> Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image.
> "There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF."
“Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT information and high speed data connections. It is practically begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing Arecibo and independent of Earth’s rotation. Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets.”
I was curious about that claim, so I did a bit of research and made a "back of the envelope" calculation. According to Wikipedia [1], the angular resolution of a telescope is proportional to <wavelength of light>/<diameter>. Starlink seems to operate from 10 to 40GHz, so assume the hardware has a 50% design margin so is capable of reaching 60GHz. Visible light has a frequency of 400 to 800THz, so take the middle of 600THz. Using those figures, it come out that the Starlink satellites, used as a telescope, would have the same angular resolution as a 1.3m visible light telescope. Is it enough to resolve exoplanets ? I'm not sure but I think not. Hubble is 6m and can apparently resolve some exoplanets so it's not too far off. Some launches to GEO would boost the resolution to the equivalent of 8.4m in visible. (IANAA)
60GHz has a wavelength of 5mm. Effective diameter would be ~13000km. Someone check my math but I end up with 5e-3/13e6 radians or ~.0001 arcseconds. Hubble is ~.05 arcseconds.
The Event Horizon Telescope "imaged" two black hole structures down to 10 microarcsecond resolution. The create synthetic apertures from radio telescope pairs separated as much as 8,000 miles and operating up to 450 GigaHertz. (Synthetic telescopes have been created since the 1970s, but used much lower radio frequencies with a much lower computation burden.) Each telescope pair samples a small bit of spatial frequencies. So sophisticated inversions were run to compute the image that best fit these samples.
Even the full planned constellation has a smaller collecting area than Arecibo had (~60 000 m^2 vs ~73 000 m^2 for Arecibo) - and that's not even considering that for half the constellation the earth will be in the way, not the full dimensions of the satellite are usable as antenna, they are pointing the wrong way, etc. etc.
Nevermind that one looses quite a lot of sensitivity when using these arrays..
It is not about collecting area, but about synchetic aperture [1] alike very-long baseline interferometry (e.g. used by Event Horizon Telescope [2], which is a combination of many radio telescopes to observe the accretion disk around the supermassive black hole in M87 galaxy [3]). For that you need as long as possible distance between antenas, good time synchronisation, and as many as possible pairs of antenas (i.e. baselines) [3].
Though unfortunately advances in radio don't compensate losses in optical and survey quality due to strays. Different sources emit at different wavelengths differently and usually one needs the whole picture (spectral energy distribution) from radio, ir, visible light, uv, x-rays up to gamma-rays to explain the properties of a source.
You need long baselines if you want high resolution.
However if you want high sensitivity there is no way around having a large collecting area.
And since we are not looking to detect the sun in super high resolution, but very far away objects that will be extremely faint we need very high sensitivity.
There is a reason the VLA (and other arrays such as ALMA) move their antennas into different configurations. A more compact configuration achieves better sensitivity at the cost of lower resolution and a more spread out configuration gives the inverse.
Your hypothetical Starlink telescope would always have extremely high resolution but virtually no sensitivity to detect anything at all (maybe the sun). Certainly not any NEO objects - those were the prime targets for large single-dish radio telescope like Arecibo.
The closest radio telescope to the concept you have in mind is LOFAR, but even for that one each station has many times the collecting area of many dozens of Starlink satellites (total collecting area of all stations together is up to ~1km^2).
In this, they take the VLA and add a few more big ones.
> By adding the GBT, phased VLA, and/or Effelsberg to a VLBA experiment the sensitivity can be increased by an order of magnitude. This capability opens up new avenues for scientific discovery. The aim of the High Sensitivity Array initiative is to facilitate the planning, scheduling, and calibration of observations making use of this array.
> A growing number of observers are using large single-dish telescopes as elements in VLBI arrays for increased sensitivity. Recently, the High Sensitivity Array (HSA) has been formed by adding the phased Very Large Array, the Green Bank Telescope, the Effelsberg Telescope, and the 305m Arecibo Radio Telescope, to the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), to deliver very sensitive VLBI observations. Arecibo is the element that contributes most to the sensitivity of the HSA, but it has limited sky coverage. The study reported here has used the 305m Arecibo Radio Telescope with the VLBA to observe the compact radio source J0837+2454, and carry out a systematic analysis of the impact of including Arecibo. In these observations, Arecibo participated for about 25% of the total observing time. ...
Their claim is the equivalent of complaining that the weight of a large vehicle engine is bad because it makes the vehicle more difficult to carry up a hill. Get in, start the engine and drive up the hill lol. I’m curious what you mean by “holographic levels of detail”
If starlink were used as an outward sensor array, with the correct software and enough compute you could generate a live 3D model of the entire sky and almost anything in it down to quite a small resolution.
Your second paragraph answers the first question, I think! As you probably know, more antennas spread further apart dramatically increases the effective antenna size when phased correctly.
But can we boost that signals - focusing not on observation, but on detection of objects in the solar system moving toward Earth? With such great resolution, what power, scanning frequency etc. of an active radar would be needed? Considering the area we can't use focused beams (but impulses would be nice) - right?, could the solar radio emission be used instead or the light is better? Or maybe there is some background radiation on frequency that we can detect when is covered ?
Yes, if that’s what you’re asking (which is not what I thought this was about). Thought as someone else said, even combined it’s still less than Arecibo.
Also cool. But the same applies: If an orbital system could get anywhere near SKA with so much better resolution it could be really impressive.
If it's a third to half the dish area of Arecibo, and Arecibo is half of SKA, then it qualifies as "anywhere near". And SKA goes up to 14GHz so this theoretical system is completely incomparable on resolution.
If their primary mission was observation, they would be an incredible astronomical resource. However, I think that given the fuel constraints and SLA they aim to provide, I would be shocked if they used any fuel to orient for extraterrestrial observation.
I think that SpaceX has convincingly proven that it is not that expensive to send up thousands of satellites. So, anyone interested in launching a telescope satellite could do worse than talk to them to see if they could help out. Also, given enough money, I don't see why SpaceX would not be using their satellite network for more than communication. Positioning is another interesting use case for them, for example.
For the amortized cost of 1 strategic modern bomber, or a submarine, or an aircraft carrier, the DOD or US NRO could easily just pay SpaceX to do this. At the nation state scale, this constellation has proven to be trivially cheap.
The resulting arms race would be... interesting and would probably get us closer to Kessler Syndrome quickly.
One thing that makes me less scared about Kessler Syndrome than other environmental problems is that there’s a very strong and immediate economic incentive to clean things up and prevent things from getting dirty by the people at risk of making things dirty. If you can’t do maintenance on or launch satellites, that destroys the industry’s source of income.
The consequences for pollution from other industries is usually longer term and less dramatic/direct on the business itself, if it even effects the core business directly.
I think all the effort put into monitoring space debris and the amount of attention things like starlink is getting speaks to this.
Starlink-61 appears to be one of the oldest ones still in orbit - https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44249 though its on its way down and you can see the type of impact and the duration of the "ok, this is going down".
Even with the maximum starlink, that's 1,700 satellites that will last about 10 years.
The 2007 China anti-satellite test created approximately 150,000 debris at 865km. Those are in an orbit that is on the order of 500 years.
Starlink isn't going to be the cause of Kessler Syndrome.
550km is also just the operational altitude. SpaceX initially releases satellites in a much lower initial orbit. If they fail to POST, they fall into the atmosphere months after launch. Starlink climbs slowly to 550km with the same ion thrusters used for station keeping. SpaceX does not want dead birds in their orbital shell.
Looking more closely at https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45203 - that makes sense. Its released right about 350 km in a rather eccentric orbit which is then stabilized at just under 400, then after about a month there, it climbs to its target orbit over the course of a month up at 550km.
The key thing with this is that without anything else, the satellite has a lifespan that is measured in months to years and up to a decade... not centuries. A Kessler syndrome at 550km would certainly be rather up there on the "suck" scale, but wouldn't keep humanity grounded for more than a decade.
One of the important things to remember about debris at a given altitude, without additional energy, an object cannot climb further out of the the gravity well into a higher orbit. It will always come back to the same spot in its orbit one orbital period later.
Why buy their own when they can just hitch a ride. They could add a 'little black box' with access to the streams of IQ samples coming off of the array elements to do their own work without impacting operations.
Another thing that SpaceX has proven with Starlink is that the benefits of economy of scale could be applied to satellite production and the aerospace industry in general.
It is so incredibly wasteful that the companies and governments keep coming up with unique designs for the satellites serving similar purposes. Imagine if we had a standard design template for an optical telescope that could be cheaply and easily mass produced and launched by the thousands.
> It is so incredibly wasteful that the companies and governments keep coming up with unique designs for the satellites serving similar purposes.
Common satellite chassis has been a thing for decades. StarLink and other systems like it benefit from mass production and economies of scale. Each block of StarLink satellites is identical. They also have a singular task and everything about them is optimized for it.
Most satellites are not identical copies of one another even if they have "similar" roles. Mass production is less desirable as you'd end up with unoptimized designs which means wasted mass or reduced capabilities.
SpaceX has not shown anything is cheap yet since they're not a public company and you can't see their financials. yes, they're reusing parts of the rocket, but as musk said recently, it's much more expensive than they want. engineers aren't free, and they're pretty much only launching their own payloads while not having great returns.
I think it's likely there will be a dope deal at some point where low-earth satellite clusters have to offer sky observation services that offset the loss of fidelity from ground-based systems.
If the satellites can swing between sky and ground scanning several times in a single orbital period, they could use off-peak hours in the early morning to scan the skies.
I don't know if that practically will work out, as Starlink has lower speed of light delays than undersea cables. Accessing content on the other side of the world will become more attractive with lower latency. For instance a lot more people using VPNs to watch BBC.co.uk at 4 am GMT.
