SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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"