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Realtime Starlink Satellite Map

214 points by deegles 6y ago

advisedwang 6y ago
> Opinion > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency, or lower prices, than terrestial > > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed > > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site.
- scohesc 6y ago
  That's what I probably misunderstand about the technology - I don't understand how you can have lower latency than current WISP-based infrastructure (are they making these claims against ground-based infrastructure?) when there's satellite internet connections that fade out when a cloud goes by... Also, I would assume they'd have massive capacity issues if they're planning on over-subscribing (they'd have to if they want to sustain a viable profit model, unless they're surviving on government funding?)
  - entropicdrifter 6y ago
    They're claiming lower latency than existing satellites due to lower altitude orbits and are using more satellites to compensate for the decreased coverage from each satellite. Presumably this setup would also help with the cloud coverage issue due to the shorter travel distance and higher likelihood of redundant satellites to connect to.
    - kitsunesoba 6y ago
      To be more precise, some of the lowest flying Starlink satellites will be at 340km, which is very low — lower than the ISS, even. By contrast, traditional internet satellites orbit at ~35,700km.
      - nyx_ 6y ago
        550km, actually, or 340 miles. Still a couple orders of magnitude closer to Earth than satellites in GSO.
        modeless 6y ago
        v2 is planned to have satellites as low as 328 km. https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=2378669 https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
  - the8472 6y ago
    Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. In theory a LEO satellite network could also beat transoceanic fiber connections since the high refractive index causes the speed of light in fiber to be only ~2/3rds the vacuum speed of light. But that would require satellite-to-satellite optical links which the first generation of starlink doesn't have.
    - godelski 6y ago
      > Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. Actually it is due to their distances. Speed of light delays is something that exists everywhere, like fiber internet. In fact, speed of light is faster in space than it is in optical fiber. The problem is distance.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        'Actually it is due to speed of light delays. Distance is something that exists everywhere.' Your weird pedantic distinction doesn't make a difference. They're synonyms in this context. Obviously the difference is how much you have, everyone knows that.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    The speed of light in a vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in glass. But that requires the inter-satellite links be viable, which they aren't yet: the required lasers would survive reentry and they want the satellites to burn up completely on de-orbit so current versions of the satellites don't have them. And yes, there are significant capacity limitations. Only the truly rural will get good data rates.
- MojoLobo 6y ago
  That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa. They're probably going after a different market?
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    The satellites orbit the earth every 1.6 hours. They're not in geo-stationary orbit, they're in very low earth orbit to reduce latency. And any orbit will spend a significant portion of it's time over water. Also, only the green circled satellites are in their final orbit, the yellow circled ones were recently launched and are not yet at their final altitude and position. It takes a couple of months for orbit raising.
    - MojoLobo 6y ago
      Ah, thanks for clarifying. I just assumed for some reason they were geostationary satellites.
    - makomk 6y ago
      Yeah, as I understand it the current generation of Starlink satellites are likely to be pretty much unusable when they're over the ocean since they need to have line of sight to a ground station.
      - aeyes 6y ago
        They might be usable for airplanes, ships, oil platforms, islands...
        zaphoyd 6y ago
        without interlinks an airplane, ship, oil platform, or island could talk to the starlink sat, but the sat couldn't talk to its ground base station to forward their messages to the rest of the internet. Coverage for deep ocean will require a second generation that can talk sat -> sat.
- modeless 6y ago
  That's strange. All of those points are wrong. Starlink isn't designed to offer lower latency or lower prices than existing terrestrial wired or wireless ISPs (at least, decent ones). Instead it's designed to offer a low latency wireless service in places where that has never been available at all. Which is most of the land area of the Earth, and all of the ocean. It may also be cheaper and/or faster than some very bad terrestrial ISPs, because there are a lot of those out there, but that's not what it's designed for. Impact on earth-based telescopes has been discussed endlessly, to the point where it seems like there's a law that you can't mention Starlink on the Internet without talking about it. And SpaceX responded by talking to the astronomers most affected by Starlink and adding a sunshade that should prevent the satellites from ruining their images. Which is more than any other satellite operator has ever done, AFAIK, and there are many satellites much brighter than Starlink in the sky today. The Pentagon is certainly interested in Starlink, but commercial service has much higher revenue potential. There are several competitors planning to do roughly the same thing as Starlink, so the business plan is at least plausible.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Starlink will has promised better latency, bandwidth and prices compared to existing satellite internet. Perhaps that's where the confusion on the first point came from.