More likely, instead of dual purposing the satellites they'll end up finding a customer who is willing to pay for them to send up additional satellites that offer imagery, radio telemetry, or other sensor data. They'll get mixed in with the rest of the fleet, possibly acting as relays between satellites rather than downlink/uplinks themselves. Removing the downlink/uplink components would free up quite a bit of mass that could be dedicated to various sensor platforms, and the comms left would be the inter-satellite system already being used by the fleet.
There are lots of potential customers for this (especially if used for terrestrial imagery or similar sensing), and piggybacking on their existing telecom fleet to handle the uplink/downlink side could be a phenomenal bit of cost savings for them. And they get the benefit of improving the inter-satellite network with the additional relays.
Yep, I was pondering that during my workout and was going to put in an edit.
If Starlink offered inter-satellite comms as a product/service, it could potentially reduce the cost of many satellites both in low orbit or any higher orbit since it would reduce both mass and energy requirements (up/downlink takes a lot of mass and energy). Reducing the weight of systems targeting higher orbits making them cheaper to launch, or allowing them to incorporate more capabilities thanks to the reduced mass.
It also reduces the terrestrial-to-satellite comms requirements, you'd connect to your satellite like any other Internet enabled device. Just with higher latency than most and maybe (for a few times a day) lower than optimal latency.
Of course, there's a downside. What if Starlink goes bust in 5-10 years? Even 20. Whatever the comms system is, you'd want it to be reprogrammable (at least) if not part of some more open specification that others could connect to. Which suggests the possibility of licensing the technology. That opens Starlink up to competitors, but makes the service more appealing to customers. Which brings it back to probably having the most near-term utility for other LEO satellites since longevity isn't an issue for them in general, but reduces the utility for the next JWT.
Does the StarLink constellation have sufficiently accurate time synchronization and phase stability to allow it to act as a long baseline multi-static radar?
I have been contemplating using it as a passive radar source, but here the limitation is its phased array nature. It is not really optimal for non-cooperative receivers.
One would imagine so given that the satellites are eventually meant to collaborate via peer to peer direct laser links. Time synchronisation and phase stability are required for direct links but it's a good question as to how much is available in terms of the microwave SDRs.
You could also install cameras pointing back towards Earth and basically have 24/7 coverage of everyone's movements similar to what Darpa's ARGUS-IS[1](2013) does except using a global network of satellites instead of drones and build the greatest video surveillance platform on the planet. Instead of covering a city for a limited time with a drone stuffed with an array of off the shelf cell phone cameras, you could have "persistent stare" for the entire planet. I wonder if the NSA has thought about that.
Starlink satellites are tiny which limits how much you can slip in undetected. You can’t get anything close to useful resolution from something like a cellphone camera at those altitudes. Maximum resolution really requires something the size of Hubble.
I was under the impression that spy satellites are put into much higher orbits to increase their lifespan but necessitating larger optical systems.
One of the advantages of a LEO based surveillance system is that the optics could be smaller at the cost of requiring more satellites with shorter life span.
~500km is still a common NRO orbit, and presumably that’s to take the highest resolution images possible. The earliest spy satellites where under 150km and had extremely short lifespans. By comparison the commercial KOMPSAT-3 can provide 0.7m b/w images and 2.8m multispectral images from a 980kg satellite at 685 km and a multi year lifespan, I doubt classified satellites are that much better than that.
Some NRO satellites are sent to geostationary orbit, presumably for other missions. So, it really depends on the goals as not all satellites are designed for ground imaging.
You just do a sensor and lens manipulated opposite to where the unwanted light source are (earth, moon and sun) and sent the info back. I am not sure the radio channel the thing operate affect this approach. Just no one seem to think of this as complement to the earth one.
Yes. If Elon was as concerned about the survival of humanity as he claims with his mars initiatives then he’d outfit these with some equipment for this. There’s got to be a way to do both internet and radio astronomy.
I'd bet he could get funding from various governments by just hiring 1 astrophysicist and adding minimal hardware to the satellites. They're SDR so it might just be a software update.
It takes enormous amounts of capital to do all of this. He's got to build some of that capital first, and to do that he has to pursue commercial interests first. Once he's got positive cash-flow and growth and demonstrated a sustainable business, then he still can't quite build a radio telescope on SpaceX's dime for fiduciary reasons, but he'd have built a launch facility that governments could use to do it.
He can't just dedicate it to this or anything else in one go. That wealth is largely paper wealth based on other people's idea of what he can deliver, but then he has to, you know, deliver -- if he suddenly dedicated himself entirely to non-commercial projects, then he'd suddenly not be all that rich anymore.
So, he has to make SpaceX more clearly a success before he can dedicate any capital to a space-based radiotelescope. And even then, he can't use SpaceX's capital -- he has to use his own.
SpaceX has to survive on its own, he can just do any project he wants. Sure, he could sell lots of Tesla stock and develop some scientific instruments but even for a rich person just dropping many billions on something experimental instrument is a bit rich.
Musk is gone have enough opportunity to invest in things that are not commercially viable for Mars missions. Because it will take a long time before NASA gives them money for this.
I'm somewhat skeptical that every radio receiver is interchangable. Yes, starlink will have some kind of transceiver - but do you have any citation to back up the claim that it can be used effectively for astronomical observation?
Even if the physics are fundamentally the same, all kinds of practical implementation details like orientation, bandwidth, frequency, and probably all kinds of stuff an actual expert in the field would know about may well differ.
I made that question once on HN (2020, relating to Arecibo) and it was downvoted:
Couldn't it be receivers on Starlink satellites plus some computing power instead? -
but I've got great feasibility study by teraflop as the answer for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25051151 .
Parent downvoted ? Whatever, if you didn't read teraflop's answer, IMHO it's the best here so far (but missing some insight like angular resolution, synthetic aperture and baselines).
Stupid question, but what international treaties currently regulate private citizens and corporations when it comes to space? Like, who can claim which orbits? Is this just first come, first serve? What would happen if someone crashes Starlink satellites, for instance by putting projectiles on a collision course?
> The geostationary orbit is part of outer space and, as such, the customary principle of non-appropriation and the 1967 Space Treaty apply to it. The equatorial countries have claimed sovereignty, then preferential rights over this space. These claims are contrary to the 1967 Treaty and customary law. However, they testify to the concern of the equatorial countries, shared by developing countries, in the face of saturation and seizure of geostationary positions by developed countries. The regime of res communis of outer space in Space Law (free access and non-appropriation) does not meet the demand of the developing countries that their possibilities of future access to the geostationary orbit and associated radio frequencies are guaranteed. New rules appear necessary and have been envisaged to ensure the access of all States to these positions and frequencies.
Always fascinated by these useless, "shaking fist at sky" denunciations by small countries. What, exactly, is Zaire going to do about a satellite operator in GEO not paying a tax for their orbital slot? Start up a space program real quick to go move the satellite?
We don't have any lasers that could have an on influence a satellite at 350km, much less one that could do anything at 35,000km.
If you're suggesting a space based laser... we don't have any of those either, and it would be just as difficult (or easy) to launch a satellite that goes out to the orbit, latches on, and then dorbits it as it would be to move a satellite out to that location that would shine a laser on it.
That would also still have the satellite in that position which is the issue.
The issue is the size of the slot for geosynchronous orbit. They're 73km apart.
> Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) has long been recognised as prime, and scarce, real estate. Starting as a measure for spectrum management, the international community agreed in the 1960s to regulate the assignment of slots in the GEO belt through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Today, any company or nation planning to launch a satellite to GEO must apply to the ITU for an orbital slot, and popular regions over North America, Europe, and eastern Asia have become so congested that few or no slots are left for new entrants to the market
> approximately 4 × 10−4 of all pixels would be lost over the course of a year. However, simply counting pixels affected by satellite streaks does not capture the entirety of the problem, for example resources that are required to identify satellite streaks and mask them out or the chance of missing a first detection of an object
It looks like the main problem is not the amount of data lost but amount of extra manual work this situation causes. I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who might be affected by their satellites? That way researchers could automatically classify these trails.
I'd be surprised if the positions weren't already public data. Surely the US government requires or pressures knowledge of the positions since its a US based company and the satellites could certainly interfere with things NASA and other agencies want and need to do.
> It looks like the main problem is not the amount of data lost but amount of extra manual work this situation causes. I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who might be affected by their satellites? That way researchers could automatically classify these trails.
The information on where Starlink is is already publicly available through the US government. Anyone who wants to know where the satellites are can view the live positions at any time.
Starlink satellites are supposed to perform movements on their own, mainly to avid other satellites. But this means you might not know where they are all the time, just for the most part.
I don't know about that. The satellite must know where it's at to avoid other satellites. And if the satellite knows where it's at, why can't it tell us?
> I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who might be affected by their satellites?
I'm not sure if this is in any way official and/or the right way of doing it, this area is all outside of my normal competence. But, stumbled upon a python library (https://github.com/python-astrodynamics/spacetrack) that supposedly connects to space-track (space-track.org) and you should be able to get the position there. How the data comes into space-track I'm not sure.
But there are bunch of small services for seeing the live location, so I'm sure someone is tracking the location somewhere, like this one: https://findstarlink.com/
It seems to me that if you know where the satellites will be, it’s not so much a problem of removing streaks but rather factoring it into automated scheduling so that you never have any streaks to remove.
Yes the article was changed from a sensationalist article by the Daily Star to the original press release on the study from caltech. The sensationalist article spun a piece of neutral-to-positive news on Starlink into a negative one.
Any explanation how it affects the asteroid detection? It is not a manual sky search it was decades ago, but a completely automated process with a computer controlled telescope, orbit calculation software, check against a database of known objects and a submission of the new findings.
"So far, ZTF science operations have not yet been severely affected by satellite streaks, despite the increase in their number observed during the analyzed period"
So it requires processing for mitigation, but isn't as dire as the title suggests.
It's probably seen more as a herald of things to come. SpaceX will not be the last private entity throwing things in orbit. There have already been concerns about the amount of space debris that currently exists and coordinating it to avoid costly and time consuming repairs/replacements (or in the case of ISS, life threatening) accidents.
