7 ms·

Starlink V2 Satellites in Trouble

163 points by drmpeg 4y ago

mabbo 4y ago
If it was anyone but SpaceX, this would be a company-ended disaster. Dozens of satellites ruined? That would be an impossible loss. For SpaceX it will be an mildly expensive lesson.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Agreed, they basically launch Starlink satellites for free as they can reuse launch vehicles other customers already paid off. Remains to be seen whether this is intentional or not. Given how a few of the satellites had a much sharper decay in orbit I would lean towards the latter. Doesn't seem to make sense that they would take them up only to bring them down again if they were setting them at a lower orbit.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mabbo 4y ago
    > they basically launch Starlink satellites for free as they can reuse launch vehicles other customers already paid off. Yes and no. First, their customers actually prefer to use previously-flown boosters now. Insurance premiums on launches are slightly higher for first flights because the booster is 'unproven'. But more importantly, there's still big costs involved. The entire second stage of the rocket is expensive to build and it's not reused. Refurbishing the boosters takes time, people, effort. Still cheaper than any of their competitors, and they get it "at cost", but we're still in the tens of millions range.
    - imron 4y ago
      > First, their customers actually prefer to use previously-flown boosters now This is hilarious, and also an incredible testament to the work SpaceX has done in moving the rocket industry forward.
      - 7e 4y ago
        All they had to do was lose a lot of money. Why didn’t anyone else think of that? I see in the article that SpaceX is proudly carrying on their tradition.
        alsodumb 4y ago
        You learn from failures, and failures are expensive. I wouldn’t call SpaceX a money loser though.
        Nevermark 4y ago
        The US, Russia, Europe and China have burned many multiples of SpaceX expenses to find their space programs obsolete. That is what losses look like. SpaceX spent a fraction of their development expenses, and now sells launch services profitably for a fraction of their costs. SpaceX has been a wealth generating dynamo. Raised estimated $9.9 Billion [1] Worth based on recent funding $127 Billion [2] NASA gave them a boost, with the result that NASA is going to save billions as they continue shifting launches to SpaceX. (Cancelling SLS would result in even more savings.) Any perception of overall economic "losses" for SpaceX, its investors, or its customer-partners, comes from incomplete accounting. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-technologies/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te... [2] https://spaceexplored.com/2022/05/23/how-much-is-spacex-worth/ https://spaceexplored.com/2022/05/23/how-much-is-spacex-wort...
    - barbegal 4y ago
      Do you have a source for the insurance premiums being higher? I really doubt that is true but Spacex may offer a discount for previously-flown boosters which acts as an incentive.
  - ulfw 4y ago
    Do they manufacture them 'for free' too? Launches are never free. Cheaper maybe, but free is a vast overstatement of what SpaceX is doing.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      The satellites are a kind of solution to the queuing theory problem. Queues work better when a small proportion of the tasks are very high priority, and a large number of very low priority tasks are available to pack in around them.
  - xoa 4y ago
    Not to pile on but as an addition to what others have said: >as they can reuse launch vehicles Falcon 9 is not fully reusable, "only" the first stage is. That was still an incredible accomplishment, and still saves a great deal of money because the first stage is the largest and has the most engines, which are one of the more complex and expensive parts of any rocket. However, the second stage is expended, so that's a fixed cost each time, IIRC estimates are around $9m. Even the fuel isn't nothing as other costs start to get brought down, F9 burns tens of thousands of gallons of RP-1 per launch and RP-1 isn't free either (probably at least $17/gal, so that's probably at least another half mil). Refurbishment of course but also recovery ships, salaries, launch pad time, it all adds up. Yes by historic scales this is all pretty cheap and SpaceX is certainly large enough with enough cadence, revenue and profit to absorb losses fine, they very intentionally run hardware rich. In a careful manner it should be made clear, they aim to learn things, but they do push to find the edges of the envelope on occasion as well. But it's not remotely free. Don't forget, there is also the lost time and cost of the actual sat capacity, they do actively want these things and are pursuing a cut down while waiting for Starship for a reason. They need more network capacity for Starlink. Losing a bunch of V2 Minis is another pile of monthly revenue they won't be getting for a while longer. The Starship system will be a big step forward in all respects, the first rocket engineered from the ground up around economics. Fully reusable and more easily, cheap to construct, even the fuel is cheap. But even there they still have expensive things to be careful with, they've gotten more cautious recently because losing ground facilities in an explosion at this point would genuinely be very painful and set them back months which itself would represent major opportunity cost. And they can't simply spread things out because of the limits of the geography they're working with right now. It's all still rocket science. Pushing hard in a controlled manner is good, they've done incredibly putting together a system around that and it's paid off. But not being reckless, and major losses are still going to sting.