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Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
- jstummbillig 3y agoI have absolutely no idea how that number relates to any comparable operation. Can anyone add a banana for scale?
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago10 minutes of 4k video is ~30GB.
- jstummbillig 3y agoKnowing the size of a video file is exactly not the information, that would help me put this number in a meaningful perspective with any comparable operation. How do I think of 42 petabytes in terms of an ISP? Is that a lot? How does it compare to other satellite providers? How does it compare to 4G capacities? Is this a small country worth of traffic or just any ol' data center? I have no intuition about traffic at this scale.
- theropost 3y ago42 million gigabytes per day, or if we are working with 30GB for 10min of 4k movies - 233,000 hours of ultra HD movies per day
- e12e 3y ago> 42 million gigabytes per second Per day?
- deathanatos 3y agoIt's 42 PB per day, though.
- besnn00 3y agoper day*
- WheatMillington 3y agoOver estimating by a factor of 86,400.
- MeImCounting 3y agoI still dont think this is what the OP was asking for. This is in the context of an individual-HD video is an individual perspective. More helpful would be a comparison to say a small town or a major city or state.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SirMaster 3y agoI feel like this is a bad example. Most people's experience with 4K video is through a streaming service, and 10 minutes of 4K video on a streaming service is more like 1-1.5 GB. Or a UHD Disc perhaps where 10 minutes is 3.5-7 GB.
- zetsurin 3y agoBased on 2160p movies i've seen around the very largest max out at around 100, and 40 is more common, so this seems wrong.
- colordrops 3y agoIf you've got a laptop with a terrabyte drive, it would be 42,000 full laptops worth of data.
- lizhang 3y agoIf you've got a server farm with a petabyte of storage, it would be 42 server farms
- bee_rider 3y agoImplementing a “comparable operation” to this satellite network using laptops instead is going to be really expensive fuel-wise, I think.
- jonathankoren 3y ago"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew Tannenbaum
- madeofpalk 3y agoIf you have a laptop with a petabyte drive, it would be 42 full laptops worth of data!
- colordrops 3y agoMight as well get a 42 petabyte drive.
- whycome 3y ago> If you took a petabyte's worth of 1GB flash drives and lined them up end to end, they would stretch over 92 football fields. https://info.cobaltiron.com/blog/petabyte-how-much-information-could-it-actually-hold https://info.cobaltiron.com/blog/petabyte-how-much-informati...
- organsnyder 3y agoThat's actually a somewhat useful visual.
- vikingerik 3y agoNot really unless you're using 1 GB flash drives from fifteen years ago. 256 GB is now common, which would make that petabyte less than 1 football field. (It's only 4096 such drives.)
- dtgriscom 3y agoYou can buy a 1TB microSD card for $150 now.
- danparsonson 3y agoWhat a time to be alive! Even those of us without a football field can lay out huge amounts of data in a straight line.
- tempmac 3y agodang I can hear the youtube channel voice
- ziddoap 3y ago>Not really unless you're using 1 GB flash drives from fifteen years ago 1GB flash drives are still 1GB today. >256 GB is now common, which would make that petabyte less than 1 football field. (It's only 4096 such drives.) If we're completely changing what we're using for scale, you can fit a petabyte on ~10 100TB drives, which is like 3% the length of an olympic swimming pool.
- permalac 3y agoEMBL-EBI’s open transfer systems provide ~5PB of data each month. ftp.ebi.ac.uk for example.
- stcredzero 3y agoBetter yet, a work in a 35 foot long Twinkie.
- new_user_final 3y agoBangladesh, the whole country, usage 2,300Gbps as of 2021. So 1 Petabyte per hour? Edit: It's international traffic. YouTube, Facebook video has local cache server by ISP.
- MeImCounting 3y agoThis is a useful scale of comparison and what I think OP was after
- jstummbillig 3y agoOP agrees
- theteapot 3y ago486GB/s
- nharada 3y agoAssuming it's a constant data transfer rate, this is 3,889 Gbps. This is - About 4,000 customers worth of maxed out Gigabit internet - ~243,000 simultaneous Netflix 4K streams - 1.6% the capacity of the latest BlueMed undersea fiber cable
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- danbruc 3y agoAccording to a quick search the average US household is closing in on 600 GB of traffic per month, that makes 42 PB per day the internet traffic of 2.1 million households. Incidentally the second picture in the article says 2.3M+ customers. With an US average of 2.5 people per household that is the traffic of 5 million people or 1.5 % of the US population.