It's probably seen more as an opportunity to acknowledge a problem early to try and prevent issue before the problem grows too large and to consider mitigation strategies now.
Those streaks are what, 0.0000001% of the sky? Probably less?
It’s like if there were just a few thousand cars and boats on the entirety of planet earth, evenly spaced out across the land and sea. And then someone pipes up to complain about the heavy traffic, or the constant sound of horn honking.
The problem isn't so much missing pixels, its that bright satellites raise the noise floor of the image significantly, the more satellites in shot, the worse it is.
Its the same reason telescopes can't just "filter out" stuff like city lights and human radio sources.
The satellite streaks affect a limited number of pixels. The optics are not perfect, so a bright object can smear light over all the pixels of the sensor (noise floor).
Do you have any facts to show that the streaks raise the noise floor significantly (say more than 10%)?
I would guess from your lack of hard information that you are just suggesting it could potentially be a problem.
Edit: for a quick and dirty calculation, I estimated the pixels on a horizontal line in the image in the article, ignoring the galaxy, and the streak is not significant compared with the light from the stars. I presume because the satellites move fast across a slow time-lapse image capture, your hypothetical problem is not actually significant.
Your metaphor is poor. Imagine 2000 vehicles travelling at 25000 km/h across your location ocassionally from seemingly random directions.
Orbital period is ~90 minutes, and the surface area of the planet is ~510 million km2, so they would only occasionally pass you closely. The Doppler effect would prevent you hearing the horn, but the sonic booms would be rather noticeable (the speed of sound is 1080 km/h).
Incidentally, even to a human observer they are very far from random (though they aren't entirely regular either).
Go to https://droid.cafe/starlink (disclaimer: my site), click the gear icon in the top right, and drag the speed slidebar all the way to the right to see...
Seems a little silly. Streaks are small and a tiny part of an image. So long as the satellites don’t block a constant part of the sky, if they block < 1% of the frame you can probably just ignore the problem entirely. Assume that by chance anything missed on photo n will be captured on n + 1.
I’m assuming it’s totally fine to delay asteroid detection by one search with regards to whatever we can do about asteroids.
The whole point of SpaceX is to make the cost of payload to orbit 1000x cheaper. At that point you can build a much better monitoring system that isn't dealing with the atmosphere.
> NASA has been tasked by the US Congress with detecting and cataloging 90% of the NEO population of size 140 meters or greater.[68] LSST, by itself, is estimated to detect 62% of such objects,[69] and according to the National Academy of Sciences, extending its survey from ten years to twelve would be the most cost-effective way of finishing the task.[70]
> The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be a powerful tool for detecting NEAs. It’ll image each area of the sky about 1000 times in its ten-year survey. And it’ll do so with a powerful 3,200-megapixel camera. The Rubin will image the entire visible sky every two nights, and Asteroids will have nowhere to hide.
And there's NEO Surveyor which is a satelite which does exactly that as well from orbit to get full coverage.
FTA: "30% to 50% of the exposures around twilight" So the rest of the night it is collecting data. Sounds like ground based detection will work just fine even with more satellites in orbit.
So are bugs and birds and planes and dust particles and uneven temperature gradients, that all have to be corrected for already when you use ground based telescopes.
true, but those are included of the natural cost of doing business.
these additional occlusions are because a private entity has chosen to take
the space for their profit with zero consequence or compensation for our loss.
It's not a zero sum game. That would be ignoring a host of reasons why some people do have fast Internet access, and others don't have any at all.
Finding an Internet connection on the market in the U.S. isn't equitable at all. Market consolidation and disparate regulations across the country are creating artificial scarcity which has little to do with the geography. That's just the U.S.
Then there's outside of the U.S. which is a wholly different ballgame. This is a U.S. enterprise providing access to the Internet to millions in other sovereign countries. Which doesn't sit well strategically with local stakeholders. India already has already refused giving a commercial license to Starlink.
When we're talking "rural" areas outside of the Western countries, we're discussing areas which just don't have same level of development or wealth. Starlink costs 499 USD for equipment + 99 USD per month for a subscription. The average monthly salary in India was about 430 USD; add to that the urban-rural wage gap and you'll quickly conclude that Internet access via satellite is prohibitively expensive in India for millions.
And that's discounting the fact that hundreds of millions of people in these rural areas don't have proper access to the electricity grid to begin with.
It's not just India, is many other regions in the world where - unlike the U.S. or Europe - the economics, the lack of infrastructure or the politics just aren't favorable to ventures like this.
Sure, all of this might and likely will change and the next decade or two. But that's a big gamble to make. In the mean time, Starlink's profitability remains a large question mark.
You have to question whether Starlink is ultimately just playing a home match on Western markets where Internet access has become a commodity that fits in larger strategic interests of large capital investments. Starlink is a commercial venture after all, it only keeps winning if it gets to dot the roofs of millions with dishes. It's business model isn't fundamentally different from ground-based ISP's in that regard.
Perception matters, and regardless of how you spin this: outside of this online bubble, a large portion of humanity simply doesn't take kindly to the appropriation of a common good such as the night sky for profiteering.
Are you suggesting that most people don't think that businesses that use public assets like the sky shouldn't be able to make a profit?
Airlines, Airports, Cell Phone companies that use public radio waves, Farms that take water from public water ways, factories that cause noise and light pollution.
I don't have any experience with telescopes or satellites but I can imagine that the cost of running a satellite in space is not just the cost of launching it. Everything after that is necessarily more complex and expensive: repairs, corrections of orbit/trajectory, availability windows if it's not geostationary, monitoring, protecting from debris, limited bandwidth, etc.
Yeah this is my take too. Version N+1 of satellite internet breaks Version N of asteroid detection. The answer is clearly to build Version N+1 of the detection system using SpaceX to launch cheap satellites.
There was some discussion (Ars Technica maybe?) about why the Webb telescope took so long and was so expensive -- basically because heavy launch is (was?) so expensive, they needed to contort to fit everything in one payload (telescoping heat shield etc). But if you could do 10 launches for the same cost, you could iterate on the satellite much more easily, and the total cost to build it would be much less. (Waterfall vs. agile, to analogize with software development.)
And when we have daily starship launches that will be great, but we aren't there yet. Hopefully some people are thinking how they could design mass produced satelites to perform this type of detection and the best way to build such a network (thinking outside the box // low earth orbit assuming low cost launches)
But ultimately prices will have to drop far more than that to be cheaper to build an orbiting telescope rather than one on the ground for most requirements.
Planet have shown that for earth observation constellations are not only possible but cost affective.
Now imagin if SpaceX stuck a camera/telescope facing outwards on even 10% of their constellation. With modern ML image proccing pipelines I could see that providing us with very valuable additional astroid detection.
I really hope to see SpaceX “renting” space on some of their constellation for uses such at this.
Satellites are relatively cheap. Certainly cheaper than the right-of-way to run cables through every expensive heavily populated city in America for instance.
In fact, it would seem obvious that a LEO power station would make a lot of sense for the same reason. Earth-bound stations have the disadvantage of ~50% duty cycle due to a periodic eclipse phenomenon known as 'night'.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it's worth reading:
Starlink will ultimately be a network of tens of thousands of satellites connecting to hundreds of millions of user terminals located all over the Earth. Its radio encoding scheme adapts the signal rate to measured atmospheric opacity along the signal line of sight across 10 different frequency bands in real time. Collectively, the system measures trillions of baselines of Earth’s entire atmosphere every day. This data, fed into standard tomography algorithms such as those used by medical CT imagers, can resolve essentially all weather structure in the atmosphere. No more careful scrutiny of remote weather station pressure gauge measurements. No more reliance on single mission oxygen emission line broadening. Instead, complete real time resolution of the present state of the entire atmosphere, a gift for weather prediction and climate study.
Starlink satellites are equipped with perhaps the most versatile software defined radios ever put into mass production. Each antenna allows the formation of multiple beams at multiple frequencies in both send and receive. With sufficiently accurate position, navigation and timing (PNT) data from GPS satellites, Starlink satellites could perform fully 3D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) of the Earth’s surface, with enough bandwidth to downlink this treasure trove of data. Precise ocean height measurements. Precise land height measurements. Surface reflectivity. Crop health and hydration. Seismology and accumulation of strain across faults. City surveying. Traffic measurements in real time. Aircraft tracking for air traffic control. Wildlife study. Ocean surface wind measurements. Search and rescue. Capella has produced extraordinary radar images with a single satellite. Now imagine the resolving power with birds from horizon to horizon.
Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT information and high speed data connections. It is practically begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing Arecibo and independent of Earth’s rotation. Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets.
There’s no reason to do only passive radio astronomy. Starlink can exploit its exceptional resolving power and onboard amplifiers to perform active planetary radar, for examination of close-flying asteroids and transmission of radio signals to distant missions in support of the Deep Space Network. As of November 2021, all Starlink satellites are flying with lasercoms so in principle the DSN application could also support laser, as well as radio, communication with distant probes. No need to build even larger dishes than the 70 m monsters. The potential to greatly increase our data rates from distant probes.
And while Starlink can derive PNT from the GPS constellation, it need not depend on it forever. High capacity radio encoding schemes such as QAM4092 and the 5G standard contain zero-epoch synchronization data, meaning that any radio capable of receiving Starlink handshake signals is able to obtain approximate pseudorange information. What Starlink’s onboard clocks may lack in atomic clock-enabled nanosecond stability, they make up in sheer quantity of connections and publicly available information about their orbital ephemerides. Already a group from OSU has demonstrated <10 m accuracy, while a group based at UT Austin is developing a related method for robust PNT estimation using Starlink hardware. It seems likely to me that Starlink could support global navigation with few to no software changes and no hardware changes, improving the resilience of satellite navigation especially in a case where the relatively small GPS constellation is disabled. I won’t go into vast detail, but GNSS signals are not only used for pizza delivery, but also support a vast array of Earth science objectives, including the monitoring of tectonic drift.
