Starlink Thread (split from SpaceX)

[AlamoVampire]

2 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

to instantly transform a society with technology would be harmful and it would be destructive.”

@tater i reiterate. Whether or not you like star trek is absolutely irrelevant to the point I am making. It is wholly irresponsible to do as you suggest. I am extremely grateful we cannot.

215411022020

[tater]

12 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

@tater i reiterate. Whether or not you like star trek is absolutely irrelevant to the point I am making. It is wholly irresponsible to do as you suggest. I am extremely grateful we cannot.

That's a positive claim that needs to be demonstrated.

No one will read with that fancy wireless around!

No one will listen to the radio with that fancy tv thingamajob rotting their brains!

People will never write letters again because of the FAX machine!

Yada, yada, yada.

CRISPR-Cas9 is far more dangerous to humanity than space travel.

 

[Terwin]

On 11/2/2020 at 5:05 AM, AlamoVampire said:

Oh really? Lets use me for an example. I live in an area with Class 8 Bortle Skies. Did I mention my house is 19 miles from the down town area of my city? Yeah. I live 19 miles from down town and my sky glows nearly as brightly as if I were in down town. In down town the Bortle Class is Class 9. The worst of the worst.

This is exactly *why* urban and suburban amateur astronomy is implausible, too much light pollution already exits from terrestrial sources.  your problems have nothing to do with Starlink.

On 11/2/2020 at 5:05 AM, AlamoVampire said:

And the reason I support some form of mandatory light pollution control as suggested by @Shpaget, 84 seconds at ISO 3200. SAME EXACT SPOT AS THE ABOVE IMAGES:

You will never get the 50+ car dealerships which turn their neighborhoods bright as day to turn off their lights, that is the most cost-effective method under their direct control to prevent their stock from being stolen, and they have plenty of local political clout to ensure no law will impinge upon that.

You can argue and complain all you want, but the political reality is, this will not change.  If your solution requires that this change, then your solution will not ever work, and if you really want something that will work, you need to find a different solution.

On 11/2/2020 at 5:05 AM, AlamoVampire said:

Which is to me, an aspiring astrophotographer kinda insulting to me. It feels almost as if I and my fellow enthusiasts are being dismissed out of hand. I am not trying to imply that is what YOU are doing, but, that is the feeling that I usually get when that sort of sentiment is presented.

*Lots* of hobbies get short shrift when they are not convenient, yours is not the first, and will not be the last.

 

If anything I would think you would be happy about StarLink funding Starship/super heavy, because this should lead to a much more cost-effective fix for your city-council sitting car dealership owners: a dramatic reduction in the price of orbital astronomy.

If the cost to orbit gets down to the same scale as a good home set-up, then you get to the point where a small club of hobbyists can get their own satellite(s) up and no longer be restricted by time of day or neighbors with awful taste in outdoor lights.

 

Personally, the only out-door lights I have outside of December are front and back porch lights that are both under roofs that limit the light to downward angles, and usually only on for a few minutes at a time.(unlike my neighbors that have uncovered lightbulbs that ruin my night vision any time I look their way, often left on for months straight)

Give up asking for a solution that requires that people not be idiots, and look for a solution that can actually work.

[tater]

Interesting:

https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/rdof-phase-i-dec-2020/

SpaceX is many (all?) of the red areas.

[mikegarrison]

7 hours ago, tater said:

Interesting:

https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/rdof-phase-i-dec-2020/

SpaceX is many (all?) of the red areas.

What is that? It says something about "Rural Digital Opportunity" but there are locations right in the middle of Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, etc. Heck, some of those red areas are on the MIT campus, which is not very rural or lacking in internet....

[YNM]

28 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

there are locations right in the middle of Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, etc. Heck, some of those red areas are on the MIT campus, which is not very rural or lacking in internet....

Probably for testing purposes, as well as testing against the "urban canyon" effect. Bad naming selection I suppose.

On 11/7/2020 at 3:35 AM, Terwin said:

This is exactly *why* urban and suburban amateur astronomy is implausible, too much light pollution already exits from terrestrial sources.

Hey, our planetarium in the downtown of a 30-million pop conurbation is still doing regular observation of the Moon and planetary objects. Still the best way for scientific outreach.

On 11/7/2020 at 3:35 AM, Terwin said:

*Lots* of hobbies get short shrift when they are not convenient.