    - arcticfox 6y ago
      I'm really confused what is going on here. It's really baffling how someone motivated and talented enough to make such a tracking site would have such an odd opinion section. Obviously, Starlink is not the best choice in all situations, but it is so compelling on some dimensions that such a flatly negative opinion is bizarre for anyone with even a cursory understanding of what's going on.
      - shaklee3 6y ago
        What dimension? It's not competitive for anyone who can get high-speed internet right now, and it's not clear if it will complete with traditional satellite in cost.
- thoraway1010 6y ago
  What's funny is if you go sailing on the ocean for extended periods (months) you realize that sat data / phone costs are RIDICULOUS in this age. $3 - $5/MB. So your 4 GB movie is $20,000. You'd think, why would anyone pay this, but there can be a lot of pressure these days to be able to send videos etc so you sometimes get jammed up with these types of costs (ie, if you do a telemedicine call the DR may want a video of joint movement etc etc, recreational trips people want to post videos and don't realize their phone records at pretty large file sizes etc etc). So if they can do better just on COST then this it would be wonderful.
  - ccmcarey 6y ago
    We used a sat link for getting the latest weather information, though you can also get that frequently on V(HF), so .. not terribly useful. But, terribly slow and unreliable (Iridium).
  - mcpherrinm 6y ago
    At least V1 of Starlink, there needs to be a ground station visible to the satellite, so it's not going to work in the middle of the ocean. It might work a few hundred miles offshore, but not further than that. So it'll be a while before you can have video calls from the middle of an Atlantic crossing.
    - Someone1234 6y ago
      There's no interlink between Starlink satellites? That's a surprising fact.
      - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
        That's a v2 feature.
        ehsankia 6y ago
        Is there a rough v1/v2 timeline? The thing they wanted to release by the end of the year is v1 I assume? Is v2 just a software update? Does it require sending a whole new set of satellite or it something they are planning to patch into existing satellites someday and have inter-sat support?
- noxer 6y ago
  LMAO saw that too an got my daily does of conspiracy theories.
- new_realist 6y ago
  Perhaps the more expert someone is, the less impressive Starlink appears.
- lawlessone 6y ago
  >Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site. from the site >Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed I am guessing the author wanted to show how they fill up the sky.
- godelski 6y ago
  I used to work on rockets and I'm very confused by the author's opinions. > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency This is weird. Even if we pretend that these satellites are directly competing with terrestrial based systems, their orbits put them in range for a latency that is at least competitive with terrestrial systems. It's unproven that they get those latencies, but there's clear evidence. Note: we're talking about like 50ms (IIRC 20ms - 100ms depending on which constellation). Geostationary satellites (which is what they are competing with) are like 250ms (these numbers are off the top of my head so correct me if I'm off). Starlink is competing with geostationary internet satellites AND places that have no internet at all. > lower prices Seems to me they can service a lot more people. Isn't this "scale?" Aren't they targeting something like a billion+ users? I know plenty of people with boats and RVs that are excited about this because the terrestrial solutions just suck (and generally aren't terrestrial based solutions). > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed What? You're literally discussing it. It is pretty easy to find articles from astronomers getting upset [0][1]. I can tell you that everyone in my community (which includes astronomers and astrophysicists) is aware of this issue. The fact is that most people just don't care. They see greater utility so it is worth the cost. Of course, there are also plenty of people that disagree. > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Little bit of this, little bit of that. Having worked at a rocket company I can definitely tell you that, like every other manufactured product in the existence of products, flights are cheaper the more you do (especially true for reusable rockets!). Sometimes this is called the "launch chasm." I'm not sure why you're mad at SpaceX here. If you have an issue with this, it is with Pentagon funding. Look, I'm not the biggest fan of Musk or SpaceX either, but these aren't great arguments. The things to dislike are a little more nuanced whereas this just comes off as hating SpaceX to hate on SpaceX. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-train-looks-amazing-but-astronomers-have-real-concerns https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-... [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomy https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-a...