Starlink has received its fair share of criticism, drawn perhaps by its overwhelming scale and potential impacts to ground-based astronomy. But Starlink can also be the single greatest scientific instrument ever built, a hyperspectral radio eye the size of the Earth, capable of decoding information about the Earth and the universe that is right up against the limits of physics.
.. dishes on every one of the 12,000 satellites for the same total area [as Arecibo] each have to be over 9 feet. That's about the same size as the chassis of the satellite itself..
.. the receivers need to have very precisely synchronized clocks, and their relative positions need to be known to within a small fraction of the wavelengths you're interested .. you might need to add atomic clocks to every satellite as well..
.. you have to think about how to aim the antennas..
.. fairly sensitive, low-noise, specialized signal processing equipment .. power .. weight..
.. satellites have a roughly 5-year design lifetime..
Few days ago I watched 'Debunking Starlink' video [0] (posted by @qsdf38100 in another thread [1] on Starlink) and it got me thinking. I am just a lay person, but, after watching it, am not so sure if Starlink is such a good idea.
Might not want to take that at face value. I skipped through most of the video but it seems like a series of thoughtless jabs. The cost estimates are way off, ignores the fact commercial launch prices are a large multiple of the actual cost, ignores economics with Starship. It handwaves the fact that Starlink orbits are so low that the satellites naturally decay in 5 years, so no permanent space trash. Comparing the addressable market (telecom alone is already 2T) to average income per capita is pointless.. I stopped there. Too much of the "i am very smart" vibe.
You just described all of CommonSenseSkeptic's 'debunking' content (along with his predecessor Thunderfoot, who should've stuck with creationists and Kickscammers).
Lately I find the word "debunking"/"debunked" in a title is a high-reliability signal of low-quality content.
How can people not hate him though?
He is so full of shit and all his projects are a joke. He stole Tesla from its true founders and made it about self driving hype. He keeps making non sense claims about it and how it’s 1 year ahead. He generally can’t help coming up with more and more stupid ideas.
I could just ignore him, but now everyone believes his bullshit even supposedly smart people on HN, and we keep hearing about futuristic revolution non sense such as hyper loop, underground taxi services, mars colonisation, rocket mass transportation, and now that star link is going to be a 12 in 1 techno marvel, best telescope, best gps, best internet provider, best weather instrument, a supercomputer, etc. Have no one heard about the fact that things that are to good to be true probably are? Elon seem to have achieved global alienation with his pseudo scientific scams and humanity is walking on its head supporting mars colonies and throwing 40000 satellites every 5 years, because we can. Meanwhile the earth is warming up and inequalities in the world is at its worst. But spoiled fans of grandiose science fiction (seemingly everyone) want moar of this giga star hyper AI sexy non sens. He is the Donald trump of the silicone valley, he represents everything that is wrong with the modern world. The car he sent to space was the car that was promised to Tesla true founder after he kicked him out. It was just a multi million dollar middle finger to the guy he stole from. Give me a break. Hope you enjoyed that nuanced take on the Elon situation.
There is a wide, wide gap between “believing his crap” and observing the first successful electric car uproot an entire industry, reusable spacecraft become commonplace, large-scale battery storage, and so on. Calling those a joke completely undermines any argument that follows.
And really, who cares that the CEO who was fired from Tesla didn’t get priority delivery, other than people looking for a match to light? It’s an inane discussion.
Tesla is successful because people are being told they will be able to sleep or work in their Tesla while it drives on its own. Like, you know, actually be allowed to take their hands of the driving wheel. Not now, but… very soon, so soon it worth 10k additional dollars. So, sure, I can’t deny Tesla success, but it’s a successful scam. And you people supporting that means what? Businesses should now be on the edge of being a scam to not be left behind by big mouth CEOs and their mindless followers? I don’t want to live in such a world. I want honesty, integrity and responsibility from the industry leaders. Elon is the opposite, and yet he’s touted as the savior of humanity. That’s gross.
> How can people not hate him though? He is so full of shit and all his projects are a joke.
I stopped here in reading your post but you're in a reality distortion field if you actually think this. Tesla and SpaceX have turned two industries on their head. And Tesla was actually in practice formed by him as the two founders were running it into the ground (Musk was there from day one as well, as chairman of the board). If you think Tesla would have succeeded without Musk, why did none of the other electrical vehicle startups then or since succeed?
That’s my point, other didn’t succeed because Elon alienated people with his promises of bringing the Hollywood blockbuster style future the masses dream of. It’s about time, where are the flying cars and hover boards. Why would one buy an boring car when one could have the car from the future from the man from the future. But it’s just a scam, teslas won’t drive themselves as it was promised, à la "driver is there only for legal reasons". It’s too late, the very people that got scammed are trusting his bullshit even more. No amount of facts will change their minds. Same as trump followers. He will achieve full self driving in 1 year with no lidar. He can do more with less. He can do everything with nothing.
Now how will other business compete? Will they need to go full bullshit to survive? Because in the end if lots of people buy, it’s a success, right? It’s just about money, who cares about truth and facts?
I think he is a terrible role model, and his "success" only proves that there’s a growing amount of people participating in a collective delusion. I’m sincerely worried.
If making unfulfillable promises was a good strategy to put competitors out of business, you'd see this happen everywhere. It doesn't. In fact that's usually a surefire way to drive a business into the ground. You can make your own conclusions starting from there.
Also, Tesla is not alone: Volvo, Waymo, Daimler, GM, Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and chinese makers have all promised Level 4 self-driving around 2021-2022.
I appreciate your effort to reconcile me with the current world. I know I’m probably missing something when seemingly half of the world is loosing its mind. Maybe I am loosing my mind. But I can’t help getting infuriated with pseudo science commercial bullshit that turns out praised and making trillions of dollars. Hearing that other automakers are claiming the same 1 year ahead full self driving makes me wonder if they feel like they have to make the same bullshit claims to survive the next decade. Would Tesla have succeeded if they were marketing as electric cars with the usual driving assistances? I think the false claims of fully autonomous driving thanks to Super intelligent AI together with Elon cult of personality played a big role in Tesla success.
Linguistically it's an awkward case. Currently, "debunked" (see also: "busted") is just the latest version of the phrase "scientists say X." The literal semantics and how it's actually used in practice are polar opposites. But "re-bunked" still sound like false information.
Right now the words are mainly used as a cheap way to sound like Carl Sagan or Mythbusters without any of the deep knowledge and research.
"De-debunked" IMO gets the message across, but also highlights the absurdity.
every credible source I've seen has shown it's not going to make financial sense. so far the returns are extremely poor, and their user adds are far from where they wanted
blame the supply shortage or whatever you want, but they're paying thousands of engineers during this time, and it's not making money. I can send more links if you're interested.
Right now nobody claims it's making money. Musk himself said gen 1 is "financially weak". They have 600k+ preorders and geo satellite people are very happy with it, which is a couple million users mostly in the US just from that. With 400 satellites per launch using Starship, Starlink looks much better financially. They plan on starting to launch Starship with Starlink this year. This reasonable analysis says about 3mil subscribers are needed without factoring in Starship.
Actually, it is. It's expected to launch around Q2 2022. The NEPA FAA PEA is going to be decided upon on February 28th then if they get the greenlight a launch attempt will happen a couple months after that. For commercial launches, they are targeting 2023. Even if Starship gets delayed to 2023-24 it will still play a big roll in getting Starlink satellites up since they haven't started launching the gen 2 constellation yet.
Somehow I suspect SpaceX did the math on how many users it can support and the cost of replacing satellites, before betting the company on the project.
What?? Noooo... they would only have to launch indefinitely something like 10 rockets a month to keep replacing aging nodes, I am sure that is financially viable way to compete with a copper/fibre cable -_-
The tech works, its just completely non feasible. Geosync satelites can give you global access with handful of satelites.
Trans-sea cables give you cheap and quick connection speeds.
Starlink is middle of the road solution that solves both problems are immense costs.
I can only imagine high frequency traders being able to afford it vs utilise the advantage of the latencies.
Why should that be owned by a private entity though? What right do they have for that? I wouldn’t mind it being run by a public (international) organization, for public good, but that’s very different.
I think that's the thing we should strive for. It has been shows time and time again that Elon Musk takes PR very seriously. We should make the company aware of astronomers so that they incorporate scientific objectives into Starlink. And pointing both the the nuisances and potential is one way to do it.
For pure visual observation you might be right, but any sort of amateur astrophotography is already significantly affected and is only going to get worse because 1) it's usually more wide-field than in professional observatories, which significantly increases the chance of Starlink streaks and 2) the ~6.5 magnitude is still a lot brighter than all the interesting deep-sky objects and is only dimmer than stars visible to the human eye.
Amateur astrophotography usually stitches multiple short exposures together to simulate long exposure, where it's trivial to remove frames with streaks. You could also automatically detect the extent of the streaks and only remove those.
With guiding you're usually aiming for 5-10 minute exposures per frame. That usually results in each frame having at least several streaks. Sure, those are technically still short and can be cancelled out, but astrophotography is already challenging enough and has plenty of other noise sources without adding more fuel to the problem.
And that's now, when we're not close to the planned tens of thousands of satellites by Starlink above, and other vendors like Amazon only starting to plan their similar programs. That's why early feedback is important - otherwise the sky will be ruined in the best case for decades to come.
And who controls access to using starlink satellites for research and the cost? The space research is now a monopoly in control of spacex. Whereas it used to be that any one could get started in their backyard.
Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of rural people in high income countries.
Their claim about bringing Internet to poor countries is bullshit. Countries like Kenya, Nigeria and India have already shown that terrestrial long-distance networking (4G and soon 5G) is the way to reach mass connectivity in developing countries.
