If they had planned ahead, they could have had a system to lift a bunch of satellites off together, then take off/replace the bad one, and then put all the rest back again.
Pretty sure SpaceX's "planning ahead" for this case is exactly what they did, i.e. proceed with the launch and rely on Starlink's low orbit to rapidly deorbit the failed unit.
SpaceX is going for vast scale with this project. Failures up to and including the loss of a launch vehicle can't derail the rest of it.
> If they had planned ahead, they could have had a system to lift a bunch of satellites off together, then take off/replace the bad one, and then put all the rest back again.
My guess is that they did a cost benefit analysis of doing this, and realized it was worth more to them to launch a dead satellite and verify it deorbits as planned than it was to miss a launch deadline, take apart the stack, fix the bum satellite, reintegrate the stack, put it back on the rocket, and schedule a new launch date.
The satellite's cheap - that's literally the point. Verifying failure modes with NASA and the USAF? Now that's expensive. It's worth more as a science experiment than a time sink.
Not knowing why that one satellite failed is also a big cost though.
There could be some systematic failure that affects them all, and just this was the first to fail. If the rest fail over the next 2 weeks, that will be a big goof.
There is an annoying interstitial ad, but the URL really says it all. From March 21, 2019.
They say the first 75 have iron thruster parts and steel reaction wheels which can survive reentry, but that in subsequent builds no parts will come down with lethal energy.
Will this still be true when the versions with inter-satellite laser links are launched next year? I heard that, at least initially, the links may require hardware that will not fully burn up.
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.
I figure it'll be a cascading effect, once the price drops below a certain threshold, any horizontal organization is going to jump on board once they see others doing the same. Some for research purposes, some for economic, some to act as watchdogs, but most of them propelled by the motivation of being among the first to market. The window of opportunity to launch a station with ease might vanish as near-Earth space inevitably becomes coated in a thick spiderweb of legislation. Also, to evade taxes.
> 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.
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...
Many payloads have been launched with known issues to meet a launch window or mass specification. Notably, I think the Mars Curiosity rover had disabled hardware (microphones) on board because its mass (all 80 grams of it) had been factored into the launch vehicle and spacecraft burns and EDL maneuvers.
Yeah, that's why I specified individual spacecraft. Presumably the rationale is similar, but it's interesting that this time it's not just a defunct subsystem but rather an entire independent spacecraft.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Easy for start, just blast satellites passing over with comparably big amounts of rf. Or just require spacex to not provide service in your territory "or else". If those phased antennas are very good, they may block point sources of jamming by "muting" that small area, but if you pump enough energy into rf, antenna will be overwhelmed and will degrade fully. But that requires tracking each of satellites passing overhead with some tracking antenna, so you would have to deploy several antennas (even hundred for territory the size of Russia). I speak only theoretically, don't know that much about currently operating phase antennas, I just know the theory and can extrapolate.
That is definitely not how China would enforce it.
You need a Starlink terminal in order to communicate with the satellite. China will most likely just block the sales of Starlink terminals in the country if they want to enforce a ban.
That seems reasonable, but easier still is putting your thumb on the Gigafactory 3 from Tesla. As long as Tesla understands that things will go smoothly as long as Starlink happens to not work there, it won't.
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.
I believe the official line is 10 with just inspections, 100 with refurbishment. If Starship's timeline and cost structure is to be believed its not likely any F9B5s will reach 10, as it will be obsolete.
The ones that flew today were fished out of the water after the Arabsat-6A mission. The two that they've caught with the boats were from STP-2 and Amos-17.
Apparently they're going to attempt to go fish these ones out, too, since the boats didn't head out today because of rough seas.
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?
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.
No chance of under $1M for both. I heard $5M. They wouldn't go to the trouble they are going to (fish out of water and re-use etc) for a $500K part, but for $5M the math changes.
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.
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.
I had read that the fairings were the limiting factor on launch frequency, because of how long they have to be cured for. So it's not just the direct cost that's relevant. Of course it's always possible to build a bunch more curing ovens, but at that point you're probably rearranging the factory layout and so on.