*looks at hobby machining and 3D printing*

 

Although, don't get me wrong, cheap, easy and somewhat decent access to the Internet around the world is sure going to be convenient - something that the current situation has only highlighted further (even in the US given some amount of monopoly in some areas). At the same time we have to look at what we might potentially be giving away in return for getting back other things at the same time, be that the ability to observe easily from the Earth (no spacecraft could do like 100 m dish), to potentially wreaking havoc in low earth orbit (sure, remote possibility, but we frequently use remote possibilities in planning, ie. earthquake resistance, wind resistance etc, not to mention relying on entirely space-based infrastructure exposes the network to direct solar storms, whereas before we only worry about geomagnetic storms).

Edited December 8, 2020 by YNM

[tater]

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

What is that? It says something about "Rural Digital Opportunity" but there are locations right in the middle of Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, etc. Heck, some of those red areas are on the MIT campus, which is not very rural or lacking in internet....

There are a few red areas here in ABQ (my house might be on one, looks like it).

Dunno about Bay Area, but for the ABQ area, my house is technically not in the city, but the county, and is surrounded by Sandia Pueblo land. At the time they buried cable, the Pueblo was arguing with Congress about who owned the land up to the crest of the mountain, and they didn't allow the cable people to work on the N side of the street to the tram. So that whole previously disputed area (Indians won) has no cable. We have DSL, but are far from a CO... maybe it meets some subsidy standard?

I can imagine there might be islands of poor connectivity in some areas that seem more urban?

[mikegarrison]

21 minutes ago, tater said:

I can imagine there might be islands of poor connectivity in some areas that seem more urban?

Some of those urban spots seem to be parks or medians between roadways. I'm just wonder what purpose is being served here.

[magnemoe]

On 11/3/2020 at 4:54 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@tater i reiterate. Whether or not you like star trek is absolutely irrelevant to the point I am making. It is wholly irresponsible to do as you suggest. I am extremely grateful we cannot.

215411022020

Instant, as in starship work out as well as Musk hopes. In short they start launching commercial payloads in 3 years after using it for starlink launches a year times. 

[YNM]

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Some of those urban spots seem to be parks or medians between roadways. I'm just wonder what purpose is being served here.

Maybe for re-broadcasting, much like 4G/5G ? They could even do like leaky feeder thing for those that stretch along highways (perhaps for Tesla connection ?).

Edited December 8, 2020 by YNM

[tater]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Some of those urban spots seem to be parks or medians between roadways. I'm just wonder what purpose is being served here.

The map would not zoom in for me yesterday for some reason. It does right now, and I see what you mean. Also, my street is NOT in that area, it is actually in areas here with no houses at all that I can tell (Sandia Pueblo land, no houses). Evergreen (an off the grid area N of me) looks like it might be covered.

I checked an one that looks like a road here is actually an arroyo. Bizarre.

It really looks the the government passed this law to get "rural broadband" in such a way that areas without broadband—because there are no houses/people there on the census—qualifies. Is "morons" too strong a word?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

31 minutes ago, tater said:

The map would not zoom in for me yesterday for some reason. It does right now, and I see what you mean. Also, my street is NOT in that area, it is actually in areas here with no houses at all that I can tell (Sandia Pueblo land, no houses). Evergreen (an off the grid area N of me) looks like it might be covered.

I checked an one that looks like a road here is actually an arroyo. Bizarre.

It really looks the the government passed this law to get "rural broadband" in such a way that areas without broadband—because there are no houses/people there on the census—qualifies. Is "morons" too strong a word?

Government does not do stuff for people.  But companies with employees who use cell phones and need to go into the wilderness to find new resources to mine must send data back to headquarters - this requires internet access.

 

And if a few bumpkins get to watch YouTube along the way - well that's just a plus for the advertisers.

Edited December 8, 2020 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[tater]

7 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Government does not do stuff for people.  But companies with employees who use cell phones and need to go into the wilderness to find new resources to mine must send data back to headquarters - this requires internet access.

 

And if a few bumpkins get to watch YouTube along the way - well that's just a plus for the advertisers.

Except many of the areas I can see here in NM aree literally places where no people live—and no people CAN live. There are no houses in arroyos, nor can there be.

There must be some dumb definition of "rural." It's bizarre to get subsidy to facilitate broadband where there are no possible customers.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 minute ago, tater said:

Except many of the areas I can see here in NM aree literally places where no people live—and no people CAN live. There are no houses in arroyos, nor can there be.

There must be some dumb definition of "rural." It's bizarre to get subsidy to facilitate broadband where there are no possible customers.

You ever done any serious 4 wheeling out in the Southwest?  I've spent quite a bit of time tooling around in the desert.  Inevitably I run into some guy who ain't out there sightseeing.  He's running samples and taking sightings / measurements.  Those guys used to have to go back to the hotel and run reports over dial up.  They also get passes to go onto military reservations at times.

