The slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has highlighted the absurdity of keeping so much of our space program and satellite internet infrastructure in the hands of a single oligarch.
I didn’t realize how temporary and disposable Starlink’s satellites were. They incinerate 4 or 5 a day by de-orbiting them into the ozone. Here’s a pretty good CNET article that talks about how they “dispose” of them. IDK, doesn’t seem sustainable. They also mention the bandwidth gains are being diminished with the influx of new users, so their solution is more temporary satellites.
But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.
It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.
SpaceX is putting up satellites for SpaceX, they’re the manufacturer and operator…
It’s definitely in their best interest to keep them working as long as possible.
That said, they’re high end communications devices, very fancy routers essentially. And like all computer technology, these things become obsolete quickly. So even if they could last 20 years, you wouldn’t want them even 10 years from now. 100 GB/s speeds might be great now, but 10 years down the road 10 TB/s could be the norm, so at that point why are you still trying to provide service with ancient hardware 100x slower than it should be.
At the time it looked like one of the main reasons to launch Starlink was to provide SpaceX with a new market, much larger than the usual space launching stuff. Also this meant Felon could get subsidies through 2 different companies.
I mean the reason for starlink was that they could, and they could do it for cheaper than anyone else because they would be launching at cost.
Also, falcon doesn’t really get subsidies for launching. SpaceX got a grant for the rural broadband infrastructure thing, but that’s like a one time thing, it doesn’t really pay for ongoing launches.
LEO does offer legitimate advantages not just to latency but also for minimizing the abandoned space junk left in orbit. The satellites will deorbit fairly quickly after running out of fuel.
Though I’m sure you’re correct about the main reason for the choice.
That would also make latency worse and the signal weaker.
Would the small ground starlink dish be able to reach higher orbits? I guess if the satellite is going to stay up longer you could afford to make it’s antennas a bit bigger to mitigate that.
Well you wouldn’t want to put them much higher, but if you raised their orbit by say 40%, they’d be getting significantly less atmospheric drag. It could probably extend their life by 15 years. And yeah, they’ll be 40% further away, so slightly more latency. Perhaps going from 70 ms ping to 100 ms ping. Not awesome, but definitely not a huge problem.
I didn’t realize how temporary and disposable Starlink’s satellites were. They incinerate 4 or 5 a day by de-orbiting them into the ozone. Here’s a pretty good CNET article that talks about how they “dispose” of them. IDK, doesn’t seem sustainable. They also mention the bandwidth gains are being diminished with the influx of new users, so their solution is more temporary satellites.
Yeah, if they want to make satellites last longer, they could go a bit higher in their orbits. The option is there.
But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.
It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.
Who’s buying satellites?
SpaceX is putting up satellites for SpaceX, they’re the manufacturer and operator…
It’s definitely in their best interest to keep them working as long as possible.
That said, they’re high end communications devices, very fancy routers essentially. And like all computer technology, these things become obsolete quickly. So even if they could last 20 years, you wouldn’t want them even 10 years from now. 100 GB/s speeds might be great now, but 10 years down the road 10 TB/s could be the norm, so at that point why are you still trying to provide service with ancient hardware 100x slower than it should be.
Isn’t that part of the grift?
At the time it looked like one of the main reasons to launch Starlink was to provide SpaceX with a new market, much larger than the usual space launching stuff. Also this meant Felon could get subsidies through 2 different companies.
Isn’t what?
I mean the reason for starlink was that they could, and they could do it for cheaper than anyone else because they would be launching at cost.
Also, falcon doesn’t really get subsidies for launching. SpaceX got a grant for the rural broadband infrastructure thing, but that’s like a one time thing, it doesn’t really pay for ongoing launches.
LEO does offer legitimate advantages not just to latency but also for minimizing the abandoned space junk left in orbit. The satellites will deorbit fairly quickly after running out of fuel.
Though I’m sure you’re correct about the main reason for the choice.
That would also make latency worse and the signal weaker.
Would the small ground starlink dish be able to reach higher orbits? I guess if the satellite is going to stay up longer you could afford to make it’s antennas a bit bigger to mitigate that.
Well you wouldn’t want to put them much higher, but if you raised their orbit by say 40%, they’d be getting significantly less atmospheric drag. It could probably extend their life by 15 years. And yeah, they’ll be 40% further away, so slightly more latency. Perhaps going from 70 ms ping to 100 ms ping. Not awesome, but definitely not a huge problem.