Why should we let one American ISP pollute our global nigh skies with 42,000 planned satellites? What happens when an European or Chinese competitor launches another 42,000 satellites? We need to stop this madness.
>Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of rural people in high income countries.
If this is true then you’ve nothing to worry about. Starlink will quickly fail, they’ll close up shop, and the satellites will de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
We need not worry about one American ISP or a European or Chinese competitor. As you’ve said, this only serves a dwindling population of rural people in high income countries. No one else would be so stupid to try and enter this market. There is clearly no need, terrestrial cellular will win.
We don't all subscribe to the philosophy that the only valid limits to something are those imposed by market forces.
If something is slightly bad for a great many people we're allowed to just prevent it. We don't have to wait for the market to decide, there's no virtue in doing so it doesn't sanctify our decision.
I'm not convinced starlink is slightly bad for a great many people.
Should a child struggle to access online learning simply because their parents have chosen to live in a rural location? Should a family in a town struggle when several children need to attend classes online, because some inept bureaucrat agreed to a telco monopoly decades ago?
The fact starlink is an inconvenience to amateur stargazers doesn't seem very important in comparison.
>The fact starlink is an inconvenience to amateur stargazers doesn't seem very important in comparison.
Hm, I recall reading recently that Starlink satellites are hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids though. Can't remember where. It's probably not important.
Why would they? It isn’t like asteroids are now impossible to detect, just harder, while we don’t actually have any counter for an asteroid that was going to crash into the Earth anyway.
The more sensible solution is in ground based towers. The US rural areas suffering from lack of coverage is due to monopolistic/cartel attitudes of US ISP and carriers. Other countries don't have this problem and true fee competition made even rural areas have good wired and wireless internet. This is a lack of political will problem (to enforce cartel laws), not a technical one.
> Mobile broadband coverage has also increased substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is still the region with the largest coverage gap; one in five people live in an area without mobile broadband coverage – an estimated 210 million people.
If 80% of Africa can manage mobile broadband, it seems likely the USA can.
> Should a child struggle to access online learning simply because their parents have chosen to live in a rural location? Should a family in a town struggle when several children need to attend classes online,
Children who struggle to learn in rural areas and have parents who can afford a hundred dollars a month, plus equipment costs? Assuming that the cost to use Starlink doesn't rise (how many 35k Teslas actually shipped)? Seems like a vanishingly small population right there.
And the percentage of that population that is middle class (the part that cannot help themselves) seems even smaller. I'm not concerned about children hanging out at their parent's 70,000 acre vacation ranch.
Meanwhile, this article seems to be about professional astronomers
This isn't children hanging out in their parents vacation ranch. This is the children of rural framers and families that have a house in the country rather than a small apartment in the city.
The cost difference for DSL at 1-30Mbps (my parents single DSL network topped out at about 6Mbps) and Starlink at $100/month at 70Mbps is night and day different.
For additional fun, unselect DSL and look at the provider counters for much of the nation. With Starlink, that number is one higher.
anecdotes don't really prove anything. while you can pay $100/mo, most people in rural America can't, and that's who they need for the most underserved users.
My point is that they're already paying $50/month for 6Mbps DSL if they have any network connection at all.
Paying $100/month instead for 100Mbps satellite link is $50/month increase in cost and a 12x increase in performance.
The anecdote that I'm addressing isn't the children on a 70,000 acre vacation ranch (that likely can afford $100/month) but rather rural America.
Yes, ISPs and telecommunications needs to improve the network resources when you get more than 20 miles away from a city and suburbia. It will likely cost in the range of $100/month to get that when it is available.
that's my point, though. they're nowhere near capacity and you're comparing it to solutions that are at capacity (DSL). just wait until they need to make more money and the system is capacity constrained.
Prior to Starlink, the residence of some of my family was rather poor DSL. The network performance for rural midwest hadn't gotten any faster in 20 years. There is no cell phone coverage because of the hilly terrain (the closest reliable cell phone location is 4 miles away). Barely acceptable video (which was necessary for tele-learning for my niece and nephew (different simultaneous zoom calls) in the past two years was accomplished by using a Firewalla two load balance two DSL connections (the "what do I need to do to make it better" isn't something that most neighbors have familiarity with nor the understanding to manage).
Starlink drastically improved the network performance. Quite frankly, without Starlink, I would have had most of my family spending their daylight hours in my house (while I did remote work too)... which again, isn't an option for most people.
As much as I'll grumble about Starlink for my night time long exposures getting less impressive and its CEO, using the 550km orbit to provide fairly reliable network connections at an acceptable speed to my family is probably worth it.
If you are that cocnerned for a small group of people to get decent internet, then vote for breaking the monopoly of xfinity instead of creating a new one
Why? If the market deems that there’s an actual need beyond “a dwindling rural population in high income countries”, Starlink will survive. If there isn’t a need, then it won’t survive. The problem will take care of itself. Legislation has a cost when there are other more pressing issues. A politician’s time is finite.
The military isn't constrained by market forces - they are constrained by budgets and capabilities. That is, I'm not sure what "market forces" justify being able to cause a city to disappear in nuclear explosions across the world in 20 minutes, but it definitely is a capability the (US, Russian, Chinese, maybe more) military pays for.
Meanwhile, GP is saying the military is a huge early investor for Starlink, and they are doing it primarily because they want to consume it.
Space X was at a severe political disadvantage vs aerospace incumbents. It did not have full government support. It still doesn’t compared to the incumbents. Could be wrong, but the military is not a major factor for Space X especially at the beginning. Why? Elon is not a fan of bribes.
Military literally paid for SpaceX to be a thing, and USAF is IIRC something in the range of 25% if not more initial funder for Starlink, and by virtue of very specific requirements, the only stable client who couldn't be easily served by few geostationary or Molniya satellites (operating an ISP in various countries can be... interesting. Elon is also very, very fond of government handout, that's how SpaceX and Tesla got funded pretty much, even if Elon provided certain capital to get things moving at times.
For example, how is Starlink going to provide local Ministry of Defense access to the network in time of emergency, which was at least in 2008 a requirement for any ISP in Poland spanning more than one commune (smallest administrative region)? Requirements like that mean that ISPs need to seek waivers or just avoid having customers in specific countries (or break the law - we're talking Elon here after all, just look at latest FSD brouhaha). And they greatly dimnish the value proposal of building a constellation.
OTOH, DoD had been shopping around for global satellite provider for last 15-20 years, as bandwidth and availability were often issues just in running bases, but also making it harder to drone strike an usually innocent group.
> but the military is not a major factor for Space X especially at the beginning
The US military funded the first two launches of the Falcon 1. Far from "not being a major factor", without that money, Musk and Space X (and likely Tesla) would have gone bankrupt in 200X.
If you don’t care for Elon what more could you ask for than he wastes tens of billions on such a fruitless endeavor? Do you think he’ll just keep launching satellites for fun and pleasure?
> If you don’t care for Elon what more could you ask for than he wastes tens of billions on such a fruitless endeavor?
Just because I don't care for Elon (nor think he should have that much money), doesn't mean I don't care what he does with his money. If he buys and shreds the Mona Lisa, I care. If he pollutes LEO because a math error keeps the satellites from deorbiting and causes Kessler Syndrome, I care. If his Boring Company in Vegas has a disaster and a hundred people die in his tunnel, I care.
I care about a lot of other things he could do too, but I'm not going to list them.
Meanwhile, while I don't care for him, that doesn't mean I want him to become poor. I don't care if he has a megayacht or something.
They had a rocket they needed to test (Falcon Heavy) and that requires a test payload. Usually test payloads are boring mass analogs. Instead they decided to use something different and get a bunch of marketing out of it. Everything had to be approved by the appropriate government agencies well ahead of time. So where does the "spite" come from?
I can't find the reference now, so perhaps I hallucinated it. But as I recall, the car was intended to go to another investor, and the early-Tesla investor/CEO shenanigans put it into limbo, and so Musk launched it.
It only happened once, which was an obvious marketing stunt that presumably served its purpose. There's not much benefit to doing it over and over again.
If he was really doing it "for the lulz" then there would be many more such launches. Cars, a painting of some artist that offended him, etc. We haven't seen that though.
For the same reason we can't do anything about people doing things in international waters: it's outside the jurisdiction of most countries. E.g. China might not like satellites flying over their territory but there's not much they can do about it legally. It's not part of their airspace. SpaceX doesn't need permission; just for operating radios on the ground that communicate with those satellites. Which of course a few countries won't be willing to do because they'd instead prefer to use their own satellites.
Because SpaceX is of course hardly the only one with plans like this. Like it or not, there will likely be tens or hundreds of thousands satellites in orbit in a few decades. Millions even long term. They are too cheap and useful for that to not happen. It's more a question of when than if other rocket companies get their act together. Lots of them have been inspired by the success SpaceX has had in recent years.
The downsides are extremely minor. Nobody ever complains about jets polluting our night skies (as opposed to our atmosphere, which they do of course do bad things to). There are thousands flying at any moment. And they are much bigger than the puny SpaceX satellites. And much closer too. And they are very easy to see because they actually have blinking lights on them that are designed to make the planes more visible. It's a complete non issue.
> The downsides are extremely minor. Nobody ever complains about jets polluting our night skies (as opposed to our atmosphere, which they do of course do bad things to).
Starlink's constellation will have 12000 satellites when fully deployed. There are between 8000 and 20000 jets in the air at any given time, so you might expect jets and satellites to be roughly equally present in any given person's sky.
But wait...satellites generally are higher up than jets, so a given satellite will be visible to a larger area than a jet will.
If the Starlink satellites were in orbits that covered all of the Earth equally then when the full constellation is deployed there would be about 360 visible from any give point on the surface at any given time. I believe they aren't using any orbits that cover the far north and south, so the actual number visible for most places should be a bit higher, but lets stick with 360 as a lower bound.
That's way more than the number of jets visible at any one place.
