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I have also carefully red entire article and only found single reason that could, well, maybe, explain the alarmistic title. There are three possible explanati
by lmilcin 5y ago
I have also carefully red entire article and only found single reason that could, well, maybe, explain the alarmistic title.
There are three possible explanations I see:
1. Either Starlink is overeoptimistic at its reliability at locating satellites and maintaining separation down to couple of meters of resoultion.
2. or the other operators don't have similar capability and are alarming they can't keep up with moving their satellites that were not designed for so many maneuvers to keep separation.
3. They just want to bad PR for Starlink because they are not happy with aggressive competition.
It seems to me that Starlink is quite precise (or optimistic, I can't tell) at locating their satellites which makes sense. When you have so many you can't be constantly moving them about to keep at least 1km separation. It would probably be cheaper if you could predict the minimum separation to much lower distances, like 50m.
But the other operators either did not anticipate this or don't want to keep investing just to keep being able maintaining their fleet.
- zadler 5y agoIt’s also possible that starlink are somewhat neglecting their responsibility to keep appropriate distances between satellites because they find that financial risk acceptable and want to signal to other operators that they should get out of the way. Essentially a game of chicken where Starlink has the upper hand because a loss is not such a problem for them.
- mlindner 5y ago> It seems to me that Starlink is quite precise (or optimistic, I can't tell) at locating their satellites which makes sense. The satellites have GPS on board. If your car can be placed to a resolution of meters, so can satellites. That is true of most satellites as well.
- lmilcin 5y agoIt is one thing to be able to locate stationary car and another to locate satellite that moves at 8km/s and yet another to predict the minimum distance between two satellites intersecting at 12km/s.