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    Their latencies are not at least as competitive as anything if they're not proven. With low orbits, they need multiple hops to get to most destinations, along with queuing and network delays. Propagation delay may not even be the dominant factor. The cost will need to be very expensive, relatively speaking. See this quick math for why: https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/1272748894380634113 https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/12727488943806...
chundicus 6y ago
I could make some guesses, but can someone give me a good answer as to why there aren't any of these satellites close to the poles?
- nickik 6y ago
  Mainly because there are no costumers there. If you want to cover the poles, you totally could but its just not necessary.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  It's a relatively big surface area increase and a relatively small customer count increase?
- upofadown 6y ago
  A satellite orbit has an inclination. If you launch it lined up with the equator then it will always stay over the equator. So you choose how far the satellite will wander north and south by adjusting the inclination at launch. The less the inclination the fewer satellites you need for coverage. So it is a tradeoff. Obviously the decision was made to only cover up to the place that population density falls off in the northern direction. Added: Because the satellites spend more time at the northern and southern extremes they get denser coverage there. That is likely why they are initially offering coverage near the US/Canada border.
- mhandley 6y ago
  All the satellites in the first phase of Starlink are in 53 degree inclination orbits. This will give them coverage from about 60 degrees North down to 60 degrees South. In later phases they plan to have satellites in higher inclination orbits, but in the early stages, there just aren't enough people living that far North (sorry Scandinavia, you'll have to wait) for it to be worth spending 30% of the satellites' time over the poles when they can be over more populated parts of the planet instead.
- 6y ago
verandaguy 6y ago
Holy Kessler Syndrome, Batman!
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  This is specifically not a concern for Starlink, which is in an extremely low orbit. Dead satellites (and any theoretical debris) would deorbit and burn up in less than 5 years. End-of-life satellites are intentionally deorbited immediately. Additionally, the starlink satellites perform active collision avoidance.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    >Additionally, the starlink satellites perform active collision avoidance. Is that currently true, or a planned feature in the future? IIRC the whole Aeolus kerfluffle happened because someone wasn't paying attention to their pager.
aphextron 6y ago
Seems like a huge footprint for each satellite to service. Dense metro areas are really getting the shaft here. Any data on the backhaul capacity?
- wmf 6y ago
  Starlink just isn't for dense areas.
- est31 6y ago
  In internet coverage, like with most infrastructure, there are power laws. I'm making up numbers but it's like connecting the first 50% costs as much as connecting the last 5%. Starlink is for those 5% who live in extremely remote areas.
mhandley 6y ago
This map seems to have some inaccuracies. I'm not sure what the circles are supposed to be, but they're wrong for the satellite's coverage limits - looks like they're shown at about half of the actual 940km coverage radius. It also looks like their altitude is incorrect - the ones in operational orbits are at 550km. Eyeballing this map, it looks like they're shown at something like 1/3 to 1/2 of that - certainly much lower than they should be.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  In the /about it's explained that the circle represents the locations where the satellite is at least 60 degrees above the horizon. 550 km is the altitude for the operational orbits, the satellites are deployed lower and need to raise their orbit. (But I see most are labeled around 550 km, so I'm not sure what you're referring to.)
  - mhandley 6y ago
    The SpaceX FCC filings indicate reachability down to 25 degrees above the horizon, so it's not clear why 60 degrees was chosen in this animation. I do understand that the satellites are deployed into lower orbits, but satellites from launches 1, 2 and 3 (and some of launch 4) are now at 550km: https://twitter.com/StarlinkUpdates/status/1273269220130861065 https://twitter.com/StarlinkUpdates/status/12732692201308610... Those launches are shown way too low in this map. From measuring pixels, I make them to be roughly 200km. Edit: maybe I'm being pedantic here, but the combination of showing artifically small coverage zones, plus showing satellites much lower than they are so giving a misleading impression of how much area each satellite can see, taken together give the misleading impression that Starlink coverage will be worse than it will actually be.
    - LeoPanthera 6y ago
      Possibly intentionally misleading, the author makes several disparaging comments of Starlink at the bottom of /about
      - 6y ago
ruslan 6y ago
Is there any decent resource explaining how the whole mesh of Starlink sattelites communicate to each others and to the ground ? Do they use RF radio or modulated laser ? What equipment should be used by end users and what frequency range ?
- modeless 6y ago
  Details are here: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=2378669 https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=... TL;DR User terminals are RF phased array antennas. Ka-band and Ku-band, plus E-band for ground stations. v1 has no cross satellite links. Plans for v2 include laser cross links.
  - ruslan 6y ago
    Ok, thanks. Designing a DYI terminal won't be easy for these bands.
  - mNovak 6y ago