- mmaunder 3y agoThe amount of bleeding edge innovation that is rapidly developed and deployed into production in Musks companies is incredible.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>The amount of bleeding edge innovation that is rapidly developed and deployed into production in Musks companies is incredible. SpaceX for sure. Hard to argue that Tesla is "bleeding edge" anymore; they maintain some advantages, but have fallen behind in other domains.
- misiti3780 3y agoWhat are you talking about - weather you think it will work or not, no other company is collecting training data and attempting to solve FSD in the same order of magnitude as Tesla. (last is saw, TSLA collects more video data in 1.5 years then Waymo does in 1 year) FSD12 is end-to-end neural nets and the videos are pretty impressive. Who else is doing that ?
- misiti3780 3y ago1.5 days**
- mrbonner 3y agoWait, I thought only Kuiper has laser.
- gggggg1 3y agoKuiper tested 1 laser
- scohesc 3y agoThe article mentions that they were able to stream video from a starlink satellite as it was de-orbiting - it would be neat to see the video of that, even if it cuts off as the laser link losing connection (or the satellite burns up)
- SushiHippie 3y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199368
- dang 3y agoOP was posted earliest so I guess we'll merge the other threads hither. Thanks!
- advisedwang 3y ago42M GB Per day = 3.9tbps
- progbits 3y ago> M GB I can hear the SI crying.
- ble 3y agoMy understanding of the state of the art of inter-satellite optical links is that they have only been used between satellites that are basically in the same orbital plane and in more or less the same orbit. That is, the angle from one satellite to the other changes very very slowly, so that the optics don't have to do much tracking -- and consequently satellites can only form an optical link with other satellites that are ahead or behind themselves in ~ the same orbit. Cross-plane optical links would have a trickier tracking problem. While there's no explicit mention of same-plane vs cross-plane optical links, I assume that the first time people have a public cross-plane optical link, they will make a big deal out of it. :) The article also mentions that SpaceX would need to do further study before using laser links between satellites and ground stations-- this kind of optical link would require both more angular tracking and probably atmospheric correction as well.
- sandworm101 3y agoTracking is an issue, but doppler can also be a thing. At orbital speed (actually up to 2x orbital speeds) the doppler effect between two satellites can change the frequency enough to cause interference. Moving a scope to track a moving target is one problem, allowing the algorithms to adapt at the frequency shifts on the fly another.
- Scoundreller 3y agoIndeed Iridium had to deal with the same thing (or I guess, didn’t): “ Cross-seam inter-satellite link hand-offs would have to happen very rapidly and cope with large Doppler shifts; therefore, Iridium supports inter-satellite links only between satellites orbiting in the same direction.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellat...
- moffkalast 3y agoDon't all satellites orbit in the same direction? Launching retrograde is just throwing away free velocity.
- mschuster91 3y ago> The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link > Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke. How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link quality when they're shooting around Earth with 17.000 miles an hour? (Meanwhile, me on Earth, has link quality issues due to a speck of dust on a fiber connector)
- ugjka 3y agoGiven this is Gen3 and Gen4 now being launched, it took some figuring out
- sumtechguy 3y agoRelative to the origin satellite I would assume the others are in a fairly fixed position to it. Remember they try to keep them spaced out and even coverage. That means the things are not moving around wildly relative to each other. But to us they are wizzing by. For example I know I am relatively moving fairly quickly to the earths core and pretty fast around the center of the sun. But from my PoV everything around me looks stationary. Also there is not a lot of dirt up there.
- diggan 3y ago> (Meanwhile, me on Earth, has link quality issues due to a speck of dust on a fiber connector) It's incredible really. I remember when I was a kid living with my mom on an island, we got broadband relatively late (compared to the rest of the country), as the island required antennas for getting mainland and the island linked, instead of cables. I think it was set up that way because of costs or something, remember it being expensive... Regardless, the antennas were setup and we finally got broadband, but every time it got a bit windy and/or rainy, the links started to have huge issues, especially if the lake got lots of waves, then the connection simply disappeared. And now it seems almost like magic to me how the same setup is literally done but way above our heads, in a really hostile environment like space.
