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SpaceX just filed a request to run 30k more Starlink satellites in orbit
- Spinosaurus 7y agoIt would be silly to think this will actually come to fruition - 30k satellites would represent a 3000% increase in the number of active satellites in LEO, which is already by far the most congested orbital altitude. That said, it would be quite exciting to see all those launches, and the end goal is a worthy one.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoLEO is not a single orbit. SpaceX is at 210, 340 & 710 miles. The space station is at 248 miles.
- Spinosaurus 7y ago210, 340, & 710 miles are all considered LEO.
- trothamel 7y agoLEO congestion is weird, since unlike GEO, there are lots of different orbital heights and orbital planes that still can be considered LEO.
- Spinosaurus 7y agoThat's absolutely true. However, even then, space debris is already a major concern[0], and let's not forget the recent debacle with the ESA[1]. What happens when you pump 30,000 more satellites up there? [0]: https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/ https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/ [1]: https://spacenews.com/esa-spacecraft-dodges-potential-collision-with-starlink-satellite/ https://spacenews.com/esa-spacecraft-dodges-potential-collis...
- tick_tock_tick 7y agoNothing at all since that's an incredibly tiny number.
- loceng 7y agoCompared to what, e.g. what's increase in purely EV sales that Tesla has caused compared to inception/previous status quo?
- xyzzyz 7y agoImagine an area of the size of surface of the earth. Put 30k objects of the size of motorcycle on it. There are currently something like 200 million motorcycles in the world. Seems like plenty of space, doesn't it? But wait, you don't actually need to restrict yourself to one spherical surface. You can place your 30k sattelites anywhere in a Earth's-surface-sized spherical shell that's 400 miles thick. You could literally put those 30k sattelites in a single straight line above some point on the earth, and still have 350 miles of shell thickness left. Congestion on low Earth orbits is really a non issue, especially if the satellites are designed to deorbit after their useful lifetime.
- CamperBob2 7y agoDifficulty: the motorcycles are moving at 20,000 miles an hour. And if two of them ever collide, not only will the motorcycles be totaled, but so will the road.
- Spinosaurus 7y agoI should have been more clear. By "congestion", I was not just considering the number of satellites, but the number of artificial objects in total regardless of size, which by many estimates is in the millions.
- gpm 7y agoWhich makes it even clearer that this isn't an issue... we're not adding 3000%, we're adding 1% (assuming "millions" = 3 million).
- ygjb 7y agoSurely you have something to back this up other than a super weak analogy? Lets pick your assumption apart - there are 200 million motorcycles in the world, but there are only an esitmated 35 million km of roads. That means there are approximately 175 meters of road per motorcycle. That seems pretty reasonable, even if they were all on the road at the same time. But they aren't alone - there are also approximately a billion vehicles. That takes it down to about 35 meters per vehicle. Thats without factoring in the loss in space for intersections, the drop in capacity at each of those intersections, or addressing the fact that most of those vehicles are clustered in high density urban areas. Now we are lucky that not all of those vehicles are on all of those roads at the same time, because they can be removed and parked. It is certainly possible to overlay orbits at different altitudes, but then you have to manage spectrum congestion, because those 30k satellites in a straight line above some point on the earth are useless unless they can actually communicate with ground stations. Not all orbital slots are created equal either - some have better coverage of human habitable areas than others. Oh, and there is the small matter that each time one of those 30k satellite degrades, it becomes between two and hundreds of thousands of devastating fast moving particles that can destroy other satellites (don't believe me? look up the number of windows that have been destroyed by paint flecks in orbit). Don't take my word for it, read up on NASA's articles and quarterly publications on orbital congestion.
- mdorazio 7y agoStarlink satellites are mostly put into deliberately low orbits to guarantee they degrade over the course of a few years and burn up in the atmosphere. This is not at all the same as putting the same number of normal LEO satellites in orbit from a space junk perspective.
- WesternStar 7y agoIf you remember the issue where SpaceX refused to move for the ESA sattelite. I think this a situation where space and air traffic control have to become more automated. This is like the beginning of an iteration in construction like the ones that happen in suspension bridges. The hope is that the Tacoma narrows scenario doesn't end up too costly. One of the fun things is that with this many sattelites you have a pretty good distributed orbital debris tracker.