Keep in mind, the entire Starlink array will only be able to handle like ~1% of global consumer internet traffic. They're only a handful of gbps downlink each. ~10gbps downlink.
So theoretically the more remote a location the faster the starlink will be because it is shared by fewer people. Which is the exact inverse for wired infrastructure.
Except that the more remote your location the further you likely are from the nearest ground station, which means more hops through the satellite network before you get back down to the ground, higher latency, and reduced total throughput of the system.
The system Starlink is trying to beat is BGAN and regional Ku/Ka providers. If you're expecting them to beat the pants off of your terrestrial wired service you're probably going to be disappointed, unless you're on the edge of the range of some old neglected AT&T DSL line or still trapped on dialup. Even then it's almost certainly going to be much more expensive but at least it will have a sizeable speed advantage.
Each RF hop is going to have more latency than fiber for RF physical layer processing. Forward error correction intentionally uses large frames to spread out burst errors.
Sounds speculative. Given link bandwidths and likely error rates, it seems better to allow the higher layers to retransmit than to optimize for correcting burst errors. Especially given Starlink's goal to control latency.
I haven't seen a link budget. Do you have a link for one about the "likely error rates"?
My guess is Starlink is going to need FEC for Doppler effects and multipath in urban environments. Maybe they will be able to overcome multipath with modulation. But Doppler shift will be significant with LEO.
The latest 802.11n standards have been increasing physical layer frame sizes, not decreasing them. I don't know of any modern wireless standard that doesn't use FEC. Coding gain is significant in most link budgets I have seen.
The last satellite RF downlink I worked with was for JPSS-1 in LEO nearly 6 years ago. There was a (255, 223) Reed-Solomon code with an interleave depth of 4 frames. So you effectively had to receive 1024 bytes, decode, and you got 4x 223 bytes worth of information. While latency wasn't a major concern, this scheme seemed pretty standard to me. If you don't believe me, the spec is public information:
I'm sure SpaceX is trying really hard to control latency - so it doesn't get out of hand! One set of RF processing here, another over there, each with their own filters and decoding algorithms and then you have an extra 100 ms of delay in the system.
Elon talks about 20ms or 10ms, not 100. He wouldn’t be wrong by a factor of 10. You’re really just speculating based on some non IP based overarchitected mil spec monstrosity you’ve seen before
Besides we’re talking about the latency of the satellite to satellite links, not the downlink (since that’s the difference between using a downlink close to the client vs close to the server).
Yeah, I'm speculating and so are you. Your citation is an Elon tweet.
I'm not talking satellite to satellite latency, I'm talking total latency end-to-end. I'm also not saying the system will be 100 ms, just that it takes significant engineering effort so latency doesn't get out of control. IMHO, it's a fundamentally much harder problem than existing transatlantic links, despite the greater signal speed in a vacuum. I'm skeptical of what the latency will be. You disagree and that's fine.
Maybe we'll see an actual measurement soon enough. The competition can do 60 ms round-trip to NYC to London.
I think you’re suggesting an /extra/ 100ms in addition to speed of light time, which is to speculate that they’ll do it in a way that’s needlessly crappy.
I’m speculating they’re smart guys working hard to keep latency low, and that routing will be a more challenging latency issue, while serialization should be minor.
Not commenting on error correction, but your speculation about multipath reveals that you fundamentally fail to understand how starlink is meant to work.
Starlink allows high bandwidth density on the ground, and at the satellites because every antenna in the system is an extremely capable steerable phased array. Every transceiver can fully distinguish between signals of equal power and frequency that differ whose sources differ at least 10 degrees.
Reflections from buildings are irrelevant when the antenna must already be capable of picking the correct transmission out of the 50 or so equally powerful beams on the same frequency that only differ in angle.
Also, since every terminal already needs to be constantly aware of the position of every satellite, the correct answer to doppler is not fancy error correction, it's modulating the transmission to eliminate it, or just expecting it at the receiver.
