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Elon Musk went on firing spree over slow satellite broadband progress
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently "fired at least seven" managers in order to speed up development and testing of satellites that could provide broadband around the world, Reuters reported today.
SpaceX denied parts of the story, saying that some of those managers left of their own accord and that the firings happened over a longer period of time than Reuters claimed.
[...] Among the fired employees were SpaceX VP of Satellites Rajeev Badyal and top designer Mark Krebs, Reuters wrote. "Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites," Reuters quoted one of its sources as saying. "Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner."
Reuters described a culture clash between Musk and employees hired from Microsoft, "where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk's famously short deadlines." Badyal is a former Microsoft employee, while Krebs previously worked for Google."
Apparently, the test satellites work:
"We're using the Tintins to explore that modification," one of the SpaceX employee sources said. "They're happy and healthy and we're talking with them every time they pass a ground station, dozens of times a day."
SpaceX engineers have used the two test satellites to play online video games at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California and the Redmond office, the source said. "We were streaming 4k YouTube and playing 'Counter-Strike: Global Offensive' from Hawthorne to Redmond in the first week," the person added.
Also at SpaceNews and TechCrunch.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @05:44PM (3 children)
Obviously, you read my post above, so you know that most of the satellites are only at an altitude of 210 miles. Resulting in a 420 mile round trip (omg blaze it) rather than 2,000 miles. While you may be skeptical of this orbit, this is the plan they have filed with the FCC and they will have to stick to it for now. SpaceX's space debris mitigation plan says that the satellites have a 5-7 year useful lifetime and will be forced to deorbit by around one year after that.
They claim latency may be between 7 and 30 ms. A 22 ms ping would be just fine for gaming. 20-40 ms should work fine, above 50 ms would be more noticeable, and 100-150 ms or above would be bad. 11 ms would be just fantastic.
In conclusion, this is not a traditional geostationary satellite constellation. It's a new beast, and using it for good Internet service and even multiplayer gaming is plausible. SpaceX is well-placed to launch small satellites for its constellation. Call it a very literal example of "vertical integration"
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(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday November 02 2018, @07:53PM
Sure but you know as well as I do you won't get that. It's not 11ms total, it's an unavoidable 11ms on top of everything else. The only way you'd get close to that would be if both endpoints are connecting directly to the same satellite, and bringing them down so low makes the odds of that pretty low. Particularly since it means the satellites themselves will be moving in and out of range of endpoints quite swiftly.
I do think it's going to be very interesting to see how it turns out. If the price comes down enough this could be very attractive for some applications.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Tara Li on Friday November 09 2018, @01:47AM (1 child)
A satellite in a 210 mile orbit is only 210 miles from the transmitter/receiver when it is directly over-head, something that is a fairly rare instantaneous event. Figure in the cross-connection while in orbit, and yeah, a thousand mile trip from ground station to ground station (ignoring the ground station to server segment of the interaction - will Starlink provide ground station to any major data center, or will they try to convince the data centers to buy those connections?)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @02:15AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellation) [wikipedia.org]
They plan to have 7,518 satellites in the lower orbit. So while it will be rare for one to be directly overhead, they could be "nearby" often.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-internet-constellation-a-license-to-print-money/ [teslarati.com]
Apparently the optimists believe that Starlink at the HIGHER orbit will beat existing networks.
I can't answer your other questions yet. I'm just saying that when the service becomes available, I will look at the reviews. If real users indicate that the hype is to be believed, I will ditch whatever ISPs I'm currently using and throw money at Starlink. I think I would pay $70-100 a month for it.
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