- lupusreal 3y ago> "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window" I can't figure out what this sentence means.
- mschuster91 3y agoThat any SpaceX user who has a connection established for >2h will have their data sent not via the classic path "ground - satellite - ground" at least once during the connection, but via "ground - satellite 1 - satellite 2 - ground".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NelsonMinar 3y agoI think it means pretty much all Starlink users have at least some data go over laser links every two hours. Which is a bit of surprise to me, if true. I have a year or so of fine-grained latency detail taken with IRTT on a Starlink connection, I should sit down and see if I can see times I'm using a satellite. Latency is highly variable in Starlink though so it's pretty noisy data.
- gibspaulding 3y agoHave you posted that data anywhere? I'm currently on a 10mbps DSL connection and considering StarLink, but have so far been scared away by the cost and concerns about latency, so I'm always on the lookout for real world data.
- regpertom 3y agoMy pings roughly 60-80 no matter if I’m going to a friends server down the road or across the world. Before starlink, my rural internet would be lucky to get below 120. For what that’s worth.
- quailfarmer 3y agoHey, I’m very curious if you’ve seen any improvement in latency over the past month.
- 7e 3y agoGlobal internet traffic is estimated to be 3 yottabytes per day. So Starlink is now carrying one of out every 77 million parts of worldwide traffic. Wow, that's small. EDIT: there's some confusion information out there. With a more conservative estimate of 150.7 exabytes per month, Starlink gets 1 part of 119, which is more impressive.
- uoaei 3y agoThe quoted number is only for inter-satellite laser links, not for other methods of information transmission.
- bagels 3y agoMost of the traffic is probably just bounced off the satellite down to the nearby ground station still.
- jlmorton 3y agoWhere do you get 3 yottabytes? That is difficult to believe. I see 150 exabytes per month [1], about a thousand times less. https://gitnux.org/internet-traffic-statistics/ https://gitnux.org/internet-traffic-statistics/ [1]
- 7e 3y agohttps://www.statista.com/statistics/216335/data-usage-per-month-in-the-us-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216335/data-usage-per-mo...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 1oooqooq 3y ago[flagged]
- aPoCoMiLogin 3y agoso you are asking if the traffic is additionally encrypted? i don't think that additional encryption is needed, like your ISP doesn't additionally encrypt your TLS encrypted traffic, that would be waste of resources
- phh 3y agoExcept wifi is encrypted
- hn8305823 3y agoMetadata (src/dest ip/port) can be of high value, especially for cross-border traffic.
- robertlagrant 3y agoYou mean in between two satellites?
- FL410 3y agoStarlink does encrypt user traffic
- Symmetry 3y agoGiven how well Starlink has held up in Ukraine against Russian interference I expect they're doing better than most internet providers.
- jlmorton 3y agoIs this a serious question? You think SpaceX developed the industry-leading orbital rocket, launched hundreds of times to deliver thousands of in-house developed satellites utilizing homegrown, novel argon gas ion thrusters, to develop a global satellite internet system using inter-satellite laser links, their own in-house developed, incredibly inexpensive phased array antenna system, and everything else, and they forgot to use TLS?
- sys_64738 3y agoIs that a lot?
- heeton 3y agoDon’t you mean 42million Gigabytes?
- Alifatisk 3y agoIsn’t that equivalent? What does it help to use GB instead of PB?
- heeton 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199368
- ortusdux 3y agoI was going to put 336,000,000,000,000,000 bits/day, but it seamed a bit overkill.
- MeImCounting 3y ago*seemed I dont think theres anything having to do with seams or fabric in this conversation
- versteegen 3y agoBeen quite a lot of discussion of both of those things in this thread!
- Scoundreller 3y agoSo which points are getting “faster than fibre” latency because of this? Extra distance up and down, but make up for it on the long-haul. Won’t beat HF radio though.
- edgyquant 3y agoWhy would we expect faster than fibre?
- Cu3PO42 3y agoThe speed of light in a vacuum is roughly 50% higher than the speed of light in fiber.
- andrewpolidori 3y agoIs attenuation in a vacuum also better?
- mensetmanusman 3y agoyes, glass has a non zero amount of absorption which is why Erbium amplification is required.