Is this some fixed point-to-point line of sight terrestrial microwave link? I'd believe that could do it. Do HFT people ever communicate with spacecraft though?
No, the point of the HFT links was to make the most direct shot possible so they could beat the packets traveling via fiber. Going up to space would defeat the purpose.
The more traffic routes through the satellites vs. the ground the more you'll be competing for that limited sat-to-sat bandwidth and the more queuing delays you will suffer. You want to get the bits off of the birds and onto the ground ASAP if you want to maintain consistent latency figures.
This was a big problem with Iridium. With only one ground station available your latency figures were all over the place thanks to the complicated routing that every packet had to go through.
Netflix claims an UHD stream is 25 Mbps. This is probably the most demanding use case for your average consumer, but it may not be a rare use case in the near future. Each satellite can support 800 UHD streams. That doesn't seem sufficient if each satellite covers a large geographic area.
This suggests to me a low data cap and/or rate, perhaps comparable to DSL.
12,000 satellites is the current FCC approved launch figures, I believe. 20Gbps per satellite but I don't know if that's full duplex or how much is divided between terminal/gateway, so lets divide that in half. For simplicity let's say they only sell consumer-grade 100Mbps connections, which are oversubscribed 100x as is typical. Divide the possible number of customers by 3 to account for uneven geographic distribution and other factors.
A service like that could sell for a lot in rural North America, but maybe not to 40m customers. Let's assume most of those customers are from lower income countries or from places with more competitive ISP environments. Maybe $20/mo average revenue per customer. That's $800m a month. That already sounds compelling to me, before considering the potential for more or higher bandwidth satellites, or for higher margin commercial or government contracts.
I think your simple calculation assumes relatively even geographical subscriber distribution, which absolutely is not the case. Just rough estimating, assuming every other figure is approximately correct, you’ll probably have to cut that by 50-75% based on people’s natural tendency to live near other people.
A few HFT customers will probably finance the whole thing, tbh.
You're forgetting that this is a satellite constellation- I'm not sure what the orbital parameters are offhand, but I'd divide that number by at least 4 (and maybe up to 20), based on number of satellites over the service area(s) at any given moment.
Last I saw, they were reconfiguring deployment plans to go for higher density constellation in the lower latitudes before worldwide coverage, so I'm not sure if this is even knowable at this point.
I'm sure people who intend to do business will accept such restrictions as long as they can access email and Salesforce dashboards. Although it might break the spirit of net neutrality (which, to be fair, isn't really a thing anymore anyways).
Actually, during the early 2010's I had heard from a reputable source that half to two-thirds of the internet traffic was "unwanted by the end user" i.e. spam, involuntary software updates, and advertising. Another source from the same time period mentioned that about a quarter of all internet traffic originated from Youtube.
Starlink apparently won't be a fixed concept. 5 year sat lifecycle means its likely we'll see rapid year-over-year turnover and hence macro-level iteration on the specs and design.
RF and the Atmosphere being what they are and the non-variable parts of this equation mean there are significant real physical and abstract legal limits for any project attempting to put "bandwidth in orbit."
Pretty sure Google dipped out of rolling their own fiber because dealing with city councils, pole sharing nonsense, lobbying from incumbent ISPs, and customer service overhead was a huge pain in the ass that doesn't fit with their current operating model.
If I recall correctly, Ubiquity had a network around this concept for broadband connections in the late 2000's. I don't think it ever caught steam, but I could be wrong.
> I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure.
Google stopped deploying fiber for several reasons:
a) they weren't able to get reasonable access to poles for deployment.
b) incumbents started large rollouts of gigabit capable services (FTTH from telcos and DOCSIS 3.1 from cablecos) in markets Google had announced, but hadn't built out
Also, they weren't very good at it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl..."When you're walking around the neighborhood, [the lines are] popping up out of the road all over the place," resident Larry Coomes said at the time. "People are tripping over it." ... "AT&T has been using various forms of shallow trenching since 2009 and hasn't seen similar issues."
