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from the the-inconceivable-has-become-commonplace dept.
SpaceX launches 60 more Starlink internet satellites from Cape Canaveral:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 60 more Starlink internet relay satellites on Saturday, boosting the total number launched to date to 895 as the company builds out a planned constellation of thousands designed to provide global high-speed broadband service.
Running two days late because of an on-board camera issue, the Falcon 9's twice-flown first stage thundered to life at 11:31 a.m. EDT, pushing the 229-foot-tall rocket away from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was the California rocket builder's 19th launch so far this year and its 15th Starlink flight.
[...] With Saturday's launch, SpaceX has put 895 Starlinks into orbit, 180 of them — more satellites than any other company owns — in less than three weeks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EvilSS on Monday October 26 2020, @05:24PM (8 children)
This might come as a surprise, but space is kind of big, especially when you start looking at it in 3-dimensions. There is plenty of room for competitors (and there are currently a couple of others looking to compete with them).
I'm pretty sure there are international laws that apply to shooting down satellites, even ones that are privately owned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Monday October 26 2020, @05:45PM (5 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty [wikipedia.org]
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law [wikipedia.org]
Now, if you shot down a satellite, that would be some feat, which a select few countries even have the capability of doing. In the event, some "redneck" shot down a satellite, it would be highly dependent on their countries' view of space law, international treaties, etc., for as to what would happen to them.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @07:07PM (4 children)
> Now, if you shot down a satellite, that would be some feat, which a select few countries even have the capability of doing.
So far, only a select few countries have demonstrated being able to do so, and doing it publicly was kind of the point.
Sounding rockets are relatively small and cheap and are able to reach suborbital tracjectories. Only as payload goes up does become building a carrier rocket become a major feat. You wouldn't need any payload to kill a satellite, just hitting it would suffice. I'd wager building a rocket able to reach Starlink orbits would not be far out of the abilities of many rocket hobbyists.
Now, tracking a satellite? As astronomy photos have shown us, they tend to glow quite brightly in the night sky. Optically tracking them is proably not too hard of a problem to solve. Add some commercial drone avionics and you're good to go?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 26 2020, @08:39PM (2 children)
Yeah, rocket science is still hard. It's one thing to shoot a rocket up high enough to theoretically hit something zipping around the earth. It's much harder to put that rocket where you want it at just the the right time to actually damage something. Now, if all you wanted was chaos, you might could do some sort of splintered shot that cluttered up the roadway so to speak, like tire spikes. Still, Space is Big and you'd be more likely to have just made a giant rocket that goes up, makes a mess and that's it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @09:22PM (1 child)
I agree it's not trivial. Since a satellite's orbital place and velocity are pretty much constant, its exact position at any point in time is known before launch though. If you have a recorded velocity profile of your rocket, you can calculate where to exactly aim it at before launch. Your flight computer just needs to make some minor course corrections due to atmospheric conditions, which should become negligible by the time of burnout.
A modern commercial drone seems to be able to cope fine with wind throwing it off course. Would it work well enough for a rocket going much faster and effectively moving in 3D space instead of just the XY needed for keeping a drone in position over ground? I don't know, but GPS should work all the way up.
I have not played Kerbal Space Program but I hear it's not *terribly* hard, so not sure if "rocket science" carries the same connotation as it used to in the days of Apollo :)
I for one would welcome some nightly fireworks as a compensation for having all my night sky pics ruined.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Tuesday October 27 2020, @07:25AM
> I have not played Kerbal Space Program but I hear it's not *terribly* hard
LOL. Thanks for the informed comment.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:17PM
Assuming you're smart enough to design a rocket and launch it, I would concede the point. Though, if all you're doing is putting together someone else's engine onto a giant tube, and lighting the fire. Yeah, no, you've still got a long way to go.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @08:59PM (1 child)
> especially when you start looking at it in 3-dimensions
Well, duh. Wild guess: SpaceX did not pick the precise orbital planes by accident, but because these happened to be "free". If you were to put a comparable constellation of satellites into orbit, you'd have to pick some other "free" planes. SpaceX specifically picked an orbital place below that of ISS so they could offer sub-100ms latency, a requirement to be eligible for government subsidies (rural bandwidth initiative). ISS needs to periodically maneuver to maintain orbit because at that plane, there is still drag loss. Those satellites on an even lower plane probably need to do that even more often.
Is there enough space to safely deploy a competitors constellation which a) is within the sub-100ms sweet spot while b) not burning so much fuel it would be uncompetitive?
On a tangent, have you seen a graphical representation of the intended orbital tracectories of the Starlink constellation? The one I've seen was for a lot less than the potential 42k satellites and the orbits already started resembling solid shells, kind of like the electron shells of an atom.
Do you know how small an electron is compared to an atom? I'm too lazy to go look it up, but I'd say it's not entirely unreasonable to compare the size relations to those of a satellite and its orbit. You've got a decent chance of knocking an electron out of an atom if you shoot some particles at the area enclosed by its "shell", even though it would seem relatively improbable of hitting such a small moving target.
Do you know any atoms with 42,000 electrons? Being such an atom and getting hit with ionizing radiation would suck.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:41PM
You've got to take into account the size of the thing you're shooting at it. Now, let's do some dirty math. The earth has aprroximately 510 million square km of surface area. Let's be generous and give each satellite 10 meters squared surface area. Going by your example, you would be shooting at something 51,000,000 times smaller than the atom. With something not much bigger than that. Assuming, you're just going for chaos, there's all kinds of stuff you could do to screw things up for everyone. Aiming at and hitting your target, is a vastly different proposition. Even then, just shooting something up there to "cause problems". What would you do, how would you even do it? Why would it make sense? Rockets / Space Science is hard and costs a lot of money.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"