- edgyquant 3y agoThe area between a starlink receiver on the ground and a satellite isn’t a vacuum
- gkfasdfasdf 3y agoThat's a great point, I was curious so I looked it up. Google offered the following: "The speed of light in air is about 299,705 kilometers per second, or 2.99705 × 10^8 meters per second. This is almost as fast as light travels in a vacuum, slowing down by only three ten-thousandths of the speed of light." So seems like the speed of light in atmosphere is still a lot faster than fiber.
- bilinguliar 3y agoAre they using Mynaric technology?
- axus 3y agoInternet says no: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/19/german-space-lasers-company-mynaric-ceo-talks-nasdaq-ipo-plans-for-growth.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/19/german-space-lasers-company-...
- latchkey 3y agoI sit in my hot tub at night and see 1-2+ satellites go over every single time I'm out there. Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I've seen recently are just old starlinks burning up.
- gnrlst 3y agoHow do you spot a satellite? I've never seen one.
- drynewton 3y agohttps://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ Put in your location and it will tell you when and where to look at the sky to see one. Works great for me and hopefully it will work for you.
- kirubakaran 3y agoThe Starlink ones look like Santa's sleigh https://i.imgur.com/4S0vbfY.gif https://i.imgur.com/4S0vbfY.gif
- giancarlostoro 3y agoProbably out in a rural area far enough away from a major city its easier to see them.
- TheAlchemist 3y agoIt depends where you live certainly - if you live close to a big city you will probably never see them. But there are places - like New Zealand - where you can see them fairly often. There are some online trackers you can use.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y agoBut how do they beam copies of the space to space links down for wiretapping, as Iridium does?
- supertrope 3y agoAt the ground stations
- inemesitaffia 3y agoGS is layer 2. It's done at the POP's like every other company
- Animats 3y agoStarlink is rolling out "direct to cell" connections, where the satellites connect directly to GSM cell phones. Is any ground station involved in a cell to cell call?
- panick21_ 3y agoYou could imagine a situation where they can do that. But practically what happens is the phone connects to a sat, the sat connects to a local ground station, then across conventional fiber to another ground station, up to a sat and then down to the other phones. The are likely doing that because regulation and so on. But the do what you suggest.
- Animats 3y agoThat wastes half the bandwidth of the system. Will Musk put up with that?
- 7e 3y agoIf I send one byte and it hops through ten satellites, is SpaceX counting that as ten bytes of data?
- mort96 3y ago[flagged]
- theultdev 3y agoI'm immensely interested in people commenting how they are disinterested in X thing. Please go on! I'd love to know the motivation of posting, it makes no sense to me. Seems to be a self-fulfilled prophecy.
- mort96 3y agoI guess I just wish the HN timeline wasn't so full of his garbage.
- theultdev 3y agoDo you have a specific qualms with satellites providing internet to remote areas or EVs or space exploration or is it purely personal? In other words, what makes it "garbage" to you? If it's straight up due to Musk being involved, isn't that a negative outlook for the sake of being negative? You could just view it as humans advancing and be happy about that.
- mort96 3y agoI think I have been pretty clear? I don't care for Musk's projects.
- theultdev 3y agoYou were clear on the opinion, not the reasoning. I was just curious as to why you didn't care for the projects.
- mort96 3y agoI don't really see an individual asshole's ownership of such a large part of the world's internet access as "humans advancing". Nor do I see his attempt at shifting the conversation away from actual solutions (e.g public transport, walkable cities, etc) over to "buy slightly more efficient and very expensive cars from him" as "humans advancing". His efforts to signal-boost the far right is certainly not "humans advancing". This is just PR for one of his shitty projects. It has no place on HN.
- why_at 3y agoRandom thought I just had: What are the odds of a rocket launch crossing through one of these laser links on its way to a higher orbit and disrupting traffic for a fraction of a second? I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we're talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds still tiny? Not that it would be a big deal if it happened, just curiosity.
- elevatedastalt 3y agoI think they are still tiny. Also don't networking systems routinely deal with temporary link disruption?
- burnished 3y agoWhat does that have to do with the odds of rocket induced dropped packets?
- pests 3y agoAny rocket induced dropped packets will just be resent after the rocket has passed or will be routed over other links. Lets not forget about clouds, birds, airplanes, hot hair balloons and tons of other things that separate the ground from space. We have protocols and networks already designed today that deal with this exact problem.
