
SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records - toomuchtodo
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/11/watch-spacex-livestream-launching-second-starlink-internet-mission.html
======
gt565k
Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink.

Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub
100ms due to the LEO distance advantage.

Global coverage with decent latency!

I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure.

Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in
wireless tech and satellite internet become available to the masses.

~~~
LeoPanthera
> Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink.

The Starlink receiver is the size of a pizza box (and cannot get smaller,
since that is the size of the necessary antenna) - and doesn't work while
moving.

So it's impractical to use on cars.

What Tesla probably could do is put a receiver at every Supercharger and
broadcast wifi there. It would be especially useful at the more rural
locations.

~~~
zlsa
With the USAF, SpaceX has demonstrated 610mbps[0] to the cockpit of an
aircraft in flight.

[0]: [https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-
starlin...](https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlink-
broadband-services-in-2020/)

~~~
gscott
It would be great for the military, future warfare will be all about having
the best signal through all of the jamming from the other side.

------
toomuchtodo
TLDR:

* 4th landing for this first stage booster. Estimated first stage service life is ten launches prior to inspection, one hundred flights total

* Fairings were reused from a previous launch, unable to be recovered due to rough seas this launch

* 360-400 satellites required in the constellation to transition from "bent pipe" to intra-constellation data routing

* 1200 satellites provides global coverage

* Starlink satellites have a five year service life

* SpaceX board recognized in 2012 that satellite comms has a much higher margin than satellite launch services

------
callesgg
One off the satellites where apparently already dead and would not respond to
commands when they got it mounted on the rocket.

But they launched it anyway.

~~~
bane
I've been having this hard to articulate notion that humanity hasn't really
begun to fathom the changes that will come with "cheap" launch vehicles.

We have better than half a _century_ where space launch was so expensive, and
so rare, that this had an impact on the payloads themselves. Perversely it
caused the payloads to become so highly engineered (for a variety of reasons)
that they also became ultra-expensive in-line with the launch vehicle and
launch opportunity cost.

This also created a negative feedback loop that because the payload was
expensive, the launch vehicle had to be extra reliable and thus cost more.

Think of the entire lifetime program expense (R&D, launch, repair, etc.) for
the Hubble program, billions upon billions of dollars to basically put a large
1 MP sensor at the end of a tube with a digital radio for communications.

What would happen if this program cost went into hundred of launches, every
month, for decades? We could launch not only an equivalent, but
technologically improving payload every month? Why not make the device
cheaper? Experiment a bit? Who cares if one fails? Maybe launch 2, 3, 4 at a
time? Have constellations of Hubbles spread throughout the system? What if
Hubble was 300 telescopes with massive 20MP sensors clustered into a
distributed virtual telescope the size of the orbit of Mars?

When the launch costs, and cadence drop so low, it doesn't really matter if
your satellite doesn't work because you didn't spend 15 years of R&D, and a
billion dollars putting up as technologically "perfect" a device as possible,
you fab another one, maybe with better parts, and put it up next month instead
and write-off the couple hundred thousand as cost of doing business. It's all
still cheaper than the alternative.

Smallsats were a kind of way to try to squeeze costs down by simply cutting
capability, size, and power. But the cost of a smallsat in orbit was still
dominated by the cost of the launch. What if you could launch a fully capable
space platform (not a compromised small sat) for less than the cost of a
shared-ride smallsat.

With the tonnage going up comes more capability as a by-product. The ISS took
over 40 flights to get ultra expensive space hab parts into orbit. A SpaceX
Starship might be able to life equivalent mass in 5 launches, at a fraction of
the cost. What if, instead of one space station every 20 years, we get two per
year?