 

Now - I agree - plopping down a house in an arroyo is stupid.

 

[tater]

5 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You ever done any serious 4 wheeling out in the Southwest?  I've spent quite a bit of time tooling around in the desert.  Inevitably I run into some guy who ain't out there sightseeing.  He's running samples and taking sightings / measurements.  Those guys used to have to go back to the hotel and run reports over dial up.  They also get passes to go onto military reservations at times.

Well, yes, I do.

The places we are talking about are arroyos in the middle of town. The cell coverage might be less than ideal, but the areas in question are not in the middle of nowhere, we're talking a road with houses on both sides, then an arroyo that forms an open space behind the houses on 1 side of the street, then houses on the far side of the arroyo, then another street.

This is literally the same as calling the concrete drainage ditches in LA "rural" for broadband.

Terminator really needs him some low latency broadband in the rural area above.

[mikegarrison]

4 hours ago, tater said:

The map would not zoom in for me yesterday for some reason. It does right now, and I see what you mean. Also, my street is NOT in that area, it is actually in areas here with no houses at all that I can tell (Sandia Pueblo land, no houses). Evergreen (an off the grid area N of me) looks like it might be covered.

I checked an one that looks like a road here is actually an arroyo. Bizarre.

It really looks the the government passed this law to get "rural broadband" in such a way that areas without broadband—because there are no houses/people there on the census—qualifies. Is "morons" too strong a word?

I'm trying to avoid politics here, but it has the whiff of government money being handed out to private companies for questionable purposes like bringing internet broadband to road medians. I'm open to someone explaining to me why this is a valuable thing, however.

[tater]

25 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

I'm trying to avoid politics here, but it has the whiff of government money being handed out to private companies for questionable purposes like bringing internet broadband to road medians. I'm open to someone explaining to me why this is a valuable thing, however.

Yeah, it looks pretty fishy.

[kerbiloid]

Can't this be for crewless vehicles and internet of things, to let them have complete covering with no gaps?

[tater]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Can't this be for crewless vehicles and internet of things, to let them have complete covering with no gaps?

In my part of NM we're literally talking about dry riverbeds 50m across being "rural" in the middle of town.

[AVaughan]

Where I live (Australia) land is zoned residential/commercial/industrial etc.  Zoning affects council rates, permitted use, and is also relevant when you need approval for development etc.   Does a similar thing exist in the USA?  Could it be simply that those creek beds are zoned rural, since they are unsuitable for residential/commercial/industrial use?

 

Also politicians tend to vote for proposals that they think will help them get re-elected.   So it doesn't matter how badly written a proposal is, if enough rural voters think the proposal is good, then that might be enough to get the appropriate legislation passed, even if it also funds internet in areas nobody lives.

[tater]

6 hours ago, AVaughan said:

Where I live (Australia) land is zoned residential/commercial/industrial etc.  Zoning affects council rates, permitted use, and is also relevant when you need approval for development etc.   Does a similar thing exist in the USA?  Could it be simply that those creek beds are zoned rural, since they are unsuitable for residential/commercial/industrial use?

 

Also politicians tend to vote for proposals that they think will help them get re-elected.   So it doesn't matter how badly written a proposal is, if enough rural voters think the proposal is good, then that might be enough to get the appropriate legislation passed, even if it also funds internet in areas nobody lives.

Yes, this is certainly part of it. Certain areas have different zoning, and the law was written by pols (and none of them are the sharpest knives in the drawer). It's gotta be to try to look like they are doing something, plus unintended consequences of a poorly defined description of "rural."

[sevenperforce]

Off topic, but does anyone know how many kg of krypton the Starlink satellites carry?

I'm wondering whether they have enough dV to do an orbital injection at Mars.

[tater]

3 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

I'm wondering whether they have enough dV to do an orbital injection at Mars.

I want to say that I read 3600 m/s dv.

[sevenperforce]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

I want to say that I read 3600 m/s dv.

Krypton Hall Effect thrusters can push up to 2700  seconds at a discharge potential of 600 volts. I don't know the voltage potential for Starlink but the specific impulse is definitely going to be somewhere between 1400 and 2700 seconds at any rate.

v1.0 is listed at 260 kg, so to get 3600 m/s it would need to carry between 33 and 60 kg of krypton. I don't know if that's realistic or not.

You need about 2300 m/s to get from a Mars transfer orbit into low Martian orbit.

 

[Val]

16 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Off topic, but does anyone know how many kg of krypton the Starlink satellites carry?

Now it is not off-topic