SpaceX Launches Another 60 Starlink Satellites, Sets Two Rocket Reuse Records (cnbc.com) 73
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: SpaceX launched another 60 of its internet satellites on Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a mission that set two new company records for reusing its rockets. Starlink represents SpaceX's ambitious plant to create an interconnected network of as many as 30,000 satellites, to beam high-speed internet to consumers anywhere in the world. This was the second full launch of Starlink satellites, as SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 in May. The company sees Starlink as a key source of funding while SpaceX works toward its goal of flying humans to and from Mars.
Monday's launch also represented the fourth mission for this SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster, which landed and was reused after three previous launches, making this the first time the company landed a rocket booster four times. The booster, the large bottom portion of the rocket, previously launched satellites and then landed successfully for missions in July 2018, October 2018 and February 2019. Additionally, SpaceX used a fairing (the rocket's nosecone) that the company fished out the Atlantic Ocean after a mission in April -- the first time a company has refurbished and used that part of a rocket again. The company has been working to catch the fairing halves in a net strung above the decks of two boats, using parachutes and onboard guidance systems to slowly fly the fairings back into the nets. SpaceX caught its first fairing half on a boat in June. "We deployed 60 more Starlink satellites. This puts us one step closer to being able to offer Starlink internet service to customers across the globe, including people in rural and hard to reach places who have struggled to access high speed internet," SpaceX engineer Lauren Lyons said on the webcast.
Monday's launch also represented the fourth mission for this SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster, which landed and was reused after three previous launches, making this the first time the company landed a rocket booster four times. The booster, the large bottom portion of the rocket, previously launched satellites and then landed successfully for missions in July 2018, October 2018 and February 2019. Additionally, SpaceX used a fairing (the rocket's nosecone) that the company fished out the Atlantic Ocean after a mission in April -- the first time a company has refurbished and used that part of a rocket again. The company has been working to catch the fairing halves in a net strung above the decks of two boats, using parachutes and onboard guidance systems to slowly fly the fairings back into the nets. SpaceX caught its first fairing half on a boat in June. "We deployed 60 more Starlink satellites. This puts us one step closer to being able to offer Starlink internet service to customers across the globe, including people in rural and hard to reach places who have struggled to access high speed internet," SpaceX engineer Lauren Lyons said on the webcast.
National Security Threat (Score:2)
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Re:National Security Threat (Score:5, Informative)
Right now, nobody but SpaceX can afford to build their own.* It would cost Russia something on the order of ten times as much to launch and maintain a similar constellation, and they'd have a smaller market to sell it to. China might manage it within the next decade since they have a larger market and are working on reusable rockets.
* OneWeb is trying but doesn't appear to have a path to viability. Blue Origin is planning, but they have to build their rocket first.
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Re: National Security Threat (Score:2)
For comedic entertainment purposes I am more interested in how the shorters and haters react.
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For comedic entertainment purposes I am more interested in how the shorters and haters react.
Do you lump astronomers into one of those two groups? Because they're definitely complaining.
Re: National Security Threat (Score:3, Insightful)
I donâ(TM)t know a single astronomer who hates SpaceX or satellites. There are plenty of other phenomena to worry about than a satellite cross the field of view. Anything from birds to clouds are more of a problem than satellites. Any rational astronomer, amateur or professional, knows the importance of developing space industries and companies like SpaceX. Ultimately we want massive telescopes in space, the only way to get them there cheap is if space companies are successful.
Itâ(TM)s irrational
Re: National Security Threat (Score:5, Informative)
You must not know many astronomers.
Birds and clouds obscure the view - birds so briefly and blurrily as to be irrelevant for most purposes. Not to mention there's not many birds that fly at night, when telescopes are doing most of their work.
Satellites in contrast send a blast of daylight that completely washes out all images in which they're contained. Not a *huge* problem when there's only a couple thousand total satellites, most of which never come anywhere close to what you're looking at. But when you talk about increasing that number 20-fold in a net that completely covers the night sky? That's a problem.
Re: National Security Threat (Score:2)
Meteors? Also satellites are only bright at twilight/dawn. Rest of the time they are in the earthâ(TM)s shadow and pretty dim. You are bad at math and dim witted.
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You can't short a stock that isn't on any exchange. SpaceX is a private company, not a pulicly traded one. Which also means that nobody really knows what their financial viability really is. They could be raking in the dough, or they could be neck deep in debt and getting worse.
I suspect they're probably doing just fine, but near as I can tell, they've never released any of the refurbishment costs for their rockets. Keep in mind the space shuttle was supposed to save money by being reusable, but the refurbi
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Would this constellation provide unfiltered internet access to people in censorship countries, like China?
