totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[Xd the great]

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The people working with that stainless steel are often less fine about getting rained on.

Elon's new invention: Personal anti-rain system.

Aka raincoat

[StrandedonEarth]

54 minutes ago, Xd the great said:

Elon's new invention: Personal anti-rain system.

Aka raincoat

Hmm, first the Boring Co. Not-a-Flamethrower, next a SpaceX Raincoat. Will it be resistant to MMOD?

Edited April 30, 2019 by StrandedonEarth

[tater]

CRS-17 slipping to May 3 due to power issues at ISS.

New liftoff is ~3:12 am at the Cape (1:12 I might actually see).

Wait, that's Friday night, and my wife is out of town. Yeah, I see myself staying up.

[Xd the great]

3 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Hmm, first the Boring Co. Not-a-Flamethrower, next a SpaceX Raincoat. Will it be resistant to MMOD?

Nah, it is just a IVA suit. Those astronauts wear during launch.

[tater]

 

[Shpaget]

13 hours ago, tater said:

CRS-17 slipping to May 3 due to power issues at ISS.

New liftoff is ~3:12 am at the Cape (1:12 I might actually see).

Wait, that's Friday night, and my wife is out of town. Yeah, I see myself staying up.

Just out of curiosity, what was your source? When I woke up this morning, I saw your post and went to spaceflightnow launch schedule, but it wasn't updated yet. I then went to NASA site and saw nothing, SpaceX site had nothing, Elon Musk twitter nothing.

Only a few hours later I found an article mentioning the power issue and the delay.

Do you have a suggestion for stock market?

Edited April 30, 2019 by Shpaget

[tater]

NSF/Twitter had it yesterday. The ISS problem was news, and people quickly figured out that the issue affected redundancy on the CanadArm needed for berthing.

 

[Geonovast]

13 hours ago, tater said:

CRS-17 slipping to May 3 due to power issues at ISS.

New liftoff is ~3:12 am at the Cape (1:12 I might actually see).

Wait, that's Friday night, and my wife is out of town. Yeah, I see myself staying up. 

That's.... uh, Thursday night / insanely early Friday morning.

[tater]

4 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

That's.... uh, Thursday night / insanely early Friday morning.

Yeah, I realized that when I saw the time again this morning. 1:11 isn't so bad, either way (I'm sort of a night owl). May 3 is a NET date, though, and I think it depends on how they manage the ISS power issue.

[tater]

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

14 hours ago, tater said:

 

Oh, for the day I can finally tell Comcast exactly where to shove it. 

[MinimumSky5]

Whenever I hear about LEO Internet constellations, I wonder why they'd be competitive with ground based Internet. 

Then I remember how ridiculous the Internet is in the US, and it all makes sense again. 

[Ultimate Steve]

Not much has been announced about the Dragon explosion yet. Granted, it hasn't been very long, but this is making it look like it isn't a straightforward failure. If that is ture, then at this point I think I'd bet on both Boeing and Blue Origin flying humans to space before SpaceX.

[tater]

28 minutes ago, MinimumSky5 said:

Whenever I hear about LEO Internet constellations, I wonder why they'd be competitive with ground based Internet. 

Then I remember how ridiculous the Internet is in the US, and it all makes sense again. 

?

 

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, MinimumSky5 said:

Whenever I hear about LEO Internet constellations, I wonder why they'd be competitive with ground based Internet. 

Then I remember how ridiculous the Internet is in the US, and it all makes sense again. 

 

1 hour ago, tater said:

?

I believe it’s a complaint about some areas of the US getting gouged for spotty or inconsistent service. 

But as I understand it, the main purpose of LEOnet is to provide lower-latency service for those rural areas that do not have landline broadband, which is quite expensive to provide for the few customers it would gain. Areas like northern Canada, Africa, etc. 

I would imagine if an entire metropolis switched to LEOnet it would saturate the satellites passing over. 

[Cunjo Carl]

1 minute ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I believe it’s a complaint about some areas of the US getting gouged for spotty or inconsistent service. 

^ This. Comcast has a total monopoly in many areas. They sell you a corndog and give you the stick.

It's better or worse in different parts of the states, and in particular in growing communities like mine it can be aggressively terrible. There's also no real alternatives, unless you're willing to install a microwave reciever mast on your roof to get internet from some crazy ISP on the hill across town....

Which of course I was! The service is up 364+ days a year and gives actually 5-10Mbps for actually $60/month, AND they don't spy on / sell our traffic. (They also give us a rebate for having the antenna and providing paid wifi to the local area too, which is nice.)

Relative to comcast this is a great deal, but whenever I explain this to someone from overseas (especially from East Asia) they always get a look of shocked horror on their face, so I'm assuming it's still not the best. Almost everyone around here wants an alternative to comcast, but of course not everyone wants a 30ft antenna mast on their roof, so I'm assuming that's part of the allure of SpaceX's constellation. I agree it'll probably saturate pretty quick, which I think SpaceX is greatly looking forward to.

[MinimumSky5]

1 hour ago, tater said:

?

 

It's the fact that in most areas of the US, there is only one Internet supplier. Given that I can chose between 6 national suppliers and a few local ones, and I'm not in a particularly big town, it's always struck me as one of the best examples of crony capitalism. 

[Scotius]

It's not only USA. Broadband internet access is spotty in Europe too. Cities are mostly in good shape, but rural areas have much more limited options. While i do have optic fiber connected (after years of suffering excrementsty signal reception from radio access), my brother living couple of kilometers away on the outskirts of our town, is practically at the mercy of phone companies. He applied to the same provider i use, but they just shrugged - "Sorry Mr.Xyz - but you live too far from existing cable network, and in your neighbourhood there isn't enough potential clients to justify the investment in a new line and all necessary hardware. Sucks to be you."

