It's not that it will worsen, it's that it will never stabilize at a reasonable level.
When did America stop dreaming big? On colonizing/exploring Mars and hating on Musk
- Thread starter arcite
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You're discounting Musk's 5D chess moves. He's purposely alienating people so that he has no other option but to decamp for Mars. That gives him further impetus to ensure the speedy success of the project.
/poe
/poe
What do you bet before each failure some rocket engineer told management about that failure mode and was ignored/told to shut up?
It seems unlikely. Most of the issues have been anticipated and had fixes in the works even before the risks were realized
In example the water deluge system for the pad and a new heatshield being installed for IFT-5
"Well believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid, and... I went ahead anyway."
Its a tradeoff of money for time mostly. We have now way of knowing how many things they thought might fail but didn't
Everything publicly described about SpaceX's
Edit to add: They probably acquired useful data about how their in-progress design changes stack up against the issues observed, too. Not enough, off the mark, sufficient, overkill, etc.
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A piece from Business Insider, via Yahoo News: Elon Musk's Starlink Satellites could burn up the ozon layer, scientists warn.
I strongly suggest reading the whole article, but the main issue is here:
Journalist Karl Bode over on Bluesky put it shortly:
Bode also discussed the level of discussion of these issues on here on Ars in this three-post thread that starts here:
If this is getting outside attention from other journalists, I think that it points to it being an issue that needs to be confronted sooner rather than later.
I strongly suggest reading the whole article, but the main issue is here:
Journalist Karl Bode over on Bluesky put it shortly:
Bode also discussed the level of discussion of these issues on here on Ars in this three-post thread that starts here:
If this is getting outside attention from other journalists, I think that it points to it being an issue that needs to be confronted sooner rather than later.
Not a Musk defender by any means, but per NASA, several tons of meteoric material hits Earth every day:
Also don't harbor any pretenses of being a physicist or geologist, but aluminum oxide, or alumina is one of the most common substances in the Earth's crust. On a daily basis, how much tonnage of the Starlink constellation is reentering the lower regions of the atmosphere, especially compared to the quantities already doing so?
Also don't harbor any pretenses of being a physicist or geologist, but aluminum oxide, or alumina is one of the most common substances in the Earth's crust. On a daily basis, how much tonnage of the Starlink constellation is reentering the lower regions of the atmosphere, especially compared to the quantities already doing so?
Aluminium oxide isn’t the main constituent of meteorites, it’s silicon and iron, so the chemistry will be different. Further more, the Earth’s crust is somewhat below the upper atmosphere and rocks on the ground tend not to be found up there, so the preponderance of alumina in the crust is a irrelevant.
round numbers: 6k satellites in orbit now, 42k satellites total possible planned. Approx 5year design lifespan means replacing around 20% of the fleet every year. No idea if that amount of stuff is a lot of a little for burning up as space junk. Also, Starlink is not the only such constellation planned, though maybe the only big one currently already operating?
If the revolution in launch was reusability, would that also have benefits for the satellites themselves? What would it refuel instead of deorbit them?
Not feasible because their on-orbit lifetime is limited by radiation tolerance and a desire to roll out upgrades quickly. Reusability doesn't even enter into it, if they wanted them to last 20 years they easily could, 20 years is the norm.
Yep. Pretty much disposable satellites. The economics have changed, if it costs you a bajillion dollars to launch a satellite, you want your money’s worth from each launch, so long lived satellites and not many of them. Drop that cost massively and you don’t need to care so much about the satellite, if it dies, just send another one up there.
Also, satellites in low orbit (to reduce latency) will have an intrinsically shorter lifespan because they will (as like the Starlink sats) deorbit relatively quickly. They'd need to engage in regular reboosting which would almost certainly make them both larger and more costly.
I think that is probably not such a serious constraint because SpaceX uses argon hall effect thrusters with extremely good ISP, like 2500s or something. Up until the 00's it was basically all hydrazine monopropellant, which is like 220s, and they could still get good lifetimes in LEO.
Starlink is a good thing though it needs competition. Taiwan planning to put up its own constellation because they know Musk won’t help them.
But man we‘re filling up the atmosphere with junk, as if CO2 wasn’t enough.
But man we‘re filling up the atmosphere with junk, as if CO2 wasn’t enough.
