Because it’s a bogus story. It’s like saying that the leaves fell from a tree or water evaporated from a lake. The satellites are deorbiting because that’s what they are designed to do, rather than hanging around as space trash for hundreds of years.
Right, and the first Starlink launch was in 2019. So, at absolute maximum, these satellites have a total lifespan of 4 years, if the ones coming down now are the very first ones ever launched into orbit.
That’s, if you’ll excuse my language, fucking abysmal. This is what’s supposed to bring reliable internet access to the distant corners of the globe? A constellation of million dollar satellites that crumble into dust on re-entry every four years? Maintaining this, and God forbid scaling it up to actually serve a majority of the world population, would be a stupendous and recurring waste of money, materials, and labor. Elon has a stable full of actual rocket scientists over at SpaceX, fucking use them. Max lifespan of four years for a “permanent” satellite constellation is actually laughable. The ISS has been in stable orbit since 1998. DIRECTV had better satellite longevity than Starlink.
By all means, design them to deorbit so that when humanity cooks itself off the face of the planet next century we aren’t left with 300,000 starlink satellites trashing up our cosmic lawn for eternity. But maybe design them to deorbit later. At this rate we’ll be turning a percent of the world’s GDP into literal smoke each year as a fifth of the Starlink constellation rains down over the plains of Africa.
It’s a balance between latency (altitude), launch weight (more satellite fuel), and number of satellites (coverage area). Would you rather have less satellites and less coverage or more satellites that have a lower lifespan?
I would rather America just build infrastructure instead of polluting the entire planets night skies with wasteful launches of infinite cell towers into very low orbit
A few tens of thousands of pieces of infrastructure in space to serve the world, or hundreds of thousands of miles of infrastructure covering the land, to serve one country
Believe it or not, but the engineers over there did probably actually think about this. Starlink isn’t competing with other providers that are at higher orbits such as Geostationary. They are deliberately placed lower for lower cost and transmission delay. When going from LEO to GEO, the limits of the speed of light make a tangible difference in latency between the satellite and the ground. In addition, the orders of magnitude lower cost to deliver to the lower orbit allows them to send many many more satellites, which increases throughout enough to make satellite internet actually usable for high bandwidth tasks.
Individual Starlink satellites are not permanent. You can argue whether it makes sense to constantly have to replace satellites in order to get more speed and lower latency, but that has nothing at all to do with some sort of engineering mistake. Comparing the longevity of Starlink satellites to satellite television, GPS, ISS, etc. is like comparing fuel mileage between a Prius and the Saturn V Crawler-transporter. They are in no means competing on this factor.
To your point, geostationary satellites are in orbits around 22,300 miles away while Starlink is in a LEO orbit ~342 miles away. At the speed of light, that’s an additional quarter second round trip time minimum. Absolutely forever in internet speeds. My experience with GEO is a latency >550ms round trip. With the TCP/IP protocol built the way it is (aka, three-way handshake), a webpage wouldn’t even start downloading until almost 2 seconds have passed.
Because it’s a bogus story. It’s like saying that the leaves fell from a tree or water evaporated from a lake. The satellites are deorbiting because that’s what they are designed to do, rather than hanging around as space trash for hundreds of years.
So they just become ocean trash instead? Seems like we should put a stop to that as well.
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Right, and the first Starlink launch was in 2019. So, at absolute maximum, these satellites have a total lifespan of 4 years, if the ones coming down now are the very first ones ever launched into orbit.
That’s, if you’ll excuse my language, fucking abysmal. This is what’s supposed to bring reliable internet access to the distant corners of the globe? A constellation of million dollar satellites that crumble into dust on re-entry every four years? Maintaining this, and God forbid scaling it up to actually serve a majority of the world population, would be a stupendous and recurring waste of money, materials, and labor. Elon has a stable full of actual rocket scientists over at SpaceX, fucking use them. Max lifespan of four years for a “permanent” satellite constellation is actually laughable. The ISS has been in stable orbit since 1998. DIRECTV had better satellite longevity than Starlink.
By all means, design them to deorbit so that when humanity cooks itself off the face of the planet next century we aren’t left with 300,000 starlink satellites trashing up our cosmic lawn for eternity. But maybe design them to deorbit later. At this rate we’ll be turning a percent of the world’s GDP into literal smoke each year as a fifth of the Starlink constellation rains down over the plains of Africa.
It’s a balance between latency (altitude), launch weight (more satellite fuel), and number of satellites (coverage area). Would you rather have less satellites and less coverage or more satellites that have a lower lifespan?
I would rather America just build infrastructure instead of polluting the entire planets night skies with wasteful launches of infinite cell towers into very low orbit
A few tens of thousands of pieces of infrastructure in space to serve the world, or hundreds of thousands of miles of infrastructure covering the land, to serve one country
Believe it or not, but the engineers over there did probably actually think about this. Starlink isn’t competing with other providers that are at higher orbits such as Geostationary. They are deliberately placed lower for lower cost and transmission delay. When going from LEO to GEO, the limits of the speed of light make a tangible difference in latency between the satellite and the ground. In addition, the orders of magnitude lower cost to deliver to the lower orbit allows them to send many many more satellites, which increases throughout enough to make satellite internet actually usable for high bandwidth tasks.
Individual Starlink satellites are not permanent. You can argue whether it makes sense to constantly have to replace satellites in order to get more speed and lower latency, but that has nothing at all to do with some sort of engineering mistake. Comparing the longevity of Starlink satellites to satellite television, GPS, ISS, etc. is like comparing fuel mileage between a Prius and the Saturn V Crawler-transporter. They are in no means competing on this factor.
To your point, geostationary satellites are in orbits around 22,300 miles away while Starlink is in a LEO orbit ~342 miles away. At the speed of light, that’s an additional quarter second round trip time minimum. Absolutely forever in internet speeds. My experience with GEO is a latency >550ms round trip. With the TCP/IP protocol built the way it is (aka, three-way handshake), a webpage wouldn’t even start downloading until almost 2 seconds have passed.