We have no idea what's about to happen in the next decade.

~~~
akira2501
> billions upon billions of dollars to basically put a large 1 MP sensor at
> the end of a tube with a digital radio for communications.

That's such a gross over-simplification of what the Hubble platform is and
what it is capable of that it annoys me.

First, there are _six_ scientific sensor packages on the Hubble craft. These
have been swapped out and upgraded several times during its life with a
process that allowed us to bring the failed instruments back to surface and
study them.

Second, it's not just scientific instruments.. the Hubble is one of the few
satellites to have a fine guidance system, that allows it to lock onto and
then _track_ with extreme precision exceptionally distant objects. The newer
JWST is the only other telescope with similar capabilities.

This system has also been upgraded during the several servicing missions that
were a planned part of the entire mission, which is another reason the initial
costs were so high. This is an exceptionally advanced program to launch one of
the most advanced scientific instruments we created up to that point.

Finally, I think it's also worth pointing out that Hubble was launched into
orbit over 29 years ago and it's still working.. which is incredibly
impressive considering it has to transit between Earth's shadow and direct
sunlight every 47 minutes.

This thing is as _far_ from "a 1MP sensor at the end of a can attached to a
radio" as you can possibly get. By the way, we could have made it larger.. but
congress wanted to keep the price under $100 million. (Or about $201 million
in Today's dollars).

> We could launch not only an equivalent, but technologically improving
> payload every month?

If all you're doing is making phone calls and routing packets, sure. If you're
trying to do legitimate astrophysical science it seems almost an entirely
worthless attribute.

> We have no idea what's about to happen in the next decade.

I think your reasoning is exactly backwards. We only launched highly specific
and purpose built scientific instruments because it was the only thing _worth_
doing with our previous limited and highly government subsidized launch
activities.

There was simply no way to commercialize those launches, and now that we
entering an era where you easily can see long term value in them, you're
simply going to see typical commercial activities and value realization
behavior when they utilize this destination. It's absurdly predictable.

~~~
bane
I think your response almost perfectly exemplifies the kind of luddism that's
going to get washed away in the tsunami of stuff heading north up the gravity
well.

We know today that the Hubble instrument cost about $4.7 billion, and lifetime
costs as of 2010 are around $10 billion [1] which doesn't appear to have
included launch costs (1 initial launch and I believe 5 servicing missions)
which at around $450 million per launch is quite a bill of around $2.7 billion
in total program launch costs.

One might try to make the argument that shuttle missions involved multiple
mission objectives for each launch (and thus the total cost shouldn't be borne
by the HST alone). However, HST servicing missions were designed around the
shuttle, making it mandatory for the servicing mission and thus the entire
cost is a minimum regardless of other shuttle duties.

For example, STS-61, the mission to repair the HST (plus a few other odds and
ends) required one of the most complex mission profiles in history. I can't
find solid figures on how much the mission cost, but I'm guessing it was on
the order of around $1 billion dollars, launch costs included. I think it
could be argued that such a complex mission was worth the cost in terms of
maybe crew and mission planning experience, but my central argument is, in a
cheap launch future, such a mission (and all servicing missions) would be
entirely pointless -- which not only would be cheaper, but allow more advanced
sensing packages to be put up over time with less of a risk to the lives of
the astronaut crews.

Suppose Falcon-9 Heavy technology existed when the Hubble was launched. Here
might be a take on an entirely different program:

1 - Separate satellites for each orthogonal sensing package. Say maybe, 1x
FOC/FOS, 1x GHRS/HRS, 1x HSP, and 1x WFPC. So a constellation of 4 satellites
to start with.

2 - Let's build all missions off of a single designed "things in a can"
platform so we can realize cheaper costs over time. Let's assume an expected
life-span of 4 years (the time between STS-61 and STS-82). So we can reduce
the per device cost from $4.7 billion/per to probably something more in line
with reality. Maybe $250 million/per so we can at least gold plate it a bit,
but keep it within the original budget per instrument.

3 - Launch mass of the original HST was about 11.1 metric tonnes. Since we're
getting rid of stuff, we can shave that down to probably <11 tonnes per
satellite.

4 - A F9Heavy can shove 63,800 kg to LEO, which is about where the HST sits
(with periodic reboosts during servicing missions). That means we can put the
entire constellation up in one launch with room to spare.

5 - So no we're now in program year 5 and total cost (minus ground station and
staff and such) is $1.09 billion. Even with a complete failure of one of the
satellites, the replacement cost is $300 million ($250 for another satellite +
$50 for an F9 launch). At 5 years in, with an equivalent optics failure as the
HST, we're at $1.39 billion for a program of greater capability and one failed
device.

6 - Over the years, the HST servicing missions added the ACS, COS, NICMOS,
STIS, and the WFPC2 and WFC3 instruments. The COSTAR was never needed, and
never needed to be replaced by the COS. That's two servicing missions that
never had to happen at all! We've just shaved off almost another billion
dollars from the program. For that cost, we can almost repeat the entire first
launch and shove another 4 satellites of the the same capability in the air.
So we do that and we're extend the life of the HSP and the WFPC missions
beyond what actually happened and we're at a total cost of around $2.5
billion.

