A Geomagnetic Storm May Have Effectively Destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink Satellites (theverge.com) 78
Elon Musk's satellite internet service Starlink just got dealt an expensive blow -- the company's currently estimating that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched on February 3rd will be destroyed because of a geomagnetic storm. The Verge reports: The storm caused "up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches," keeping the deployed satellites from reaching their proper orbit around the Earth. And while Starlink tried to fly them "edge-on (like a sheet of paper)" to reduce that drag, it now looks like as many as 40 of them will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere instead of reaching their destinations. SpaceX recently crossed the 2,000 satellite launch milestone, and has plans to launch 12,000 if not a great many more -- so losing 40 of them might not be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Still, that's the vast majority of an entire Falcon 9 rocket's Starlink launch capacity burning up in the atmosphere.
Expensive Lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX just spent, perhaps, $25M to learn more about the impact of magnetic storms on the atmosphere. (I found an estimate from over a year ago saying the satellites could be as cheap as $250K each, and the internal launch cost could be $15M, but it's all guesswork.) It's surprising after the fact to find out that they didn't already know this and just delay the launch, but apparently they miscalculated. I hope they got some really good data on the atmospheric effect, and I hope they publish it so that everyone can learn from it.
Re: Expensive Lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Expensive Lesson (Score:2)
Re: Expensive Lesson (Score:2)
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Any of the comments by whoever doesn't have enough self worth or world worth to post under their own user and instead makes names similar to silvers are going to be trash and should be ignored.
Maybe I'm late to the party, but why are there trolls obsessed with rsilvergun and making copy-cat, look alike accounts? And they seem to be exaggerated MAGA types which is an assumption based on the comments. I guess I'm a little dim because I don't get it.
You can disagree and/or not like someone and just move on with your life. You can even stay mad at them if you don't have anything else to do. Sometimes you can't help but to be mad about something for awhile. I guess making a comment in response is reas
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Re: Expensive Lesson (Score:2)
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Re:Expensive Lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems they had some unexpected new learnings about some corner cases and failure modes.
Chain of events seems to be:
1. Lots of drag from raised atmosphere -> put sats in edge-on "safe mode" for minimal drag.
2. Go to take sats out of "safe mode" -> can't for some reason*.
3. Sats de-orbit.
* Reasons could be along the lines of:
- Couldn't unfold solar panel again because drag on panel stops them getting to normal operating position for thrust,
- Can't activate thruster while panel is folded because of software interlocks to prevent power issues when panels aren't pointed at the sun.
- Unfolding panel to give more power increases the drag to greater than thruster ability, etc. etc.
A bit unfortunate, but that amount of sats is going to deorbit every week if the full constellation gets installed. The scale of it all, from the production line of sats to launch rate to on-orbit management, is quite mind-boggling,
Re:Expensive Lesson (Score:5, Informative)
Put simply - his take is that with the higher drag from the inflated atmosphere and having already slowed down, the Magnetorquer and reaction wheels were unable to pull them out of the 'safe mode' edge-on attitude so they could deploy the solar panels, turn to fire their engines and raise their altitude.
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that amount of sats is going to deorbit every week if the full constellation gets installed.
Which makes this the first test of that. How well will they burn up, will any large parts make it back to the surface? And will there be any detectable emissions?
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And will there be any detectable emissions?
Well, burning up a single satellite would be equivalent to setting fire to something like a large motorbike , when you look at at mass and components used.
Burning up 40 of them a week in the upper atmosphere is basically undetectable compared to the sheer quantity of general materials we set fire to on Earth each week.
Now if instead of satellites you burnt 40 cargo ships a week, that would be detectable.
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Not exactly rocket science (Score:2, Insightful)
> space travel is hard
Eh, it's not exactly rocket science. Oh wait ...
Which reminds me. Some things ARE complicated, indeed. I watch our elected leaders say so much idiotic stuff that demonstrates they can't understand anything more complex than ordering lunch. The "brain surgeons" on both sides of the aisle. It makes me wish Ben Carson had won - just because he's actually a top brain surgeon. I don't agree with him on everything, but stupid he isn't.
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It makes me wish Ben Carson had won - just because he's actually a top brain surgeon.