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      At a much smaller and less costly scale than Starship, Stoke Space (Kent, WA) has a plan and has published CGI videos of a proposed fully reusable second stage. Along with something very similar to a Falcon 9 resuable first stage. Whether they are actually able to do it remains to be seen.
  - ianburrell 4y ago
    It doesn't matter if SpaceX gets discounted cost from reused rockets and not taking profit, because SpaceX is losing out on money they could get from selling launch. There is backlog of payloads for Falcon 9 so there opportunity cost for internal launch. The effective cost for Starlink launch is the $67 million that others pay.
- dgrin91 4y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. These aren't satellites like the GPS satellites where each one cost hundreds of millions or billions to make, let alone launch. These are more akin to fancy cube sats where you can mass produce and make them (relatively) cheap. Still very expensive, but if a company was structured around building lots of these then this wouldn't be game ending.
  - ugh123 4y ago
    I think it's more about the launch costs to get replacements back up there fast
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      One launch loss would not ruin most companies.
      - Fatnino 4y ago
        Unless you're virgin orbit
    - entropicgravity 4y ago
      Yes and for SpaceX their launch costs are particularly low as their boosters have been reused up to fifteen times.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Cube sat is a bit of an understatement of the size and complexity of these satellites. IIRC they are roughly the size of a small car (albeit only a few hundred kilograms).
    - _0ffh 4y ago
      Yeah, the comparison would be okay-ish for the old ones, which where about 1m^3 in volume, just big and flat instead of cubes. The new V2 are ~5x the weight @2k8 pounds, the V2 Mini ~3x @1k8 pounds.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Losing a one-off sattelite is very expensive. Losing a handful of satellites that are produced by the thousands in a factory is not quite as big a setback as it may seem.
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    Finding out that there's a systematic issue with a new model that was overlooked until after launch might be, though. It does betray deficiencies in engineering and testing. Then there was that incident where they launched a batch into the wrong kind of space weather, the atmosphere had been heated up by a solar flare, and the ion engine couldn't overcome the increased drag from the temporarily increased density. It looks wasteful.
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      It's hardware rich development.
drmpeg 4y ago
Here's the orbit height tracking plot. https://www.w6rz.net/starlinkv2.jpg https://www.w6rz.net/starlinkv2.jpg
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  I love there's still a place for crude but very clear MRTG style graphics. :)
  - ilyt 4y ago
    You misspelled RRDTools. And it took absolute ages for industry to get to the level where those graphs could be recreated easily in something else. Even now it's pretty hard to recreate something like what https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ does with it.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      The nice thing about smokeping is that a smokeping targets file and its whole configuration under /etc/smokeping/* can be very easily moved between places and set up somewhere new in less than 10 minutes. And its charting of the output of fping does a remarkably good job for such a simple tool. For best results set your smokeping to run on 60s intervals not 300s.
    - sph 4y ago
      And if you want to use smokeping to measure your internet connection for free, there's this: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality I've been using it for years now
      - lloydatkinson 4y ago
        Thanks for sharing this, I had no idea that existed as a thing. I had for a while thought about making something like this, running on some cloud somewhere, pinging home - but looks like I don't need to now.
visviva 4y ago
Pretty mind-blowing if true. That is an unbelievably basic mistake to make.
- jackmott 4y ago
  [dead]
- wilg 4y ago
  a basic mistake huh?
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    In a way, yes. Many of the systems on these satellites rely on math and physics we've only recently mastered, high speed radio telecommunications and all that goes with it is truly magic, a modern marvel. Inertial stuff however, that's all basic Newtonian physics, we've had that mastered for a bit longer. Side note/fun fact - many satellites use tape measures for this purpose, literally tape measures. They're called gravity gradient booms. So, I get your point, it's not a simple mistake compared to me forgetting my keys this morning, but it is a simple mistake in the context of a satellite.
