
Just throwing more money at utterly gridlocked system is not the solution.
So all you need to do is change the policy determining billions of dollars of infrastructure and profits with powerful entrenched interests? Where do I sign up?
This system is not primary for suburban America, but for places that are further out. But if suburban America is so shit, then why not solve this problem as well.
It is absolutely not a "mostly-US problem". We have the same problem in Australia. A lot of places only option was crappy ADSL. Then new (centre-left) government announced a project (NBN) to install fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) to the majority of the population. Massive, very expensive project, that was going to take a long time. Quite predictably, the centre-right party attacked it as costing too much money. Six years later, the centre-right win election, and thus far only a small number of lucky people had got their FTTP installed. New government decides FTTP was too expensive, replaces it with crappy fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) instead, which slows to a crawl whenever the node is oversubscribed (happens a lot due to the growing popularity of video streaming). And it tells other people that any fixed line solution was too expensive for them, and forces them on to wireless or satellite. Some people even got told they were losing their ADSL and having it replaced with a less reliable wireless or satellite connection.
... poor internet bandwidth or accessibility in remote region... is a "US only problem"??
I make it a point to not sound snarky or sarcastic on HN, we have a pretty good standard of discourse here - but that just seems a ludicrous statement to make, and I'm frankly curious what consideration went into it, as opposed to a knee-jerk reaction?
I don't think technology will solve all the world's ills; I agree that regulation of markets is a useful measure to undertake in certain situations; I don't find "Socialist" a swear word; but if ever there was a problem with a technical solution, then accessibility of internet in remote solution is almost the canonical use-case. Regulation of markets will not bring the Interwebs to remote or underdeveloped parts of the world.
Now... if we want to discuss whether bringing the Intertubes to all the world is a worthy goal or not; whether it is worth the compromises and risks a massive constellation of satellites will impose; sure, that's a productive tops to examine. But if we accept for sake of argument that internet in remote or underdeveloped parts of the world is a goal, I'm curious to see how market regulation will make that happen better and faster than a giant freakin' laser... I mean, giant freakin' constellation of satellites :).
Local market regulation is what is blocking any competition. The absurd believe people have that whenever something isn't working, markets will need more regulation is so absurd.
There are literally regulation that are preventing markets from even existing. But your solution is more regulation?
The quality of internet service falls off precipitously as you leave urban city limits.
It's better than it could be - when we decided to move "to the country", we almost bought a property where the only internet option was HughesNet. From all reports, HughesNet is incredibly expensive and barely usable. A big plus for the place we landed is that we can get "rural wireless broadband" - basically a point-to-point wifi signal bounced off of a solar-powered relay on a hill, to a set of towers on a faraway ridge, run by a folksy two-man ISP. It's expensive, unreliable, and slow compared to what I left in SF. But it's better than HughesNet and there's no data cap.
I don't know what to expect from Starlink, but I'm hopeful. Even if it's just a reliable 10Mbit connection I'll be ecstatic.
I feel for you. Our holiday house is about 30km beyond the middle of nowhere, but the 4g uplink is reliable. Plus we have to share it with very very few others...
If we ever need more, I'll probaby do just like the folksy two-man ISP you describe...
More supply drives down prices. Don't even mention current satelite Internet. Those operate via GSO satelites with seconds of ping and a way higher pricing considering SpaceX wants to be competitive with broadband pricing.
My mom's house in rural Arkansas. I mean basically if you live outside of a large city you have 1 choice of internet access and it's usually hot garbage and over priced.
Usually you are able to save the tasks that require fast internet connection for later. If you find your self on a slow internet connection while uploading a large video file, you can hold that up until you find somewhere that has a fast connection.
You also often have the option of lowering the bandwidth requirements (e.g. switch of the video call for a voice call at a lower quality). I find fast internet a luxury rather then anything while traveling.
And you can also not use wireless ever until you can connect to a cable.
What kind of logic is that? Sure, humanity has existed before global internet. But now that we can have it, there are 100s of reason to do so.
You see it as a luxury, but so is the ability to buy clean water or even get it of the tab. Things that are luxury in the beginning get cheap enough so many can use it and that whats called progresses.