[tater]

1 hour ago, MinimumSky5 said:

It's the fact that in most areas of the US, there is only one Internet supplier. Given that I can chose between 6 national suppliers and a few local ones, and I'm not in a particularly big town, it's always struck me as one of the best examples of crony capitalism. 

"Most areas" of the US are in fact in the middle of nowhere. My State has about the population of Slovenia. It is 15.5X the area of Slovenia. Internet infrastructure costs scale with area, not with population. Is it worth the same cost to cover NM with internet for 2 million people as it cost to cover Germany (slightly larger than NM) with internet for 83 M people? The per capita cost would be 41 times higher here in NM.

Edited May 1, 2019 by tater

[tater]

 

[StrandedonEarth]

16 minutes ago, tater said:

"Most areas" of the US are in fact in the middle of nowhere. My State has about the population of Slovenia. It is 15.5X the area of Slovenia. Internet infrastructure costs scale with area, not with population. Is it worth the same cost to cover NM with internet for 2 million people as it cost to cover Germany (slightly larger than NM) with internet for 83 M people? The per capita cost would be 41 times higher here in NM.

Which is where LEOnet (I should copyright and sell that term) comes in. I don’t have any numbers, but StarLink must be cheaper per square kilometre of coverage than laying cable. Or they wouldn’t be doing it. 

2 hours ago, MinimumSky5 said:

It's the fact that in most areas of the US, there is only one Internet supplier. Given that I can chose between 6 national suppliers and a few local ones, and I'm not in a particularly big town, it's always struck me as one of the best examples of crony capitalism. 

Most if not all of those suppliers (especially the local ones) will be leasing their bandwidth from the major providers’ systems, if it comes through a cable. Much like how the smaller cell providers lease bandwidth on the major providers’ cell towers 

Edited May 1, 2019 by StrandedonEarth

[tater]

Most areas is the critical thing here, not most people.

In Albuquerque, the largest "city" in NM with a population in the greater metro area of maybe as many as a million (think it's lower), we have DSL, cable, a couple sat options, plus various wireless providers. There are likely more, and many if you count reselling the same actual service by different providers (as @StrandedonEarth said). Similar choices exist for people in the other decent sized towns. Outside of those, there are few options. There are many towns in NM with populations substantially smaller than my neighborhood, and I live in one of the lowest density parts of town. How many millions should be spent to run optical fiber hundreds of km to a town of 50 people? Who should pay for that?

[Cuky]

3 hours ago, Scotius said:

It's not only USA. Broadband internet access is spotty in Europe too. Cities are mostly in good shape, but rural areas have much more limited options. While i do have optic fiber connected (after years of suffering excrementsty signal reception from radio access), my brother living couple of kilometers away on the outskirts of our town, is practically at the mercy of phone companies. He applied to the same provider i use, but they just shrugged - "Sorry Mr.Xyz - but you live too far from existing cable network, and in your neighbourhood there isn't enough potential clients to justify the investment in a new line and all necessary hardware. Sucks to be you."

I for example can't get speeds higher than this from my provider:

I have asked for higher speeds because they have them as options. It would cost more, but hey you can't have something for free.  But they say that line that comes to my building just can't handle more bandwidth so I am stuck with those speeds until they do something about their infrastructure. They started upgrading here in Croatia about a year or two ago, but they are doing it on county by county schedule... and it is going really slow.

 

Who knows, maybe SpaceX would be able to provide faster internet for me.

[Racescort666]

2 hours ago, tater said:

"Most areas" of the US are in fact in the middle of nowhere. My State has about the population of Slovenia. It is 15.5X the area of Slovenia. Internet infrastructure costs scale with area, not with population. Is it worth the same cost to cover NM with internet for 2 million people as it cost to cover Germany (slightly larger than NM) with internet for 83 M people? The per capita cost would be 41 times higher here in NM.

At the risk of sounding like an arrogant American, this is something that's sometimes hard to explain to Europeans. The sheer size of the US (and Canada, they have the same problem) is what precludes a lot of things that are seen as commonplace in Europe.

Some of them are self-perpetuating like trash public transit. Well, in the US, most people own cars and don't regularly use public transit. Public transit in the US is generally terrible so people drive their own cars or have to own a car. Cities and metro areas are much more spread out which also makes public transit a challenge. It's easy to spread out when the norm is owning your own car and you have more flexibility of where to live and commute.

Internet, as discussed, is also a good example. I would add that eminent domain is a bit more of a challenge in the litigious United States where people are sensitive about how their property is used. I don't know how it is in other developed countries.

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, Scotius said:

It's not only USA. Broadband internet access is spotty in Europe too. Cities are mostly in good shape, but rural areas have much more limited options. While i do have optic fiber connected (after years of suffering excrementsty signal reception from radio access), my brother living couple of kilometers away on the outskirts of our town, is practically at the mercy of phone companies. He applied to the same provider i use, but they just shrugged - "Sorry Mr.Xyz - but you live too far from existing cable network, and in your neighbourhood there isn't enough potential clients to justify the investment in a new line and all necessary hardware. Sucks to be you."

This is an issue, more so in that its not many who bother to sell lower quality internet connections who can cower larger areas but are still far cheaper and better than mobile internet. 
Lots of the same issues in Norway who is also very spread out.