    - wilg 4y ago
      my main point is that its silly to assume the satellite designers at SpaceX made some kind of remedial physics error as opposed to a more subtle error that is the result of engineering or design tradeoffs
      - iancmceachern 4y ago
        I dont know, I'm a designer like that and I make far more remedial errors than errors that were carefully weighed and considered.
        wilg 4y ago
        That's fair enough, but in that light I feel like the parent commenter should be less incredulous.
lozf 4y ago
"Move Fast and Break Things"?
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  > "Move Fast and Break Things"? When satellites are cheap and launching then is cheap, this might be a reasonable approach.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    ... as long as their Kessler Syndrome half-life is low enough. And, you know, you haven't launched thousands of them. Oh. Oops.
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      They launch into a LEO explicitly so this can happen and it won't be a problem.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        The complaints I’ve heard is that LEO is great but there’s a carrying capacity for any orbit and people are worried that starlink is over that limit even for LEO. I’m not orbital mechanics expert but when we discussed it at the time I believe it was agreed that a collision can launch debris into higher orbits but on a parabolic path, so if it doesn’t encounter anything else in a couple orbits it probably never will. Also some of the LEO SpaceX has been approved for are higher than the ISS, not just lower. Kessler is mostly worried about long term debris patterns, but one that cleans itself up in a few months could still cause a many billions in damage and loss of life. Also starlink enables some terrestrial activities that might not be wise without it. A cascade could leave some earthbound people fucked as well. That’s partially on them of course, but the optics are not great.
      - walrus01 4y ago
        All starlink satellites are LEO, just varying degrees of it. They release the satellites from the second stage deliberately quite low, because it's more efficient in total weight carried by second stage, and more efficient in specific impulse to spend weight in kilograms of propellant tankage on the satellite for ion/hall effect type thrusters (specific impulses of 2000 ISP and greater) than to place N additional kg of fuel on the second stage to release them all in a higher orbit. At the release altitude they're above the vast majority of the earth's atmosphere and solar panels + ion thruster burning prograde are sufficient to raise their altitudes to the intended operational orbit.
yumraj 4y ago
Were the SpaceX engineers also deployed to fix Twitter issues, like per some reports Tesla engineers were?
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
walrus01 4y ago
They also lost something like 40 out of 52 satellites when a solar flare caused the atmosphere to temporarily expand, causing more drag than expected before they could all go into thrusting prograde with their ion/hall effect thruster for standard post-release orbit raising. Immediately after launch. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=starlink+launch+solar+flare https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=starlink+... At the scale of 3500+ satellites and automated assembly line production of them this is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. It's unfortunate that this happened but also it's great that if this is in fact the problem with the hardware design of the satellites it was revealed on the very first launch of the "v2.0 mini" production line. I'm sure they're pushing it into a "v2.0 mini rev B1" now or something in Redmond.
mgsouth 4y ago
Anyone care to recap for those of us who'd rather not pull up twitter? The graph linked to in other comments appears to show a deliberate de-orbiting, or at least lowering of orbit. Edit: There appear to be a few people, at least, who think this comment is inappropriate or not-in-the-spirit-of-HN. Fair 'nuff; that would be my opinion also if I thought the asker was being lazy. For the record, I attempted but was unable to find any relevant info by searching for such as "starlink v2 satellite" or "tmfassociates" (the last post on their blog was mid-Feb.) For now, at least, the only source appears to be that twitter post (thread?) The comments here are just informative enough to be maddeningly cryptic ("mind-blowing basic mistake"?)
- elromulous 4y ago
  tl;dr altitude is lower than it should be https://archive.is/gzNG0 https://archive.is/gzNG0
- DlSGUSTlNG 4y ago
  [dead]
Ephil012 4y ago
I think there’s a general trend online where people post tweets on places like Reddit where others might assume the tweet is factual. As a standard disclaimer, just because someone claimed on Twitter that SpaceX messed up the reaction wheels does not mean it’s true. Unless there’s more concrete proof, we should not automatically assume it’s true.
diebeforei485 4y ago
These are the V2-Mini not the V2. And some level of "learning" is expected considering it's only the first launch of these. It's not the entire V2 (or V2-Mini) program in trouble, just this batch.