7 - We go ahead and do two more F9Heavy launches to clear out the mission
backlog and now we have 14 satellites conducting mission, _in orbit_ , for
almost exactly the cost of just the original HST device, and no lives risked
on servicing missions. With the remaining funds, we can deorbit failed
satellites, engineer better/different sensing packages, and put _another_ 14
satellites in orbit. Hell, there's enough spare launch capacity in the flight
plan to put a couple JWSTs, CXOs, and roadsters up as well.

8 - We don't know what Starship launch costs might be, but they could
significantly expand these kinds of mission profiles. Musk's crazy claim is $2
million per, and could shove maybe 6-8 HST-class satellites up in one go.

9 - For $2 million per launch, why the hell are we putting up $250 million
dollar devices? Why not get crazy, set up an assembly line for "things in a
can" space sensing devices and crank them out at $500,000 per can and radio
setup with a "bring your own sensor" policy? Who the fuck cares if the STIS
mission didn't pan out? Deorbit the sucker and put two more up next month!

At the scale of nation states and large corporations, it means space platforms
become as disposable as they de facto actually are.

[1] [https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/499224main_JWST-ICRP_Report-
FINAL.p...](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/499224main_JWST-ICRP_Report-FINAL.pdf)

------
ianai
Are there photos of just the Starlink satellites? I know the impressiveness of
the stack of them, but I can’t tell what I’m looking at without seeing one
outside of the stack. It’s like showing a photo of a geologic specimen without
a scale reference.

~~~
skykooler
It's not a photo, but there's a render (originally from SpaceX's Starlink
website): [https://techcrunch.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/05/satellite_...](https://techcrunch.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/05/satellite__ANTENNA.jpg)

The red arrows indicate the phased-array antennas.

------
Havoc
4th reuse. Wow didn't realise they were that deep in already. Thought reuse
was still conceptual

~~~
vvanders
Also first re-use of a faring as well, which is awesome because they're
apparently not that cheap to make.

~~~
tbabb
I do wonder if that fairing endeavor will come out net positive over the
lifetime of Falcon. They paid for a specialized boat to catch the things, and
iterated on the boat design several times.

Starship is the real reusability project; Falcon is now just holding on to
revenue while they get Starship ready to take over the entire launch market
(including their own).

The fairing is passive, I really wonder if it would have been more cost
effective to try and reduce the fairing cost to a (few) hundred thousand bucks
or so instead of going to all the trouble of catching it.

Although maybe this is best seen as R&D cost for the eventual Starship
architecture?

~~~
CydeWeys
I've been thinking about this, and it seems doubtful. The fairings are under a
million dollars apparently, so they'd have to recover many dozens if not
hundreds to pay back the investment into all the catching technologies. It's
not clear that they'll ever use that many fairings before switching over
entirely to BFR.

~~~
mdorazio
Fairings cost upwards of $5M per launch. The technology for the boat basically
consists of some arms (with shock absorbers) welded to the deck and a big net
strung between them. The boat itself is chartered, not owned by SpaceX as far
as I know. The only real tech development is in the parachute systems for the
fairings, which also aren't particularly advanced.

I can't imagine positive ROI requiring more than 4 or 5 recoveries.
Personally, I'm kind of disappointed they didn't go with a skyhook concept,
but getting that system to work with something the size and drag of a half-
fairing would probably be a nightmare.

~~~
skunkworker
I remember reading that the fairing build time is also fairly long (months?
but I can't find the reference, it might've been a comment on /r/spacex), so
it's trying to minimize the cost + build time.

------
andy_ppp
How easy will star-link be to block, for example in Russia say or China?

~~~
modeless
Not easy to block with technical means over a large area. But easy to block
with legal means. The way Starlink works the system needs to know exactly
where each terminal is, so SpaceX doesn't have plausible deniability about
serving customers in areas that prohibit it.

It would make much more sense for them as a business to try to provide
censored service to China so that they could openly sell to the Chinese. Elon
has business ties in China now with Tesla and I don't see him trying to be a
rebel with SpaceX now. He needs that Chinese revenue to fund his Mars mission.

~~~
mlindner
> Not easy to block with technical means over a large area. But easy to block
> with legal means. The way Starlink works the system needs to know exactly
> where each terminal is, so SpaceX doesn't have plausible deniability about
> serving customers in areas that prohibit it.

