solar storms messing up the satellites,
satellites falling from the sky,
piles of space junk,
overpriced satellite equipment,
throwing up another 49 satellites over the weekend. ..
the express describing blackout and “critical states”
I mean it’s a business that can’t afford to not deliver but at what expense? i have no idea how much those little cubesats cost each to build but i can’t imagine it’s cheap. I found some mention of it that they can cost between $250k and half a million so that’s upwards of $20 million for a fleet of forty with each rocket that goes up — not chump change by any means.
SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 satellites for its Starlink network and now has approximately 145,000 users in 25 countries worldwide.
recently they put together v2 of their hardware with the starlink premium package and boy it’s not cheap — a natural revision of course, always be having r&d working on the the real world issues of the one before. The new one has double the antenna, is faster and higher outputs but it’s not cheap, you’ll probably be looking at $500 a month for it.
if you are in the middle of nowhere then it’s probably worth it for you to throw money at if you know for a fact that you are going to get what’s offered on the website — 20/40 ms latency from effectively space via satellite is pretty incredible. getting 150/500Mbps is a pretty sweet deal and there is no data caps either so grabbing offline copies of things from your youtube subscription is perfect — highly recommend https://www.4kdownload.com for that! :)
with the recent news however i’m sure it’s gonna put a number of new subscribers off paying out to get started, hopefully they have a plan for what they are going to do in the case of solar storms moving forward but i’m more interested in the plan for a much bigger mesh of them, especially when other companies starting do it too, will we have to have more timed outages when they have to “effectively” move for rockets to get out into space?
surely we will end up with a kinda gridlock in space, what with all the trash it’s super possible and who knows what futuristic corporate space satellite warfare looks like just to maintain that no1 position! Don’t get me wrong, i love the idea of a global skynet, grid or mesh of connectivity that covers the planet — it impacts everything, in every corner of the globe!
it reminds me so much of the film “antitrust” i’m not sure if elon/team saw this film but it certainly feels exactly like i expect starlink to work, all these satellites, connected together, having the ability to have this global broadcast network, kinda the opposite to what starlink does right now but easy to complement when the whole world is connected. I’m sure starlink will have it’s own antitrust moment!
with their existing customer base bringing in maybe 15+ million in a month (more with the premium package members) it makes sense that they can throw up rockets with twenty million a time payloads i guess, but still, it’s like a lot of businesses these days, operating at a loss until they break even in the hope of turning an eventual profit with future upsell.
One’s things for sure they can’t keep having things falling out of the sky, such a bigger challenge and task ahead to have equipment that can operate (or get out of the way) of expected solar storms, i mean, we are gonna need to be able to do that with rocket ships and future transportation systems past our solar system so maybe these things are just the jump of point of future exploration. You gotta start somewhere right?
humble x