163 points by drmpeg 4y ago

If it was anyone but SpaceX, this would be a company-ended disaster. Dozens of satellites ruined? That would be an impossible loss. For SpaceX it will be an mildly expensive lesson.

throwntoday 4y ago
Agreed, they basically launch Starlink satellites for free as they can reuse launch vehicles other customers already paid off. Remains to be seen whether this is intentional or not. Given how a few of the satellites had a much sharper decay in orbit I would lean towards the latter. Doesn't seem to make sense that they would take them up only to bring them down again if they were setting them at a lower orbit.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mabbo 4y ago
  > they basically launch Starlink satellites for free as they can reuse launch vehicles other customers already paid off. Yes and no. First, their customers actually prefer to use previously-flown boosters now. Insurance premiums on launches are slightly higher for first flights because the booster is 'unproven'. But more importantly, there's still big costs involved. The entire second stage of the rocket is expensive to build and it's not reused. Refurbishing the boosters takes time, people, effort. Still cheaper than any of their competitors, and they get it "at cost", but we're still in the tens of millions range.
  - imron 4y ago
    > First, their customers actually prefer to use previously-flown boosters now This is hilarious, and also an incredible testament to the work SpaceX has done in moving the rocket industry forward.
    - 7e 4y ago
      All they had to do was lose a lot of money. Why didn’t anyone else think of that? I see in the article that SpaceX is proudly carrying on their tradition.
      - alsodumb 4y ago
        You learn from failures, and failures are expensive. I wouldn’t call SpaceX a money loser though.
      - Nevermark 4y ago
        The US, Russia, Europe and China have burned many multiples of SpaceX expenses to find their space programs obsolete. That is what losses look like. SpaceX spent a fraction of their development expenses, and now sells launch services profitably for a fraction of their costs. SpaceX has been a wealth generating dynamo. Raised estimated $9.9 Billion [1] Worth based on recent funding $127 Billion [2] NASA gave them a boost, with the result that NASA is going to save billions as they continue shifting launches to SpaceX. (Cancelling SLS would result in even more savings.) Any perception of overall economic "losses" for SpaceX, its investors, or its customer-partners, comes from incomplete accounting. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-technologies/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te... [2] https://spaceexplored.com/2022/05/23/how-much-is-spacex-worth/ https://spaceexplored.com/2022/05/23/how-much-is-spacex-wort...
  - barbegal 4y ago
    Do you have a source for the insurance premiums being higher? I really doubt that is true but Spacex may offer a discount for previously-flown boosters which acts as an incentive.
- ulfw 4y ago
  Do they manufacture them 'for free' too? Launches are never free. Cheaper maybe, but free is a vast overstatement of what SpaceX is doing.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    The satellites are a kind of solution to the queuing theory problem. Queues work better when a small proportion of the tasks are very high priority, and a large number of very low priority tasks are available to pack in around them.
- xoa 4y ago
  Not to pile on but as an addition to what others have said: >as they can reuse launch vehicles Falcon 9 is not fully reusable, "only" the first stage is. That was still an incredible accomplishment, and still saves a great deal of money because the first stage is the largest and has the most engines, which are one of the more complex and expensive parts of any rocket. However, the second stage is expended, so that's a fixed cost each time, IIRC estimates are around $9m. Even the fuel isn't nothing as other costs start to get brought down, F9 burns tens of thousands of gallons of RP-1 per launch and RP-1 isn't free either (probably at least $17/gal, so that's probably at least another half mil). Refurbishment of course but also recovery ships, salaries, launch pad time, it all adds up. Yes by historic scales this is all pretty cheap and SpaceX is certainly large enough with enough cadence, revenue and profit to absorb losses fine, they very intentionally run hardware rich. In a careful manner it should be made clear, they aim to learn things, but they do push to find the edges of the envelope on occasion as well. But it's not remotely free. Don't forget, there is also the lost time and cost of the actual sat capacity, they do actively want these things and are pursuing a cut down while waiting for Starship for a reason. They need more network capacity for Starlink. Losing a bunch of V2 Minis is another pile of monthly revenue they won't be getting for a while longer. The Starship system will be a big step forward in all respects, the first rocket engineered from the ground up around economics. Fully reusable and more easily, cheap to construct, even the fuel is cheap. But even there they still have expensive things to be careful with, they've gotten more cautious recently because losing ground facilities in an explosion at this point would genuinely be very painful and set them back months which itself would represent major opportunity cost. And they can't simply spread things out because of the limits of the geography they're working with right now. It's all still rocket science. Pushing hard in a controlled manner is good, they've done incredibly putting together a system around that and it's paid off. But not being reckless, and major losses are still going to sting.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    At a much smaller and less costly scale than Starship, Stoke Space (Kent, WA) has a plan and has published CGI videos of a proposed fully reusable second stage. Along with something very similar to a Falcon 9 resuable first stage. Whether they are actually able to do it remains to be seen.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  It doesn't matter if SpaceX gets discounted cost from reused rockets and not taking profit, because SpaceX is losing out on money they could get from selling launch. There is backlog of payloads for Falcon 9 so there opportunity cost for internal launch. The effective cost for Starlink launch is the $67 million that others pay.
dgrin91 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree. These aren't satellites like the GPS satellites where each one cost hundreds of millions or billions to make, let alone launch. These are more akin to fancy cube sats where you can mass produce and make them (relatively) cheap. Still very expensive, but if a company was structured around building lots of these then this wouldn't be game ending.
- ugh123 4y ago
  I think it's more about the launch costs to get replacements back up there fast
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    One launch loss would not ruin most companies.
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      Unless you're virgin orbit
  - entropicgravity 4y ago
    Yes and for SpaceX their launch costs are particularly low as their boosters have been reused up to fifteen times.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Cube sat is a bit of an understatement of the size and complexity of these satellites. IIRC they are roughly the size of a small car (albeit only a few hundred kilograms).
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    Yeah, the comparison would be okay-ish for the old ones, which where about 1m^3 in volume, just big and flat instead of cubes. The new V2 are ~5x the weight @2k8 pounds, the V2 Mini ~3x @1k8 pounds.
Fatnino 4y ago
Losing a one-off sattelite is very expensive. Losing a handful of satellites that are produced by the thousands in a factory is not quite as big a setback as it may seem.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  Finding out that there's a systematic issue with a new model that was overlooked until after launch might be, though. It does betray deficiencies in engineering and testing. Then there was that incident where they launched a batch into the wrong kind of space weather, the atmosphere had been heated up by a solar flare, and the ion engine couldn't overcome the increased drag from the temporarily increased density. It looks wasteful.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    It's hardware rich development.