That doesn't always work out the way you'd expect. There are plenty of well educated people who are quick to assume they've come to the right conclusion in every area of study because they excelled at a specific discipline.
Personally, I'd prefer a leader who is humble enough to admit he doesn't know everything and isn't afraid to defer to people who actually are experts.
In praise of humble learners as leaders (Score:1)
Coincidentally I just made a post praising Douglas Trumbull for his willingness to learn from knowledgeable other people (when first-time directing Silent Running): https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Humble people don't run for president (Score:2)
I read a book written by a guy who worked closely with three presidents. He said that while they each played different characters on TV, their actual personalities were quite similar. A certain type of person runs for president, and wins.
The guy who worked with the presidents pointed out all of them:
a) Thought they *should* be president
b) Thought most Americans would agree with that assessment - "everyone knows I should be president", they had to think
In other words, they are all extremely arrogant.
> Pe
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I think rocket science is over-rated in terms of difficulty. It used to be hard when it was new and we didn't have computers to handle the calculations for us. These days it's more of an engineering challenge.
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It makes me wish Ben Carson had won - just because he's actually a top brain surgeon. I don't agree with him on everything, but stupid he isn't.
Just because he's a brain surgeon doesn't mean he can't be an idiot, or no better than the common person [slashdot.org].
Since he has no grasp on the Constitution, he would have been no better, and probably worse, than the con artist. And that takes a supreme amout of effort. Considering Raphael Cruz, the guy who didn't say a word when the con artist called his wife ugly and later
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It makes me wish Ben Carson had won - just because he's actually a top brain surgeon. I don't agree with him on everything, but stupid he isn't.
There's a certain level of crazy that's functionally difficult to differentiate from crazy. Ben Carson argues that the Egyptian pyramids were alll built during the same span of a few short years as grain silos to hold the excess grain predicted by the biblical Joseph in preparation for the famine also predicted by Joseph. To believe that, you have to be stupid or crazy and does it really matter which? He also thought it was a good idea to insist, during his presidential campaign, that reports that he was _n
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There's a certain level of crazy that's functionally difficult to differentiate from crazy
Sorry, that should read: "There's a certain level of crazy that's functionally difficult to differentiate from stupid.
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You criticize private companies for having a profit motive, but on a scale of "1 to boneheaded", this was a LONG way from the US government spending $193 million (in 1999 dollars) to re-learn that not everyone uses English units [nasa.gov].
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Are people still buying that coverup nonsense about units?
That was a preemptive strike against the primary martian weapons facility, and singlehandedly prevented the First Interstellar War that Mars was about to launch!
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The Council of Elders of Mars will not forget this !
The assassination attempt carried by the Earthlings that so badly injured K'breel (may his gelsacs grow ever wider) will be avenged !
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SpaceX just spent, perhaps, $25M to learn more about the impact of magnetic storms on the atmosphere.
Musk can always make it up by pumping up some crypto on Twitter. For anyone else, this would be a very bad day.
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The sun is in a low point in its cycle right now. In a few years, will Starlink even be usable? Worst case you could have biweekly outages due to solar flares. And that's assuming they've properly hardened the satellites themselves and don't lose the entire constellation to a big flare or CME.
Re:Expensive Lesson (Score:5, Informative)
They launch the satellites into a very low orbit, and then they use their thrusters to reach their intended orbit. That takes something like six months. That way if something goes wrong, they burn up right away, and they never get anywhere near the operational level where they would be space junk for five to ten years. So this particular problem only impacts the satellites right after launch.
The regular problem of handling solar storms is completely different, and probably much better understood.
Re:Expensive Lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
The sun is in a low point in its cycle right now. In a few years, will Starlink even be usable? Worst case you could have biweekly outages due to solar flares. And that's assuming they've properly hardened the satellites themselves and don't lose the entire constellation to a big flare or CME.
Or go out of business. Or do an Iridium, or any of a dozen possible scenarios.
The Elephant in the room question to me though, is what is going to cause the mass exodus to StarLink?
In areas with population, there is cable and fiber, and 4G/5G.
Starlink isn't all that fast, and relies on a constant stream of replacement satellites. This was a decision based on getting low latency. But it brought a shit ton of other issues like the need for a shit ton of satellites. And it is subject to weather events like rain.