That is incorrect. SpaceX doesn't need to know where a terminal is for it to
work. The Terminal itself though will know where it is, as it needs that
information to calculate the pointing angles of the phased array to the
satellite orbits.

~~~
gruez
But you can proximate where the clients are based on where the satellite is.
Since they're flying low, there can't be that much deviation in ground
location between the client and the satellite. You could get plausible
deniability if the satellite is flying over border regions, but there's very
little excuse to not enforce chinese censorship regulations when flying over
the middle of china.

------
udfalkso
Are they recovering the fairing again?

~~~
lachlan-sneff
Not this time, apparently the weather was too bad for the ships to go out.

~~~
eps
Yeah, but the sea was calm and the weather looked fine on the booster landing
video from the platform.

------
marktangotango
The money quote imo, I haven't read this explicitly stated before:

 _Shotwell said the company’s board of directors in 2012 realized the profit
margins from the commercial satellites it was launching for customers were
“much higher” than SpaceX’s launch business. Musk estimates Starlink could
generate more than $30 billion per year – at least 10 times what SpaceX could
bring in at best from its launch business._

What other customers businesses will they seek to cannibalize next?

~~~
nradov
Iridium isn't really a direct competitor to Starlink. The Iridium ground
station can be much smaller (like a cell phone) and it's intended for a
different set of customers with much lower data bandwidth requirements.

~~~
oh_sigh
Is there any reason future starlink satellites couldn't have similar
functionality? If 1% of the planned starlink satellites also supported the
1.6GHz band which I believe iridium uses, you could blanket the earth in a
similar manner with this low bandwidth service.

------
soulofmischief
When is Twitter going to ban that spammy Elon bot?

------
heyflyguy
The final cage match to settle dominance between Musk and Bezos is going to be
so epic.

~~~
Diederich
All hyperbole aside, I am looking forward to seeing Blue Origin's offerings
actually operational.

Having said that, my understanding is that BO has nothing even planned for
full re-use. They are going for 1st stage re-use only, similar to what Falcon
9 is doing right now.

SpaceX Starship, which is well under development, and has had two very short
test hops, is fully re-usable. Musk said that each Starship flight to orbit
and back costs a TOTAL of $2m, including fuel and operational overhead. The
currently expendable 2nd stage on Falcon 9 costs several times more than that,
and Blue Origin's 2nd stage should be in the same cost category.

------
aaron695
Will there be a Starlink train again and where?

------
guelo
Goodbye amateur astronomy
[https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=1...](https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=153933)

~~~
derekp7
If you don't mind me asking, What time of night was that image taken? That
looks like sunlight reflected off the satellites, so it must have been just
after sunset or just prior to dawn (where the satellites are illuminated but
it is dark on the ground) -- or am I mistaken? And is that still an issue
after the satellites were raised to their target orbit?

Also, this being a composite image, I'm assuming it is from multiple
exposures. Can the software that merges the images together also filter out
the satellites? And how is it that just 60 satellites do this, but the 2000 or
so currently in orbit don't exhibit this behavior?

~~~
sq_
There was definitely a _huge_ amount of controversy over this after the first
Starlink launch. If I'm remembering correctly, the problems got significantly
better after the satellites moved to their final orbits and oriented their
solar panels correctly.

Additionally, SpaceX promised to do their best to lower the albedo of this
second set of sats, which, based on side-by-side pictures of the two stacks of
sats, they seem to have done.

In my opinion, there's definitely reason to be afraid of the effects of
Starlink on astronomy, but SpaceX also seems reasonably receptive to making
changes in order to lessen the impact.

------
Trisell
I’m not sure that Starlink is supposed to make money. I think it’s another
part of the get Musk to Mars plan. If you are going to a planet with unknown
resources what is the easiest way to bootstrap communications. Is it bury 100k
of km of wire? Or just plug a bunch of “cheap” satellites into a low Mars
orbit? Makes total sense in that light to try it here. I’m not convinced these
plans and products are designed to make money as much as bootstrap humans
living on another planet.

~~~
mlindner
Starlink very clearly is supposed to make money and has been stated many
times... It's there to provide revenue for Mars vehicle development.

Communications development for Mars before even having a launch vehicle for
Mars payload delivery is putting the cart before the horse. You don't need a
global network of satellites to communicate with Mars.