Is there a reason you need fast internet connection in forrests/on the Arctic/while sailing in the middle of the ocean?[1] Is there a reason why much of Africa or Asia can’t invest in similar infrastructure as Europe has done to provide internet to where people live?
1: Maybe it could be handy to transmit large amount of science data I suppose, but they seemed to be able to cope with this limitation while photographing the black holes
> is there a reason you need fast internet at home? now imagine being some place that isn't home.
My internet needs away from home are vastly different then at home, so I don’t understand how this is an answer.
> crushing poverty?
It is highly likely that the same poverty is going to prevent locals from using Starlink. Besides lacking infrastructure in large parts of Africa and Asia has often been the result of bad policy, or wars, not poverty (or poverty as a result of war). A lot of African nations are catching up on their infrastructure projects, and I see no reason why they will skip internet connectivity as they build up their infrastructure (given that most African nations have infinitely better policy—and a lot fewer wars—now then say 30 years ago).
I used to live on a boat. It'd be nice to have access to the internet when I do so again even coastally. I can't even imagine how much of a boon getting internet access across an ocean would be. Not only to help with boredom, but also to get heaps of up to date weather observation and prediction data to do routing.
I’ve never navigated across oceans so I don’t know this, but can’t you already get (albeit slow) internet connection at sea via satellite? Or at least sufficient connection for accessing weather data?
Regarding boredom, I know a lot of sailors bring with them physical media, i.e. books, DVDs, video games, etc. knowing the internet connection will be slow.
I know getting fast internet at sea would certainly make life better for people traveling across oceans a lot, but the question is: Is is worth sacrificing the night sky for astronomers over?
Yes, but you're already bandwidth constrained when getting grib files through a satphone which often means using coarser grids over a smaller area (constraining your options) less frequently. Not the largest limitation, but better bandwidth would be useful.
As you point out, it's largely a value judgement between worldwide fast internet and ground based optical astronomy and it's one I'm conflicted about. I comfort myself with the thought that because of the expense these constellations either will bring internet access to large numbers of people justifying continuing satellite replacement or they'll fail and the satellites will be gone sooner rather than later, but as I say, I'm conflicted.
This is crazy. Why do you need fast internet away from ground based infrastructure?
Are you just acting dumb or trolling? Because its easy to come up with 100s of reasons why you would want internet in those places. You can't seriously claim you don't see the need for that.
What you need and what you want are vastly different. Off course I want fast internet wherever I am, but I don’t need it. And I’m certainly not willing to sacrifice the night sky for astronomers for it.
I have disposable income, most of what I do I don't 'need'. So yes, I want faster internet, period. Now if you want to morally shame me for not living like a month that is fine.
You make it sound as if a cloud of eternal darkness will rise. Some parts of astronomers will have a somewhat higher rate of bad signals, that they are already having to work around anyway. And we can iteratively improve both sides to make it less of a problem.
At the same time this change will help drive 10x more science overall by the simple economics of scale the space industry will reach.
Most airlines will end up using it to stream telemetry as a backup and for areas where primary telemetry communication channels aren't viable. IIRC, it doesn't work near the poles but for everywhere else it would be good for knowing the last position when a flight vanishes.
"Albedo" sounds like visible light. That's fine for those guys. Then there's x-ray and above, and infrared- and radio- below. Doubt they'll be able to make those sats soak up all EM radiation. And a few thousand of them will also be bouncing ground-based signals back down in all directions ... forget about isolation from earth-based sigs in basins.
I don't recall any beforehand news of this being publicly discussed.
There are currently roughly 5000 satellites in orbit (per wikipedia). I don't have good stats on those 5000 satellites but I believe they are on average substantially bigger than the starlink satellites.
Either way, a few thousand things spread out over the surface area of the earth is practically nothing.
> Either way, a few thousand things spread out over the surface area of the earth is practically nothing.
and the surface of a sphere at the altitude they're orbiting at is even larger. and the satellites are all spread across a variety of altitudes, relative to their size.
Satellites already have a nontrivial effort put into keeping their orbits from colliding with each other. Increasing that number by 50% is not going to be easy.
there's other stuff in low orbits, but contrary to the claim, low earth orbits aren't carefully planned. you ask for a rough altitude, and then you get whatever you get, because you probably don't have anything on board for adjusting your orbit.
it's up in geosynchronous where things are carefully planned, and the spacecraft can adjust their orbits, and do lots of long term station-keeping.
