19 ms·

SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites, misses booster landing

176 points by ajaviaad 7y ago

throwaway77384 7y ago
Also discussed here I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348251
jayd16 7y ago
Any word on when the Starlink service becomes available?
- partiallypro 7y ago
  Supposedly this fall in the US. That is according to people I've talked to on /r/starlink
- gpm 7y ago
  From what I've gathered: They should have enough satellites in the sky, at the right positions, to start offering limited service around the start of July. This is based off of Elon's statement that they need 6 launches worth of satellites, educated guesses on launch dates, assuming that satellites need to move into their operational positions after that 6th launch, and will take the same amount of time to do so as previous launches. They hope to be ready to help out with emergency service connectivity this hurricane season, which starts roughly speaking in August. That gives them around a months buffer, which sounds reasonable. They don't seem to yet be making huge moves to get ground stations up and running, advertising to consumers, etc. This leads me to believe that the initial service will not be consumer oriented (probably as they work out the kinks). We know they're interested in emergency services, and we know the military is interested, these are likely to be higher paying and more forgiving customers to start with since they aren't competing with traditional ISPs at all. For them, somewhat unreliable service is better than no service.
  - hadtodoit 7y ago
    The soft-launch of service this year is only expected to cover northern Canada and the south of South America.
    - gpm 7y ago
      I've seen this simulation of what initial coverage should look like (ignoring ground stations): https://streamable.com/3lbqj https://streamable.com/3lbqj Southern Canada/Northern US is where I presume they will actually do testing, but they should be able to provide reasonable-ish (eyeballing at >80%) uptime across most of the world provided they can get ground stations. They'll continue to launch satellites past the first 6 launches too, so coverage should dramatically improve by the end of the year compared to a June or August launch.
- 101404 7y ago
  Question isn't so much "when" as it is "where". For now, the sats will depend on ground stations to signal relay, until there are enough satellites (few thousand) to have them communicate between them via laser.
jasoncartwright 7y ago
Since when is 32MB of GIFs on a webpage OK?
- krallja 7y ago
  How did it affect you? I just loaded the page on my three year old smartphone, and didn’t even notice the extra bandwidth or CPU usage.
  - dmerrick 7y ago
    It's pretty annoying for people on devices without unlimited data
  - jasoncartwright 7y ago
    I'm in an AirBnB in the countryside, it saturated the available bandwidth whilst showing me a bad quality dithered video at around 1FPS
    - wilg 7y ago
      Sounds okay to me. Seems like a minor deal.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        It's senseless.
        wilg 7y ago
        It makes a lot of sense – they wanted to show an animation and most people can load it.
        catalogia 7y ago
        It doesn't make sense, because 1) everybody who can load a gif can load an mp4 too. 2) an mp4 can actually be loaded by more people, because it isn't a senseless waste of bandwidth.
Twirrim 7y ago
Starlink satellites that are already impacting astronomy. Yay....? https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/starlink-satellites-astronomy/ https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/starlink-sate...
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to have a ton of stuff in space (even if it's not Starlink satellites specifically), and not to block the view for ground based astronomy. I think that while there's perhaps more difficulty and more cost - there's probably a lot more advantages to having these in space. No atmospheric interference/absorbtion issues. No ground-based light interference from nearby cities. No weather or time of day observing restrictions. No issues with trampling sacred/sensitive indigenous sites. Able to get very very large synthetic apertures combining telescopes in earth + lunar orbit. (Plus sol-earth lagrange points too, I guess) Starlink seems to be the first to exploit the drastically lowered launch costs to launch a lot more stuff into space at once.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    It's just unrealistic to propose that astronomers put their telescopes in space instead. There's no way to put a telescope with a 30-meter-diameter primary mirror in space. I don't know how many decades away that capability is, but it's way beyond our technical capabilities now. Large-aperture ground-based telescopes have huge advantages over space telescopes in many technical areas (and disadvantages in others). Eliminating them would be a huge blow to astronomy.
    - pharke 7y ago