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Would this constellation provide unfiltered internet access to people in censorship countries, like China?
No. In order to do billing, SpaceX needs a name and an address, at the very least, if not also a credit or debit card number. If Starlink isn't censored, such jurisdictions won't allow any Starlink subscription payments.
If you can finagle a way to pay for the connection that's invisible to the local government, and you can smuggle the antenna and base station into the country (the size and shape of a pizza box), then sure, you can have uncensored Internet. But you will have a tough time keeping it secret
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It would be surprising if you couldn't cover it with a vinyl or perhaps coroplast cover, and make it look like something else. But beamforming isn't perfect any more than any other means of making a directional antenna, so as long as the frequencies in question aren't in common use for some other purpose, it should be pretty easy to find them from the air.
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Depends on their strategy - they might not insist on billing. E.g. they might offer high-speed internet anywhere in the world for $$$, or anonymous dial-up equivalent for anyone who wants it - on the theory that giving away otherwise unused capacity costs them nothing, and can do a great deal of good for the poorest segments of the global population.
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Would this constellation provide unfiltered internet access to people in censorship countries, like China?
Others have pointed out how an authoritarian government can crack down on users they don't like. To get around it you would need at minimum:
* Well hidden ground units.
* Physical separation between the ground unit and the actual users. In other words when the authorities eventually find one they have no way to trace who actually owned it or used it.
* A way to pay for it that can't be traced. Blockchain currencies are oversold in this area but there could be better ways.
* A sensor system to detec
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No. SpaceX will not have landing rights for those countries, therefore they will not support service in those countries. This is how all satcom systems work.
For example, Iridium has had a global satellite network for the past 20 years almost. However, until recently, the phones would simply to refuse to work in a number of countries (India, China, Russia among others). It wasn’t until Iridium installed hub stations in those countries that they were enabled. Still not sure about China.
It’s the sa
Re:National Security Threat (Score:4, Informative)
Starlink uses highly-directional beams to connect a user to the satellite. Both the user terminal and the satellite have to know where the other is to enable high-speed connectivity. For typical high-bandwidth communication satellites in geostationary orbit, the "footprint" per beam is relatively large, but those satellites have terrible latency (the distance to GEO is roughly the circumference of the planet, so your round-trip time, even at light speed, is quite significant). Starlink uses a low earth orbit, only a few hundred miles (or KM) up. This means that the footprint of each beam is tiny, so it needs to know fairly precisely where the users are.
Why does this matter? Well, if China wants to say "no using Starlink in this country until they let us censor everything" and Starlink doesn't enable that censorship, then they won't be licensed to operate in China. That doesn't physically stop them from aiming beams at China, of course, but that would be detectable (and in violation of the bandwidth allocation by the Chinese equivalent of the FCC). Because the beam footprints are so tiny, you can't really say "Oh sorry, we have a customer in Nepal, we didn't mean to let people in Tibet access the system"; that excuse just wouldn't fly. If Starlink doesn't have approval from China, they probably just won't aim any beams at it.
Also, China could just arrest anybody with a Starlink user terminal. Phased array antennas are not small or particularly subtle; they're roughly the size of a pizza box. Even if SpaceX were willing to allow service in China without government approval, and deal with the resultant incident (which would probably get them in hot water with the US government, for violating international agreements about national sovereignty and spectrum use and so on), the user on the ground still needs hardware.
Or, to put it differently: Starlink doesn't enable connectivity anywhere that Iridium doesn't already provide, it's just much faster and (hopefully) cheaper. Iridium user terminals are small enough to hold in one hand, though, because they don't use phased arrays. One way or another, the Chinese government (and everybody else) can endure this problem; they already are, and have been for decades.
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Also, there's nothing in SpaceX's or Starlink's mission goals about fighting government censorship. They're not going to inexplicably decide to shoot themselves in the foot by taking a political stance that will deny them access to the majority of the world market (most large countries are censoring their internet one way or another) and delay their ability to reach Mars.
Presumably, in order to keep things simple for SpaceX, censorship will be implemented through the ground stations in each country. SpaceX
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That doesn't physically stop them from aiming beams at China, of course, but that would be detectable (and in violation of the bandwidth allocation by the Chinese equivalent of the FCC).
I call BS on that one. No way spaceborn operators have to receive emissions approval from every country on earth because the transmissions of their satellites / spacecraft can be received in that country at some point in time. What China can do is enforce their rules against operators on the ground within their country, but they cannot control what satellites do in space above their country. It doesn't work that way. While it may be more feasible technically for these low orbit satellites to not operate
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There absolutely are licensing requirements for high-bandwidth purposes like communication satellites. It's not a problem, though, because they use directional antennas that aren't just indiscriminately spraying the planet, and they can (and must) steer those antennas as they pass overhead (or, if they're in GEO, they aim at a particular region).
