Starlink Thread (split from SpaceX)

[mikegarrison]

This same picture has now been posed to two different threads and also one made up new just for it.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

 

This is so cute and you have plenty of ammo as in snowballs to chase them off but should feel bad doing so. Having an dome or spike would also help against snow or ice build up. 
Friend lived on an chicken farm who had tons of mice because the feeds so they had an army of stay cats and other cats hanging out with the strays. 
It was an standard to use the horn on the car before starting it to scare away cats heating up in the engine department before starting the engine. 
If you don't you killed some poor cat and your engine looked like an bloody mess. 

[Scotius]

Did cats help with mice problem? Because i keep couple of hens for eggs, mice get into the fodder all the time, there are stray cats around - but number of vermin doesn't seem to decrease.

 

[kerbiloid]

They have founded a sindicate.

[CatastrophicFailure]

2 hours ago, Scotius said:

Did cats help with mice problem? Because i keep couple of hens for eggs, mice get into the fodder all the time, there are stray cats around - but number of vermin doesn't seem to decrease.

 

Obviously you need your own cat. 

[StrandedonEarth]

4 hours ago, Scotius said:

Did cats help with mice problem? Because i keep couple of hens for eggs, mice get into the fodder all the time, there are stray cats around - but number of vermin doesn't seem to decrease.

 

Apparently not enough hungry cats. A proper barn cat doesn’t get fed by the farmers; it catches its own food. But if there’s a lot of vermin, then the cats just can’t keep up

[Scotius]

23 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Obviously you need your own cat. 

I have a cat But she's too young and spoiled. She doesn't even want to leave house on her own.

[magnemoe]

21 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Apparently not enough hungry cats. A proper barn cat doesn’t get fed by the farmers; it catches its own food. But if there’s a lot of vermin, then the cats just can’t keep up

My sisters new car is quite the mouser, she rarely eat the mice but tend to leave them under a tree for display after finding that trying to bring the catch into the house was very unpopular. Once she brought back an mouse in a unknown mouse trap  
She also catch voles who we got a lot of the last years. 

[magnemoe]

On 1/1/2022 at 7:34 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

 

Now that is an Cat 5 connection not an starlink ones. 

[NFUN]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Now that is an Cat 5 connection not an starlink ones. 

Lower meow-width, higher felinity?

[Gargamel]

Multiple Starlink threads have been merged. 

[kerbiloid]

1. Are cats included?

2. The "catpad receiver" term should be official.

[cubinator]

I hope the sky clears for this launch, I might be able to see it one orbit later.

Wait, they're going south with it? Never mind

[StrandedonEarth]

 

[kerbiloid]

Starlink helps dinokillaz stay stealth.

https://www-rbc-ru.translate.goog/technology_and_media/06/02/2022/61ff4a219a79470395194467?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-starlink-satellites-are-photobombing-astronomy-images-study-says-11644062404?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a

[mikegarrison]

What annoys me about all this is that basically they are monetizing the night sky.

It's kind of like living next to a loud nightclub. You are going to hear their music whether you like it or not, and while the club owners make money from it, and the partiers choose to attend, the neighbors don't get get either money or choice.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

What annoys me about all this is that basically they are monetizing the night sky.

It's kind of like living next to a loud nightclub. You are going to hear their music whether you like it or not, and while the club owners make money from it, and the partiers choose to attend, the neighbors don't get get either money or choice.

Free Starlink for astronomers!

[kerbiloid]

If SpaceX gets bankrupt, we will see a star shower.

Such systems even in theory should not belong to one company.

[tater]

On 2/5/2022 at 10:25 PM, kerbiloid said:

Starlink helps dinokillaz stay stealth.

Knowing about a dinokiller is only useful with the ability to send some large mass with sufficient dv to do something about said dinokiller.

Step 1 would be gaining that capability—which requires cheap heavy lift, IMO. For that particular issue, NTP as well, ideally (chemical to get to space, nuclear once there).

Minus that it's sort of like the movie Melancholia.

 

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

What annoys me about all this is that basically they are monetizing the night sky.

It's kind of like living next to a loud nightclub. You are going to hear their music whether you like it or not, and while the club owners make money from it, and the partiers choose to attend, the neighbors don't get get either money or choice.

Legit concern that I share.

That said, it's just a matter of who does it first. I notice aircraft when I'm in the back country, for example (particularly if the conditions are right for contrails). Heck, I notice aircraft at home sometimes—gorgeous sky, except crisscrossed with contrails. Vehicle noise, too. All are impacts, we're just so used to some of them we ignore them, or forget that they are not supposed to be a thing. Some people might be happy to have drones delivering packages, but I certainly don't want that lawnmower sound over my house all the time, for example.

So mitigating visibility is very important, IMO. FWIW, I try and spot starlink trains naked eye, and with binos. They're hard to come by for me, though I certainly see individual starlinks sometimes. I managed to see a few after a launch a couple months ago. Not sure how much more they can do, clearly as much as possible.

