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SpaceX to offer Starlink public beta in six months, Musk says
- Traster 6y agoI find the bit about them getting permission to use the satellites at a lower altitude very strange. If the lower altitude means less debris and better service, then why did they have them at the higher altitude in the first place? My gut tells me there must be some reason that isn't quite as clear cut as it seems, but I have no idea what.
- nickff 6y agoSpaceX has greatly decreased launch costs, which are a substantial portion of satellite fleet total cost of ownership. That, along with modern, cheaper electronics (due to the rise of cellphones) has changed the cost structure, so that SpaceX thinks a large fleet of short-lived satellites providing a high-bandwidth connection is a viable business. They are not the only ones doing it, but they seem to be in the lead. For comparison, the higher-orbit satellite networks put up in the 90s used satellites that cost 2 orders of magnitude more than SpaceX's, and had launch costs that were similarly much higher. Those networks had much higher latency and lower bandwidth, and they all lost money.
- Traster 6y agoRight but all of those things were true when they got permission. It's not like cell phones have just been invented. Or are you saying that the original altitudes were just a standard set of altitudes everyone uses, and now spaceX wants to go lower?
- nickff 6y agoSpaceX decreased their target satellite lifetimes, and increased their target constellation size. It looks like they made the changes to reflect a change in the projected demand, which they seem to believe is larger than they initially believed, with greater bandwidth requirements and stricter latency requirements.