SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation has lost more than two hundred satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) since July, according to data from a satellite tracking website. This is the first time that Starlink has lost a significant number of satellites in a short time period, and these losses are typically influenced by solar flares that cause changes in orbit and damage or destroy the spacecraft. The nature of the satellites, i.e. their model, is unclear, and if they are the newer Starlink satellites that SpaceX regularly launches, then the firm will have to conduct at least nine Falcon 9 launches to make up for the satellites lost.
Since it is a SpaceX subsidiary, Starlink has rapidly built the world’s largest LEO satellite internet constellation and the world’s largest satellite constellation by rapidly launching them through the Falcon 9 rocket. However, upgrades to the spacecraft and constraints with the Falcon 9 have reduced the number of satellites that the firm can launch, with its latest launches seeing roughly 22 satellites per launch for a nearly one-third reduction over the 60 satellites that SpaceX launched during the early days of the Starlink buildout.
The newer satellites are second-generation spacecraft that SpaceX received the launch authorization from the FCC less than a year back. They are more powerful and are thus larger and heavier than the earlier satellites, which limits the Falcon 9 ability to squeeze large numbers inside a single payload fairing.
Satellites in orbit or space have to face off against various hazards that can damage or put them out of commission. SpaceX faced one such event in February 2022, when a solar flare damaged at least 40 of the recently launched satellites. SpaceX confirmed this and shared that the heat from the solar flare increased atmospheric density and made it impossible for the satellites to maintain their trajectory.
Every time I read anything about starlink, it all just seems so quintessentially American.
You’ve got effective monopolies of communication infrastructure, which causes everyone to be underserved, and instead of just fixing the monopoly problem, you fire off infinite rockets full of cell towers that burn up in a year
I’m angry at you because I’m about to defend an Elon Musk project… But Starlink is used in many countries. (in)Famously in Ukraine. The idea has merit for anyone living in remote areas (northern Canada, war-torn areas, etc.).
Ukraine is a fantastic example of how bad the whole thing is playing out. Remote areas are always better served by actual infrastructure investment however.
It doesn’t help to have infrastructure if it’s destroyed by war.
The idea has merit for anyone living in remote areas (northern Canada, war-torn areas, etc.)
I will grant you war torn areas, and remote islands, but rural continental communities are better served with terrestrial infrastructure. Just because someone’s willing to fill the sky with space junk as a means of masturbation doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for public infrastructure.
Laying 200km of fiber for a town of ~1000 will always be more expensive than it is worth (for an ISP) and that math only gets worse when you look at last-leg hookups for people spread out ~5km apart around the area and not living directly in the town.
… which is maybe why things that are essentially critical to a developed country’s lifestyle probably shouldn’t simply be companies. If we go off of “it’s not profitable”, public transport wouldn’t be any good, postal services would suck, etc.
The internet should be a public service like mail.
Also, in the US they paid the ISPs to hook everyone up to fiber, and then they just… didn’t.
Over a long enough term it will be worth it.
But as a said elsewhere neither electricity nor phone being run to rural US homes was cost effective for companies. So the US decided that was shit and paid for it to get done. Started to do the same for internet access. Phone companies refused, used the money for other purposes, inflated prices faster the inflation, etc. and yet neither FTC nor congress held them accountable. Other countries have done the same thing for power and phone, there is nothing fundamentally different about physical internet access stopping anyone from doing the same thing.
Terrestrial includes wireless solutions, which are better suited for many last-leg hookups in situations like these.
Sure, there’s a lot of places where these won’t work (eg. mountainous areas), but there are also questions about whether people living that remotely even want broadband or wireless.
Do you think xfinity grade router would do 5km?
Also, serving a community of 2k people as far as 1000 km might cost hundreds of millions. So I don’t believe the 2k community would be happy to pay $5k each monthly to make it profitable for the ISP.