First, I don't think space is either American or Non-American land :)
Second, I imagine outer space treaty covers this in much similar way that treaties governing international waters do.
Third, to a certain degree "satellite trash" is in the eye of beholder - I don't think there's any more or less legality in this, than in ISS, TV and comms satellites, GPS, etc all flying all around the world.
No one wants to get into a real estate battle in space. At least not yet. Maybe some day it will make sense to some nation but right now fighting that battle is a negative sum game.
I know people living in remote and even not so remote areas for whom cheap and easy internet access would literally be a live changer, and who wouldn't care less about astronomers having their work more difficult as a consequence, because, again, it would be a literal life-changing event for them in terms of personal safety, agriculture, income or education.
There's a lot of misinformation about how visible Starlink is. The satellites are barely visible (and only in dark skies) in their operational orbits. Next-gen versions (with albedo reductions, which they've started experimenting with) will likely be operationally invisible entirely. This doesn't mean it won't be an issue for astronomy with incredibly sensitive instruments from which almost nothing can hide. SpaceX is working with the astronomy community to try to improve the situation for (especially) ground survey campaigns.
As far as who will pay for it... SpaceX has lower launch costs than anyone else by a significant fraction as well as lower satellite costs (likely by a similar fraction). There are tens or perhaps (globally) hundreds of millions of rural users who these constellations would help, as well as some fraction of more urban users.
Satellite internet already several billion in annual revenues from rural areas, in spite of the terrible service and high (expendable) launch costs. It doesn't take much for SpaceX to be profitable here; being a satellite service provider historically is much more lucrative than being a launch provider. The main unproven hurdle I see is user terminals, not the constellation itself.
The launch costs are nowhere near the most expensive part. By using leo they have cornered themselves into using technology that won't be available to consumers.
Oneweb is not using the same technology. They're both using phased array, but SpaceX couldn't solve the low price point like oneweb, so they have it mounted on a motor. That will surely increase cost and reduce longevity.
Oneweb is another story, and regardless of their antenna, it's not clear how they're going to monetize.
They're both using phased array. The motorized mount is only for pointing optimization during the installation process; it's not going to be constantly motoring around. (and personally, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX drops that eventually... they're trying to minimize installation costs to lower than current satellite dishes so the customer or unskilled worker can basically just plop it in the ground without adjustment while still optimizing the signal.)
Whether or not SpaceX "couldn't solve" the low price point is unknown. I'd be skeptical of anyone who claims they can't do it. Don't be too willing to buy OneWeb's PR. "Special sauce" is marketing speak. Execution is what matters. (This works both ways... OneWeb will eventually be using reusable rockets--i.e. from Blue Origin and others--like SpaceX.)
> The motorized mount is only for pointing optimization during the installation process; it's not going to be constantly motoring around.
Please cite a source on that one. If they're putting a motor on just for installation to point to roughly the right spot, that's a ton of money spent on a motor for a single-use item. That will again point to it not being a consumer product. What's more likely is the motor is making up for the poor scan loss of the cheaper phased array.
But a one-time-use, non-precision motor is pretty inexpensive. A precision motor that has to run 24/7 outside in the elements is super expensive.
Musk is trying to get rid of the $100 cost of professional installation by substituting with a $10 motor. I'm not sure it'll be successful (I wouldn't be surprised if professional installation still ends up happening and they eventually delete the motors), but that is the plan. It's just to get a good view of the sky, not to scan. A reliable scanning motor would cost a lot more. (And they need to track multiple satellites at once... can't do that with a single array steered by a motor, has to be beam-steered.)
Source is here:
"Looks like a thin, flat, round UFO on a stick. Starlink Terminal has motors to self-adjust optimal angle to view sky. Instructions are simply:
- Plug in socket
- Point at sky
These instructions work in either order. No training required."
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/12145487640542167...
Trust me -- it's NOT inexpensive. Maybe your definition of inexpensive is different from mine, but adding $20-$30 onto the cost of every install is a massive expense, especially when you still have to send a trained installer out to do it. You can't rely on an end user to do it since there are all kinds of issues with placement/blockage/etc. If you choose to ignore that, you spend more money on customer support to help them install it. Notice Elon doesn't say that end users will do it. He just said no training required, just like you don't need training to install tiles in your house either.