- wrboyce 3y agoI don’t think there are many birds, aeroplanes, nor hot air balloons in LEO? Are there?! (I doubt clouds too, but meteorological phenomena perhaps?)
- belthesar 3y agoI think the GP is saying that we already deal with these problems with downlinks, so accounting for similar problems on crosslinks is a known, and expected quantity.
- timcavel 3y ago[dead]
- therealmarv 3y agoI hate that PCMag ignores browser preferred language lists. It switches the language on my geo IP address which is a language I cannot read.
- shoelessone 3y agoThis is a serious annoyance for me all day long, across the internet. Have you found most sites respect your preferred languages list?
- Symbiote 3y agoFor Google, I found setting my browser to "Accept-Language: en,sv" when I live in Denmark was sufficient — just English and they seem to assume I can't configure the browser and want the local language. PCMag serves me English, with "en-GB,en", though I don't know if they would support Danish anyway.
- joshspankit 3y agoI’m waiting for two things: 1. Full-circumference world round-trip latency sat to sat (yes it has to go to ground to “count” but I just want to know what the number is) 2. Deployed LEO servers running with laser communication to the Starlink satellites. Preferably gaming or CDN since either is a great way to verifiably test the limits.
- mrb 3y agoSo that is "432 Mbit/s per laser, and 9000 lasers total". I don't know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than "42 PB/day". Interestingly, they also say each laser "can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link" (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit/s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is probably achievable in ideal situations (eg. 2 satellites very close to each other), so these laser links are used in bursts and the link stays established only for a few tens of seconds or minutes, until the satellites move away and no longer are within line of sight of each other. And with 2.3M customers, that's an average 1.7 Mbit/s per customer, or 550 GB per customer per month, which is kinda high. The average American internet user probably consumes less than 100 GB/month. (HN readers are probably outliers; I consume about 1 TB/month).
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago"Customer" may refer to households, not individuals, in which case it could be numerous internet users soaking up data per customer.
- janalsncm 3y agoThere’s probably redundancy in the links. In other words, A sends a MB to B which sends it to C, that’s 1 MB of information transmitted to customers but 2 MB of laser transmission.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- garciasn 3y agoNetflix uses 3-7GB an hour. The average person is spending 4-5hrs a day watching TV. I’d say most are above 100GB/month. But that’s me.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoDo you have a source on the 4-5 hrs?
- justina20 3y ago[flagged]
- Havoc 3y agoIn the long run that could become a massive strategic advantage for the US. A 2nd layer of resilience over undersea cables
- bagful 3y agoA privately-held strategic advantage?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoOffloading the risk on private players, reduces the amount of government investment required, and shields them from any criticism, should the project fail. Also, if it is that strategically important, the government can just buy SpaceX.
- roywiggins 3y agoThey probably wouldn't have to buy them, if there's a war on they probably have enough legal tools to just require SpaceX to sell them whatever capabilities they have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
- roywiggins 3y agoIt doesn't really matter who owns it as long as it can be bent towards national goals when it matters. American vehicle manufacturing was a strategic advantage during WWII because they swiftly pivoted to selling tanks to the government instead of cars to civilians.
- forgot-im-old 3y agoIt's already been bent towards missile defense https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
- throwaway2037 3y agoSomewhat tangential: I assume that Starlink is not yet profitable. How many customers do they need to become profitable?
- BluSyn 3y agoI recall reading they were profitable on a quarterly basis at end of 2023.
- hk1337 3y agoIsn’t the user experience with starlink pretty abysmal for the average user? Both the service and the customer service?
- inemesitaffia 3y agoIt's pretty average ish. You can try it out for 30 days and form your own opinion.
- karim79 3y agoHas anyone tried Starlink? I super curious as to whether it's a decent drop in replacement for the ISP have been using at home, and have had trouble with since day one. I won't mention any names (but I will say that it sounds a bit like Smodabone). What is the latency like? The variability of the up/down? Does it do what it says on the tin? Is (non-professional) online gaming a go?
- freedomben 3y agoBeen using it since it was first available. Latency is fine, speeds are good and steady. Occasional outages of several hours every few months or so, but improving as time goes on. Only complaint is that their DHCP server is buggy so if you don't use their blessed router, you can expect outages when you get transitioned to a new base station and starlink expects your IP to have changed, but it doesn't, or sometimes when your IP lease expires. Took me months to figure out that was the issue. I run almalinux on my router so I just have a script that checks a heartbeat and if it gets interrupted it will nmcli down the wan interface and back up, which usually gets a new IP. Though sometimes it will give the special IP to my router that is supposed to go to the blessed router. Overall I do recommend, but have a backup ISP if always up is important.