    The user terminals in the current generation are Ku only; Ka is reserved for the gateways. Interesting, the picture on reddit above--those don't look like phased arrays to me.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      They could be phased array under a radome.
      - ruslan 6y ago
        AFAIK, those are regular dishes with tracking system. Phased arrays do not require mechanical tracking as they use phase shift to direct radiation.
        shaklee3 6y ago
        SpaceX phased antennas are both phased arrays and mechanical steering since they are lowering cost by decreasing the scan angle of the phased array.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Will they cover the North and South poles as well? I know there isn't much of a customer base, but it would be interesting to know that every part of the planet is covered and connected.
- hooper 6y ago
  No. If you look at the map you'll see that there's an equally sized coverage gap at each pole. I don't know if any reliable source has stated whether they will put any satellites in orbits that can cover the poles, but I imagine it's a pretty low priority commercially. There is already some polar coverage from the Iridium network, which uses orbits with higher inclination.
jodrellblank 6y ago
The (or some of the) Starlink satellites stand out as a very distinctive line on http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/ currently over the Pacific and West Coast North America.
lawlessone 6y ago
Why is there a perfect(kinda) circle of the satellites around Antarctica and the Arctic? They orbit near them but somehow none go over the south or north poles?
- sneak 6y ago
  The orbital planes top parts are all up there at high latitudes. The circle you are seeing is actually made up of several different orbital planes that swoop down toward/past the equator and then up/down to 60 degrees N/S. Seeing them move will make it clearer. Here’s an awesome visual explanation with a ton of other cool info: https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY
- davewasthere 6y ago
  It'd be super not efficient... Also, nobody wants a figure-8 demolition derby in space...
- dmckeon 6y ago
  Fewer potential users in the near-polar regions, so the orbits are angled & aligned like wrapping a ball of twine, while polar coverage would require multiple tracks in north-south orbits. edit: more answers at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556843
coronadisaster 6y ago
I wish I could know how the position of each of them was chosen...
RocketSyntax 6y ago
no satellites over california right now
gpm 6y ago
The circles in this map are really deceptive. They're two fixed sizes depending on altitude with no apparent relation to actual coverage. Here is my attempt at estimating actual coverage, based on a 25 degree angle from the horizon https://i.imgur.com/poj8cae.png https://i.imgur.com/poj8cae.png I've included a screenshot of the code I modified so people can play with it themselves. I made a slight simplification in my math (explained in the comments in the screenshot), but I think it should be close enough. Edit: Pictorial explanation of simplification https://i.imgur.com/XtADkmh.png https://i.imgur.com/XtADkmh.png
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  They're confusing, but I wouldn't say "really deceptive". The big circles seem to be satellites that are at final altitude, showing range equal to altitude, so slightly lower than 45 degrees. The small circles are satellites that aren't there yet, and the size is meaningless.
  - arijun 6y ago
    I would say really deceptive, or perhaps just plain wrong. The circles are, in fact, intended to convey coverage and left me pretty confused about the huge gaps everywhere. From the about section: > Dashed lines show the approximate coverage with very conservative viewing slant (approx 60 degrees above horizon, where 90 means vertically overhead).
- walrus01 6y ago
  The circles in the map match what a number of offline (TLE based) standalone Linux and Windows satellite pass prediction tools will show you. They assume that each ground location is on a flat plane with no hills or mountains, and the size of the cone extending from the satellite to the ground is the full coverage of everything the satellite can see (such as if you had a magical laser on the satellite capable of illuminating any ground location visible from the satellite). Such as if you had a theoretical, nonexistant ground terminal that was capable of communicating with a satellite at only 1 degree look angle elevation above the horizon. Of course in reality this is not the case and most systems that communicate with LEO satellites will have minimum elevation look angles of 15-20 degrees above the horizon. The circles do, however, provide a useful approximate scale of how much ground area is visible at any given time from the point of view of a satellite. It's not intended to be perfect.
person_of_color 6y ago
Do these satellites have thrusters?
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Electric hall effect thrusters that use krypton as propelant. These give the individual satellites a really efficient thruster with a lot of delta v. They also use krypton instead of xenon, which everyone else uses for electric thrusters due to it being cheaper.
erwinh 6y ago
Check out: https://space-search.io/?search=starlink https://space-search.io/?search=starlink for another type of visualisation of starlink! Doesn't include coverage yet but I do plan to add that with some kind of heatmap. I think these static circles in the OP are a bit deceptive in indicating 'coverage' as these satellites are constantly moving.
hypefi 6y ago
No one is worried about environmental impact? And 5G ?