> There are tens or perhaps (globally) hundreds of millions of rural users who these constellations would help, as well as some fraction of more urban users.
indeed, even if you have a ground link, something radio based makes a spectacular backup. even if you've got one good high speed link available, it's unlikely you've got two whose failures are even slightly decorrlated.
Based on the prices I've been hearing, yes. $100/month or less for a GB/s connection shared between dozens of houses or more. Or an astute entrepreneur will create a cybercafe or resell it. The small businessmen can also afford it (since they already have satellite TVs), and they stand to make the most from it financially. The possibilities are many.
And it's not a problem of profitability for some, it's a problem of availability. Some could afford what their urban compatriots pay for internet, but that's simply not possible.
Yes! I live 90 minutes from Washington DC and have no land-based Internet access. Our community of 59,000 has probably just 65% true broadband coverage, from one cable provider. The FCC maps are a lie, they show my home and my neighbors as having access.
They've done a bit, enough that the public won't be severely affected. But as it stands: no, the techbros will simply kill large parts of ground based astronomy to stream gifs to rural California.
I think everyone making these comments is going to be eating their words in about 10 years when orbital telescopes are so cheap and plentiful that even third grade classrooms will be booking time for observations.
A comment below explained that we don’t have the technical capabilities to launch a 30 meters diameter telescope in orbit. And we’ll probably not have that capability in 10 years either. The extremely large telescope being build in the Atacama desert is almost 40 meters in diameter.
Sure maybe it can be fun for a third grader to look into images made for them by a cheep satellite telescope, but professional astronomers will continue to need the larger telescopes that remain technologically impossible to lunch into space for the next decade, or few.
Without wanting to get involved in the purpose of your rhetorical question (the purpose being some kind of analogy to the StarLink situation)...
How many compilers were there back in the 60s? By codebase or by install count, your choice. Hundreds of codebases and tens of thousands of installs?
How about now? Tens of thousands of codebases and billions of installs?
Do you think this could have happened without lowering the cost of transistors pretty hugely? (circa 3e7-fold price decrease in 50 years)
Seems to me that lowering the cost of transistors DOES increase the number of compilers, whether by counting the number of distinct codebases, or by counting number of users, or counting number of installed copies, or number of times executed, or whatever.
Here's the logic: If space launches are expensive, you spend more on your satellite to make it worthwhile. Give it more features, etc. Then spend even more to make it extremely reliable, because replacing it would also be expensive (both the launch and the hardware itself). If launches are cheap and routine, you can just launch a cheap simple satellite for each type of sensor you want, and even if it fails you can launch backups (or just activate stand-bys already in orbit). You can even aggregate the sensor data from a swarm of smaller satellites to generate the view of a single large virtual telescope, potentially bigger than anything you could construct on the ground.
I'm sure you know rural California is not the only place without stable and fast internet access. And while that is one usage that will probably dominate in the developed world, have you considered the possibilities in Africa, Asia and the oceans?
If the marginal cost is low enough, it may be profitable to give rural populations Internet at a price that they can afford, even if it's way cheaper than in California, and so low that the entire system couldn't be run profitably if everyone could get it that cheap.
SpaceX would have to run tens of thousands of what you're doing all over the world, where regulations and laws are different. It's not comparable at all.
Why would SpaceX run it? I am talking about freenets, the communities run these by themselves. SpaceX sells a station and connectivity to the group as a whole, and I'm pretty sure 600 Mbps (which conpares to nearly a hundred people watching a fullhd video, btw) is more than enough for a town - my network is still just 300 Mbps.
I think you're missing the point of spacex's business plan. First, what you're saying is somewhat common in the USA, but they have far too much competition in the USA for that to be profitable. Outside of the USA, WISPs aren't very common, and even if they were, it's a huge effort to sell your service through every other tiny company in different countries.
This is such a closed minded western centered mindset.
The idea of paying for infrastructure projects (or helping fund them) in foreign nations that you might do business with is just not on the horizon.
The only option on the table is to build some technologically obscene infrastructure that only those who can afford can use, leaving the local population in poverty.