For myself on the top tier of cable intertoobz, Satellite is about as interesting as DSL. my next move is fiber, not Elon's little experiment.
So here's the straight skinny, folks. Starlink customers will have to foot the cost of constant satellite replacement, the rocketry to emplace and replace the satellites. All of this while being a small demographic among superior speeds and lower latency.
So unless Elon is going to carry Starlink as a loss leader, This system is questionably sustainable.
Re:Expensive Lesson (Score:4, Insightful)
You know there's a whole lot of people that aren't in cities with high availability of multi-hundred-megabit connections, right?
Starlink has never been a product focused on urban settings where decent broadband options exist.
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You know there's a whole lot of people that aren't in cities with high availability of multi-hundred-megabit connections, right?
Starlink has never been a product focused on urban settings where decent broadband options exist.
Except that some of the numbers promoted require those people you dismiss.
But okay - Musk says that StarLink will provide 30 Billion in Revenue, https://www.fool.com/investing... [fool.com] and will fund His other projects. Those people in flyover country are apparently going to be the vanguard of the Musk world order. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
While there is a bit of the other musk project info thrown into the video, here is a video with some numbers you won't like https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The co
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It's actually around 25 million people, not 300. The price is $100 / month, so $100 / month * 12 months * 25 million = $30 billion per year.
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It's actually around 25 million people, not 300. The price is $100 / month, so $100 / month * 12 months * 25 million = $30 billion per year.
Bad math on my part, fo shizzle.
But bad math notwithstanding, we have to understand that that is just money in, not outlay. rocket launches and constant never ending new satellite construction.
One thing that just occurred to me - the company that brags about how it lands and re-uses first stages, purposely throws away what will be millions of satellites by design. That's assuming it lasts that long.
In the end, considering the launch and satellite plus replacement costs, the business model seems a l
Re: Expensive Lesson (Score:2)
30 billion in revenue does not mean costs are 0 and profit is 30 billion.
Also hikers will not get starlink. The dish and power supply are not portable.
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30 billion in revenue does not mean costs are 0 and profit is 30 billion.
Also hikers will not get starlink. The dish and power supply are not portable.
Of course not. That's my point. But a lot of people seem to think that everyone not in a major city will rush to Musk's nirvana net. This is possiblythe most wasteful, most expensive way to implement an internet system that ain't all that. That will show interesting effects when there is a downpour. Who in their right mind would think we should implement a system that requires many rocket launches to orbit and replace satellites. that will need replaced regularly For internet speeds many of us believe ar
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I live in an urban setting only served by a cable monopoly and DSL provider.
The DSL provider is only able to offer max 10Mbps and in reality it's much lower than that due to line noise.
I'm paying the cable company $70 a month for 30Mbps. Any option close to StarLink speeds, costs way more than StarLink
StarLink is cheap (for this area in the US)
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Not saying that Starlink won't work in an urban area - that's clearly false as there are people doing it today. However, shitting on Starlink as a concept because you can't deliver gigabit speeds where gigabit speeds already exist is patently stupid, because that's not even remotely the goal. Rural, suburban, and worldwide regardless of nationality is the goal. Raising the floor from 90s ISDN speeds to 2000s cable speeds everywhere is the goal.
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So here's the straight skinny, folks. Starlink customers will have to foot the cost of constant satellite replacement, the rocketry to emplace and replace the satellites. All of this while being a small demographic among superior speeds and lower latency.
So unless Elon is going to carry Starlink as a loss leader, This system is questionably sustainable.
Considering the billions and billions in money and infrastructure annually devoted to surveillance by governments, google, telecom providers, media companies, all of which must navigate complex jurisdictional and civil-rights systems to piece together their data...
Do you suppose someone might come up with a way to monetize access to their hundred-thousand--plus-node planet-wide surveillance system which never cares about national borders, never needs to ask for a judge's signature, doesn't have to wait for
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So here's the straight skinny, folks. Starlink customers will have to foot the cost of constant satellite replacement, the rocketry to emplace and replace the satellites. All of this while being a small demographic among superior speeds and lower latency.
So unless Elon is going to carry Starlink as a loss leader, This system is questionably sustainable.
