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> To be clear - it's not novel Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites. Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I

by jve 5y ago

> To be clear - it's not novel Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites. Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Except no-one can provide you with low latency, high speed satellite internet. If you have alternatives (I do where I live) - Starlink is probably not for me. You seem to paint as if starlink is something trivial, as some years ago people were thinking CRAZY - they can't possibly put that much satellites up there. Not to mention that people were really surprised they could put 60 satellites on a single rocket. That they established mass production of satellites. Etc. This kind of comment reminds me of the Dropbox introductionary post [1]: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

wcarey 5y ago
It's not exactly equivalent, but I think the TDRS provides communication between different objects in space.
lmm 5y ago
> Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Iridium has been running sat-to-sat communication links since 1998?
Aloha 5y ago
Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel. Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths. Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper. The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.

by jve 5y ago

wcarey 5y ago

It's not exactly equivalent, but I think the TDRS provides communication between different objects in space.

lmm 5y ago

> Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Iridium has been running sat-to-sat communication links since 1998?

Aloha 5y ago

Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel. Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths. Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper. The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.