So people that have some modest wealth in Africa shouldn't be able to get internet? Does it not matter that an entrepreneur and companies can get reliable internet? The local population can get together and buy one antenna is one more option they might be able to provide access to the net for a village. The government could provide one for each school. Human deploy infrastructure in so many different ways.
You can try to intellectualize everything away because you seem to have some intense dislike for this, but the fact of the matter is, this system will make internet easier and more affordable then any alternative system in a huge number of places all over the world. And in all those places it will have to compete with the alternatives and the people on the ground can make the choice what helps them the most.
Your counter argument boils down to 'We can't solve global poverty, therefore we shouldn't have global internet' and that is just such an insane position.
I’m sorry, my comment was very snarky and therefor not very clear.
What I was trying to say: A more reasonable way to get better internet connectivity to the poor parts of the world is to build tried and trusted traditional infrastructure funded by the wealthier communities around them.
You are right though, I do dislike Starlink. In general I have a big distaste for any endeavor that tries to solve a problem with new and untried technology, but that problem only exists because of wealth disparity.
Non of the individual parts of Starlink are totally untried. Its a new way to put it together really. Rockets being cheaper now is just a fact of the industry.
> What I was trying to say: A more reasonable way to get better internet connectivity to the poor parts of the world is to build tried and trusted traditional infrastructure funded by the wealthier communities around them.
The demand that you can live anywhere in the country and have people who live in the city provide you with a FTTH at the same price just seams like unreasonable to me. In most places, specially in the western world, its an organizational not a cost problem.
If Starlink is the cheaper way then why should richer communities not just provide Starlink antennas. Especially when you have large area and small communities.
> I have a big distaste for any endeavor that tries to solve a problem
Starlink solves many problems where other solutions simply don't exist. That is a plain fact. It just so happens that it will also be competitive in lots of other fields and if the competition is terrible, why not adopt Starlink?
Its global by design anyway so driving the marginal cost of utilization might make for a competitive price point in many regions and locations.
The reality is that its fine to talk about these potential changes, but they haven't happened for a long time now, and the most likely way for a totally dysfunctional system to change is with massive shock to the outside. Then ideas for reform might actually get adopted.
So even from that perspective, I really can't see any argument why putting another competitor in this market is not a fantastic idea.
They should have enough satellites in the sky, at the right positions, to start offering limited service around the start of July. This is based off of Elon's statement that they need 6 launches worth of satellites, educated guesses on launch dates, assuming that satellites need to move into their operational positions after that 6th launch, and will take the same amount of time to do so as previous launches.
They hope to be ready to help out with emergency service connectivity this hurricane season, which starts roughly speaking in August. That gives them around a months buffer, which sounds reasonable.
They don't seem to yet be making huge moves to get ground stations up and running, advertising to consumers, etc. This leads me to believe that the initial service will not be consumer oriented (probably as they work out the kinks). We know they're interested in emergency services, and we know the military is interested, these are likely to be higher paying and more forgiving customers to start with since they aren't competing with traditional ISPs at all. For them, somewhat unreliable service is better than no service.
Southern Canada/Northern US is where I presume they will actually do testing, but they should be able to provide reasonable-ish (eyeballing at >80%) uptime across most of the world provided they can get ground stations.
They'll continue to launch satellites past the first 6 launches too, so coverage should dramatically improve by the end of the year compared to a June or August launch.
For now, the sats will depend on ground stations to signal relay, until there are enough satellites (few thousand) to have them communicate between them via laser.
I love how the headline isn't "SpaceX has more operating satellites in orbit than any other company." or "SpaceX launches 240 satellites in 90 days." it is "SpaceX fails to land the booster stage on their latest flight."
It's absurd that they embedded long videos as animated GIFs. I wanted to fast-forward to see the failed landing, but the "video", being a GIF, couldn't be skipped ahead.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I agree, it would be nice to be able to pause/rewind/fast-forward/speed/slow animated GIFs. I don't want to encourage this abusive use of GIFs, but sometimes I want to control even short animated GIFs, to see individual frames or something. I have a plugin that disables autoplay, and stops animated GIFs from looping endlessly, but it'd be nice to pause and rewind.
