9 ms·

SpaceX is going to be printing money with Starlink.

by hop 4y ago

vkou 4y ago
What happens if someone decides to flex their ASW in a demonstration of capability, and accidentally triggers a Kessler syndrome situation?
- maccam94 4y ago
  Starlink orbits are far too low for kessler syndrome. Atmospheric drag would clear them out in <10 years, probably much less. In fact, Starlink satellites are far too numerous for anti-satellite weapons to be effective (at least, until countries decide it's worthwhile to start mass producing orbital-class rockets to attack enemy satellite constellations, which would almost certainly lead to a loss of their own satellites as well). Russia would love to be able to take out Starlink right now, but they can't.
- walrus01 4y ago
  Nobody has enough asw weapons, and probably can't afford to build enough, quickly enough individual asw missiles, to take out even 15% of starlink. They launched four batches of 53 satellites each just in May and the month hasn't ended yet. Additionally the US and NATO would see an act like that as barely one step below declaring nuclear war.
  - vkou 4y ago
    People with ASW don't want to use them against Starlink, they want to use them against spy satellites. Starlink would just be collateral damage. If anyone in NATO considers blowing up satellites to be one step below killing hundreds of millions of people, I want that person fired. Because they have completely lost touch with reality, and should not be allowed anywhere near a weapon, or a job where they manage people with weapons.
    - thinkcontext 4y ago
      Ukraine is using Starlink to control drones and Russia has tried jamming the service. Given that its not outlandish to contemplate Russia escalating. They might destroy one and say they'll do worse unless Ukraine is kicked off. The reason taking out spy satellites is taken so seriously is it is considered a likely prelude to an attack.
      - vkou 4y ago
        Are spy satellites actually intended to detect ongoing icmb attacks? Isn't the overwhelming majority of that job done by ground and sea-based radar stations?
        thinkcontext 4y ago
        Though there are certainly land and sea based systems, satellites will see launches from interior Russia first.
        vkou 4y ago
        There is no meaningful difference between detecting a launch from Siberia, and detecting it once it's over the Bering sea. Either way, everyone on both sides will die.
        walrus01 4y ago
        There are dedicated purpose infrared sensor missile launch warning sats owned and run by USA and Russia and China. In addition to other radar systems.
  - thinkcontext 4y ago
    I wonder how many Starlink sats one would have to take out to start a cascade to destroy the usefulness of the constellation? Of course there would be a lot of other collateral damage. I'm sure people are wargaming this.
- madengr 4y ago
adtac 4y ago
And consumer internet isn't even Starlink's endgame
- geoffeg 4y ago
  I'm aware that they expect one of their customers to be stock market companies where lower latency is highly important. Are you referring to that or something else?
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    I’m very ignorant about HFT, but https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/ says “latency as low as 20ms in most locations”. Isn’t that many many orders of magnitude too much for HFT?
    - wmf 4y ago
      He's referring to highly speculative theories like https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/ https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/
    - paranoidrobot 4y ago
      High-Frequency Trading / Arbitrage between distant markets was what I'd read. i.e starlink can get much lower latency between say London and NY than terrestrial links.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        As I understand it, HFT justified digging new tunnels between NYC and Chicago to take advantage of the shorter distance the signal would have to go. And that was transmitting at or near the speed of light. Somehow, I doubt bouncing on a roundtrip to a satellite is worth it.
        manquer 4y ago
        The speed of light in fibre (I.e. glass) is substantially slower speed of light than near vacuum . So yes bouncing up a few hundred km is faster for medium and long range connections . It will not be faster than fibre for Manhattan to Princeton , but it would be faster for London - New York or London-Frankfurt
aaomidi 4y ago
Are they though? It's really not that expensive to manage 4G towers vs sending up thousands of small sats.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  It's an expensive upfront cost, but once the full constellation is up, they'll have basically full world coverage, and anywhere that's not a big city charges big money for internet. See how much internet in rural Canada costs.
  - dntrkv 4y ago
    Except their network is extremely limited in capacity. 4G/5G is a much better solution for 99.9% of use-cases. Starlink is better for the extremely rural locations where installing a tower just isn't feasible. I have a pretty rural property and there are areas nearby that get 5G UW with speeds in excess of 1Gbps. Most of the area is covered by 4G with download speeds of over 40Mbps. 5G is already replacing wired home internet for many people. Give it a few more years to expand coverage and I bet 5G will make Starlink obsolete for most of its US users.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      A few things to note are that Starlink is by far the best option for airplanes and boats, and the percentage of very rural customers is probably closer to 5-10% than .1%. Putting up towers is expensive, and space is pretty close. If you want the tower to be much closer than a leo satellite, it needs to <<200 miles away, and in non-flat areas, having the signal go up gives much better results than trying to send it through a mountain.
  - ahahahahah 4y ago
    > It's an expensive upfront cost, but once the full constellation is up, they'll have basically full world coverage This is wrong. Years before they have a full constellation they will already have started needing to replace previously launched satellites. It's not like they just launch them once and they're done and those satellites last forever. Just to maintain a constellation they'll need to be replacing something like 20% every year.
ge96 4y ago
Imagine your data gets cached on a Starlink satellite and it dies... then future people find the satellite and see your info.
- xur17 4y ago
  What??
- p1mrx 4y ago
  Dead Starlink satellites burn up in the atmosphere within a decade... and why are you sending your data unencrypted over the internet?
  - ge96 4y ago
    Ahh yeah, have this archaeology fantasy like my data lives on in space somewhere but yeah forgot about the LEO atmosphere drag bit.
    - p1mrx 4y ago
      You'd have better luck with a GEO satellite like HughesNet, but I'd be surprised if any of them cache user data in nonvolatile storage.
      - ge96 4y ago
        Yeah I wonder if there will be a service like "send your data into space" which sounds equally stupid (use radio waves) but yeah... just longevity woes (sculpt a rock and burry it). Some of my code is in the arctic vault though a piece of crap Todo List.
- martyvis 4y ago
  Imagine your data gets on a server in the cloud and it dies (gets replicated/replaced/decommissioned ...) What's special about satellites (and how much caching are they gonna do) and why are you worried about data you have chosen to send in the clear over a network you don't own?
rtpg 4y ago
This video[0] seems to disagree with this. In particular it seems like there's a lot of recurring costs involved and this infrastructure is not super stable (the video talks about satelites having a shelf life of 5 years. We're not rebuilding fiber out every 5 years!) The videos "has an agenda" but it seems a bit easy to accept the idea that constantly launching satelites into space is pretty expensive. Infrastructure on the ground is expensive, but most people tend to not move around so at one point just building out lots of wires everywhere can work pretty well. Having great coverage across the globe is great! But especially after seeing that (super crappy!) satelite internet providers getting the same shit done with 3 satelites.... you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg
- frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  Not to mention that (someone can fill in the accurate numbers) some rather significant number of satellites are expected to be lost every year due to various factors at a rate that will require several rocket launches just for maintenance of the current state. My understanding when I was reading about that, is that it did not even consider the "shelf life" issue.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    It's possible that "shelf life" is shorthand for that. I watched the video a while back but only skimmed it to remember the details.
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    He doesn't just include those calculations in. He overcounts them to a pretty large degree. He also photoshops screengrabs of articles and lies about launch prices and lies about the number of launches and lies about the speed of SpaceX service and lies about a government conspiracy because the speed test numbers were too low, and he is a misogynist towards Shotwell, mocking her for being female, and he lies about the cost of the competitor services. You don't need to worry. Every angle for making the comparison unflattering to SpaceX, including taking screen grabs of Elon Musk with funny faces and making character attacks on him on the basis of his face looking funny, are more then covered in that cesspit designed to radicalize and monetize the gullible.
kirykl 4y ago
At least right now starlink is really more of a long tail capture
thinkcontext 4y ago
Musk has said there's a risk of bankruptcy if both Starlink 2 and Starship don't work. > The consequences for SpaceX if we can’t get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1 by itself is financially weak, whereas V2 is strong. I very much hope they both do work but let's be clear there's still a lot of risk to get through before that's clear. https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/30/22809720/elon-musk-spacex-raptor-engine-crisis-bankruptcy-starship https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/30/22809720/elon-musk-space...

SpaceX is going to be printing money with Starlink.

by hop 4y ago

SpaceX is going to be printing money with Starlink.

vkou 4y ago

What happens if someone decides to flex their ASW in a demonstration of capability, and accidentally triggers a Kessler syndrome situation?

maccam94 4y ago
Starlink orbits are far too low for kessler syndrome. Atmospheric drag would clear them out in <10 years, probably much less. In fact, Starlink satellites are far too numerous for anti-satellite weapons to be effective (at least, until countries decide it's worthwhile to start mass producing orbital-class rockets to attack enemy satellite constellations, which would almost certainly lead to a loss of their own satellites as well). Russia would love to be able to take out Starlink right now, but they can't.
walrus01 4y ago
Nobody has enough asw weapons, and probably can't afford to build enough, quickly enough individual asw missiles, to take out even 15% of starlink. They launched four batches of 53 satellites each just in May and the month hasn't ended yet. Additionally the US and NATO would see an act like that as barely one step below declaring nuclear war.
- vkou 4y ago
  People with ASW don't want to use them against Starlink, they want to use them against spy satellites. Starlink would just be collateral damage. If anyone in NATO considers blowing up satellites to be one step below killing hundreds of millions of people, I want that person fired. Because they have completely lost touch with reality, and should not be allowed anywhere near a weapon, or a job where they manage people with weapons.
  - thinkcontext 4y ago
    Ukraine is using Starlink to control drones and Russia has tried jamming the service. Given that its not outlandish to contemplate Russia escalating. They might destroy one and say they'll do worse unless Ukraine is kicked off. The reason taking out spy satellites is taken so seriously is it is considered a likely prelude to an attack.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Are spy satellites actually intended to detect ongoing icmb attacks? Isn't the overwhelming majority of that job done by ground and sea-based radar stations?
      - thinkcontext 4y ago
        Though there are certainly land and sea based systems, satellites will see launches from interior Russia first.
        vkou 4y ago
        There is no meaningful difference between detecting a launch from Siberia, and detecting it once it's over the Bering sea. Either way, everyone on both sides will die.
      - walrus01 4y ago
        There are dedicated purpose infrared sensor missile launch warning sats owned and run by USA and Russia and China. In addition to other radar systems.
- thinkcontext 4y ago
  I wonder how many Starlink sats one would have to take out to start a cascade to destroy the usefulness of the constellation? Of course there would be a lot of other collateral damage. I'm sure people are wargaming this.
madengr 4y ago

adtac 4y ago

And consumer internet isn't even Starlink's endgame

geoffeg 4y ago
I'm aware that they expect one of their customers to be stock market companies where lower latency is highly important. Are you referring to that or something else?
- codetrotter 4y ago
  I’m very ignorant about HFT, but https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/ says “latency as low as 20ms in most locations”. Isn’t that many many orders of magnitude too much for HFT?
  - wmf 4y ago
    He's referring to highly speculative theories like https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/ https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/
  - paranoidrobot 4y ago
    High-Frequency Trading / Arbitrage between distant markets was what I'd read. i.e starlink can get much lower latency between say London and NY than terrestrial links.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      As I understand it, HFT justified digging new tunnels between NYC and Chicago to take advantage of the shorter distance the signal would have to go. And that was transmitting at or near the speed of light. Somehow, I doubt bouncing on a roundtrip to a satellite is worth it.
      - manquer 4y ago
        The speed of light in fibre (I.e. glass) is substantially slower speed of light than near vacuum . So yes bouncing up a few hundred km is faster for medium and long range connections . It will not be faster than fibre for Manhattan to Princeton , but it would be faster for London - New York or London-Frankfurt

aaomidi 4y ago

Are they though? It's really not that expensive to manage 4G towers vs sending up thousands of small sats.

ehsankia 4y ago
It's an expensive upfront cost, but once the full constellation is up, they'll have basically full world coverage, and anywhere that's not a big city charges big money for internet. See how much internet in rural Canada costs.
- dntrkv 4y ago
  Except their network is extremely limited in capacity. 4G/5G is a much better solution for 99.9% of use-cases. Starlink is better for the extremely rural locations where installing a tower just isn't feasible. I have a pretty rural property and there are areas nearby that get 5G UW with speeds in excess of 1Gbps. Most of the area is covered by 4G with download speeds of over 40Mbps. 5G is already replacing wired home internet for many people. Give it a few more years to expand coverage and I bet 5G will make Starlink obsolete for most of its US users.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    A few things to note are that Starlink is by far the best option for airplanes and boats, and the percentage of very rural customers is probably closer to 5-10% than .1%. Putting up towers is expensive, and space is pretty close. If you want the tower to be much closer than a leo satellite, it needs to <<200 miles away, and in non-flat areas, having the signal go up gives much better results than trying to send it through a mountain.
- ahahahahah 4y ago
  > It's an expensive upfront cost, but once the full constellation is up, they'll have basically full world coverage This is wrong. Years before they have a full constellation they will already have started needing to replace previously launched satellites. It's not like they just launch them once and they're done and those satellites last forever. Just to maintain a constellation they'll need to be replacing something like 20% every year.

ge96 4y ago

Imagine your data gets cached on a Starlink satellite and it dies... then future people find the satellite and see your info.

xur17 4y ago
What??
p1mrx 4y ago
Dead Starlink satellites burn up in the atmosphere within a decade... and why are you sending your data unencrypted over the internet?
- ge96 4y ago
  Ahh yeah, have this archaeology fantasy like my data lives on in space somewhere but yeah forgot about the LEO atmosphere drag bit.
  - p1mrx 4y ago
    You'd have better luck with a GEO satellite like HughesNet, but I'd be surprised if any of them cache user data in nonvolatile storage.
    - ge96 4y ago
      Yeah I wonder if there will be a service like "send your data into space" which sounds equally stupid (use radio waves) but yeah... just longevity woes (sculpt a rock and burry it). Some of my code is in the arctic vault though a piece of crap Todo List.
martyvis 4y ago
Imagine your data gets on a server in the cloud and it dies (gets replicated/replaced/decommissioned ...) What's special about satellites (and how much caching are they gonna do) and why are you worried about data you have chosen to send in the clear over a network you don't own?

rtpg 4y ago

This video[0] seems to disagree with this. In particular it seems like there's a lot of recurring costs involved and this infrastructure is not super stable (the video talks about satelites having a shelf life of 5 years. We're not rebuilding fiber out every 5 years!) The videos "has an agenda" but it seems a bit easy to accept the idea that constantly launching satelites into space is pretty expensive. Infrastructure on the ground is expensive, but most people tend to not move around so at one point just building out lots of wires everywhere can work pretty well. Having great coverage across the globe is great! But especially after seeing that (super crappy!) satelite internet providers getting the same shit done with 3 satelites.... you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg

frankfrankfrank 4y ago
Not to mention that (someone can fill in the accurate numbers) some rather significant number of satellites are expected to be lost every year due to various factors at a rate that will require several rocket launches just for maintenance of the current state. My understanding when I was reading about that, is that it did not even consider the "shelf life" issue.
- rtpg 4y ago
  It's possible that "shelf life" is shorthand for that. I watched the video a while back but only skimmed it to remember the details.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  He doesn't just include those calculations in. He overcounts them to a pretty large degree. He also photoshops screengrabs of articles and lies about launch prices and lies about the number of launches and lies about the speed of SpaceX service and lies about a government conspiracy because the speed test numbers were too low, and he is a misogynist towards Shotwell, mocking her for being female, and he lies about the cost of the competitor services. You don't need to worry. Every angle for making the comparison unflattering to SpaceX, including taking screen grabs of Elon Musk with funny faces and making character attacks on him on the basis of his face looking funny, are more then covered in that cesspit designed to radicalize and monetize the gullible.

kirykl 4y ago

At least right now starlink is really more of a long tail capture

thinkcontext 4y ago

Musk has said there's a risk of bankruptcy if both Starlink 2 and Starship don't work. > The consequences for SpaceX if we can’t get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1 by itself is financially weak, whereas V2 is strong. I very much hope they both do work but let's be clear there's still a lot of risk to get through before that's clear. https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/30/22809720/elon-musk-spacex-raptor-engine-crisis-bankruptcy-starship https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/30/22809720/elon-musk-space...