214 points by deegles 6y ago

> Opinion > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency, or lower prices, than terrestial > > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed > > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site.

scohesc 6y ago
That's what I probably misunderstand about the technology - I don't understand how you can have lower latency than current WISP-based infrastructure (are they making these claims against ground-based infrastructure?) when there's satellite internet connections that fade out when a cloud goes by... Also, I would assume they'd have massive capacity issues if they're planning on over-subscribing (they'd have to if they want to sustain a viable profit model, unless they're surviving on government funding?)
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  They're claiming lower latency than existing satellites due to lower altitude orbits and are using more satellites to compensate for the decreased coverage from each satellite. Presumably this setup would also help with the cloud coverage issue due to the shorter travel distance and higher likelihood of redundant satellites to connect to.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    To be more precise, some of the lowest flying Starlink satellites will be at 340km, which is very low — lower than the ISS, even. By contrast, traditional internet satellites orbit at ~35,700km.
    - nyx_ 6y ago
      550km, actually, or 340 miles. Still a couple orders of magnitude closer to Earth than satellites in GSO.
      - modeless 6y ago
        v2 is planned to have satellites as low as 328 km. https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=2378669 https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
- the8472 6y ago
  Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. In theory a LEO satellite network could also beat transoceanic fiber connections since the high refractive index causes the speed of light in fiber to be only ~2/3rds the vacuum speed of light. But that would require satellite-to-satellite optical links which the first generation of starlink doesn't have.
  - godelski 6y ago
    > Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. Actually it is due to their distances. Speed of light delays is something that exists everywhere, like fiber internet. In fact, speed of light is faster in space than it is in optical fiber. The problem is distance.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      'Actually it is due to speed of light delays. Distance is something that exists everywhere.' Your weird pedantic distinction doesn't make a difference. They're synonyms in this context. Obviously the difference is how much you have, everyone knows that.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The speed of light in a vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in glass. But that requires the inter-satellite links be viable, which they aren't yet: the required lasers would survive reentry and they want the satellites to burn up completely on de-orbit so current versions of the satellites don't have them. And yes, there are significant capacity limitations. Only the truly rural will get good data rates.
MojoLobo 6y ago
That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa. They're probably going after a different market?
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The satellites orbit the earth every 1.6 hours. They're not in geo-stationary orbit, they're in very low earth orbit to reduce latency. And any orbit will spend a significant portion of it's time over water. Also, only the green circled satellites are in their final orbit, the yellow circled ones were recently launched and are not yet at their final altitude and position. It takes a couple of months for orbit raising.
  - MojoLobo 6y ago
    Ah, thanks for clarifying. I just assumed for some reason they were geostationary satellites.
  - makomk 6y ago
    Yeah, as I understand it the current generation of Starlink satellites are likely to be pretty much unusable when they're over the ocean since they need to have line of sight to a ground station.
    - aeyes 6y ago
      They might be usable for airplanes, ships, oil platforms, islands...
      - zaphoyd 6y ago
        without interlinks an airplane, ship, oil platform, or island could talk to the starlink sat, but the sat couldn't talk to its ground base station to forward their messages to the rest of the internet. Coverage for deep ocean will require a second generation that can talk sat -> sat.
modeless 6y ago
That's strange. All of those points are wrong. Starlink isn't designed to offer lower latency or lower prices than existing terrestrial wired or wireless ISPs (at least, decent ones). Instead it's designed to offer a low latency wireless service in places where that has never been available at all. Which is most of the land area of the Earth, and all of the ocean. It may also be cheaper and/or faster than some very bad terrestrial ISPs, because there are a lot of those out there, but that's not what it's designed for. Impact on earth-based telescopes has been discussed endlessly, to the point where it seems like there's a law that you can't mention Starlink on the Internet without talking about it. And SpaceX responded by talking to the astronomers most affected by Starlink and adding a sunshade that should prevent the satellites from ruining their images. Which is more than any other satellite operator has ever done, AFAIK, and there are many satellites much brighter than Starlink in the sky today. The Pentagon is certainly interested in Starlink, but commercial service has much higher revenue potential. There are several competitors planning to do roughly the same thing as Starlink, so the business plan is at least plausible.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Starlink will has promised better latency, bandwidth and prices compared to existing satellite internet. Perhaps that's where the confusion on the first point came from.