drmpeg 4y ago

Here's the orbit height tracking plot. https://www.w6rz.net/starlinkv2.jpg https://www.w6rz.net/starlinkv2.jpg

actionfromafar 4y ago
I love there's still a place for crude but very clear MRTG style graphics. :)
- ilyt 4y ago
  You misspelled RRDTools. And it took absolute ages for industry to get to the level where those graphs could be recreated easily in something else. Even now it's pretty hard to recreate something like what https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ does with it.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    The nice thing about smokeping is that a smokeping targets file and its whole configuration under /etc/smokeping/* can be very easily moved between places and set up somewhere new in less than 10 minutes. And its charting of the output of fping does a remarkably good job for such a simple tool. For best results set your smokeping to run on 60s intervals not 300s.
  - sph 4y ago
    And if you want to use smokeping to measure your internet connection for free, there's this: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality I've been using it for years now
    - lloydatkinson 4y ago
      Thanks for sharing this, I had no idea that existed as a thing. I had for a while thought about making something like this, running on some cloud somewhere, pinging home - but looks like I don't need to now.

visviva 4y ago

Pretty mind-blowing if true. That is an unbelievably basic mistake to make.

jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
wilg 4y ago
a basic mistake huh?
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  In a way, yes. Many of the systems on these satellites rely on math and physics we've only recently mastered, high speed radio telecommunications and all that goes with it is truly magic, a modern marvel. Inertial stuff however, that's all basic Newtonian physics, we've had that mastered for a bit longer. Side note/fun fact - many satellites use tape measures for this purpose, literally tape measures. They're called gravity gradient booms. So, I get your point, it's not a simple mistake compared to me forgetting my keys this morning, but it is a simple mistake in the context of a satellite.
  - wilg 4y ago
    my main point is that its silly to assume the satellite designers at SpaceX made some kind of remedial physics error as opposed to a more subtle error that is the result of engineering or design tradeoffs
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      I dont know, I'm a designer like that and I make far more remedial errors than errors that were carefully weighed and considered.
      - wilg 4y ago
        That's fair enough, but in that light I feel like the parent commenter should be less incredulous.