      > There's no way to put a telescope with a 30-meter-diameter primary mirror in space... it's way beyond our technical capabilities now. I don't think it's that far off, the primary mirror for Hubble was 2.4m and the big telescopes you're talking about are made up of mirror segments around 10m in size. The Falcon 9's payload fairing is 5.2m diameter and 13m long and the proposed Starship fairing would be 9m diameter by 19m high. SpaceX is currently proving they are capable of sustaining a rapid launch cadence and have already proved they're capable of docking with the ISS. If someone built a modular space telescope, they'd be the first ones to call to get it into orbit for assembly. Cost has been a severe bottleneck to getting science into space for so long that we seem to have become convinced that it will always be so. These Starlink launches are the first real steps in proving that it need not be so.
rleahy22 7y ago
Do we know if SpaceX has taken any steps to address the issue with Starlink satellites affecting astronomers' view of the night sky? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-starlink-astronomy/606169/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-s...
- jve 7y ago
  Yes, we know: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1228598015247536129 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1228598015247536129 > @elonmusk: albedo will drop significantly on almost every successive launch
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    "Albedo" sounds like visible light. That's fine for those guys. Then there's x-ray and above, and infrared- and radio- below. Doubt they'll be able to make those sats soak up all EM radiation. And a few thousand of them will also be bouncing ground-based signals back down in all directions ... forget about isolation from earth-based sigs in basins. I don't recall any beforehand news of this being publicly discussed.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    "Funding secured."
    - bpodgursky 7y ago
      I don't think TSLA would have a lot of trouble securing their $420 funding, given the current $800 stock price.
      - hawaiianbrah 7y ago
        That’s missing the point completely.
- zionic 7y ago
  Yes: 1) Future sats will continue to get progressively lower albedo 2) The sats brightness is much higher in their "orbit raising" phase then their "service" phase.
_Microft 7y ago
We have never seen the actual release of the Starlink satellites. During every launch the hosts on the stream state that an unfortunate unexpected loss of signal happened but since the stream is stable before and after payload separation, this would be surprising. One might have thought that the vehicle was just at an unfortunate point in the trajectory where no connection was actually possible but today's payload separation event was far earlier and the video cut off anyways. It is a bit surprising since the mechanism does not seem that sophisticated.
- nexuist 7y ago
  I'm guessing it might be censored for national security reasons. The same mechanism that successfully deploys 60 satellites could probably also successfully deploy 60 warheads. Or 60 nefarious spy satellites.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    It's a good question about something that is probably not a coincidence! But immediately moving to speculating about a conspiracy theory seems like hiding a good question with a fake answer. It seems better to keep it unanswered and remain curious.
    - gpm 7y ago
      "Conspiracy theory" is an exaggeration. Lots of things rocketry related are covered by ITAR and are not allowed (by law) to be shown to non-green-card holders. SpaceX is pretty careful to comply with ITAR restrictions. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the US government had decided that satellite deployment mechanisms were one of those things covered, or if SpaceX's legal department decided that they weren't sure they weren't covered.
      - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
        If that were true, they would simply say as much. What possible advantage would there be to offer a bullshit reason? A far more likely reason is that it's technically hard, and/or not a priority.
pintxo 7y ago
Watched the launch this morning from the Saturn V stands at KSC, wow!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deegles 7y ago
Any news on the inter-satellite links?
- shaklee3 7y ago
  Elon says they're using boats now, which, if you read between the lines, it means that's not working.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I love how the headline isn't "SpaceX has more operating satellites in orbit than any other company." or "SpaceX launches 240 satellites in 90 days." it is "SpaceX fails to land the booster stage on their latest flight." That is pretty amazing to me.
- Razengan 7y ago
  The Tall Poppy Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- hawaiianbrah 7y ago
  This says that Planet Labs has over 300 satellites: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/private-company-launches-largest-fleet-of-satellites-in-human-history-to-photograph-earth-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/private-company-launches-la...
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink Shows 302 Starlink satellites although only 240 are v1.0, next month with the Starlink 6 mission it will be moot :-)