There are some bands which are, by international agreement, unlicensed - WiFi uses these, for example - but even those aren't fully unregulated (there are still pro
If they are going to need 500 launches (Score:1)
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They better get going.
SpaceX President Gywnne Shotwell in October told a crowd of investors in New York City that SpaceX aims to “get to a cadence of launching 60 every other week to fill out the constellation” for Starlink.
Source [cnbc.com]
SpaceFlightNow launch schedule [spaceflightnow.com]
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24 launches have been stated as the minimum for global coverage. The rest are just to ensure there's enough bandwidth for high-traffic areas. This system isn't (just) intended to compete with geostationary satellite connectivity for people in the middle of nowhere; it's also meant to be an alternative to your local ISP.
Re:If they are going to need 500 launches (Score:5, Insightful)
Let’s see, I can stick with my current provider and get fast cheap and reliable service
LOL, that's a good one, Ajit.
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Symmetric gigabit is slow? You think Ku-band radio is blocked by clouds? Damn, you don't even know what a phased array antenna looks like (it's a flat box, not a disk). What a moron.
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The first year or two will be probably 30-40 Falcon 9 launches. Their hope is to move to Starship for launching which will be substantially fewer launches.
Tracking (Score:2)
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https://www.heavens-above.com/... [heavens-above.com]
Lunar far side telescopes needed more than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
30k of the things? That's some serious light pollution for astronomy :(
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Re:Lunar far side telescopes needed more than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most of the world's population faces extreme light pollution already. To the degree that they can't see Starlink over all of the other pollution.
Suddenly having an issue with extremely small light pollution that provides enormous benefit to hundreds of millions of people indicates some sort of bias being the real cause of objection.
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It's easy to get street lights that have don't impact telescopes (ever been to Hawaii at night?) but satellites, not so much.
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It'll mean that it has to filter out 3x more streaks (~45k vs. 15k). And life will go on.
Re:Lunar far side telescopes needed more than ever (Score:4, Informative)
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That's... not how math works. 0.01 percent of 3200 is 0.32.
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Let me google that for you [lmgtfy.com].
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You know as it is those 15k objects cause problems that have a noticeable impact on performance.
Would you be happy if you're Tesla had 1/3rd of the range? (Not really a suitable car analogy but pick something else that is affecting you and make it three times worse).
Stick to supporting Tesla's car and space projects. They do not deserve any defending for this stupid internet plan.
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In your view, Starlink will block out 2/3rds of the pixels on the sensors?
Meanwhile, in the real world... [newscientist.com]
They can't be filtered out (Score:1)
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Amazing how people literally just make things up. [twitter.com]
"Agreed, sent a note to Starlink team last week specifically regarding albedo reduction. We’ll get a better sense of value of this when satellites have raised orbits & arrays are tracking to sun"
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Tripling the number of streaks astronomers have to filter from their data vs. providing the entire planet with broadband net access. Yeah, gee, I can't figure out which aspect is more important here....
Musk wants to build interferometric optical and radio telescopes based on the Starlink design, which would allow for capabilities vastly beyond what any current system can offer (as well as putting a huge amount of effort into Starship, which will be able to launch up to ~150t 9x9x~20m space telescopes, with
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Nobody is *giving* the planet anything. They are *taking* the planet's night sky and *selling* wireless back to some of its inhabitants.
Secondly, this is a false dichotomy. This is simply the easiest way for a private company at present to offer this service.
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Nobody said "giving". If you have to change wording to try to argue against something, that's literally the definition of a straw man.
"Providing" is the standard word for offering up internet service. It's literally right there in the name "ISP": Internet Service Provider. Nobody is talking about giving it away for free; it's about making it available to the vast number of the world's people who currently cannot get it, while breaking up monopolies elsewhere.
Re:Lunar far side telescopes needed more than ever (Score:4, Interesting)
But only if you can find a gap large enough to safely launch through. 30,000 LEO sats, assuming equal distribution, means about one every 5,666 square miles. That's one satellite per 75 mile x 75 mile square. Traveling at ~18k MPH, that means during a one-hour launch window, ~240 satellites will pass through that 75 mile x 75 mile square, on average. That's one satellite flying by every 15 seconds. This represents a not-insignificant hazard.