Considering the billions and billions in money and infrastructure annually devoted to surveillance by governments, google, telecom providers, media companies, all of which must navigate complex jurisdictional and civil-rights systems to piece together their data... Do you suppose someone might come up with a way to monetize access to their hundred-thousand--plus-node planet-wide surveillance system which never cares about national borders, never needs to ask for a judge's signature, doesn't have to wait for you to log in using your linked social media account, and doesn't even have to go through the flimsy pantomime of asking whether you accept all cookies?
Please do not tell me that you think that Musk is building the first ever Satellite internet system. That he came up with the idea, that no one has ever done before.
Then again, he did invent the rocket.
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So here's the straight skinny, folks. Starlink customers will have to foot the cost of constant satellite replacement, the rocketry to emplace and replace the satellites. All of this while being a small demographic among superior speeds and lower latency.
So unless Elon is going to carry Starlink as a loss leader, This system is questionably sustainable.
Considering the billions and billions in money and infrastructure annually devoted to surveillance by governments, google, telecom providers, media companies, all of which must navigate complex jurisdictional and civil-rights systems to piece together their data...
Do you suppose someone might come up with a way to monetize access to their hundred-thousand--plus-node planet-wide surveillance system which never cares about national borders, never needs to ask for a judge's signature, doesn't have to wait for you to log in using your linked social media account, and doesn't even have to go through the flimsy pantomime of asking whether you accept all cookies?
Please do not tell me that you think that Musk is building the first ever Satellite internet system. That he came up with the idea, that no one has ever done before.
Then again, he did invent the rocket.
Okay. I won't tell you in this comment what I already didn't tell you in the previous comment.
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So here's the straight skinny, folks. Starlink customers will have to foot the cost of constant satellite replacement, the rocketry to emplace and replace the satellites. All of this while being a small demographic among superior speeds and lower latency.
So unless Elon is going to carry Starlink as a loss leader, This system is questionably sustainable.
Considering the billions and billions in money and infrastructure annually devoted to surveillance by governments, google, telecom providers, media companies, all of which must navigate complex jurisdictional and civil-rights systems to piece together their data... Do you suppose someone might come up with a way to monetize access to their hundred-thousand--plus-node planet-wide surveillance system which never cares about national borders, never needs to ask for a judge's signature, doesn't have to wait for you to log in using your linked social media account, and doesn't even have to go through the flimsy pantomime of asking whether you accept all cookies?
Please do not tell me that you think that Musk is building the first ever Satellite internet system. That he came up with the idea, that no one has ever done before.
Then again, he did invent the rocket.
Okay. I won't tell you in this comment what I already didn't tell you in the previous comment.
I answered the way I did because parsing your previous post was like a conversation with a schizophrenic. You wrote a bunch of stuff about surveillance and other stuff that reads as chaotic.
If you are trying to say that Musk's miracle network of Volkssatellites will free people of the laws of nations, no matter where they may be, that's naivety of the highest order.
You see, there is already satellite based internet. Can you show me where they are immune from the laws of man? You seem to believe that M
Re: Expensive Lesson (Score:2)
The difference between Musk's network and previous networks is due to Musk's network being in LEO ping times are suitable.
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The difference between Musk's network and previous networks is due to Musk's network being in LEO ping times are suitable.
and at a heck of a price. to get that low latency. Whereas at a higher orbit, you need nowhere near the number of Satellites. Set up a constellation of just a few, versus many thousands of them that will need replaced often.
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I answered the way I did because parsing your previous post was like a conversation with a schizophrenic. You wrote a bunch of stuff about surveillance and other stuff that reads as chaotic.
If you are trying to say that Musk's miracle network of Volkssatellites will free people of the laws of nations, no matter where they may be, that's naivety of the highest order.
You see, there is already satellite based internet. Can you show me where they are immune from the laws of man? You seem to believe that Musk will free you from that. But even then, your post is muddled and most difficult to extract meaning from it.
If you want to engage in a conversation, First state your premise so people will have some idea just what on Musk's green earth you are talking about. Then go into logging on to something via your social media cred or those people monitoring your account.