This just popped up in my news feed. It's amazing how much bullshit this guy can get away with. But I do think the Optimus robot can do at least as good a job at raising children and being a companion as Elon.
Claims that go beyond requiring a "pinch of salt" as the article suggests.
I wonder if that would also have the side benefit of showing that Taiwan can, hypothetically, launch a bunch of stuff on a ballistic trajectory if they really want to. (Although maybe that’s just table stakes for a country at their level of development anyway).
Once Starship really gets going it's very conceivable they could just go pick up old Starlink satellites instead of deorbiting them., I have serious doubts as to whether they would be able to have any impact on the atmosphere, I would need to see some hard data proving causation.
I do expect Starlink satellites to get bigger and longer lived as they mature. Right now the tech is changing too fast to leave them up there for long.
I do expect Starlink satellites to get bigger and longer lived as they mature. Right now the tech is changing too fast to leave them up there for long.
I've been thinking we're unlikely to see many (if any!) of the "full size" V2 satellites which need Starship for deployment. They're due to iterate to V3 (or at least V2.5) pretty soon anyway (based on prior performance)
Which is worse for the atmosphere? The satellites burning up as they deorbit? Or burning fuel to send a Starship up to grab them? Yes they would probably send the Starship up with new satellites and deorbit the old ones, but they’d still need to send it up with extra fuel to maneuver around And pick the old satellites up from their various orbits. And then with more mass coming down they’d need more fuel for the deceleration burn. Alternatively they could launch them off towards the sun, but that too would require more fuel to get the Starship up to the right velocity to send the satellites out of orbit.
Any which way you slice it, retrieval with a Starship isn’t free from a greenhouse gas perspective. Perhaps in the far future when we can mine fuel off planet???
How you'd handle it if you were going to do it at all would be to have the satellites maneuver themselves into a parking orbit ready for pickup close to the launch orbit for the new satellites.
Unclear if you're paying attention? The concern for deorbiting them is that the aluminum oxide may deplete the ozone layer. That is a different concern than it being a greenhouse gas. Any chemistry that acts as an ozone destroying catalyst is damaging to humans and the environment at many orders of magnitude lower concentrations.
We will have robot build this in space and ship them to earth (and its orbit).
Yes, I get that. Thats why I didn’t say “would be as bad as” or really make any other comparison of the relative impact of the two approaches. I just noted that it wasn’t free of all environmental impacts, which I’m not sure that you’re disagreeing with. I would be curious to know what the back of the napkin math is for the relative impact of both I just don’t have the chops to do that.
We just need more fiber and less satellite Internet. Satellite needs to be a fallback and secondary option rather than becoming the norm.
Kind of hard to get fiber to airplanes and ships. The service being reachable from developed land is just a bonus feature
But airplanes and ships are a tiny market that cannot support megaconstellations. And it's not clear the terrestrial market can either, at least, not to the level needed to support starship.
Getting fiber out to thinly populated areas is a major selling point of Starlink. There have been plenty of stories on the FP where many users in the USA—some not even all that remote—can't get broadband. Domestic ISPs aren't very helpful in this regard. Used to have a manager that didn't live in the middle of nowhere, but who was quoted $30K to install fiber in her house situated at the end of a long driveway. There are plenty of roadblocks thrown out toward consumers in less-than-ideal cases. For some, terrestrial options don't exist at all.
There are over 100,000 large merchant vessels. The rate for maritime customers is between $250-$5000/mo. If you can charge them $1,000/mo that would be over a billion a year. Cruise ships will be on the upper end of that price range, if not using a higher bandwidth bespoke plan
Airlines will have similar needs and pricing. Their current internet service is bad and expensive so they will definitely switch. Easily a few hundred million in potential demand
Obviously not every ship and airplane will sign up but that still forms a substantial revenue baseline that isn't going anywhere and no similar competition is in sight
You also have other circumstances like Antarctica, Ukraine, and in-orbit communications where fiber isn't practical either.
Not to mention defense agencies. They already have a massive deal with the DoD both for civilian Starlink and building out Starshield
Starlink has signed Hawaiian Airlines and supposedly has some kind of deal with Air New Zealand as well.
Hopefully more coming.