Where are you based exactly? I'm researching time off from Auckland for winter and seems like Nuie, Fiji, New Caledonia, vanuatu, Tonga, Rarotonga got somewhat acceptable rates for work (Raro being worst).
It doesn't make sense, because 1) everybody who can load a gif can load an mp4 too. 2) an mp4 can actually be loaded by more people, because it isn't a senseless waste of bandwidth.
We have different definitions of "make sense". It makes sense why they would embed a GIF, because it is easier to do, more broadly compatible, and well-understood.
It's not surprising someone would trade off bandwidth for this.
I also think MP4 is better, it just makes sense to me why someone would use a GIF.
mp4's can be embedded just as easily as gifs, are compatible with everything under the sun except for obscure RMS-approved FOSS distributions, and are 'understood' as well as anything (whatever that means.)
I can't think of a single rational reason to use a gif rather than an mp4 for something like this. The reason it's done is because some people are old dogs who can't learn new tricks. There is a good reason sites like reddit will transcode user-uploaded gifs to either mp4s or webms (the later of which isn't supported by Safari, but mp4 has no such problem.)
If your webmaster wants to use a 32MB gif because he can't be bothered to figure out how to embed an mp4, fire him on the spot. Serving up 32MB of gif to every user who visits the page because you can't figure out the <video> tag is inexcusable. This is very far from rocket science.
Sigh all you want, just don't use gifs. It's an obsolete format with no remaining niche. Your first argument for the use of gifs focused on the experience of users seeing an animation "they wanted to show an animation and most people can load it." If the experience of the users is your concern (and it should be), you should feel obliged to never use a gif for something like this because the users will have an objectively superior experience with mp4's in every respect.
If instead you're screwing the users just to save the webmaster some minor hassle, you should sack the webmaster.
Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to have a ton of stuff in space (even if it's not Starlink satellites specifically), and not to block the view for ground based astronomy.
I think that while there's perhaps more difficulty and more cost - there's probably a lot more advantages to having these in space.
No atmospheric interference/absorbtion issues.
No ground-based light interference from nearby cities.
No weather or time of day observing restrictions.
No issues with trampling sacred/sensitive indigenous sites.
Able to get very very large synthetic apertures combining telescopes in earth + lunar orbit. (Plus sol-earth lagrange points too, I guess)
Starlink seems to be the first to exploit the drastically lowered launch costs to launch a lot more stuff into space at once.
It's just unrealistic to propose that astronomers put their telescopes in space instead. There's no way to put a telescope with a 30-meter-diameter primary mirror in space. I don't know how many decades away that capability is, but it's way beyond our technical capabilities now.
Large-aperture ground-based telescopes have huge advantages over space telescopes in many technical areas (and disadvantages in others). Eliminating them would be a huge blow to astronomy.
Certainly 30 meter telescopes in space are not possible now, and likely won't be until we get space based manufacturing capabilities.
We won't get space based manufacturing until we can put a ton of things in space - things that likely be much larger and a whole lot more visible than Starlink satellites.
I don't think requiring that we can put a 30M telescope in space be the requirement before we can put things into space.
Also, as very-much-an-amateur my understanding is that a single 30m element isn't necessarily the only way to get very large telescopes.
One approach is what JWST is using, using folding mirror segments, another is tying together multiple telescopes that are distant from each other, where the distance between them is the effective aperture.
Of course, I'm sure there's drawbacks and issues with those approaches too.
Your earlier comment seemed to suggest that astronomers should just put their telescopes in space. There are telescopes that simply cannot be put in space with current technology. Even for those that could theoretically be designed to be put in space, we're talking about increasing the cost of doing astronomy by orders of magnitude.
At the moment, the vast majority of telescopes are on Earth. There is a role for space telescopes, but the total number of them could be counted on a few hands. Space telescopes are an extremely precious and limited resource, used basically only for things that absolutely cannot be done from Earth.
We can sit here and dream about building 30-meter telescopes in space some day, but that day is a very long way off. My guess is that even far in the future, if you're given X amount of money to invest in astronomy, you will still want to invest a large percentage of it in ground-based telescopes, because your money goes a lot father on the ground for most problems.
> a single 30m element isn't necessarily the only way to get very large telescopes.