- madaxe_again 3y agoMy experience, a year of use - 300Mbps down pretty consistently, 40Mbps up, 40-60ms latency, fine for gaming for the most part, and the drop outs are unnoticeable short when they do infrequently happen. Never had an outage more than 10 seconds. They’ve also nearly halved the price since I signed up.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>Has anyone tried Starlink? I super curious as to whether it's a decent drop in replacement for the ISP have been using at home I use it when I'm venturing around my rural area, which has spotty (or zero) LTE and broadband. It's awesome for that, literal game-changer. But it does suffer from downtime, sometimes poor reception, bit of lag, etc. It's the difference between 99% uptime and 99.999999%; you'll notice if you're using it all day, every day. It's also more expensive than my home broadband for lower speeds. I don't think you could replace your ISP, unless your ISP is pretty bad.
- mise_en_place 3y ago4 nines uptime is great, but I would think the SNR matters more in a packet switched network like this. There are conditions that may lead to a very low SNR.
- hasoleju 3y agoI just noticed that they were launching their first satellites in 2019. It's impressive that they are now able to casually talk about the different routing options for the data streams to remote areas just 5 years after that. At first this sounded like an utopian dream but now it looks like common infrastructure that has a place in everyones life. This must have been the same feeling when the first landlines were installed. The very first lines were a sensation and then after only a few years it becomes normal quickly.
- loceng 3y agoI think it's likely a bad idea at this point to bet against Elon - he seems to make more good decisions than bad decisions, and is able to attract and keep the talent that is enabling his companies to snowball exponentially towards reaching the abundance of the universe. My deepest hope currently is that the riches of the universe now on the horizon of being relatively easily accessible, in a systematic and efficient way, will lead to the military industrial complex profit seeking to redirect their efforts to mining the riches of the our solar system and beyond, rather than likely mostly inadvertently driving for hell on Earth.
- robbiep 3y agoPast performance is a piss poor indicator of future performance. You can’t deny (I don’t think) that the things he’s done are amazing. He’s in the zone where he’s smelt too many of his farts though, and believes he can do no wrong, which is historically a very bad place to be. I hope, for all of the awesome things he’s said he’d like to do, that they don’t come agutsa due to that
- aetimmes 3y ago> the things he's done are amazing The things he's _purchased_ are amazing.
- merman 3y agoThis is obviously untrue. what you’re really saying is “I don’t agree with Elons views so it would be uncomfortable for me to think that he has some admirable qualities, so I don’t allow myself to think about it”
- eterevsky 3y agoThat's around 3.9 Tb/s, in case you are wondering.
- hypertele-Xii 3y agoIs it possible one of these laser satellites miss and hit you in the eye? Would that blind a man?
- hasoleju 3y agoNo. The focus of a laser beam is not constant over these large distances. It is the same effect you get if you use a laser pointer over large distances. The spot becomes large quickly.
- Denote6737 3y ago3.65 days of downtime isn't going to be winning any prizes.
- vardump 3y agoIf near a ground station, can't the satellites just use their standard radio links to cover that? Might be an issue for Antarctica and major seas.
- gotmedium 3y agoWhen will we see data centers in space?
- ryankrage77 3y agoI think the biggest hurdle would be heat dissipation. Solar power is plentiful, but all that energy then has to be radiated away somehow.
- ijhuygft776 3y agoThis post currently has 420 points, I bet Musk would like that (wont vote to keep it this way)
- testemailfordg2 3y agoMy novice view....Laser connections are point to point, so they can be between satellites....But to the end user equipment,having those many point to point laser connections might be too difficult or impractical to achieve...So that's where they use radiowaves, which means any satellite over the horizon can talk to a dish...
- sheepybloke 3y agoJust for context, here's SDA's Open Standard on how they expect to do connections over Optical Links. I assume the starlink terminals work in a similar manner: https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SDA_OCT_Standard-3.1.0_Signed_Web_Version.pdf https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SDA_OCT_Stand...
- sonicanatidae 3y agoBut how much of that data is insane right-wing conspiracy theories? lol