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Skylon

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This is not a new pic, but it shows something useful given the close approach of Dorian from the Cape and Cocoa:

In the images above, the "VAB" tent that Starship is now inside is nearly due north of the large building. The wind field from the Hurricane  at closest approach will be roughly from... the NW to N. So this structure should be fairly protective (10-20 knots average, too, we have worse than that all the time at my house, and my umbrella table doesn't even move, lol, though I think they can get gusts 2-3 times that)).

Edited by tater
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1 minute ago, sevenperforce said:

In this case, SpaceX likely rejected any suggestion that a collision was likely and accordingly declined to move their sat, as doing so would ruin its data. Even an inclination change would alter numerous factors (like insolation, exospheric temperature, etc.) and make the whole thing harder to work out. ESA was free to move its satellite if it was concerned...which, evidently, it was.sired orbit, but that's fine.

They could de-orbit any other sat. Like... ???

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3 hours ago, Technical Ben said:

They could de-orbit any other sat. Like... ???

This sat was probably already on its way to being deorbited. After all, it was selected to be deorbited because there was something wrong with it. So altering its course would have made the experiment worthless.

Anyway, as the updated presser revealed, they would have coordinated with ESA if necessary.

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Just now, sevenperforce said:

This sat was probably already on its way to being deorbited. After all, it was selected to be deorbited because there was something wrong with it. So altering its course would have made the experiment worthless.

Anyway, as the updated presser revealed, they would have coordinated with ESA if necessary.

You do know how experiments work right? Like, the other 2, or 57 sats? Like... they would rather risk exploding another company's satellite, than have to press "retry" on the sat, or another sat?

 

Wow, I hope I don't meet you at a party, who knows how you'd react. ;)

 

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11 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

This sat was probably already on its way to being deorbited. After all, it was selected to be deorbited because there was something wrong with it. So altering its course would have made the experiment worthless.

Anyway, as the updated presser revealed, they would have coordinated with ESA if necessary.

Some were intended to be deorbited from the start to demonstrate/test that capability.

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Who is legally liable if a Starlink (or any other sat) collides in space? If I have my weather satellite out there and one day a Starlink plows through it, can I sue SpaceX? Would I win?

I guess they would claim my satellite plowed through them. But that doesn't hardly seem fair if I have one and they have 12000.

(It also doesn't seem fair if my sat is out there just getting science data while theirs is out there making them a profit. Are they profiting by risking other people's sats?)

Edited by mikegarrison
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8 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Who is legally liable if a Starlink (or any other sat) collides in space? If I have my weather satellite out there and one day a Starlink plows through it, can I sue SpaceX? Would I win?

I guess they would claim my satellite plowed through them. But that doesn't hardly seem fair if I have one and they have 12000.

A space volume tax should be implemented. Like a ground area, but orbital volume occupied by orbits.
Length of orbit * safety cross-section area * number of sats.

They joke about "tax on air". But this would be literally a "tax on nothing"!

Edited by kerbiloid
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Maybe the license to launch a new satellite (of any type) should have to automatically include some kind of bonded insurance that says "if this satellite or any debris from this satellite ever damages anything else that was already in space when this launched, all damages will be covered by the launcher of this satellite". In other words, space would essentially be grandfathered, and whoever was there first has right of way.

Politically this would be a non-starter, of course, because countries that currently have no sats (or few sats) would never accept that countries with many sats already there get grandfather rights.

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TBH the minute I finished reading that Teslarati article about ESA and SpaceX I thought that it looked very much like one of those "nothing happened!!!! BUT... we still reported on it" articles.

Those avoidance manouvres seem to be pretty common, it's just that this time Starlink sats were involved. They are pretty new to the wholr orbit place and I bet there will be more of those incidents in the future. Not only because there will be more sats but because it's just something that can't be avoided (no pun intended) and has to happen eventually.

Edited by Wjolcz
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33 minutes ago, Wjolcz said:

TBH the minute I finished reading that Teslarati article about ESA and SpaceX I thought that it looked very much like one of those "nothing happened!!!! BUT... we still reported on it" articles.

Those avoidance manouvres seem to be pretty common, it's just that this time Starlink sats were involved. They are pretty new to the wholr orbit place and I bet there will be more of those incidents in the future. Not only because there will be more sats but because it's just something that can't be avoided (no pun intended) and has to happen eventually.

Yeah, for example there are over 100 motor vehicle crashes a day in the US that result in a fatality, and the only ones I hear about here in NM are either:

1. Local (and not even all of those).

2. The victim or responsible party was someone really famous outside of my local area, hence national/international coverage.

3. The car was a Tesla, I've literally heard of every single fatal Tesla crash.

 

 

Edited by tater
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1 hour ago, tater said:

3. The car was a Tesla, I've literally heard of every single fatal Tesla crash.

Yeah, and every time there’s a debate about how dangerous electric cars are, and whether the autopilot is to blame.

Edited by sh1pman
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1 hour ago, Nightside said:

Those pictures are... not very good.

what are we looking at?

Nothing of... huge interest. :rolleyes: Top left looks like up inside, looking at the lower tank butt. You can see the manifold for the fuel lines, similar to recent SLS photos. 

Top right is a tank dome hidden behind shipping containers.

bottom left is just the flank of the beast. 

Bottom right is the same tank dome closer. 

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On 9/3/2019 at 2:20 PM, kerbiloid said:

A space volume tax should be implemented. Like a ground area, but orbital volume occupied by orbits.
Length of orbit * safety cross-section area * number of sats.

They joke about "tax on air". But this would be literally a "tax on nothing"!

I'm pretty sure that the higher (and therefore more volume "consumed") the satellite is, the less likely it is to hit anything.  I suspect requiring insurance to cover anything you hit (the FAA required Spacex to have plenty of insurance just for the "hopper" test) would have the actuaries get the real requirements much closer to reality.  Of course, this is more how the USA works, not sure if other countries would be interested.

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