You answered the way you did because you (apparently) are already mentally primed to perceive and then mire yourself in adversarial conversations with people who are championing Musk as some kind of celebrity tech-Liberator -- which you then get to righteously tear down. It's understandable, since those conversations happen all the time online, but that narrative framing simply hadn't occurred to me because I don't see the world through a savior/villain lens. Other than "he's some super wealthy dude who inv
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This data has commercial application. Giving it away would probably put the company officers at risk of lawsuits for not maximising shareholder returns.
This is the space business now.
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SpaceX just spent, perhaps, $25M to learn more about the impact of magnetic storms on the atmosphere. (I found an estimate from over a year ago saying the satellites could be as cheap as $250K each, and the internal launch cost could be $15M, but it's all guesswork.) It's surprising after the fact to find out that they didn't already know this and just delay the launch, but apparently they miscalculated. I hope they got some really good data on the atmospheric effect, and I hope they publish it so that everyone can learn from it.
It's not quite that simple.
a) Nobody knows the exact instant the storn will arrive.
b) AFAIK the satellites were fine, they just failed to reach orbit.
Re:We need a space tow car to move them (Score:4, Funny)
China already has one.
https://www.moneycontrol.com/n... [moneycontrol.com]
Think they'll rent it out to Musk?
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They already have that ability.
Trouble is, you touch another country's satellite and you're into declarations of war.
And if you think that's overblown, quite what do you think would happen if China or Russia just deorbited one of the US miltary satellites?
This is why all the "clear up the space junk" has never happened. Nobody's going to let you sweep away their secret military sats and if you make one mistake with even a small foreign commercial sat, you're going to be in big trouble explaining yourself.
T
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They already have that ability.
Trouble is, you touch another country's satellite and you're into declarations of war.
And if you think that's overblown, quite what do you think would happen if China or Russia just deorbited one of the US miltary satellites?
It is exactly correct, not overblown, and doesn't even have to be a military sat.
This is why all the "clear up the space junk" has never happened. Nobody's going to let you sweep away their secret military sats and if you make one mistake with even a small foreign commercial sat, you're going to be in big trouble explaining yourself.
There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of spy sats just sitting hiding in "space junk", or even officially declared so. You tend not to announce "Hey, US, yeah, sat 27? Yeah that's our super secret military sat spying on you that we don't want you to touch, okay?"
Hey! What's the deal here with a person knowing the straight scoop? I'm serious, not sarcastic or ironic.
Any space cleanup will require exhaustive treaties, and will be complicated as hell, almost certainly too complicated to be performed in a world where there's a lot of intel sitting up there.
space weather news (Score:4, Informative)
For daily space weather news: https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers/videos [youtube.com]
Their take on the SpaceX news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjLzXkoGDbw [youtube.com]
If you are not familiar with catastrophism, you'll see a lot of really new, possibly crazy ideas there.
Hey! Forty fewer ... (Score:2)
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You should be. The lower orbit they're in, the more they obstruct your view. These will be replaced. So the net amount of hours per SpaceX satellite in this orbit will increased by this loss.
"Duh."
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They self-deorbited and self-destructed according to articles I've seen.
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And they still need those satellites in those positions, so they'll launch more to replace them. And that mission will have the same profile as this one that was lost, thus the statement that there will be more hours spent obstructing views.
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Well, no. There's currently no obstruction. There is nothing in orbit in those positions. If the satellite launches had succeeded, there would be. Therefore there are fewer hours obstructed.
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If you're planning on passing away in the next year or two, and are only measuring your own viewing, then that makes sense.
However, if you're counting the total obstruction by SpaceX satellites, then you're just bad at math and completely forgot to include terms in the future when calculation the total amount of obstruction.
Note that when they reach their final orbit, they'll be further away, and obstruct less.
An soon (Score:2)
we will be breathing those satellites.
Re: An soon (Score:2)
Do you understand ppm. We are talking way less than that... if one single particular from these satellites hit your lungs, it's probably comparable in odds to winning the lottery or even less likely. I would love to see the math, just to salute the nerd that gives it but no.. you won't be breathing this.
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I never said there would be a problem with it, but the odds are not zero.
Do you understand avogadros number? If you take 260kg satellite and burn it up in the atomosphere, and suppose that the satellite 'smoke' will eventually mix out globally in the atmosphere.