No existing or planned telescope uses a single 30-meter element. I think the largest primary mirror is 12m. All the planned 30-meter-class telescopes are segmented.
> Your earlier comment seemed to suggest that astronomers should just put their telescopes in space.
There's no "just" about it, I'm aware of that, and I know it's not a case of taking existing scopes and shoving them into space.
> There is a role for space telescopes, but the total number of them could be counted on a few hands. Space telescopes are an extremely precious and limited resource, used basically only for things that absolutely cannot be done from Earth.
This is, in large part, because of the cost of launching and maintaining them. Satellite launch prices have come down dramatically in the last 20 years. If Starship becomes a reality, then it'll come down even further.
If we're actually to ever get off this planet as a species, then dramatically lowering the cost of getting stuff into orbit is a necessity.
I sympathise with Astronomers who're concerned about the impact on their ability to do science today, but its a bit like people complaining about the first interstates highways being built. Yep, we're going to demolish some houses, and make some places a bit noisier.
I'm hoping that someone will decided to invest their billions of dollars into mining and manufacturing in space to demonstrate that it's actually possible, and likely incredibly profitable.
Once that happens, we can make really stupidly large telescopes in-orbit.
If we talk radio telescopes instead of visible/infrared light telescopes, we likeky already have such big radio telescopes in orbit now, they are just pointing the wrong way (downwards):
It is estimated the highly classified Orion signal inteligence satellites currently in geostationary orbit have radio reflecting dishes of more than 100 m in diameter.
> There's no way to put a telescope with a 30-meter-diameter primary mirror in space... it's way beyond our technical capabilities now.
I don't think it's that far off, the primary mirror for Hubble was 2.4m and the big telescopes you're talking about are made up of mirror segments around 10m in size. The Falcon 9's payload fairing is 5.2m diameter and 13m long and the proposed Starship fairing would be 9m diameter by 19m high. SpaceX is currently proving they are capable of sustaining a rapid launch cadence and have already proved they're capable of docking with the ISS. If someone built a modular space telescope, they'd be the first ones to call to get it into orbit for assembly.
Cost has been a severe bottleneck to getting science into space for so long that we seem to have become convinced that it will always be so. These Starlink launches are the first real steps in proving that it need not be so.
It is barely within our technical capabilities to build 30-meter-class telescopes on Earth. Such telescopes cost on the order of $1 billion each.
The cost to build JWST, a 6.5-meter space telescope, is over $10 billion. The ground-based telescope costs 1/10th as much and has 20x the collecting area (and 4.5x the resolution). Unlike the space telescope, the ground-based telescope can be periodically upgraded with new cameras, spectrometers, and other scientific instruments.
Space telescopes have a place in astronomy, but they're no substitute for ground-based telescopes.
Apologies if an ignorant question, but would a telescope in space require a much smaller mirror to achieve the same quality of an earth based telescope?
No, not really. Filtering out atmosphere isn't that hard for some (most?) spectra that we care about. The benefits of a bigger mirror are more about resolution than signal quality. There are physical limits to the size of a distant object under observation that can't be replicated just by more/cleaner observation time.
Not just resolution, but also collecting area and weight. If you think of a telescope as a bucket that collects photons, you can build a much bigger bucket on Earth and get a whole lot more photons. That allows you to see fainter objects.
Weight allows you to put many more scientific instruments on the same telescope (fiber-fed spectrometers, intregral-field spectrographs, imagers, coronagraphs, etc.) In order to put an instrument on a space telescope, you have to miniaturize it and make it light, and you have to decide before launch what instruments to put on the telescope. In contrast, on the ground, you're not nearly as weight- and size-constrained, and you can upgrade the instruments on a telescope every several years. There are decades-old telescopes still in use, retrofitted with modern sensors.
At least in theory you should by able to do really big mirrors for space telescopes due to the lack of gravity trying to flex them. Also there is no weather to destroy your flimsy mirror, so you can make it even lighter.
During every launch the hosts on the stream state that an unfortunate unexpected loss of signal happened but since the stream is stable before and after payload separation, this would be surprising. One might have thought that the vehicle was just at an unfortunate point in the trajectory where no connection was actually possible but today's payload separation event was far earlier and the video cut off anyways.
It is a bit surprising since the mechanism does not seem that sophisticated.