> And they are very easy to see because they actually have blinking lights on them that are designed to make the planes more visible. It's a complete non issue.
Interesting point. They'd also be harder to remove from your data because they'd be less predictable. Presumably someone could track/monitor all the satelite's so you could adjust for them (as best you can) in your data.
This is assuming that the satellites all remain in one piece, the idea behind Kessler Syndrome is that one impact will generate loads of fragments in unpredictable orbits and cause a chain reaction.
That being said I don't know what the probability of such an event is, I assume it's fairly small. I could look it up but I've got to fix an omelette.
I'm not an expert in orbital dynamics, but (logically) if the point of impact is low enough that it's within a high-drag area of space, then any orbits generated by the impact must have that point as part of their orbits, therefore all pieces after the collision should decay eventually as well.
This doesn't happen. The energy is not close enough to shoot things far enough up that they will not decay. On this altitude Kessler Syndrome is so close to impossible as to be a non issue.
Oneweb is 1000x more dangerous compared to Starlink but that not by Musk so nobody cares.
Ended up falling back on my old standby of instant mi goreng with bok choy and fried egg on top. Tastier than anything you can make in 15 minutes has any right to be.
This is why I wanted orbital space to be treated as Antarctica. But the US and China are in a new cold war and both sides have no stomach for accountability.
Musk just destroyed America's moral high-ground on the issue as well so 10 years from now when we look up we'll see corporations battling it out.
You can't use the (false) premise that "nobody ever complains about jets polluting our atmosphere" to justify hindering the detection of near-earth asteroids, which is guaranteed to eventually threaten the safety of people in this planet, possibly in a country that is not opting in to this situation. This is why legality cannot be the sole basis of right/wrong. Just because countries do not (yet!) have jurisdiction over space doesn't mean that you can just do anything with it--and especially if the said countries without jurisdiction may be the collateral damage of such actions.
I think it is your privilege to give such opinion, however, I can see the various advantage of Starlink. Many ISP in the US simply refuse to provide proper bandwidth and people have to live with ISP shenanigans, Starlink has helped those people. Sometimes submarine cables are destroyed. We saw that in a recent disaster where a volcanic eruption was responsible for an internet blackout, Starlink would have been helpful there.
And to counter your same example, in India around 41% of people have access to the internet. I think the internet is a basic right, at least in this century, so we shouldn't deprive people of the internet. I do acknowledge that Starlink might be costly but something is better than nothing.
I mean, I don't think that your argument justifies why we should trade off near-earth asteroid monitoring with faster internet connections just so we can consume more Instagram and TikTok videos better.
If scanning for near Earth asteroids was really a priority, there's nothing stopping us from building a detection network in space, above the altitude at which Starlink satellites fly.
Isn't it more the case that it is a priority precisely because we have our current methods for detecting near-earth asteroids, but we're letting capitalism get in the way and launch Starlink satellites in space to trade off the safety of our species for more profit that, honestly, isn't even necessary? I mean, of course you can argue that the survival of our species isn't necessary and is not more important than money, but if you believe that, you should state that plainly because that seems to be where we'll have an impasse.
In my opinion... If we REALLY wanted to detect near Earth asteroids, we'd focus on space based telescopes. They are better in nearly every way, except for the raw size of the mirror. But we use ground based telescopes because they are cheaper. Capitalism has already prioritized lower science budgets for finding big rocky planet killers.
To me, internet doesn't means "Instagram and TikTok videos". And, we should focus on how to solve this asteroid detection issue, that doesn't mean we should dismiss whole idea.
> Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of rural people in high income countries.
By the FCC’s estimates[0], there are 26 million people in the US alone, mostly in rural areas, who lack access to adequate high speed internet. I believe that exceeds what most would consider a small dwindling population by quite a large margin.
This number could potentially increase too, with the recent advent of full remote work. A fair number of people who live in urban areas do so only because they have to for employment and if they had the option would move somewhere less densely populated.
A large market for Starlink are ships and aircraft. It's already been tested in these applications, but commercial usage is pending regulatory approval.
Let's say you put a 5G tower with battery+solar in the middle of nowhere to provide coverage for a small village. How is that tower going to connect to the rest of the world? You'd still need to invest in fiber or microwave links to hook it up. Starlink could be a cheaper and simpler alternative to connect the tower.
> What happens when an European or Chinese competitor launches another 42,000 satellites?
Then there are 84,000 satellites in orbit and room for literally millions more? Space is big. Each satellite is smaller than a car. What happens if a company produces 42,000 more cars? Will it blanket the Earth? Of course not!
I think you might just be a bit confused when trying to conceptualize just how much room we're talking about here.
It fantastically benefits US military providing reliable communication channel and high speed networking everywhere. Not sure if Europeans will want this. Not sure if Russians will be able to afford this. Chinese might want the same very much and they can built all the satellites for sure.
I dont see why spacex has got to target the same niche (rural people in rich countries) everywhere in the world. They could provide low cost backhaul in developing countries for telcos. Offer more expensive access for airlines and ships. Have an offering aimed at organisations who want to run a WiFi network (like schools or offices). The advantage of satellite is that the same infrastructure can offer different services in different places.
SpaceX bringing internet to rural areas is just another of those Musk stories he tells. Like how SpaceX is “meant to make us a multi planet species” when in reality it’s just another government contractor at this point. Starlinks real business will come from the military, airlines and shipping fleets.
I agree that most revenue will come from military, shipping, airlines etc. But I don't see why that should preclude other uses at other price points. Particulaly as those users can be separated geographically. And the marginal cost of bandwidth could become very low. If the only customer in a footprint is a school in a remote area then you might as well sell to them at a price they can afford. It is more revenue than you would have got otherwise. It's like selling seats on an airline. Most revenue comes from expensive business class seats, but there are still cheap seats. Because most costs are fixed regardless of how many users.
No I’m not saying it will preclude the other clients. Just that Musk has a way of selling his companies as doing one thing to the masses while actually making money via the government.
> Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of rural people in high income countries.
I live in downtown Chicago and I can't get wired Internet for less than $70,000 installation. I would have gone with Starlink except they had backorders on the receivers, so I went with T-Mobile 5G Home Internet instead. So, it's not just people in the boondocks that need wire-free Internet.
You're absolutely right. It's saddening to see how little regulation there is, or even how little focus there is on regulating business in space. I don't want to sound naive, but it's frustrating that us citizens of any countries have no weight on such important matters. All for the Musks and Bezos' of this world I guess.
Regulations will come with time. Space is the new Wild West, once we have a decent amount of infrastructure (and people) in space governments and regulations will follow.
Starlink with laser links could be providing Internet access in Tonga right now. Sadly they're a year (or more) from having it working, they only just started yet.
(I'm posting this message via Starlink. Admittedly I'm a rural person in a rich country. Still grateful for it.)
Russians think there could be some hidden military use of Starlink and there could be some truth in that, as from a business point of view only Starlink somehow does not add up.
I've been on the edge of buying Starlink, but am currently waiting on a few other things to pan out:
* I often have to drive through rural roads with my family. Cell service is limited/spotty here. Starlink would allow me to work on the road (and have an emergency backup).
* My wife and I have been eyeing the possibility of purchasing a small plot of land to "get away to" occasionally. Starlink would enable me to work from that plot of land.
A plot of land to 'get away to' is a great thing to have if you are getting away to it frequently enough to stop it from turning into a jungle. Abandoned land turns into proto forest with amazing speed, and any dwelling on there will be eaten up in record time. If you are serious about this please budget for a local caretaker.
Big +1 on this. Elon Musk is not a philanthropist. The goal of Starlink is just to bring Internet to people that can afford an expensive system just for themselves by literally annoying everyone else.
If you are that cocnerned for a small group of people to get decent internet, then vote for breaking the monopoly of xfinity instead of creating a new one comtrolled by a lunatic narcisstic megalomaniac billionaire with no empathy
Everyday a billionaire wakes up and does nothing with those billions but make more of those and hold on to them. They are nothing like anybody else but other billionaires
There was no precedent set by Starlink. What they did was already allowed and many other constellations have been launched previously. Some into the low 100s in total satellites. Starlink just has much larger amounts than any previous constellation and they're reasonably large as generally there was somewhat of an inverse correlation in satellite size and the number of satellites in the constellation.
OT but related... Starlink would really be useful in Tonga right about now, with their fibre-optic connection severed and expected to be out of commission for at least a month.
Not in its current state; it relies on a local ground station as they don't have the inter-satellite relaying via lasers working yet. Coming "soon", but that's Elon saying so. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482424984962101249
There's only 568km from Tonga to Niue, who still have Internet. I wonder if that's close enough to use a hypothetical Niue base station to bounce Internet off a Starlink to Tonga. Might be a little patchy depending on the exact locations of the satellites at any time.
The site you're linking to is talking about visible starlink satellites, not starlink coverage.
Starlink is definitely available at that latitude (in the sense that there is signal, not in the sense that SpaceX is currently taking customers or has set up base stations), in the southern hemisphere the only significant landmass that doesn't have more or less constant coverage is Antarctica.
Back when coverage was more spotty, I made this map. I'd probably change some things if I revisited it now that there are lots of satellites up, but it's good enough for demonstrating the point: https://droid.cafe/starlink
The satellites have a ground footprint of about 4700km, so if there was a base station in Niue it should be easily in range. From what I’m reading no one on Tonga has a Starlink terminal, and there aren’t any base stations in the pacific.
Are you sure? AFAIK the laser links are just needed to further reduce latency. I don’t think SpaceX needs any ground stations. Elon even talked about governments in countries like Afghanistan not being able to do anything against their citizens using Starlink apart from “shaking their fists at the sky”.
It is not magic. You signal from the user terminal has to reach a ground station / gateway connected to the Internet. Either there are inter-satellite links and the signal can be routed to a gateway far away. Or there are not and the gateway need to be at most a few hundred kilometers away if you satellites are in orbit at 400km.