When the shuttle used to launch, the exclusion zone was about 1500 square miles. Short of intentionally steering satellites to clear a gap (which can be done, of course), you'd be talking about a launch safety window measured in single-digit seconds.
On the other hand, the odds of a successful ICBM launch will go down, too, for the same reason, so at least there's that. :-)
Re:Lunar far side telescopes needed more than ever (Score:4, Insightful)
But only if you can find a gap large enough to safely launch through. 30,000 LEO sats, assuming equal distribution, means about one every 5,666 square miles. That's one satellite per 75 mile x 75 mile square. Traveling at ~18k MPH, that means during a one-hour launch window, ~240 satellites will pass through that 75 mile x 75 mile square, on average. That's one satellite flying by every 15 seconds. This represents a not-insignificant hazard.
You're missing something in your calculations. These satellites will be at two different altitudes, at least. In the last FCC filing I saw, the outer layer is almost twice as high as the inner layer.
Launch windows to ISS are 1 second right now, not 1 hour. Multiple seconds of space is more than enough.
Personally I expect the final constellation size to be much less than 30,000. ITS was originally going to have 9 engines in the second stage and be 12 meters in diameter. Starship is now 9 meters in diameter with just 6 engines in the second stage. The 30k filing looks like a notional upper limit so SpaceX doesn't have to keep doing paperwork. They don't have to actually launch that many, and probably won't.
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I actually missed quite a bit. I sloppily used the surface area of the earth, instead of the surface area at LEO altitudes, so the area was off by almost a factor of two. :-)
Either way, it's still an absolutely insane number of orbiting birds. :-D
Re:Lunar far side telescopes needed more than ever (Score:4, Informative)
You're aware that LEO isn't a single altitude, right? That not all satellites are in the same "shell"? There's a lot more room in space once you remember that it's three-dimensional.
Also, rockets don't go straight up; most of them will be entering a parking orbit well below the Starlink satellites (just like they do today) and then they (or their spacecraft payloads) will raise their orbit along a path similar to the path that the satellites are taking. It's like complaining that freeways are too dangerous to allow because you'll have cars whizzing by every five seconds, without considering that you'll be going the same speed and direction as them.
Finally, "instantaneous" one-second launch windows are already quite commonplace. Every single space station launch is an instantaneous window, for example. If you don't make it, you try again another day when it passes overhead again.
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You're aware that LEO isn't a single altitude, right? That not all satellites are in the same "shell"? There's a lot more room in space once you remember that it's three-dimensional.
Also, rockets don't go straight up; most of them will be entering a parking orbit well below the Starlink satellites (just like they do today) and then they (or their spacecraft payloads) will raise their orbit along a path similar to the path that the satellites are taking. It's like complaining that freeways are too dangerous to allow because you'll have cars whizzing by every five seconds, without considering that you'll be going the same speed and direction as them.
That's all fine if you're launching to LEO. My assumption is that most space telescopes (Hubble notwithstanding) would be in a higher orbit, which means they would end up passing through all of those layers, and probably not in an path that's parallel to the orbit of even one LEO constellation, much less all of the various orbits of all of the different constellations.
Finally, "instantaneous" one-second launch windows are already quite commonplace. Every single space station launch is an instantaneous window, for example. If you don't make it, you try again another day when it passes overhead again.
True, but that involves tracking only one bird, not dodging hundreds. I fully expect that with 30k birds, they'll end up having to clear a
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If this becomes an issue, they can just start by going into a LEO orbit, then boost to the higher altitude at the appropriate time. Having so much stuff in space that finding a launch window becomes difficult implies that launches are cheap, so even if this maneuver costs some more delta-v, it's not going to be that much of an extra cost.
I don't see the problem with needing to form an Air Traffic Control organization for space. Space Traffic Control?
Now the real problem with so many spacecraft in LEO is Kes
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No as bad as you make it out... the satellites travel in the same orbit so so long as you stay out of the ring you're fine.
Now if each satellite was all in an orbit of its own then the congestion would be [more] significant.
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A single orbit per layer, maybe. Nothing prevents different layers from having different orbits, and some planned constellations (e.g. TeleSat [youtube.com]) have a mix of multiple orbits.
Re: Lunar far side telescopes needed more than eve (Score:2)
How is tthe ban on airplanes,which donâ(TM)t even have a predictable flight plan, working out? If there is a for astronomers to deal with airplanes, dealing with satellites are 100x easier.
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We need far-lunar telescopes anyway, though, and L-point telescopes too. With our current level of technology it's senseless not to have them. It's a much better use of money than bombing brown people for oil.
An (Score:2)
AMBITIOUS PLANT
Gone from amazing to mundane in 2 years (Score:1)