
SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites, misses booster landing - ajaviaad
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/spacex-successfully-launches-60-more-starlink-satellites-but-misses-booster-landing/
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_Microft
We have never seen the actual release of the Starlink satellites.

During every launch the hosts on the stream state that an unfortunate
unexpected loss of signal happened but since the stream is stable before and
after payload separation, this would be surprising. One might have thought
that the vehicle was just at an unfortunate point in the trajectory where no
connection was actually possible but today's payload separation event was far
earlier and the video cut off anyways.

It is a bit surprising since the mechanism does not seem that sophisticated.

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nexuist
I'm guessing it might be censored for national security reasons. The same
mechanism that successfully deploys 60 satellites could probably also
successfully deploy 60 warheads. Or 60 nefarious spy satellites.

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skybrian
It's a good question about something that is probably not a coincidence! But
immediately moving to speculating about a conspiracy theory seems like hiding
a good question with a fake answer.

It seems better to keep it unanswered and remain curious.

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ColanR
I don't think it's intellectually honest to label something as a conspiracy
theory and brush it aside without discussion.

~~~
elif
Does "Unfounded speculation about an organized effort to deliberately mislead
the public" do more justice to the subject?

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rleahy22
Do we know if SpaceX has taken any steps to address the issue with Starlink
satellites affecting astronomers' view of the night sky?
[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-
starlink-astronomy/606169/)

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izacus
Is shoveling so much trash over non-american land actually legal?

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gpm
Explicitly so by the outer space treaty.

Not that these launches are launching trash, or launching very much in the
grand scheme of things either.

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hawaiianbrah
How many satellites currently orbit the earth? Aren’t they planning to launch
a thousand or two? That’s a pretty substantial amount of things!

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gpm
There are currently roughly 5000 satellites in orbit (per wikipedia). I don't
have good stats on those 5000 satellites but I _believe_ they are on average
substantially bigger than the starlink satellites.

Either way, a few thousand things spread out over the surface area of the
earth is practically nothing.

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sigstoat
> Either way, a few thousand things spread out over the surface area of the
> earth is practically nothing.

and the surface of a sphere at the altitude they're orbiting at is even
larger. and the satellites are all spread across a variety of altitudes,
relative to their size.

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hawaiianbrah
Satellites already have a nontrivial effort put into keeping their orbits from
colliding with each other. Increasing that number by 50% is not going to be
easy.

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skuthus
Starlink sats are all in LEO, way below the rest of the satellites currently
in orbit

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sigstoat
there's other stuff in low orbits, but contrary to the claim, low earth orbits
aren't carefully planned. you ask for a rough altitude, and then you get
whatever you get, because you probably don't have anything on board for
adjusting your orbit.

it's up in geosynchronous where things are carefully planned, and the
spacecraft can adjust their orbits, and do lots of long term station-keeping.

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jayd16
Any word on when the Starlink service becomes available?

~~~
gpm
From what I've gathered:

They should have enough satellites in the sky, at the right positions, to
start offering limited service around the start of July. This is based off of
Elon's statement that they need 6 launches worth of satellites, educated
guesses on launch dates, assuming that satellites need to move into their
operational positions after that 6th launch, and will take the same amount of
time to do so as previous launches.

They hope to be ready to help out with emergency service connectivity this
hurricane season, which starts roughly speaking in August. That gives them
around a months buffer, which sounds reasonable.

They don't seem to yet be making huge moves to get ground stations up and
running, advertising to consumers, etc. This leads me to believe that the
initial service will not be consumer oriented (probably as they work out the
kinks). We know they're interested in emergency services, and we know the
military is interested, these are likely to be higher paying and more
forgiving customers to start with since they aren't competing with traditional
ISPs at all. For them, somewhat unreliable service is better than no service.

~~~
hadtodoit
The soft-launch of service this year is only expected to cover northern Canada
and the south of South America.

~~~
gpm
I've seen this simulation of what initial coverage should look like (ignoring
ground stations):

[https://streamable.com/3lbqj](https://streamable.com/3lbqj)

Southern Canada/Northern US is where I presume they will actually do testing,
but they should be able to provide reasonable-ish (eyeballing at >80%) uptime
across most of the world provided they can get ground stations.

They'll continue to launch satellites past the first 6 launches too, so
coverage should dramatically improve by the end of the year compared to a June
or August launch.

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ChuckMcM
I love how the headline isn't "SpaceX has more operating satellites in orbit
than any other company." or "SpaceX launches 240 satellites in 90 days." it is
"SpaceX fails to _land_ the booster stage on their latest flight."

That is pretty amazing to me.

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hawaiianbrah
This says that Planet Labs has over 300 satellites:
[https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/private-company-launches-
la...](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/private-company-launches-largest-
fleet-of-satellites-in-human-history-to-photograph-earth-60-minutes/)

~~~
ChuckMcM
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink)
Shows 302 Starlink satellites although only 240 are v1.0, next month with the
Starlink 6 mission it will be moot :-)

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pintxo
Watched the launch this morning from the Saturn V stands at KSC, wow!

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throwaway77384
Also discussed here I think:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348251)

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deegles
Any news on the inter-satellite links?

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shaklee3
Elon says they're using boats now, which, if you read between the lines, it
means that's not working.

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jasoncartwright
Since when is 32MB of GIFs on a webpage OK?

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krallja
How did it affect you? I just loaded the page on my three year old smartphone,
and didn’t even notice the extra bandwidth or CPU usage.

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kaiwen1
OTH, I'm connecting from a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with
metered data. I regret loading that page.

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vezycash
Unlock origin. Go to settings. Look for "Default Behaviour". Under it, you'll
find an option to block media larger than any size you choose.

I put 100KB for mine.

Also, you can install the Firefox extension called Video Image Block. It's a
real data saver.

Lastly, look up bandwidth hero. Can help compress images on a server before it
gets to you. I'm using free heroku tier for mine.