Not sure about the RF aspect, though, that's another can of worms.

 

 

[kerbiloid]

People who want a good internet should live in cities rather than crap everyone's sky.

[tater]

39 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

People who want a good internet should live in cities rather than crap everyone's sky.

Imagine SpaceX actually gets SS working, and starts building a city on Mars (I'm in the camp that finds this pretty kooky).

Every 2.14 years (that's the synodic period, right?) for ~21 years, 1000 Starships have to go to Mars. Each one also takes several refilling flights which will be done ahead of time with depots or depot ships. Best might be a depot for every 1-2 Mars-bound SSs (twice as big if 1 needed per 2 ships). That means for many months out of 25 in the synod there are >1000 Starships (2000?) in orbit, each shiny steel, and a decent fraction of the surface area of ISS.

What if we had Epstein Drive from The Expanse, and the Moon, Mars, and the Belt as destinations we could all easily visit—Starlink would seem trivial by comparison. Briefly winking sats near sunrise/sunset, vs ships burning for days away from Earth—new, moving stars in the sky—or burning to brake for Earth. Like aircraft now, but with fusion torches at the back.

The science fiction future is simultaneously pretty cool, and also very different than the world we live in now.

 

[Flavio hc16]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

People who want a good internet should live in cities rather than crap everyone's sky.

I think you have your scale of priorities wrong..by a lightyear probably

[kerbiloid]

52 minutes ago, tater said:

Imagine SpaceX actually gets SS working, and starts building a city on Mars

The first part I basically can imagine, the second part is no way.

53 minutes ago, tater said:

1000 Starships have to go to Mars.

A Jules Verne level of probability.

54 minutes ago, tater said:

What if we had Epstein Drive from The Expanse

We have kerosene engines and hardly can start methane ones.

***

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for SpaceX Epstein and then Starlink (if still needed).

But currently they just burn moar kerosene to cover the sky with a mountain of cheap satellites.

[Jacke]

9 hours ago, tater said:

Knowing about a dinokiller is only useful with the ability to send some large mass with sufficient dv to do something about said dinokiller.

Considering what we know already about significant threat asteroids, if we keep up observations and find one with the near-passage probability ellipse enclosing Earth, said near-passage will be several orbits away.  And we could send out the heaviest probe and just have it station-keep besides said asteroid to perturb that near-passage ellipse away from Earth.  That method works despite the consistency of the asteroid, while all other methods have a lot of risk of not removing all of the asteroid's mass away from that near-passage.

Edited February 7, 2022 by Jacke

[tater]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The first part I basically can imagine, the second part is no way.

Like I said, I'm not one who thinks 1 million people on Mars is going to happen terribly soon.

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

A Jules Verne level of probability.

Yes, but if that comes to pass, Starlink—with very intentional work to mitigate brightness—is trivial in comparison.

 

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

We have kerosene engines and hardly can start methane ones.

***

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for SpaceX Epstein and then Starlink (if still needed).

But currently they just burn moar kerosene to cover the sky with a mountain of cheap satellites.

One, I think that SpaceX sees Starlink as enabling Starship, not the other way around. I've done the math in other threads, but the short answer is that the launch market is chump change. Single digit billions for a US launch provider realistically, and still small even if a company like SpaceX was to completely capture the entire NASA budget (not possible, as by far most is not launch). The global sat broadband market is estimated at >$50B.

The point of the Expanse or other SF level space travel observations is that once space travel is actually common, particularly any mass visitation by people (I think tourism is the killer app here, not colonizing Mars), then the sky is filled with crawling dots. I live in the middle of the US, so we have fewer aircraft at night, it's sort of like Starlink only being visible within X hours of daytime. Few planes, then the airport starts operating around dawn, and a few, more as the day starts, then after a couple hours the overflights from CA and TX come overhead. Either noisy and close from our airport, or in a much larger dome of sky visible from great distances with contrails (which linger long after the aircraft are gone). I certainly notice aircraft, and they certainly mar the natural quality of the sky. Perhaps because I love aircraft I don't care, or perhaps it's because the sky has been crawling with aircraft since before I was born and I know nothing else, regardless, it's not a huge point of concern for me. I don't mind their lights at night either for the same reasons—though that is far more time limited per pass than contrails.

Regardless, it's going to happen anyway if it makes sense to do it. If the model turns out to not be viable, it will be a brief experiment. If it is viable, someone would do it. If SpaceX made cheap access to orbit a thing minus Starlink, then it becomes more viable. I was sure that space solar power was not a thing (sorry, Gerry O'Neill), but with cheap enough access, and modern PV tech, maybe the case closes. In that case we have large, ugly solar farms in space eventually (just as ugly as the ^%#%$@%$! windmills I can see 50km from my front window).