Look up LMG when linus wanted to connect two warehouses that are meters apart with entry level networking solution.
First, no one is talking about standard home-grade routers, though there is technology to make those work at longer distances. We’re talking about say a cellular network, which is considered broadband in most of the US and has an existing infrastructure. Many of these areas are already going to have cellular access, and upgrades to existing networks are significantly cheaper and easier to maintain. There are long-range wifi solutions, and those work too, but most require line-of-sight, so as i stated, aren’t suited for say mountanous area.
Name one community that is stretched out over 1000k. That’s not community, that’s a fucking state or territory. Seriously, that’s more than 10x the width or height of Rhode Island.
Again, as I said, it’s questionable whether those people even want high-speed internet in the first place. You’re probably not living remotely to be on-the-grid.
Governments generally fund the buildout for this, so it’s rarely on citizens anyway.
The LMG video is irrelevant. Linus is far from an expert.
In on starlink because it’s now the only half decent option. There is a fairly strong 4g tower reception but it’s underprovisioned and gives less than 3mbps downloads. 25 up though. We did have ADSL for a long time but they’ve shut that network down.
I’m on a farm 15km from town in hilly terrain.
Sorry English isn’t my first language so I meant 1000 km far from networking infrastructure. Not stretched out over 1000 km.
Linus isn’t professional. I just want you to have an idea of the cost. Specifically the fiber optic cables.
That doesn’t include maintenance, professional installation, and hardware to distribute the connection to multiple users / houses.
Even wireless solutions would not make it viable. I am not an expert but I would assume you need 100 towers for 1000 km (a tower for each 10 km) to relay data to keep speed and stable connection in check.
The average cost of a barebone cellular tower in USA is $250k without networking hardware. This would result in $25,000,000 just for towers.
If each person in the town of 1000 subscribed and paid $100 monthly it’d be $100k a month which I don’t think would cover the operation expenses of the service.
It will never be commercially viable to run a cable into the extreme rural reaches of North America. People just don’t understand the scale of the expanse.
Neither was running phone lines or electricity in the rural US, but we did it anyway because it was better for the country.
I agree for some definitions of rural, but I don’t know if you have an idea on just how remote rural can mean. Try looking around northern Ontario in Google maps if you’ve never done it before. It’s fascinating. So many tiny towns that are only reachable by boat or plane. They’re not islands, but they might as well be, with how isolated they are.
But even for towns that aren’t nearly so remote, no company is going to lay down quality infrastructure to accommodate every random farm that is spread several dozens of kilometers away from the nearest city. Even without capitalism, it’s an expensive use of resources to connect isolated areas.
Satellite internet has existed for some time now for those areas. I wonder if star link is really worse than those alternatives, or if people just love to hate Musk.
The previous satellite internet was more expensive, had much higher ping times and lower transfer Speeds because the satellites where fewer and further away from earth. This mean more people had to share a lower bandwidth. You could use email and some text heavy websites, but bloated news sites with Autoplay ads, video calls or online games not so much…
Building rural infrastructure is incredibly expensive. I grew up about 25 miles from the nearest city, and to this day there are still no cell towers or broadband in the area. Just dial up internet that maxes out at 28.8 baud running over copper twisted pair. It’s frankly archaic.
My parents inquired with the local telco, and for 7 miles of fiber I believe they wanted to charge somewhere around $13 million for their rural neighborhood - just for the trenching. For like 20 farms.
I lived in a semi-rural area that had fiber access 1 mile away on the same road and they refused to run it unless i paid them $20k. The area was separated by a railroad track, which required permits and they didn’t want to deal with it.
Money is no object? Sure. Running fiber to every cabin in the woods though? That’s going to run up a cost…
Yes it will. Just like doing the exact same thing for power and phone lines to every single place in the entire US ran prices up. Difference is we paid for it and enforced companies do to it. For internet access we just paid for it and then never made them provide the internet access to everyone everywhere.
As much as this is true, this is also a solution that’s doesn’t have a lot of alternatives for very isolated areas. You can technically run undersea cables to everywhere, but it’s actually faster and easier to have LEO satellites serve places like Antarctica. Some smaller island nations, the middle of Africa, etc.
There are problems with every solution, but this was always an inevitable solution for worldwide communication.
We’ve had communications satellites for this function for decades without needing starlink and blotting out the sky with garbage
Yeah and they suck with 500kbps links and ping times measured in seconds.
Geosynchronous sats are just fine! Only 22,236 miles high vs. Starlink’s 342 miles.
Want me to do the math on speed-of-light delay? .119 seconds is hella slower than .002.
oooh nooo i can’t play cod at pro levels, that’s worth endlessly throwing satellites that struggle to stay up for a year before becoming space junk and requiring us to burn a whole bunch more fuel to keep another load up for barely a year
So, you’ve never had to rely on satellite internet? That was a rhetorical question.
Had a client not far from here, only option was satellite. Couldn’t even get 3G at the time. 950ms+ ping times.
We were trying to hook up a simple RDP system, PC to PC, and I finally had to tell him it wasn’t possible to do anything but FB and email, and that would be miserable. Hell, almost nothing was possible.
before becoming space junk
So you don’t get speed-of-light delay, and you also don’t get low-altitude orbital decay. You won’t admit it, but you have no idea what you’re talking about it. But you’ll be back to double down on your ignorance! FFS, just stop.
Yup, that’s why the Antarctic Event Horizon telescope needed to wait 6 months to send its data back…
There is a reason that StarLink is better than the previous options.
I wouldn’t say I’m underserved (I live in a tech hub). Overcharged? Definitely.
Rural folks do have a hard time without satellite though, and one thing a lot of Europeans do not viscerally realize about the States is how big the country is, and how much empty space there is.
Even as someone living on the east coast of the US, I’m always surprised when I visit the Midwest and Central US to see just how much “nothing” there is. At least compared to the relative density of driving up and down the northeast corridor
I kinda wish the Capitalism dev team would patch out the
ExternalitiesAreHardToTrackcheat code. It’s been abused for centuries and yeah, it’s hard to fix, but there are quite a lot of upvotes on its bug tracker, and only a few billionaire downvotes.
Okay, so is this actual news, or just reporting on the fact that starlink satellites have a 5 year lifespan by design? Because this reads like the numerous other articles out there that are ignoring the fact that satellites need fuel to stay in low earth orbit, and that fuel eventually runs out.
I dislike musk as much as the next guy, but let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t.
I get your point, but I suspect there’s more here than just lifespan. I don’t think we know the reason but the article says this:
As a comparison, only 248 satellites had burned up at the start of this year, so the number destroyed during the last two months is higher than the figure for the first seven months of the year.
If 200 over the span of 2 months is “normal” then I have questions about the financial viability of the project.
It kinda depends on what we are considering a starlink satellite. They did launch a batch of satellites that experienced some issues, and some of them did come down. Iirc those were new models that were going up for the first time.
That said, I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. Firstly because we are talking about less than a percentage point of the total, and second because once the bugs are ironed out, a different company that isn’t run by a moron will likely step in to do a better job.
Firstly because we are talking about less than a percentage point of the total
(200 / 5000) * 100 = 4%
Ah, fair enough. Not sure why I thought there were more in total. In fact I think there may be less than 5k.
By the way, what happens to these satellites once they reach their planned lifespan and run out of fuel?
There is sufficient drag in Low Earth Orbit for the crafts to deorbit without station keeping, meaning they burn up in the atmosphere within a few months/years depending on atmospheric conditions.
Thank you for the explanation!
Yeah, if you want to avoid that, you need to go way up into more expensive and less effective orbits
I srsly dont want the internet infra to be controlled by the dick headed person.
You just don’t know about the other dickheads in charge.
Luckily he’s not the majority stakeholder.
I’m not touching it even with a 2ft pole. I don’t want every website to be throttled except Twitter.
This is a complete non story. They have a design life of only a few years. They have already been replaced in orbit with upgraded ones.
Total clickbait.
“This is a non story”
Billionaires adding to space junk that will keep us from getting the fuck off this rock is a non story, eh? Tell me more.
Sure! I’d be happy to.
The satellites operate in an extremely low orbit. At the end of their life they are manually de-orbited. If they fail, they will naturally de-orbit themselves in just a few years. They contribute to “space junk” in no way.
The precise position of all the Starlink satellites is known, and space is much bigger than you appear to be imagining, so the network will in no way impede lauching rockets.
There is no need to simply make stuff up about Starlink. There are plenty of reasons to hate Elon without inventing things.
What part of “reentry into earths atmosphere” did you have trouble comprehending?
I’d be way more worried about the amount of CO2 being released with so many Falcon 9 launches.
Wow, I didn’t realize they’re already at more than 5000 satellites. Crazy numbers.
“And this is how we trapped ourselves in our own planet”
Well at least it’s a habitable planet, right?
Has been, until end of last year. Now? Not so much.
The way politics are moving rn I can imagine the big funny happening soon, which could trigger a new ice age though.
“it’s”, yes.
“it’s” is a contraction of it and is…
Or it and was
It’s ok, we were already trapped in our planet. There is no planet B…unless you don’t mind living in high-tech caves :) on Earth they’re called “vaults”.
Im fine with it, so long as we all get extra water chips we should be good.
Do they deorbit? Or did musk just pollute our orbit for no reason whatsoever?
They deorbit very quickly.
That’s good. Happy to hear that.
And then… just… drop somewhere?
No, they vaporize on reentry.
Ah ok lol, that makes more sense
This is the first time that Starlink has lost a significant number of satellites in a short time period
It’s an Elon debacle, it’s probably been a problem from day one that he’s happily shoveled other people’s money at instead of fixing it or admitting he’s a moron.
Musk is a minority stakeholder in Starlink. This place hates Musk so much that they’ll criticize and actual innovative company serving the underserved.
Like the Ukraine? Piss off with your billionaire worship.
People all over the world use starlink internet that would be functionally locked out of it other wise. In no way is pointing that out billionaire worship. Use your head
I’m no expert by any means but it seems incredibly wasteful that we build satellites, then expel tons of CO2 into the atmosphere to get them into orbit, only for them to just burn up after a few years.
We can’t even reclaim the material because it literally burns and disintegrates as it’s falling out of orbit.
Seriously what the fuck are we doing???
Burning things creatively.
So billionaires filling Earth 's orbit with junk …
luckily LEO junk will be pulled into Earth’s atmosphere without propulsion
This place hates Elon Musk so goddamn much they suddenly become experts on satellites. I bet Musk has very little to do with the day to day at Starlink.
One can hate Musk and Starlinks separately.
They ruin our night sky and make Kessler syndrome worse and worse.
These are also mostly irrelevant to Kessler syndrome. At such low orbits, any debris is cleaned out in months or only a couple years
The number of satellites in orbit right now should have next to 0 impact on your view of the night sky. This can be proven with some pretty simple equations. Should we get rid of GPS satellites too?
what is this supposed to prove. Go outside at night and look, they’re not clogging up the sky. At the very worst they’re a faint little line you can barely see. I think that is worth giving internet to unserved areas of the world.
Big Brainy in chief probaly thought the could cut down on latency if they move the orbits closer to the atmosphere and no one cares enough to correct him.
This just sounds like regular LEO attrition, these satellites are small and “simple” so they were never going to last long (not trying to defend musk here, starlink is full of issues)
Probably. It would be funny, though :)
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Sounds like a lot of space debris :(
One of the benefits of such a low orbit - they deorbit quickly
