Something that might not be obvious for people not following space flight closely: this was a launch into a polar orbit from Florida. In the past these would have launched from Vandenberg airforce base in California because there is a clear path towards the south from there.
So, how is SpaceX doing that now? They are conducting a so-called „dog leg“ maneuver. This trajectory leads the rocket further out to the east over the ocean before it turns south. This is to avoid to fly over land/populated area. This had not been done in decades if I remember correctly.
More stuff: the first Starlink satellites for polar orbits also launched on this flight. As I understand these were the first ones to have inter-satellite laser links too.
(I can’t imagine what an improvement cheap and high bandwidth satellite Internet must be for stations in Antarctica.)
This was an incredibly insightful comment, thank you.
I've been following SpaceX relatively closely; as a South African I've cheered on Elon since his PayPal exit - and so for example I had friends over for dinner on the night of the twin Falcon landing (and more recently the crewed Dragon mission).
Please forgive my fanboyism, but now that I've read your points that you've just made, it has shed a whole new (fascinating) light on something I was already passionate about.
Other than that no one really drops stages on neighbors - China drops them on their own (evacuated) villages on land and other rockets are often designed the way they are due to the need of not dropping stages on people - Shavit launching westwards or PSLV/GSLV staging in a specific way to avoid dropping stages on some inhabitted islands.
This CalPoly presentation takes an ecological view and suggests that constellations of several hundred or more could be too many, if poorly managed. I would hope that we could manage orders of magnitude more safely with planning/control software and good thinking. http://mstl.atl.calpoly.edu/~workshop/archive/2016/Spring/Da...
There are more than 1 billion cars on earth. Cubesats are smaller than a car and can be distributed in an additional dimension (altitude). I think there is little risk of oversaturation currently.
Well, cars can park (and stay parked most of the time). Cars generally do not go offroad.
Also, cars do not go 8 km/s (30 Mm/h, 17k mph). That really compensates the actual satellite size. And a single debris can ruin your day at these speeds.
Cars spend most of their time at rest, don't travel at cosmic speeds, and when they collide, don't send tens of thousands of pieces of shrapnel flying around the world for months/decades.
Cars seem to have a lot in common actually: satellites are "at rest" most of the time, it just that this rest could be a hazard as some point; but a car parked badly, around a sharp turn or in the middle of the highway would be a hazard as well. Cars can collide too, they can leave debris, which can become dangerous themselves for other cars, or pollute the nature around from leaks, ...
The only reason I'd say cars are in a "better" situation is simply because we can clean up. We don't do it yet with satellites.
Other cars can steer around a badly stopped car. Satellites can't. A better analogy would be if once they entered their lane, cars would have to travel down it at their maximum speed, without being able to steer, or brake. Under those constraints, I, uh, wouldn't get into a car.
Cars are also not phased if they run over a loose bolt. The same can't be said for satellites.
> We don't do it yet with satellites.
Basic orbital mechanics indicates that we won't ever be able to clean up Kessler-syndrome space debris in a remotely-economical manner. There'd be too much of it, and it would travel at vastly disjoint orbits.
Satellites have propulsion and sometimes adjust orbit.
Maybe a bolt wont break your car, but a nail will flatten your tire.
And most of the time we don't clean much the highways: a lot of small debris end up here and there...
The problem is indeed that cleanup is expansive and not interesting when it's not such a big hazard, but after some time the sum of those small hazards become a big problem, and the sum of cleanups almost impossible.
I'm not spinning anything, and the scenario I'm responding to (62k satellites in one launch) has not occurred. I've been a fan of SpaceX for years, but apparently even a whiff of anything short of pure adoration is enough to send some fanboys into a tizzy. It's tiresome.
> [...] even a whiff of anything short of pure adoration is enough to send some fanboys into a tizzy. It's tiresome.
I think it's more that the question you asked, _in the way you asked it_, is so oft-repeated and shallow that it's indistinguishable from concern trolling or other similar kinds of low effort drive-by sniping.
Of course that doesn't mean that your question was insincere. But consider that pretty much anyone who has shown the slightest bit of interest in spaceflight has probably seen nearly that exact question hundreds, if not thousands of times. It's nearly as common as "why are we spending money on space when there are still so many problems to fix down here on Eaaaaarth?" It's likewise not a constructive question, and it's just not reasonable to expect a positive response.
EDIT: By the way, I do find the question of what to do about all the stuff already zipping around in various Earth orbits, and how we regulate the addition of new satellites to be a really interesting and important topic. It's only that I've never seen "how much X is too much X" — especially when asked in response to a report of someone doing X — generating meaningful discussion. How about... "if one country regulates its own space industry to mitigate addition of new LEO debris (limits, tracking, investing in clean-up tech), then at least some other countries will just ignore it. Are there any existing multilateral agreements in place for this stuff specifically, or maybe agreements in other domains that have successfully avoided similar kinds of tragedy of the commons down on Earth? Nuclear disarmament and ocean protection aren't working perfectly, but have had some positive impact..."