Not disagreeing with any of the above, but you're still missing the point. Starlink's rosy revenue projections, which it is still far short of, were based on the assumption that it would pick up a chunk of the market currently served by terrestrial and oceanic fiber backbones. The underlying conceit of these optimistic numbers was that people would pay a premium for lower latency, made possible by the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is faster than the speed of light in glass. As you appear to have conceded, whether knowingly or not, it's clearly not doing anything remotely like that. And in any case recent developments, namely the advent of hollow core fiber, allow comparable latency in terrestrial/oceanic fiber networks, meaning whatever hope there might once have been for future growth in this area is limited in the medium term and gone in the long term. It takes time to roll such improvements out, but it also takes time to develop and launch new satellites, and once the fiber is deployed its advantages are insurmountable.
So all the current markets you're listing are there, but there's no huge untapped market beyond that, which is what the enormous future growth plans for Starlink were always premised on.
Was the whole thread and interview about Starlink's profitability conclusive about their current profitability?* Because if they are already profitable, then even if they don't expand to meet their highest projections they'll be sitting on a money printer. So long as they aren't overbuilding and mismanaging based on those projections, which I admit is a distinct possibility.
*I will admit I didn't watch the interview, and only occasionally looked at the comment thread.
[citation needed]
Unless your version of "a chunk" is vanishingly small or the timeframe you are referring to is a decade hence - this just seems rather a silly claim.
It is a silly claim, the only problem is that Elon is the one that made it. He's a lot more impressive when you memory-hole all his called shots that never materialized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJcQA0-qDU&t=3m10s skip to 3:10
Probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, we'll do about 10% business and consumer direct, and then more than half I think of long distance traffic. As you guys may know the speed of light in vacuum is 40-50% faster than in fiber.
I will confess to a certain amount of embarrasment here because I was perfectly aware this was never going to happen when this talk came out, and I did say so, but I didn't extrapolate from that to a more generalized skepticism of anything Musk says. This was a warning sign I should have taken more seriously.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/spacexs-starlink-demonstrates-its-power-but-still-needs-growth-9906c5b0
Paywalled, but I'm attaching the chart that gives the pertinent details. This is SpaceX's internal projections vs reality. They're on track for $6.6B this year so yes it's up... but that's only just catching up to where their first year should have been, and again, nothing to suggest they've made any headway in competing with fiber backbones, and good reasons to think whatever theoretical advantage they might have had will be rapidly eroding going forward. So yes there's customers that don't really have any other options, but there's nothing to suggest they will make any headway for customers that do, and that was critical to these sky high projections.
It's very important to track this stuff over time because with today's information environment it's very easy to let something slip that happened only 8-10 years ago, which makes it trivial for someone like Musk to move their goalposts provided they do it casually over time.
We electrified Rural American once. Running fiber isn't rocket science.
Yes but. With the price of solar, and the death of the land line some rural households are wondering “why do I even need all these poles and wires coming up my driveway?”
Starlink + Solar means no more wires or poles to maintain. No need to trim tree branches back from the wires every few years. And if I’m being honest I find them kind of unsightly.
So I think there are reasons that go beyond laziness or lack of ambition for why some rural households would prefer something like Starlink over fiber.
My wife and I have been contemplating building a cabin in the woods as a summer getaway and I can’t imagine bothering with running wires to it if I could just go solar + Starlink.
I imagine they are wondering that, but they can wonder it just as easily with 4G/5G service from terrestrial cell networks that are usually cheaper than Starlink where available. And the population density has to get very low before they're not available at all, particularly with all the 600/700 mhz spectrum that's opened up in the last few decades.
Not the best service? True. Neither is Starlink. So what? You've already excluded the people that care because if they cared they wouldn't be asking about the wire up the driveway.
Not available everywhere? Also true. But it is deployed where there's the population density to drive demand, which slices off a huge part of what might otherwise be a promising market for Starlink.
Fiber not available everywhere? Also true, but Starlink doesn't beat cable, and cable isn't standing still. DOCSIS 4.0 looks to be competitive with GPON in most situations, and there is a hell of a lot of cable out there, and it's not abandonware like copper phone lines.
Starlink is necessarily left with the dregs because anything that's not dregs is economical to serve some other way. It's not an argument the market doesn't exist, it's an argument the market is small, with a low ceiling. Whenever you set up an elaborate scenario to demonstrate the market, you are conceding this point because your scenario only serves to illustrate how unusual the situation has to be before Starlink makes the most sense.