176 points by ajaviaad 7y ago

Also discussed here I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348251

jayd16 7y ago

Any word on when the Starlink service becomes available?

partiallypro 7y ago
Supposedly this fall in the US. That is according to people I've talked to on /r/starlink
gpm 7y ago
From what I've gathered: They should have enough satellites in the sky, at the right positions, to start offering limited service around the start of July. This is based off of Elon's statement that they need 6 launches worth of satellites, educated guesses on launch dates, assuming that satellites need to move into their operational positions after that 6th launch, and will take the same amount of time to do so as previous launches. They hope to be ready to help out with emergency service connectivity this hurricane season, which starts roughly speaking in August. That gives them around a months buffer, which sounds reasonable. They don't seem to yet be making huge moves to get ground stations up and running, advertising to consumers, etc. This leads me to believe that the initial service will not be consumer oriented (probably as they work out the kinks). We know they're interested in emergency services, and we know the military is interested, these are likely to be higher paying and more forgiving customers to start with since they aren't competing with traditional ISPs at all. For them, somewhat unreliable service is better than no service.
- hadtodoit 7y ago
  The soft-launch of service this year is only expected to cover northern Canada and the south of South America.
  - gpm 7y ago
    I've seen this simulation of what initial coverage should look like (ignoring ground stations): https://streamable.com/3lbqj https://streamable.com/3lbqj Southern Canada/Northern US is where I presume they will actually do testing, but they should be able to provide reasonable-ish (eyeballing at >80%) uptime across most of the world provided they can get ground stations. They'll continue to launch satellites past the first 6 launches too, so coverage should dramatically improve by the end of the year compared to a June or August launch.
101404 7y ago
Question isn't so much "when" as it is "where". For now, the sats will depend on ground stations to signal relay, until there are enough satellites (few thousand) to have them communicate between them via laser.

jasoncartwright 7y ago

Since when is 32MB of GIFs on a webpage OK?

krallja 7y ago
How did it affect you? I just loaded the page on my three year old smartphone, and didn’t even notice the extra bandwidth or CPU usage.
- dmerrick 7y ago
  It's pretty annoying for people on devices without unlimited data
- jasoncartwright 7y ago
  I'm in an AirBnB in the countryside, it saturated the available bandwidth whilst showing me a bad quality dithered video at around 1FPS
  - wilg 7y ago
    Sounds okay to me. Seems like a minor deal.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      It's senseless.
      - wilg 7y ago
        It makes a lot of sense – they wanted to show an animation and most people can load it.
        catalogia 7y ago
        It doesn't make sense, because 1) everybody who can load a gif can load an mp4 too. 2) an mp4 can actually be loaded by more people, because it isn't a senseless waste of bandwidth.

Twirrim 7y ago

Starlink satellites that are already impacting astronomy. Yay....? https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/starlink-satellites-astronomy/ https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/starlink-sate...

paranoidrobot 7y ago
Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to have a ton of stuff in space (even if it's not Starlink satellites specifically), and not to block the view for ground based astronomy. I think that while there's perhaps more difficulty and more cost - there's probably a lot more advantages to having these in space. No atmospheric interference/absorbtion issues. No ground-based light interference from nearby cities. No weather or time of day observing restrictions. No issues with trampling sacred/sensitive indigenous sites. Able to get very very large synthetic apertures combining telescopes in earth + lunar orbit. (Plus sol-earth lagrange points too, I guess) Starlink seems to be the first to exploit the drastically lowered launch costs to launch a lot more stuff into space at once.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  It's just unrealistic to propose that astronomers put their telescopes in space instead. There's no way to put a telescope with a 30-meter-diameter primary mirror in space. I don't know how many decades away that capability is, but it's way beyond our technical capabilities now. Large-aperture ground-based telescopes have huge advantages over space telescopes in many technical areas (and disadvantages in others). Eliminating them would be a huge blow to astronomy.
  - pharke 7y ago
    > There's no way to put a telescope with a 30-meter-diameter primary mirror in space... it's way beyond our technical capabilities now. I don't think it's that far off, the primary mirror for Hubble was 2.4m and the big telescopes you're talking about are made up of mirror segments around 10m in size. The Falcon 9's payload fairing is 5.2m diameter and 13m long and the proposed Starship fairing would be 9m diameter by 19m high. SpaceX is currently proving they are capable of sustaining a rapid launch cadence and have already proved they're capable of docking with the ISS. If someone built a modular space telescope, they'd be the first ones to call to get it into orbit for assembly. Cost has been a severe bottleneck to getting science into space for so long that we seem to have become convinced that it will always be so. These Starlink launches are the first real steps in proving that it need not be so.