> I've been a fan of SpaceX for years, but apparently even a whiff of anything short of pure adoration is enough to send some fanboys into a tizzy. It's tiresome.
I think it's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction leftover from when SpaceX was still trying to get its foot in the door and was more vulnerable to the whims of public opinion (since early on, it was wholly dependent on NASA contracts which strong public pressure could get cut).
Spaceflight is also one of those subjects that tends to attract opinions and fears more based in sensationalized headlines and Hollywood depictions than reality. This is natural since space isn't exactly accessible to general public, but it can be frustrating for enthusiasts, especially since unfounded claims spread much more widely and quickly than corrections do.
All that said, no company is above criticism and I do not encourage fanboyism.
> I think it's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction leftover from when SpaceX was still trying to get its foot in the door and was more vulnerable to the whims of public opinion (since early on, it was wholly dependent on NASA contracts which strong public pressure could get cut).
> Spaceflight is also one of those subjects that tends to attract opinions and fears more based in sensationalized headlines and Hollywood depictions than reality. This is natural since space isn't exactly accessible to general public, but it can be frustrating for enthusiasts, especially since unfounded claims spread much more widely and quickly than corrections do.
Well said.
> All that said, no company is above criticism
Agreed.
> and I do not encourage fanboyism.
Nah man, it's cool to be a fanboy of SpaceX. But I think the point is that we're not overly sensitive to criticism of SpaceX.
Ehh, your phrasing was dangerously close to the "how many is too many" political rhetoric that typically connotes not only the existence of a moral boundary but having already crossed the boundary and caused significant damage. That's what set people off, not "a whiff of anything short of pure adoration."
A small change, like tweaking the phrasing to "is there a limit?," would have avoided the landmine and signaled that you were looking for a good faith engineering discussion rather than political headbutting.
If LEO space were priced as real estate / property and assuming there are currently little restriction to zoning. SpaceX is about to own most of it.
I am thinking of it like a Game of Monopoly but SpaceX currently has anywhere from 5 - 10 rounds of head start if not more.
Interestingly once you start thinking about it. If TSMC were blown up by CCP. Samsung and Intel would caught up to their progress and volume within 2 years time.
Compare to SpaceX AFAIK There are currently nothing remotely close to SpaceX's offering within 3-4 years time frame.
Usually, a satellite that launches from a country has to abide by that country's regulations.
As a requirement for getting regulatory approval to launch your satellite, I think you have to submit a debris management plan, which can include raising a geostationary satellite to a graveyard orbit after EOL (GEO is really far from earth, it would take a lot of fuel to de-orbit them), or lower a low-earth orbit to an altitude at which it would decay in a few weeks or years.
Generally, I think these small satellites are quite cheap both to launch and manufacture, do not have a great lifespan, and certainly not have lots of fuel. So they are most likely intended for LEO, and a low one with that, where atmospheric drag is small, but could bring a satellite down in a few (~5-7) years. Hopefully smaller than the rate at which the operator renews them.
Picking LEO has many benefits: lower latency, higher bandwidth, smaller antennas, higher resolution for pictures, with a few drawbacks: more earth shadow, faster ground velocity, smaller coverage for earth sensors.
American regulations. Because of ITAR, SpaceX cannot legally export any of their development or manufacturing. This means they are, and will always be, subject to all the other American regulation too.
And there is precedent that even if an American company launches their satellite from somewhere that is not the USA, they still have to follow all the American regulation. See FCC and Swarm Technologies over the SpaceBee 1-4 launch.
I think it's inportant to note that a traditional 3 ton sattelite and a cubesat will have totally different lifetimes, and that articles appears to assume a larger satellite
Yea, I saw that. It seems the key thing is the ratio of surface area to mass. It seems reasonable for a smaller satellite to have higher surface area to mass, and thus deorbit faster, but I don't have a handy link to that data.
The Planetary Society Lightsail 1 mission was a 3U cubesat and went down really quickly from LEO once it unfurled its solar sail - IIRC it basically multiplied its cross-section 300 times.
Interesting. Spacex says it's 5 years for the 550km orbit without propulsion. Maybe the orbit isn't perfectly circular or something else changes the maths.
So like little space drones? But way more subtle I guess. Like a mini blowtorch prodding this little thing along, and in the background, a giant view of Earth, below.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Nationalistic flamewar is particularly not where we want to go here.
The mission was PSLV-C37, but they also didn't tell you that the SpaceX flight was F9-106 or that it flew on booster B1058. Would you describe that as the BBC's anti-American stance at work? Or maybe the serial numbers tacked on to the missions aren't really newsworthy, and anyone who wants more specific details can type "104 satellites" into google?
I vouched you comment back up because I think it's worth linking, but no need to ascribe some sort of malicious motive to the BBC here.
More stuff: the first Starlink satellites for polar orbits also launched on this flight. As I understand these were the first ones to have inter-satellite laser links too.
(I can’t imagine what an improvement cheap and high bandwidth satellite Internet must be for stations in Antarctica.)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1353408098342326276