  - arcticfox 6y ago
    I'm really confused what is going on here. It's really baffling how someone motivated and talented enough to make such a tracking site would have such an odd opinion section. Obviously, Starlink is not the best choice in all situations, but it is so compelling on some dimensions that such a flatly negative opinion is bizarre for anyone with even a cursory understanding of what's going on.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      What dimension? It's not competitive for anyone who can get high-speed internet right now, and it's not clear if it will complete with traditional satellite in cost.
thoraway1010 6y ago
What's funny is if you go sailing on the ocean for extended periods (months) you realize that sat data / phone costs are RIDICULOUS in this age. $3 - $5/MB. So your 4 GB movie is $20,000. You'd think, why would anyone pay this, but there can be a lot of pressure these days to be able to send videos etc so you sometimes get jammed up with these types of costs (ie, if you do a telemedicine call the DR may want a video of joint movement etc etc, recreational trips people want to post videos and don't realize their phone records at pretty large file sizes etc etc). So if they can do better just on COST then this it would be wonderful.
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  We used a sat link for getting the latest weather information, though you can also get that frequently on V(HF), so .. not terribly useful. But, terribly slow and unreliable (Iridium).
- mcpherrinm 6y ago
  At least V1 of Starlink, there needs to be a ground station visible to the satellite, so it's not going to work in the middle of the ocean. It might work a few hundred miles offshore, but not further than that. So it'll be a while before you can have video calls from the middle of an Atlantic crossing.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    There's no interlink between Starlink satellites? That's a surprising fact.
    - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
      That's a v2 feature.
      - ehsankia 6y ago
        Is there a rough v1/v2 timeline? The thing they wanted to release by the end of the year is v1 I assume? Is v2 just a software update? Does it require sending a whole new set of satellite or it something they are planning to patch into existing satellites someday and have inter-sat support?
noxer 6y ago
LMAO saw that too an got my daily does of conspiracy theories.
new_realist 6y ago
Perhaps the more expert someone is, the less impressive Starlink appears.
lawlessone 6y ago
>Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site. from the site >Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed I am guessing the author wanted to show how they fill up the sky.
godelski 6y ago
I used to work on rockets and I'm very confused by the author's opinions. > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency This is weird. Even if we pretend that these satellites are directly competing with terrestrial based systems, their orbits put them in range for a latency that is at least competitive with terrestrial systems. It's unproven that they get those latencies, but there's clear evidence. Note: we're talking about like 50ms (IIRC 20ms - 100ms depending on which constellation). Geostationary satellites (which is what they are competing with) are like 250ms (these numbers are off the top of my head so correct me if I'm off). Starlink is competing with geostationary internet satellites AND places that have no internet at all. > lower prices Seems to me they can service a lot more people. Isn't this "scale?" Aren't they targeting something like a billion+ users? I know plenty of people with boats and RVs that are excited about this because the terrestrial solutions just suck (and generally aren't terrestrial based solutions). > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed What? You're literally discussing it. It is pretty easy to find articles from astronomers getting upset [0][1]. I can tell you that everyone in my community (which includes astronomers and astrophysicists) is aware of this issue. The fact is that most people just don't care. They see greater utility so it is worth the cost. Of course, there are also plenty of people that disagree. > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Little bit of this, little bit of that. Having worked at a rocket company I can definitely tell you that, like every other manufactured product in the existence of products, flights are cheaper the more you do (especially true for reusable rockets!). Sometimes this is called the "launch chasm." I'm not sure why you're mad at SpaceX here. If you have an issue with this, it is with Pentagon funding. Look, I'm not the biggest fan of Musk or SpaceX either, but these aren't great arguments. The things to dislike are a little more nuanced whereas this just comes off as hating SpaceX to hate on SpaceX. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-train-looks-amazing-but-astronomers-have-real-concerns https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-... [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomy https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-a...
- shaklee3 6y ago
  Their latencies are not at least as competitive as anything if they're not proven. With low orbits, they need multiple hops to get to most destinations, along with queuing and network delays. Propagation delay may not even be the dominant factor. The cost will need to be very expensive, relatively speaking. See this quick math for why: https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/1272748894380634113 https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/12727488943806...