rleahy22 7y ago

Do we know if SpaceX has taken any steps to address the issue with Starlink satellites affecting astronomers' view of the night sky? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-starlink-astronomy/606169/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-s...

jve 7y ago
Yes, we know: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1228598015247536129 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1228598015247536129 > @elonmusk: albedo will drop significantly on almost every successive launch
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  "Albedo" sounds like visible light. That's fine for those guys. Then there's x-ray and above, and infrared- and radio- below. Doubt they'll be able to make those sats soak up all EM radiation. And a few thousand of them will also be bouncing ground-based signals back down in all directions ... forget about isolation from earth-based sigs in basins. I don't recall any beforehand news of this being publicly discussed.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  "Funding secured."
  - bpodgursky 7y ago
    I don't think TSLA would have a lot of trouble securing their $420 funding, given the current $800 stock price.
    - hawaiianbrah 7y ago
      That’s missing the point completely.
zionic 7y ago
Yes: 1) Future sats will continue to get progressively lower albedo 2) The sats brightness is much higher in their "orbit raising" phase then their "service" phase.

_Microft 7y ago

We have never seen the actual release of the Starlink satellites. During every launch the hosts on the stream state that an unfortunate unexpected loss of signal happened but since the stream is stable before and after payload separation, this would be surprising. One might have thought that the vehicle was just at an unfortunate point in the trajectory where no connection was actually possible but today's payload separation event was far earlier and the video cut off anyways. It is a bit surprising since the mechanism does not seem that sophisticated.

nexuist 7y ago
I'm guessing it might be censored for national security reasons. The same mechanism that successfully deploys 60 satellites could probably also successfully deploy 60 warheads. Or 60 nefarious spy satellites.
- skybrian 7y ago
  It's a good question about something that is probably not a coincidence! But immediately moving to speculating about a conspiracy theory seems like hiding a good question with a fake answer. It seems better to keep it unanswered and remain curious.
  - gpm 7y ago
    "Conspiracy theory" is an exaggeration. Lots of things rocketry related are covered by ITAR and are not allowed (by law) to be shown to non-green-card holders. SpaceX is pretty careful to comply with ITAR restrictions. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the US government had decided that satellite deployment mechanisms were one of those things covered, or if SpaceX's legal department decided that they weren't sure they weren't covered.
    - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
      If that were true, they would simply say as much. What possible advantage would there be to offer a bullshit reason? A far more likely reason is that it's technically hard, and/or not a priority.

pintxo 7y ago

Watched the launch this morning from the Saturn V stands at KSC, wow!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deegles 7y ago

Any news on the inter-satellite links?

shaklee3 7y ago
Elon says they're using boats now, which, if you read between the lines, it means that's not working.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I love how the headline isn't "SpaceX has more operating satellites in orbit than any other company." or "SpaceX launches 240 satellites in 90 days." it is "SpaceX fails to land the booster stage on their latest flight." That is pretty amazing to me.

Razengan 7y ago
The Tall Poppy Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
hawaiianbrah 7y ago
This says that Planet Labs has over 300 satellites: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/private-company-launches-largest-fleet-of-satellites-in-human-history-to-photograph-earth-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/private-company-launches-la...
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink Shows 302 Starlink satellites although only 240 are v1.0, next month with the Starlink 6 mission it will be moot :-)