It sounds like (b) achieved Google's ends. I don't think they wanted to be in the fiber business. They just wanted everybody to have it so that Google could sell them services over it (including the service of feeding ads to them).
> 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.
Curious about the 'doesn't work while moving' that seems to me to be one of the advantages of a phased array. Since it is software derived aiming I would guess it would excel at adjusting for movement. Do you have details on that I can read on?
People already covered why that's not possible with Starlink, but in-car WiFi is already incredibly cheap and works well.
My Volt included unlimited data for 20$ a month, and it was fast enough for streaming video and worked at times where my phone didn't (presumably because of the better positioned antenna)
What do you use in-car wifi for, that you couldn't already use your existing unlimited cell data plan for? I have unlimited data, plus "unlimited" hotspot on my t-mobile phone for a really reasonable price (the unlimited hotspot throttles down after a certain point, but even that speed is still plenty for what I used it for -- I only which I could explicitly tell it I want to use the throttled speed gigabytes now, and save the high-speed gigabytes for when it would be useful).
Sorry to rain on your parade. But Starlink will never be competing with internet in urban areas. The economics for simply laying a few miles of fiber are too good (if the fiber isn't even already there). More so the satellite density needed to serve an entire city is many more than even SpaceX is proposing. Starlink is for long distance backhaul and for rural/underserved areas.
I heard from a constellation internet company that fibre will always be the go-to solution as far as they were concerned - they’re going for marketers where fibre isn’t available.
After the first Starlink launch, Musk made a number of comments about being willing to experiment with launching some telescope-equipped Starlink sats since they expect the per-sat costs to be so low.
If you had dozens to hundreds up there, you could probably do some useful interferometry even with small telescopes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
161 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] thread* 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
But they launched it anyway.
SpaceX is going for vast scale with this project. Failures up to and including the loss of a launch vehicle can't derail the rest of it.
My guess is that they did a cost benefit analysis of doing this, and realized it was worth more to them to launch a dead satellite and verify it deorbits as planned than it was to miss a launch deadline, take apart the stack, fix the bum satellite, reintegrate the stack, put it back on the rocket, and schedule a new launch date.
The satellite's cheap - that's literally the point. Verifying failure modes with NASA and the USAF? Now that's expensive. It's worth more as a science experiment than a time sink.
There could be some systematic failure that affects them all, and just this was the first to fail. If the rest fail over the next 2 weeks, that will be a big goof.
PS: besides, who said they don't know the reason?
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1193687615528042496
And in this case, if dead, the satellite will be used as a science experiment
There is an annoying interstitial ad, but the URL really says it all. From March 21, 2019.
They say the first 75 have iron thruster parts and steel reaction wheels which can survive reentry, but that in subsequent builds no parts will come down with lethal energy.
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.
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.
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...
The red arrows indicate the phased-array antennas.
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.
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.
You need a Starlink terminal in order to communicate with the satellite. China will most likely just block the sales of Starlink terminals in the country if they want to enforce a ban.
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.
Apparently they're going to attempt to go fish these ones out, too, since the boats didn't head out today because of rough seas.
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
This reads that he was unaware that they were reusing at all.
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.
Which isn't that great.
The system Starlink is trying to beat is BGAN and regional Ku/Ka providers. If you're expecting them to beat the pants off of your terrestrial wired service you're probably going to be disappointed, unless you're on the edge of the range of some old neglected AT&T DSL line or still trapped on dialup. Even then it's almost certainly going to be much more expensive but at least it will have a sizeable speed advantage.
I’m seeing figures of 1 million$ per satellite. Over 10 years that’s roughly 100k/month in mortgage or around 1k customers at 100$/mo.
My guess is Starlink is going to need FEC for Doppler effects and multipath in urban environments. Maybe they will be able to overcome multipath with modulation. But Doppler shift will be significant with LEO.
The latest 802.11n standards have been increasing physical layer frame sizes, not decreasing them. I don't know of any modern wireless standard that doesn't use FEC. Coding gain is significant in most link budgets I have seen.