> Afghanistan not being able to do anything against their citizens using Starlink apart from “shaking their fists at the sky”.
Or sentence to death people caught with a Starlink dish on their roof.
Currently Starlink doesn't do Satelite-Satelite communication, so you'd have to downlink reasonably close to Tonga. Even ignoring the lack of downlink equipment, the maximum range is about 250 miles.
Fiji is the nearest realistic location to downlink, Suva, where many cables land (including the cable from Tonga). It's 466 miles, way over the horizon.
Would it be totally insane for SpaceX to offer free/very cheap launches every now and then to pure science missions to make up for these types inconveniences?
For context: plain old Falcon 9 could launch a Hubble-sized telescope to LEO (with a bit of room to spare) and return for reuse.
It feels like the right thing to do and could gain them a bit of goodwill.
They already do offer cheap launches. That's kind of their business model. There's more science missions being launched by their rideshare missions than ever before. There's a media campaign to somehow discredit SpaceX despite all the good they're doing.
Semi off-topic question. Would it be possible or reasonable to mount small energy efficient high resolution cameras on the opposing side of the satellite and make a real time grid picture of space, then open source the data to any scientists or astronomers that want it? Could that be a feature request for the next model of their satellite?
.. Now you have to think about how to aim the antennas. Presumably you can't just reorient the entire satellite, because its main job is to keep its ground-facing antennas aimed at the ground and its solar panels aimed at the sun. So you need to add a separate antenna pointing mechanism, with a fairly wide range of very accurate movement along multiple axes, so that all of the radio antennas can observe the same region of the sky simultaneously..
No it's not feasible for multiple reasons but the primary one being cost. Putting high quality optics on so many satellites is cost exorbitant and the problem isn't the quantity of optics, it's the quality needed to be cost effective.
Momentarily setting aside the human tragedy of losing the night sky for...broadband internet. We can manage externalities through taxation. Large constellations should be funding space-based sensors across all spectrums for regular astronomy and planetary defense. I feel like we could get here via a launch license fee.
No, we actually do lose the night sky as we understand it and have understood it for generations. That literally is a thing.
No, there are many scientific instruments, basic optical telescopes, advanced observatories to NEO detection tools that will be affected (see article). The costs of placing telescopes in orbit is exceptionally high relative to constructing them on the ground, so again, no optical astronomy is going to experience a significantly higher cost of operations.
Yes, few people will notice. Few people noticed when we poisoned rivers with PCBs or approved the demolition of Penn Station. There is an aesthetic, social and practical value that is lost when we allow a select set of firms to dominate certain frequency bands and orbital locations.
No, we cannot stop being so dramatic, these are legitimate questions. Space is for everyone's benefit, not just SpaceX, despite their remarkable accomplishments.
It is reasonable to have a discussion about how we will mitigate the tragedy of the commons in advance, have a plan and ensure that again...broadband internet in space, a regulated business doing a thing for money in a common setting...benefits us from its use of our common domain.
Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.
The ironic thing would be if we detected a large asteroid and had no way of deflecting it in time because we had shutdown SpaceX in an attempt to better find smaller asteroids.
The lower the orbit, the more quickly objects de-orbit. This is especially true of the lowest LEO orbits that Starlink sits in, where atmospheric drag also enters the picture. Worst case scenario, a totally dead satellite will deorbit on its own in a couple of years and they can very easily suicide if required to avoid catastrophe.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but this seems unlikely; sure two large satellites colliding could create smaller debris with a much higher apogee, but it seems to me that the perigee would not increase, so it would still spend a significant fraction of its orbit in atmospheric drag.
Kessler syndrome will never prevent us from launching things, it could theoretically stop us from parking things in certain orbits, but the risk to launch through those orbits will be minimal.
We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an asteroid.
Only in the near planetary region of the solar system. There's lots of comets with very long periods we didn't detect yet, because their last visit to the inner solar system was centuries or even millennia ago.
Why not put sensors on them that can used to help detect asteroids. I’m guessing if the signals were combined in an array and integrated you could gain quite a high resolution image.
They did, turned out painting things black makes them a lot hotter. They instead opted for sunshades, which is what this study shows, a great improvement in the brightness of the satellites roughly equivalent with the guidelines. The original article for this spun a positive study about how little the effects of Starlink are into a negative one.
Why don’t we do instead the starlink equivalent but at a lower altitude -> lower radius -> less satellite. We could easily put a “satellite” at each roof and be done. It’s just not as good PR as space.
Yes it's incredible how the original article misrepresented things before hacker news replaced it with the original press release. They spun a piece of positive news into a negative news piece.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
For example, if Alice did X and got Y, then published a paper about it, and Bob did X and got Y, and Charlie did X and got Y, then X->Y is scientifically proven.
If well known and proven scientist Alice said that X may cause Y, then it is just Alice words, not a science.
I find it interesting how opposite my view is of yours. I see earth as flourishing with 100k+ people lifting themselves out of extreme poverty, daily, for the last 25 years. I see violence on the decline for decades. I see new discovery happening at an insane rate that gives me hope. I see people identifying issues and the world responding, maybe not perfectly or even effectively, but there's certainly huge movement with real problems across the board. People are more connected to information than ever and as a whole I see progress dominating and the future looks incredibly bright.
Are there new discoveries happening at an insane rate? I feel that due to the knowledge circle always expanding in radius, we effectively have a continuously increasing surface area to learn about, slowing it down significantly.
Also, I fail to be that optimistic given how wealth imbalance is greater then ever, and the looming climate change we do jackshit about. The people being connected to information suck up bullshit conspiracy theories like they were nothing (and those kind little FAANG companies help them in that). And this anti-intellectualism is even scarier than climate change, might I say.
I felt this movie was truly awful. Vacillating between a comedy and a serious movie. As a leftist I felt offended at the leftist pandering and idiotic portrayal of conservatives in the film. It felt like a dangerously left populist film cheering on the decline of public trust. Similar to how the kingsmen did so for right populism.
This film really made me feel apathetic to US cultural direction. Not because of the portrayal of political incompetence. But for the eagerness and shamelessness of pretending that the only good smart folks are the little people on the left and that everyone else is comic book evil in a mostly serious film, or at least, a film that felt like it was trying to have a serious point.
Anti science and intellectualism in the US is a problem but Christ this movie was just as bad in the opposite direction.
> I felt this movie was truly awful. Vacillating between a comedy and a serious movie. As a leftist I felt offended at the leftist pandering and idiotic portrayal of conservatives in the film.
They were more of a blend of left and right than you might appreciate. The president's smoking habit was a clear reference to Barack Obama, and all of the photographs of her with celebrities was a reference to Hillary Clinton. Unqualified children working as advisors was a reference to Donald Trump.
I would argue that what you see in the characters is more of a reflection of your political leanings.
Yes everyone knows that American left is still pretty damn right. But it’s the left in America. I don’t care about the global spectrum.
I disagree with your lighthearted assessment of the film’s values.
I saw all business and political elites being portrayed as truly sociopathic villains, and just generally, assholes in private contexts.
I saw conservatives being portrayed as fucking idiots. Like showing the military commander shooting an assault rifle at the comet, or the Fox News equivalent covering stupid content instead of the meteor.
I saw constant appeals to young liberal folks as the only ones that get it. And for some reason Arianna Grande.
If this movie were clearly a comedy, sure, but it frequently tried to be a serious film, and I think it just adds chaos and anger to what is otherwise an important set of issues. This is just as divisive as the bullshit the movie calls out.
> Like showing the military commander shooting an assault rifle at the comet
I haven't seen it, but that sounds like a sendup to Doctor Strangelove. What are you going to do when faced with your inevitable death? Why not something totally absurd! Like ride a nuclear bomb or shoot futilely at a comet heading your way.
A man who everyone bet against but probably did the most in terms of pushing 100% electric cars and making them mainstream and you say he’s fucked the earth?
Listen, 2 years ago I would have said Elon is a clown and Tesla is going to zero.
And I was 100% wrong.
Dude has massive balls and the kind of personality (warts and all) that pushes humanity forward.
We need to nurture people like him, not condemn them.
Building goddamn infrastructure for public transport would put us so much ahead than stupid luxury cars transiting a single person.
Also, did you calculate the production of batteries and their limited reusability into the picture as well? Or the not even close to renewable-only sources of electricity used to recharge the cars?
Well if you can figure out how to actually accomplish a big expansion in public transport, please let us know. People have been trying for decades. You have to get politicians and taxpaying voters on board and that's not so easy.
In the meantime, Tesla is making real progress on decarbonizing transport. And it's not just "stupid luxury cars," the whole idea was to start with that and work their way down to the mass-market as they scaled up mass production and batteries got cheaper, and that plan seems to be progressing nicely.
Batteries can be recycled and Tesla's 4680 cells are designed to make recycling easy. And a recent Yale study found that, even taking all indirect emissions into account, electric cars are far better than gasoline cars: https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/yse-study-finds-el...
> Building goddamn infrastructure for public transport would put us so much ahead than stupid luxury cars transiting a single person.
And he would do that how? Pulbic infrastrucutre is a political problem and I tell you a secret, rich people don't actually control the world.
And living in a country with good public transport, there are still many cars. Juts FYI.
And you need to start EV of in more expensive cars to get the needed margins to make massive investment of batteries and battery supply chain. Like literally anything else, things start expensive and get cheaper over time, I can't believe how people still complain about this with every single new technology.
> Also, did you calculate the production of batteries and their limited reusability into the picture as well?
Yes. People keep making that point as if its a good point. Because it really isn't.
> Or the not even close to renewable-only sources of electricity used to recharge the cars?
Another terrible point. You have to move both renewables and electric transport at the same time. The idea that EV don't matter and they should only be done when the Grid is 100% electric is literally one of the dumbest possible arguments. They clearly have to be done at the same time for any chance of getting there by 2050 (or hopefully before).
