SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - SpaceX does it again!!! + Rolling out Starlink

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- - SpaceX does it again!!! + Rolling out Starlink (https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=225962)

Ah ok, that makes of course more sense. Though i can imagine that Musk will grant some regions of the world free access.. just to make information available and shake things up a bit :03:

Our out-in-the-green spot of a "village" has now been connected with a glass fibre backbone, which means 400 to 1000 mbit/sec download speed. Costs are around 20 Euro/month first year and around 40 in the second year, for internet and voip telephony. The initial connection costs from street to house (some 30 meters here) are being paid by the provider (finally by you of course, lol). After the second year you can choose another provider, if you want.
So it is not cheap, but cheaper than what the German Telecom demands now.. and streaming films etc. is a joy.

If StarLink can provide similar performance via satellite .. let's wait and see.

Starlink launch 4 happening now live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KmB...ature=emb_logo

We live out in the Fens (flat, like Holland) and our next-door neighbours... after years of putting up with a painfully slow service via their phone line... had a dish put up on the roof to get wireless internet from a mast a few miles away

They've never looked back... and I was planning to follow suit until I read this

Mission 4 was a success, looking forward to the next launch. History in the making. :Kaleun_Applaud:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90458407...lite-broadband

Quote:

The company’s 60 Starlink nano-satellites are delivered to low Earth orbit by a partly reused Falcon 9 rocket and gently ejected one at a time from a rack, as if it were a Pez dispenser. They bring SpaceX’s broadband project up to 242 deployed satellites. That’s about a third of the 720 the company will need for “continuous coverage of most populated areas,” as the company tweeted last May.

But while the Starlink constellation is becoming increasingly real as it grows towards a planned mesh-network array of 7,518 satellites, much mystery remains about the internet service that Elon Musk’s space-exploration firm plans to start selling later this year.

The obvious virtue of Starlink’s design, as well as that of other next-gen satellite-broadband services, is that it doesn’t send data on a roughly 44,000-mile round trip. Current space-broadband services require that journey, thanks to their reliance on satellites parked 22,236 miles up in geosynchronous orbits that keep them over one spot on Earth. Starlink’s first satellites occupy an orbit of just 340 miles up, while later waves will provide service from 210 and 710 miles high.

James Watt made a steam engine that could actually supply power. It was a novelty. Then, thanks to the development of rolled iron, they were able to make boilers small enough to fit into a ship. Then Robert Fulton commercialized the thing and steam had a means and a purpose. Before long they had a boiler that would fit into a land vehicle and the steam locomotive was born.

Hans Otto developed the first gasoline powered internal combustion engine. At first it was a novelty, but in just a year Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz had each constructed an automobile. Today it is rare to go anywhere and not see someone not driving a car.

Rudolf Diesel developed a working compression-ignition engine. At first it was just a novelty, but today almost all heavy machinery of any kind, especially in the transportation industry, is diesel powered.

Wilbur and Orville Wright won the race to be the first to fly, but their real contribution was the control system that was fitted to virtually every airplane built by anybody anywhere right up to the beginning of the First World War. Until that point the flying machine was just a novelty. Today every city in the world has at least one airport, and most cities have several.

The Russians put the first satellite into orbit. If they hadn't the Americans would have. Then the Russians put the first man into orbit. If they hadn't the Americans were only a few months behind. This led to more and longer space flights, until the Americans put a man on the moon. If they hadn't the Russians would have. All this is just exploration. The satellites continued to go up in ever-increasing numbers, and with the exception of military satellites put up by governments, they were funded by companies for commercial purposes. Still, they were put up by government agencies.

Now we are seeing the culmination of that process. Commercial rocketry is taking the place of the governments, with a whole space program dedicated to bringing a service to a portion of the population unlikely to get it any other way. The point for the company involved is the age-old evil - to make money. To me this is a marvelous turn of events. It falls into the "If we can do this, we can do anything!" category.

I've commented before on the tail-end landing system, and how it was once accepted that while in movies and TV from the 1940s to the '60s it was nice, in reality it was impossible, once again it turns out that "Common Knowledge" and "Conventional Wisdom" are wrong, and now we see something once dismissed as "impossible" becoming reality. It's still rare at this point, but there's a good chance that our younger members will see this kind of system become so common that, as with the steam engine, the diesel and gasoline internal combustion engines, the gas turbine or "jet" engine, and the rocket engine, it will become a common sight and accepted as the way to get into space.

SpaceX Launch schedule
https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

Impressive. That's industry level activity.

^ If there was a LIKE button i would have pressed it several times. Good post! :up:

Yes sir, me too!
This works and it will change the world.

@Steve, great references, these big leaps often surprise most of the population. And it's good if it makes money, a lot of it, for the company. It's likely they will take it and turn it into more amazing things.

Anyone wondering what I mean by this, read Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Australia’s regulator opens the door for SpaceX Starlink internet service
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/aust...t-service.html

OneWeb now getting into the act. Launched by Russians :O:
https://youtu.be/y13iQJ8m1Ms

Quote:

SpaceX says it is considering spinning off its Starlink broadband Internet project into a separate company, while teams at Cape Canaveral ready to launch around 60 more of the flat-panel data relay nodes into Earth orbit as soon as Feb. 15.

I'm getting in on this one. :up:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/0...bruary-launch/

Another launch coming in days.

Feb 17th launch and deployment successful
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/sp...oster-landing/

Booster missed the barge.

Next launched planned for Mar 2.

Fascinating, well done!

I wonder what they do to keep exact position and orbit.. or do they have to be replaced after some time.
So if there is position correction, do they have small jets, or is it done by "sunwind" pressure :hmmm:

Yep, they have small ion thrusters to move them around and keep them in place, and from what I have read, they are designed to be deorbited as newer tech is developed to replace them. As a property of their low Earth orbit by design, this will be routine:

Quote:

... there’s the matter of attrition, as satellites will begin to deorbit after a few years and SpaceX will need to replace them regularly in order to maintain its constellation. In fact, Hugh Lewis – the UK Space Agency’s representative on the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee – recently stated that in order to maintain a constellation of just 4425 satellites, SpaceX will have to launch that many every five years.

However, SpaceX intends to use this to their advantage by gradually replacing inactive satellites with ones that offer superior performance. In this way, the constellation will gradually be upgraded with the addition of heavier satellites that are capable of transmitting more information, and which are placed in longer-lasting, higher orbits."

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/24/sp...60-satellites/

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/up...N_THRUSTER.jpg

Quote:

SpaceX is targeting launches March 6 and March 11 for its next two missions after swapping an upper stage for its next Falcon 9 rocket with another stage already being readied for liftoff at Cape Canaveral.

The launch targeted for March 6 from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station will send a Dragon supply ship toward the International Space Station with nearly three tons of cargo, crew provisions and experiments, including a new mounting platform for external research payloads outside the station’s European Columbus lab module.

Liftoff is scheduled for 11:50 p.m. EST on March 6 (0450 GMT on March 7) on SpaceX’s fifth Falcon 9 flight of the year.

SpaceX teams a few miles to the north at Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A will prepare a separate Falcon 9 launcher for liftoff as soon as March 11 at 10:40 a.m. EDT (1440 GMT). That mission will loft approximately 60 more satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink Internet network, which is expected to take up the bulk of the company’s 2020 launch manifest.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/2...lcon-9-launch/