The last satellite RF downlink I worked with was for JPSS-1 in LEO nearly 6 years ago. There was a (255, 223) Reed-Solomon code with an interleave depth of 4 frames. So you effectively had to receive 1024 bytes, decode, and you got 4x 223 bytes worth of information. While latency wasn't a major concern, this scheme seemed pretty standard to me. If you don't believe me, the spec is public information:
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/jpss/documents/CDFCB/GSFC_4...
I'm sure SpaceX is trying really hard to control latency - so it doesn't get out of hand! One set of RF processing here, another over there, each with their own filters and decoding algorithms and then you have an extra 100 ms of delay in the system.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/11329039145865297...
Besides we’re talking about the latency of the satellite to satellite links, not the downlink (since that’s the difference between using a downlink close to the client vs close to the server).
I'm not talking satellite to satellite latency, I'm talking total latency end-to-end. I'm also not saying the system will be 100 ms, just that it takes significant engineering effort so latency doesn't get out of control. IMHO, it's a fundamentally much harder problem than existing transatlantic links, despite the greater signal speed in a vacuum. I'm skeptical of what the latency will be. You disagree and that's fine.
Maybe we'll see an actual measurement soon enough. The competition can do 60 ms round-trip to NYC to London.
I’m speculating they’re smart guys working hard to keep latency low, and that routing will be a more challenging latency issue, while serialization should be minor.
But we’ll see and I agree we’re both speculating
Starlink allows high bandwidth density on the ground, and at the satellites because every antenna in the system is an extremely capable steerable phased array. Every transceiver can fully distinguish between signals of equal power and frequency that differ whose sources differ at least 10 degrees.
Reflections from buildings are irrelevant when the antenna must already be capable of picking the correct transmission out of the 50 or so equally powerful beams on the same frequency that only differ in angle.
Also, since every terminal already needs to be constantly aware of the position of every satellite, the correct answer to doppler is not fancy error correction, it's modulating the transmission to eliminate it, or just expecting it at the receiver.
This was a big problem with Iridium. With only one ground station available your latency figures were all over the place thanks to the complicated routing that every packet had to go through.
I thought downlinks were going to be pizza box-sized antennae. Why would it be far away from you? That could live on your roof.
This suggests to me a low data cap and/or rate, perhaps comparable to DSL.
12000 * 20Gbps / 2 * 100 / 100Mbps / 3 = 40,000,000 customers
A service like that could sell for a lot in rural North America, but maybe not to 40m customers. Let's assume most of those customers are from lower income countries or from places with more competitive ISP environments. Maybe $20/mo average revenue per customer. That's $800m a month. That already sounds compelling to me, before considering the potential for more or higher bandwidth satellites, or for higher margin commercial or government contracts.
A few HFT customers will probably finance the whole thing, tbh.
Last I saw, they were reconfiguring deployment plans to go for higher density constellation in the lower latitudes before worldwide coverage, so I'm not sure if this is even knowable at this point.
150kg sat to launch at $2,719kg/leo costs $0.4m
At this point I'd just like to have a built-in wifi hotspot for my own usage in my car. My Chevy can do this. My fancy high-tech Tesla cannot.
Google stopped deploying fiber for several reasons:
a) they weren't able to get reasonable access to poles for deployment.
b) incumbents started large rollouts of gigabit capable services (FTTH from telcos and DOCSIS 3.1 from cablecos) in markets Google had announced, but hadn't built out
c) maybe? lots more LTE deployment
The Starlink receiver is the size of a pizza box (and cannot get smaller, since that is the size of the necessary antenna) - and doesn't work while moving.
So it's impractical to use on cars.
What Tesla probably could do is put a receiver at every Supercharger and broadcast wifi there. It would be especially useful at the more rural locations.
[0]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...
My Volt included unlimited data for 20$ a month, and it was fast enough for streaming video and worked at times where my phone didn't (presumably because of the better positioned antenna)
> decent latency
pick one
If you had dozens to hundreds up there, you could probably do some useful interferometry even with small telescopes.
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?
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.
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.
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?