lozf 4y ago

"Move Fast and Break Things"?

oldgradstudent 4y ago
> "Move Fast and Break Things"? When satellites are cheap and launching then is cheap, this might be a reasonable approach.
- hinkley 4y ago
  ... as long as their Kessler Syndrome half-life is low enough. And, you know, you haven't launched thousands of them. Oh. Oops.
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    They launch into a LEO explicitly so this can happen and it won't be a problem.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      The complaints I’ve heard is that LEO is great but there’s a carrying capacity for any orbit and people are worried that starlink is over that limit even for LEO. I’m not orbital mechanics expert but when we discussed it at the time I believe it was agreed that a collision can launch debris into higher orbits but on a parabolic path, so if it doesn’t encounter anything else in a couple orbits it probably never will. Also some of the LEO SpaceX has been approved for are higher than the ISS, not just lower. Kessler is mostly worried about long term debris patterns, but one that cleans itself up in a few months could still cause a many billions in damage and loss of life. Also starlink enables some terrestrial activities that might not be wise without it. A cascade could leave some earthbound people fucked as well. That’s partially on them of course, but the optics are not great.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      All starlink satellites are LEO, just varying degrees of it. They release the satellites from the second stage deliberately quite low, because it's more efficient in total weight carried by second stage, and more efficient in specific impulse to spend weight in kilograms of propellant tankage on the satellite for ion/hall effect type thrusters (specific impulses of 2000 ISP and greater) than to place N additional kg of fuel on the second stage to release them all in a higher orbit. At the release altitude they're above the vast majority of the earth's atmosphere and solar panels + ion thruster burning prograde are sufficient to raise their altitudes to the intended operational orbit.

yumraj 4y ago

Were the SpaceX engineers also deployed to fix Twitter issues, like per some reports Tesla engineers were?

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

walrus01 4y ago

They also lost something like 40 out of 52 satellites when a solar flare caused the atmosphere to temporarily expand, causing more drag than expected before they could all go into thrusting prograde with their ion/hall effect thruster for standard post-release orbit raising. Immediately after launch. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=starlink+launch+solar+flare https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=starlink+... At the scale of 3500+ satellites and automated assembly line production of them this is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. It's unfortunate that this happened but also it's great that if this is in fact the problem with the hardware design of the satellites it was revealed on the very first launch of the "v2.0 mini" production line. I'm sure they're pushing it into a "v2.0 mini rev B1" now or something in Redmond.

mgsouth 4y ago

Anyone care to recap for those of us who'd rather not pull up twitter? The graph linked to in other comments appears to show a deliberate de-orbiting, or at least lowering of orbit. Edit: There appear to be a few people, at least, who think this comment is inappropriate or not-in-the-spirit-of-HN. Fair 'nuff; that would be my opinion also if I thought the asker was being lazy. For the record, I attempted but was unable to find any relevant info by searching for such as "starlink v2 satellite" or "tmfassociates" (the last post on their blog was mid-Feb.) For now, at least, the only source appears to be that twitter post (thread?) The comments here are just informative enough to be maddeningly cryptic ("mind-blowing basic mistake"?)

elromulous 4y ago
tl;dr altitude is lower than it should be https://archive.is/gzNG0 https://archive.is/gzNG0
DlSGUSTlNG 4y ago
[dead]

Ephil012 4y ago

I think there’s a general trend online where people post tweets on places like Reddit where others might assume the tweet is factual. As a standard disclaimer, just because someone claimed on Twitter that SpaceX messed up the reaction wheels does not mean it’s true. Unless there’s more concrete proof, we should not automatically assume it’s true.

diebeforei485 4y ago

These are the V2-Mini not the V2. And some level of "learning" is expected considering it's only the first launch of these. It's not the entire V2 (or V2-Mini) program in trouble, just this batch.