There is 5x10^18 kg of atmosphere a 260kg satellite would seem inconsequential, if evenly mixed you would only have 0.0000000000000052% in every liter of atmosphere. You breath in about 1.5x10^26 atoms with every breath, so 0.0000000000000052% of tha
Lessons of business (Score:1)
I see they are taking the Radio Shack approach to satellite deployment. That's a bold move Cotton, let's see if it pans out.
The bad thing (Score:1)
So call up China (Score:1)
Edge on? (Score:2)
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Yes. They failed to take that into account.
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Space Weather: We STILL lack good models! (Score:5, Interesting)
Had SpaceX known about this "thermospheric puffing" event, they could easily have rescheduled the launch. However, we had no models capable of providing the information needed, at least not in a usable or actionable form.
I was part of a project in the '90's designed to attack this precise issue using swarms of short-lived ultra-cheap disposable satellites. This was back when Mir was in orbit, and the Russians were offering free rides to orbit for "interesting" projects so long as the designs were open and the data was freely shared. They'd be released after separation from Mir, to minimize operational risks. The project ended abruptly when Mir was ended in favor of ISS, and the Russians were "asked" not to bring any extra stuff anywhere near the ISS.
The initial plan was to orbit "dumb" radar reflectors (which had been done before at a much smaller scale), but this proved unworkable for several reasons, not the least being getting guaranteed updates from Air Force radars often enough to permit adequate precision to measure drag as it was happening. It wasn't possible to get extremely accurate individual orbits for small satellites in a dispersing swarm. The satellites had to report their own data to permit precise calculation of their orbital elements.
The satellites were spherical to present a uniform drag profile. They had no solar cells and were powered by a bundle of AA batteries for both safety and power density, which meant the satellite had to be off as much as possible. Since the entire mission-critical data set was the data needed to calculate a continuously updated orbit, we needed a fast and cheap way for a satellite to obtain its position and (ideally) its velocity vector. And it needed to do so very quickly using a fantastically small amount of power during brief wakeups.
The satellites also had to autonomously determine when they were above the telemetry base station dish and start transmission when possible. That's right: The satellites would not have receivers (though provision was made for one as a fallback design). The satellite transmit power had to be low enough to avoid licensing issues, and in a frequency band that also avoided licensing issues. The solution was for each satellite to be a tiny ham radio station! They would transmit the FCC License ID of one of the student design team members.
Did I forget to mention that this was also an undergraduate student project? After I (the engineer) and two scientists did the basic proof of concept design (for the orbit determination stuff), we turned the entire project over to a student team, for which I was the mentor/facilitator.
About the orbit determination: The first key was for each satellite to start with a known orbit, provided long in advance by the Russians as part of the deployment agreement. The next step was to frequently update that orbit, with the final step being knowing when to report it to the ground. To ensure enough battery life for what could be up to a 60-day mission (30 expected, but we could be deployed in exceptionally low-drag conditions), we had to have each orbit determination awake period to be 10-30 seconds in duration, to be repeated a few times during each orbit.
The "trick" was to use GPS, which is massively useful in LEO because we can see WAY more GPS satellites in LEO than is possible from the ground, permitting us to select the best ones for very rapid orbit determination. But no way did we have the time available for a '90's-era GPS chipset to wake up and do its own position finding, which could take several minutes. Instead, we used the GPS almanac to pre-select the GPS satellites we expected to be in-view during our next wake period, then pre-computer and load the GPS chip registers with the values for the next wake period needed AS-IF the GPS chip had done a normal settling period. This took some major hacks that are still under NDA to this day. The first successful test in a GPS simulator (one capable of supporting orbital velocities) is what triggered
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1. We need a correct model of the Sun. Start with the work of Birkeland, Alfven, Donald Scott, etc.
2. We need to understand better the circuits between the Galaxy and the Sun, and Sun and the Earth. This will help us understand "Space Weather".
3. Then we can start developing better earth weather models. Until then, we are chasing our tails.
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Thanks BobC! THIS post restores my confidence in Slashdot - sounds like a really great project to be involved in. Godspeed Bob! Keep a 'lernin those youngins.