> The fact that humanity got to a point where it made more "sense" to shoot dozens of rockets and deploy hundreds of satellites into space instead of running cables to cell towers to cover large areas is sad.
1. I think you are grossly underestimating just how many cables and cell towers would be needed to cover just rural North America alone (nevermind less developed places like Africa).
2. LEO satellite internet benefits more than just terrestrial clients. Ships and airplanes can now have more reliable communications.
>1. I think you are grossly underestimating just how many cables and cell towers would be needed to cover just rural North America alone (nevermind less developed places like Africa).
Not underestimating at all. Of course it will be a lot, but it has many advantages, and is by far more eco-friendly than shooting rockets into space.
>2. LEO satellite internet benefits more than just terrestrial clients. Ships and airplanes can now have more reliable communications.
There will always be a need for ship and airplane connectivity, but LEO being more reliable is still up for debate, and other forms of satcomms can be done with and order of magnitude less satellites.
> Not underestimating at all. Of course it will be a lot
Do you have any data to back this up? Starlink (and other possible future constellations) most effectively serve the low-density or unconnected areas of the world. North America alone has a land area on the order of 25 million square km, with significant topographical and geographical contraints.
I have several relatives who had what the government considered "high speed" internet available - one an old adsl 1.5Mbit connection, the other a drastically overprovisioned cell phone wireless that they were lucky if it provided 0.5Mbit real world connections. The providers offered no consolation, and there was zero prospect of them upgrading services. Both relatives are now happily using their starlink at ~200Mbit.
> other forms of satcomms can be done with and order of magnitude less satellites.
There is effectively a per-satellite maximum bandwidth, as well as distance-based power requirements. The same satellite in low earth orbit can provide much better internet than if it were in GEO. Non-LEO satellites will remain second-class internet (with lower speeds and higher latencies) because of fundamental physical limitations.
> is by far more eco-friendly than shooting rockets into space
Really? The energy usage is almost certainly much higher to do it terrestrially. If you're concerned about the CO2 generated by the launch burn you could easily offset that and more using carbon removal with the energy saved versus doing the same buildout terrestrially.
You're massively underestimating how many miles of cable would need to be run to cover the US with 4G. You're talking on the order of a million miles of cable. Not to mention building even more towers than the satellites they are launching. Raw materials alone are likely an order of magnitude more. Plus all the labor involved. Do you know how trenching works? There's no way that's more economical. Not a damn chance.
And yet countries like Vietnam have pulled exactly that off. If we have $1.7T for the f-35 fighter, we have the money to give everyone 100 Mb or better internet, it's just a matter of priority. I'm a satisfied Starlink customer but only because there are no other viable alternatives currently where I live.
Since the comparison to Vietnam is triggering some people, let's add some hard numbers and really get the downvotes going.
Vietnam's GDP is $271B, The US is $21T or ~77x higher with ~3.4x as many people living in a space ~30x bigger than Vietnam. And yet we still cannot deliver cellphone reception and broadband on par with Vietnam. Wonder why? Also wonder why this is such a triggering statement to make but I guess some things will just remain a mystery. And won't you do your part to bring this post to -10? We can do this together.
Vietnam is smaller than California with a larger population. That cell towers can be made to work is not really in dispute, it's the cost (both initial and ongoing) for reaching the increasingly sparse population areas (like Wyoming and Montana) or geographically hard-to-cover areas (like the Rocky Mountains) that make satellites more economically viable.
Sure but between the current situation and the outskirts of Wyoming and Montana there's plenty of low-hanging fruit.
For example, my neighborhood is 1.5 mi away from gigabit internet. Good luck with that last mile and a half so Starlink it is.
The study I'm linking here says it would cost $80B to fix the current situation. That's chump change. I am so fed up with the tiny minded thinking that is trapping America in an endless loop of failure. But watch trillions materialize instantly if we have to go to war with someone again.
I'm having trouble finding how much Starlink has currently cost to deploy, but per wikipedia in 2018 (yes, 4 years old):
> The cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in May 2018 to be at least US$10 billion. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink]
Which would be 1/8th the cost you describe (though probably more by now, I haven't found any figures yet). It also covers a larger geographic area (and therefore a larger number of people) in a shorter time than any cell tower + cable solution would, short of conscripting every possible technician in the US to accomplish the effort.
Starlink also gets to piggyback on other SpaceX launches so they aren't eating the entire launch cost themselves, it's subsidized (or can be) by their other customers. This is what I'm talking about when I say that presently it's more economically viable. It sucks about your situation (being so close to gigabit Internet without access), I've been there, too. Cable companies and ISPs in the US suck.
More recent, June 2021. Musk is expecting to spend $30 billion to cover 12 countries, and expects to have spent $10 billion before becoming cashflow positive with Starlink.
EDIT: Fixed link above, not sure why I ended up with a link to a subheading.
However, starlink isn't a product yet. It's hard to separate the hype from reality; so whether starlink turns out to be a practical alternative still needs practical demonstration. Or to put it another way - I'm sure you've heard of a few of the teething problems early adopters have, but it's not so clear whether those are merely small wrinkles, or just the tip of an iceberg of nasty practical problems that will render the network uneconomical.
The idea is definitely very attractive, but it's not quite yet proven itself - and it's definitely unclear how realistic those cost guesstimates are.
What are you talking about it's definitely a product. I use it right now in my rural area (USPS doesn't even deliver here) and I'm getting 30ms latency with a 150/40 Mbps link. Rock solid for months straight even during snow storms.
And varelse, the one who I was responding to, is also using it right now. There are around 145k current users of the system. Which is certainly not enough to keep it afloat if it fails to grow in customer base, but it is a real thing being used by real people.
Yeah, that's what I meant - there's a beta out (i.e. a development tool), not a self-sustaining product. The scale is still too small; for this to be economically viable they need to show they can scale much larger and at competitive prices. I'm not saying that won't happen; but let's not go counting chickens before they hatch either.
that's not what it means to be a product. it's a beta service that's nowhere near capacity. it would be like saying a website that served a hundred people is clearly capable of providing the same service to a million.
> However, starlink isn't a product yet. It's hard to separate the hype from reality; so whether starlink turns out to be a practical alternative still needs practical demonstration
Yeah, it's a product. It's out of beta. I know people using it, I've video-chatted them for hours without a single hiccup. It's a real, practical alternative and it's here now.
> I'm sure you've heard of a few of the teething problems early adopters have, but it's not so clear whether those are merely small wrinkles, or just the tip of an iceberg of nasty practical problems that will render the network uneconomical.
I haven't, actually - the people I know using it have had it running for 5 months without any issues. The only issue I've seen online is someone's humourous photo where their cats sat on it because it's warm.
The caveat here concerning economic viability still stands, even if it's not looking bad. Without insider knowledge concerning costs it's hard to say how many customers starlink minimally needs to sustain itself, but I get the impression that that number is going to be at least in the millions. Still, that might be just one order of magnitude to go, if they're lucky.
Interesting - I'd be curious when that article was written - it states Sept 2, 2021 at the top, but towards the end of the article it mentions speeds improving to 200Mbps "as of April 12". Their experience sounds quite likely for those early days, but not at all what my relatives experienced (they got theirs in late August 2021). I think their dish placement is also poor - the app basically showed my relatives that the roof was the only place with good enough sight of the sky (they have similar amounts of trees to what's in videos on that article)
> The caveat here concerning economic viability still stands, even if it's not looking bad.
Yeah, for sure - however much you trust Elon's internal messaging, he suggested it is minimally viable as-is, needs starship to be a real moneymaker [1]
You say we can't wire up America, but what's your source? I'm not personally seeing a problem with a TVA-level engagement to bring high-speed Internet to as many people as possible. Starlink looks like it will be half the price, but Musk has gone on record saying this is for rural areas.
Further, I was getting 150 Mb a few months back, but now I'm down to 30 Mb. This isn't a polished product yet and it's in danger of losing federal funding.
> You say we can't wire up America, but what's your source?
I did not say that, reread what I wrote and quote where you think I said that.
> I'm not personally seeing a problem with a TVA-level engagement to bring high-speed Internet to as many people as possible.
That's basically what I was getting at with this:
>> short of conscripting every possible technician in the US to accomplish the effort.
But, sadly, it is politically not viable in the US. If it were, I suspect we would have seen such an effort (though probably not telecom focused) post 2007/2008 financial crisis. Instead, a crap ton of money was dumped into the hands of contractors to spend on infrastructure that barely went anywhere. Just like a crap ton of money has been dumped into ISPs that still can't be bothered to cover the last 1.5 miles to your home.
What I did write:
>> [Starlink] also covers a larger geographic area (and therefore a larger number of people) in a shorter time than any cell tower + cable solution would
The first part is pretty obviously true, but the parenthetical does remain to be seen. It depends on how effective the fleet actually scales with connecting additional users, and they're only at ~145k right now.
Ignoring quality of service, a satellite constellation is really very significantly less hardware for global coverage.
Somewhere elsewhere in the thread says the full constellation is expected to be 12,000 satellites. Yes, you have to replace them every ten years, and yes you need quite a few base stations, but by contrast, this random site[1] says there's over 100,000 cell towers in the United States. That number supports multiple networks, but only the US. Rocket launches are expensive, but so is building a lot of cell towers over the whole world.
Starlink could provide a reasonable backhaul technology for some terrestrial towers that are hard to service through wires or terrestrial radio. I'm hopeful that it will provide a service floor that inspires terrestrial networks to do better in areas where they have the capability but not the desire to invest in upgrades.
I think you've got it backwards. This is much more efficient than running cables everywhere and putting up giant towers all over the place in density needed to service everyone. That's why it's working in the first place. It's cheaper to do this than the alternative. (Too many Europeans assume rural places in America are similar to rural places in Europe. The layout is fundamentally different.)
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument...
It includes this perspective:
> Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image.
> "There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF."