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Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer
- mlindner 3y agoIt's unfortunate that this misinformation is being upvoted on this site. The headline is completely incorrect, as is the statistics they're using to base the article on. https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/1705562829225410697 https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/17055628292254106... https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html There has only ever been 350 starlink satellites that have deorbited, and only 8 within the last two months.
- bagels 3y agoIs this intentional? Is it just happening for newly launched satellites?
- vasco 3y agoIf you read the article you can answer both of your questions. The Sun has no intentions, and solar flares don't choose cohorts of satellites.
- complex_exp 3y agoHow do solar flares burn satellites? I thought they just mess up the ionosphere and inhibit communication.
- jakear 3y agoIf shielding is insufficient the control systems fry, or at least get wonked.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoDunno if it's what happened in this case, but solar flares make the atmosphere bigger* which increases drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. That said, the satellites have an expected life of 5 years so it's not necessarily a big deal. Their planned constellation is so large that it's dependent on having a nearly continuous churn of replacement satellites. * This is a bit of an oversimplification
- dabluecaboose 3y agoSolar radiation pressure is a non-negligible perturbation to an orbit, especially during solar weather events.
- bagels 3y agoArticle says 'burned' but also 'burned up', which I infer to mean, burned up during reentry, though it is not precise with the langauge.
- dotnet00 3y agoAs one example, IIRC earlier this year they lost some freshly launched satellites in a batch because of a flare, which made the atmosphere expand in density by up to 50% at their altitudes and didn't allow those satellites to point their solar panels at the sun in time. Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch. So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.
- ramraj07 3y agoI read the article and have no clarity still. They say it correlates with increased sun activity but no actual proof.
- bagels 3y agoThe article doesn't say when the satellites that are being lost were launched. They could be bringing down the earlier versions of satellites intentionally to replace them with new ones. Yes, the Sun doesn't care when the satellite was launched, but the current orbit of the satellite and drag profile will decide which ones come back down, if not also applied thrust.
- Timshel 3y agoIt might not choose but we don't know how similar those cohorts are. It's not the same situation if they already improved the shielding and only old satellites are impacted.
- npunt 3y agoLost $250M using the advertised launch price of $67M for Falcon 9, which of course is way higher than what it actually costs SpaceX.
- fooker 3y agoThe fuel costs about half a million. Beyond that it's mostly people's times and materials they have stockpiled for economies of scale. I would guess the lost satellites cost a bit more to manufacture that to launch in a reused Falcon 9.
- elihu 3y agoDon't they waste the upper stage on Falcon 9 launches? (That being one of the reasons they want to transition to using Starship.)
- 6nf 3y agoThe fairings alone add another million. The whole upper stage is not re-used at all.
- onethought 3y agoThey recover the fairings.
- m_mueller 3y agodoes it? why can they then sell it for not much more and run a profit?
- inemesitaffia 3y agoProfit is price - cost
- Rebelgecko 3y agoThere's reason to be skeptical of that. I think their most recent profitable quarter (maybe their only profitable quarter?) was with a profit margin of ~3%. Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets
- vardump 3y agoI think they're prepared to lose satellites, that's the nature of large swarms. Some losses might be intentional for safety after damage or low propellant. They really can't afford to put any debris on their orbits.
- kvdveer 3y agoIIRC debris is not a major concern in the orbits Starlink is using. There is a non-trivial amount of atmospheric drag. This will slow down anything without active propulsion, causing them to drop from orbit, and eventually burn up.
- modeless 3y agoLost 200 but launched 345, almost all of which are the latest upgraded version. The satellites are designed to last 5 years (the lifetime is limited by propellant because of atmospheric drag at their low altitude) and the first batches were launched 4 years ago now. As the constellation matures they will be de-orbiting satellites about as fast as they launch them. Seems to me like the long term viability of Starlink (if it's not already profitable) will be assured if Starship meets its goals. They'll be able to launch way more satellites at once, for less per launch, and with faster turnaround.
- mlindner 3y agoIt's unfortunate that this misinformation is being upvoted on this site. The headline is completely incorrect, as is the statistics they're using to base the article on. https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/1705562829225410697 https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/17055628292254106... https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html There has only ever been 350 starlink satellites that have deorbited, and only 8 within the last two months.
- threatripper 3y agoHow many satellites can be launched at once? I assume that the number of satellites per orbit will be limited and changing the orbit would take extra fuel that either the launch vehicle or the satellite has to provide.
- usrusr 3y agoLaunch way more, and I'd imagine the sweet spot for the amount of fuel each satellite gets to shift up considerably: with a launch the size of starship they can saturate the orbits reasonably reachable from that launch for decades (spares remain in higher orbits with less drag I think) and giving one satellite more fuel is cheaper than deploying two satellites with less fuel each. And achieve far more than twice the runtime, because the fuel complement in today's starlinklings is certainly quite far from 100% mass fraction. The current compromise is far quick global reach running on F9, with a generous dose of iteration.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoThat's about a 4.4% loss (200 of 4500 satelites which are expected to have a life of 5 years), and the internal cost to Starlink of a new launch is probably far less than the $67 million 'retail' cost of a SpaceX launch.
- codegladiator 3y agoSo we have reached that stage of Universal Paperclips
- jefozabuss 3y agoBe careful googling this if you have a weak resistance to incremental games like I do as some hours will fly by quicky...
- eunos 3y agoSpeaking of Starlink, what piqued my interest is that Huawei Mate 60 incorporated satellite call module without being bulky. It is not yet able to do data transfer but in case they can, isnt that practically a portable starlink equivalent?
- inemesitaffia 3y agoMore like Iridium
- cf141q5325 3y agoThanks for mentioning that. Its the pro version and it apparently entails voice and text. Which makes it sound more like satellite phones then internet over satellite. Still, quite the interesting feature.
- chrismorgan 3y agoStarlink is low earth orbit, around 550km up, adding best-case latency of under 4ms (550km*2/c ≈ 3.67ms). That allows an excellent service. Satellite phones (and I’ve confirmed this applies to the Huawei Mate 60) connect with satellites in geostationary orbits, meaning an altitude of about 35,786km, adding latency of around 240ms (35786km*2/c ≈ 238.74ms). This can be acceptable for some purposes, but harms things far more than you might imagine. (Source: personal experience with the Australian NBN SkyMesh or whatever it was called before NBN took it over, only once, about five years back. Look, a lot of the internet is located in the USA, and many things perform vastly worse from Australia than from the USA, e.g. several second page loads instead of under one second, and this satellite connection was basically that but even for stuff in Australia, and several times as bad for stuff in America.)
- wkat4242 3y agoThe mate 60 uses beidou sats which are not quite geostationary but also in a pretty high orbit. But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.
- Ekaros 3y agoGoing forward what is the expected yearly attrition rate? So how much have they spend a year to keep replacing the natural losses of their satellites?
- grouseway 3y agoIs this because they are making a trade-off between surving some amount of solar flare activity vs increasing satellite weight by hardening them to radation? I imagine it's preventable since the ISS and other large orbiters stay functional forever.