chundicus 6y ago

I could make some guesses, but can someone give me a good answer as to why there aren't any of these satellites close to the poles?

nickik 6y ago
Mainly because there are no costumers there. If you want to cover the poles, you totally could but its just not necessary.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Pfhreak 6y ago
It's a relatively big surface area increase and a relatively small customer count increase?
upofadown 6y ago
A satellite orbit has an inclination. If you launch it lined up with the equator then it will always stay over the equator. So you choose how far the satellite will wander north and south by adjusting the inclination at launch. The less the inclination the fewer satellites you need for coverage. So it is a tradeoff. Obviously the decision was made to only cover up to the place that population density falls off in the northern direction. Added: Because the satellites spend more time at the northern and southern extremes they get denser coverage there. That is likely why they are initially offering coverage near the US/Canada border.
mhandley 6y ago
All the satellites in the first phase of Starlink are in 53 degree inclination orbits. This will give them coverage from about 60 degrees North down to 60 degrees South. In later phases they plan to have satellites in higher inclination orbits, but in the early stages, there just aren't enough people living that far North (sorry Scandinavia, you'll have to wait) for it to be worth spending 30% of the satellites' time over the poles when they can be over more populated parts of the planet instead.
6y ago

verandaguy 6y ago

Holy Kessler Syndrome, Batman!

LeoPanthera 6y ago
This is specifically not a concern for Starlink, which is in an extremely low orbit. Dead satellites (and any theoretical debris) would deorbit and burn up in less than 5 years. End-of-life satellites are intentionally deorbited immediately. Additionally, the starlink satellites perform active collision avoidance.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  >Additionally, the starlink satellites perform active collision avoidance. Is that currently true, or a planned feature in the future? IIRC the whole Aeolus kerfluffle happened because someone wasn't paying attention to their pager.

aphextron 6y ago

Seems like a huge footprint for each satellite to service. Dense metro areas are really getting the shaft here. Any data on the backhaul capacity?

wmf 6y ago
Starlink just isn't for dense areas.
est31 6y ago
In internet coverage, like with most infrastructure, there are power laws. I'm making up numbers but it's like connecting the first 50% costs as much as connecting the last 5%. Starlink is for those 5% who live in extremely remote areas.

mhandley 6y ago

This map seems to have some inaccuracies. I'm not sure what the circles are supposed to be, but they're wrong for the satellite's coverage limits - looks like they're shown at about half of the actual 940km coverage radius. It also looks like their altitude is incorrect - the ones in operational orbits are at 550km. Eyeballing this map, it looks like they're shown at something like 1/3 to 1/2 of that - certainly much lower than they should be.

wcoenen 6y ago
In the /about it's explained that the circle represents the locations where the satellite is at least 60 degrees above the horizon. 550 km is the altitude for the operational orbits, the satellites are deployed lower and need to raise their orbit. (But I see most are labeled around 550 km, so I'm not sure what you're referring to.)
- mhandley 6y ago
  The SpaceX FCC filings indicate reachability down to 25 degrees above the horizon, so it's not clear why 60 degrees was chosen in this animation. I do understand that the satellites are deployed into lower orbits, but satellites from launches 1, 2 and 3 (and some of launch 4) are now at 550km: https://twitter.com/StarlinkUpdates/status/1273269220130861065 https://twitter.com/StarlinkUpdates/status/12732692201308610... Those launches are shown way too low in this map. From measuring pixels, I make them to be roughly 200km. Edit: maybe I'm being pedantic here, but the combination of showing artifically small coverage zones, plus showing satellites much lower than they are so giving a misleading impression of how much area each satellite can see, taken together give the misleading impression that Starlink coverage will be worse than it will actually be.
  - LeoPanthera 6y ago
    Possibly intentionally misleading, the author makes several disparaging comments of Starlink at the bottom of /about
    - 6y ago

ruslan 6y ago

Is there any decent resource explaining how the whole mesh of Starlink sattelites communicate to each others and to the ground ? Do they use RF radio or modulated laser ? What equipment should be used by end users and what frequency range ?

modeless 6y ago
Details are here: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=2378669 https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=... TL;DR User terminals are RF phased array antennas. Ka-band and Ku-band, plus E-band for ground stations. v1 has no cross satellite links. Plans for v2 include laser cross links.
- ruslan 6y ago
  Ok, thanks. Designing a DYI terminal won't be easy for these bands.
- mNovak 6y ago
  The user terminals in the current generation are Ku only; Ka is reserved for the gateways. Interesting, the picture on reddit above--those don't look like phased arrays to me.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    They could be phased array under a radome.
    - ruslan 6y ago
      AFAIK, those are regular dishes with tracking system. Phased arrays do not require mechanical tracking as they use phase shift to direct radiation.
      - shaklee3 6y ago
        SpaceX phased antennas are both phased arrays and mechanical steering since they are lowering cost by decreasing the scan angle of the phased array.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Will they cover the North and South poles as well? I know there isn't much of a customer base, but it would be interesting to know that every part of the planet is covered and connected.