- perl4ever 7y agoA pretty good distributed orbital debris generator too... Reminds me of "beer: the cause of and solution to all of life's problems!"
- londons_explore 7y agoThis is probably a speculative application. It looks good to investors ('look at the potential profit!')
- Hongwei 7y agoI think SpaceX is private and has healthy positive cashflow, so this shouldn't be a factor?
- Alupis 7y agoPrivate investors still like to be "wowed"... even if they don't do their homework either.
- londons_explore 7y agoIt isn't so obvious to me that they have positive cashflow. Their main costs will be employees, and not having a full launch schedule will have a dramatic impact on the financials.
- portillo 7y agoThis is complete nonsense. There is not enough demand for all those satellites and capacity, so it's very hard to understand why they are making such a filing. As of today, there is probably ~ 1 Tbps of usable capacity in space (wordlwide). With such a big constellation they could provide 100x this capacity, but who is going to buy it? How are they going to compete with fiber-delivered Internet in big cities? They cannot offer the same QoS, so you do not want space delivered Internet if you can have it through terrestrial networks.
- nikanj 7y agoSupply creates demand. Rural areas in the US and Canada get no fiber
- SupersonicScrub 7y agoNot to mention the massive populations living in underdeveloped areas in Africa.
- dvdbloc 7y agoNot to mention the populations in Urban America that simply don’t have access to fiber.
- wlesieutre 7y agoEven developed areas in the US typically are stuck with one broadband provider. If you do have a second one, everywhere I've lived it's been DSL service and I've never heard anything good about it aside from being cheaper than Comcast.
- portillo 7y agoExactly, that is the real problem, the lack of competition from terrestrial networks. In the US the ISPs operate as a monopoly. In most big cities in Europe you have 3/4 providers to choose from, which reduces costs and increases the quality of service.
- mzkply 7y agoThis was likely done to discourage any further investment in competing networks like OneWeb, Telesat, etc. It'll probably work, especially since SpaceX is also the only network operator that can control launch costs.
- portillo 7y agoI also like Tim's idea here: https://twitter.com/TMFAssociates/status/1183436364974419968 https://twitter.com/TMFAssociates/status/1183436364974419968
- new_realist 7y agoAre launch costs “out of control”? Cannot other networks’ cubesats hitch a ride with bigger payloads?
- anko 7y agoWhich launch company would they go with? SpaceX? Even then, they are splitting costs of the rocket (most expensive part) and fuel, while SpaceX themselves can just pay for fuel on an already flown booster. SpaceX are also paying cost, rather than retail prices. Sure, there are a few more costs, the point being that SpaceX has a supreme cost advantage.
- kd3 7y agoThe criminal Chinese government is going to have a difficult time with Starlink.
- the8472 7y agoMaybe not. The receivers are not low-tech, they can ban possession and track anyone using it by the signal. The great firewall is not perfect either, it just needs to be good enough to discourage most of the population from even trying and tag everything else as suspicious activity.
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- gpm 7y agoI doubt SpaceX is going to go to war with China, and if they did I doubt they would win. China, like other major powers, has anti satellite weapons. Most likely beamforming will be used to avoid servicing Chinese territory as much as possible, and they will not try to have people smuggle receivers into China.
- rjf72 7y agoI'm curious why people aren't seeing China as, at least potentially, a very big customer. They have hundreds of millions of people with limited to no internet access, in spite of a rapidly increasing level of national wealth. Their government could change that, instantly, with a check. Not that I'm in favor of a censored internet but it's a reality of China and it would perhaps work even better with something like the Starlink. Satellite internet relies on ground stations to know what to beam out on requests. China would operate their own regional ground stations resulting in a complete centralization of all access from China. Only reason I see this not happening is if China chose to develop their own similar solution, which is perhaps a real possibility.
- gpm 7y agoI don't see China as a potential customer because I don't see the CPC allowing any company not under their control to run China's telecommunications infrastructure. Especially not a company under US control.
- gpm 7y agoDiscussion from reddit suggests that this might not be 30k more satellites, just multiple radios on 1525 satellites. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/dge0xk/we_need_to_talk_about_starlink/f3cbwva/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/dge0xk/we_nee...
- swiley 7y agoThis will be the end of android. GNU/Linux is already available on handhelds that can connect to traditional networks but this will make things trivial. All android will be is a runtime that will slowly die as google attempts to weaponise it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]