hooper 6y ago
No. If you look at the map you'll see that there's an equally sized coverage gap at each pole. I don't know if any reliable source has stated whether they will put any satellites in orbits that can cover the poles, but I imagine it's a pretty low priority commercially. There is already some polar coverage from the Iridium network, which uses orbits with higher inclination.

jodrellblank 6y ago

The (or some of the) Starlink satellites stand out as a very distinctive line on http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/ currently over the Pacific and West Coast North America.

lawlessone 6y ago

Why is there a perfect(kinda) circle of the satellites around Antarctica and the Arctic? They orbit near them but somehow none go over the south or north poles?

sneak 6y ago
The orbital planes top parts are all up there at high latitudes. The circle you are seeing is actually made up of several different orbital planes that swoop down toward/past the equator and then up/down to 60 degrees N/S. Seeing them move will make it clearer. Here’s an awesome visual explanation with a ton of other cool info: https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY
davewasthere 6y ago
It'd be super not efficient... Also, nobody wants a figure-8 demolition derby in space...
dmckeon 6y ago
Fewer potential users in the near-polar regions, so the orbits are angled & aligned like wrapping a ball of twine, while polar coverage would require multiple tracks in north-south orbits. edit: more answers at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556843

coronadisaster 6y ago

I wish I could know how the position of each of them was chosen...

RocketSyntax 6y ago

no satellites over california right now

gpm 6y ago

The circles in this map are really deceptive. They're two fixed sizes depending on altitude with no apparent relation to actual coverage. Here is my attempt at estimating actual coverage, based on a 25 degree angle from the horizon https://i.imgur.com/poj8cae.png https://i.imgur.com/poj8cae.png I've included a screenshot of the code I modified so people can play with it themselves. I made a slight simplification in my math (explained in the comments in the screenshot), but I think it should be close enough. Edit: Pictorial explanation of simplification https://i.imgur.com/XtADkmh.png https://i.imgur.com/XtADkmh.png

Dylan16807 6y ago
They're confusing, but I wouldn't say "really deceptive". The big circles seem to be satellites that are at final altitude, showing range equal to altitude, so slightly lower than 45 degrees. The small circles are satellites that aren't there yet, and the size is meaningless.
- arijun 6y ago
  I would say really deceptive, or perhaps just plain wrong. The circles are, in fact, intended to convey coverage and left me pretty confused about the huge gaps everywhere. From the about section: > Dashed lines show the approximate coverage with very conservative viewing slant (approx 60 degrees above horizon, where 90 means vertically overhead).
walrus01 6y ago
The circles in the map match what a number of offline (TLE based) standalone Linux and Windows satellite pass prediction tools will show you. They assume that each ground location is on a flat plane with no hills or mountains, and the size of the cone extending from the satellite to the ground is the full coverage of everything the satellite can see (such as if you had a magical laser on the satellite capable of illuminating any ground location visible from the satellite). Such as if you had a theoretical, nonexistant ground terminal that was capable of communicating with a satellite at only 1 degree look angle elevation above the horizon. Of course in reality this is not the case and most systems that communicate with LEO satellites will have minimum elevation look angles of 15-20 degrees above the horizon. The circles do, however, provide a useful approximate scale of how much ground area is visible at any given time from the point of view of a satellite. It's not intended to be perfect.

person_of_color 6y ago

Do these satellites have thrusters?

m4rtink 6y ago
Electric hall effect thrusters that use krypton as propelant. These give the individual satellites a really efficient thruster with a lot of delta v. They also use krypton instead of xenon, which everyone else uses for electric thrusters due to it being cheaper.

erwinh 6y ago

Check out: https://space-search.io/?search=starlink https://space-search.io/?search=starlink for another type of visualisation of starlink! Doesn't include coverage yet but I do plan to add that with some kind of heatmap. I think these static circles in the OP are a bit deceptive in indicating 'coverage' as these satellites are constantly moving.

hypefi 6y ago

No one is worried about environmental impact? And 5G ?