"What’s not usual is the atmospheric fallout. The fiery re-entry of even one Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide vapor, a compound that erodes the ozone layer. A new study finds these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022, and the Great Re-entry Event increases this pollution even more.
To put this into perspective: Before the first Starlink launches began in 2019, only about 40 to 50 satellites re-entered per year. SpaceX just brought down ten years' worth in only six months, adding an estimated 15,000 kilograms of aluminum oxide to the upper atmosphere."
Apparently earth soaks up ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day.
So with 1-2 starlink satellites producing 30kg each dissipate each day, that's adding about 10% to this figure.
I'm not sure if the cosmic dust aluminum finds itself in the same places up there as the dissipating starlink aluminum. Maybe that could be figured out from the above paper.
This could have a significant effect, I don't know.
wow your post gave me a bit of perspective. The distribution might really matter here.
Are those ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day uniformly distributed, and if not how big are those clouds of aluminum oxide that the earth is travelling through? Those 30kg from the satellites are going to be extremely concentrated and therefore take longer to "soak up".
Yeah, I didn't think much of it at first but you pointing out that the 400-800kg is likely spread widely (if not evenly) across much of the earth's surface while the 30kg is landing in one spot, is an interesting point.
I wonder how much aluminum oxide we get though from disintegrating meteors and other impacts every day. Quick search suggests 50-100t of mass from meteors on average each day - similar total to the dust. Those might be more concentrated and analagous to the starlink satellites.
Either make a meaningful argument or stop insinuating through omission that there's a real problem here. You're not only insulting the intelligence of your readers but also, thereby, undermining your cause.
The article you linked is garbage. Its authors find (of course not controlling for multiple comparisons) an effect that looks statistically significant if you p-hack it just right, then juxtapose it with overdetermined and badly simulated South polar vortex behavior to create the false impression that these satellites are killing the planet.
The real motivation behind pieces like this is personal enmity towards Elon Musk. It could not be more obvious. These people pollute our intellectual commons and degrade whatever remains of their intellectual honesty to run tendentious pieces that let them tell their friends they're sticking it to bad rocket man.
> It's well established these oxides lead to degradation of the ozone layer, are you disputing that fact?
“The ozone layer is mainly found in the lower portion of the stratosphere, from approximately 15 to 35 kilometers (9 to 22 mi) above Earth” [1]. Satellites break up around 75 km AGL [2], with most burning up “between 60 and 80 kilometers (37–50 miles)” [3].
So Idk! I don’t think anyone else does—these seem to be novel nanoparticles. We need to study it. If it’s a problem, that’s solvable—carbon composite satellite structuring could use funding. What we can’t do is just assume it’s terrible because items novel because that basically precludes space flight.
> Do you always have a meltdown whenever someone brings up something that upsets your worldview?
Happy to unflag once this unnecessary bit is removed.
What do you think the word "dissipates" means? Antimatter annihilation? Some other mass to energy conversion? That atoms making up re-entering satellites obviously aren't going to disappear.
> Since when did pollution from fires become a controversial topic?
"Fires"?
This whole discussion is like people with a hatred of religion going around saying we have to abolish the Catholic Church because votive candles produce soot. A study showing that would not motivated by earnest and dispassionate scientific curiosity about the laws of the universe, but by a desire to achieve a political end.
The public should fund foundational research, not partisan apologetics.
How much ozone is being destroyed by 15000kg of aluminum oxide vapor? Is it a meaningful amount?
On the scale of the Earth, my completely uninformed intuition is that 15k kg of alumina doesn't feel that significant. I'd guess that rocket production and launch emissions are way more harmful. But don't know.
This is kind of that 'climate change skeptic' argument that CO2 is only a tiny percentage in the atmosphere, 0.04%, so anything humans have done to that tiny percentage is therefore negligible. But we've had a massive impact by increasing that tiny percentage by 50% causing climate change.
So the starlink satellites dissipating could increase the aluminum oxide arriving up there by ~10% - depending which numbers are correct I suppose it could be anywhere from like 3-30%.
If we're really concerned with heavy metals and particulates added to the atmosphere we should also be considering all of the weather modification projects that go on effectively unregulated.
NOAA collects reports[1] of what is done in the US but they don't officially regulate it. They currently have 1,113 reports publicly available.
IIRC there recently was a white paper about the environmental affects of the metallization of the upper atmosphere by satellites - not just those burning up, but the general emission over time of tiny particles of metal from all satellites.
However, quick Google now I can find research which has determined pure rare earth metals in the upper atmosphere coming from satellites and boosters and so on, but nothing about the consequences, and I thought I recalled something about consequences.
> Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to 5 satellite reentries per day
Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)
“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not accounting for energy, which natural burn-up has more of, or incomplete burn-up, which reduces the atmospheric effects of artificial mass.)
Broadly speaking, we don’t seem to be in a problematic place in respect of the atmosphere. Where improvement may be required is in moving from splashdown, where we sink space junk in the ocean, to targeted recovery.
I hear 10% increase on a global constant and that doesn't sound like peanuts. If we increase 10% each few years that might be a problem? I don't know anything about whatever field studies this but given that LEO constellations born yesterday even that 2% increase in stuff coming from the skyes sounds significant to me.
Short answer is we're still theorizing. Models suggest we might see accumulation. But we might not, or it might not accumulate at relevant altitudes. (Current LEO satellites burn up before hitting the ozone layer.)
The same could have been said about pollution from the industrial revolution compounding and hurting the atmosphere, but that never played out, right???
> please recall that the mass of de-orbiting man-made satellites came from the earth in the first place.
Then again, so are CFCs, CO2, radioactive materials...
Just because some elements naturally occur on Earth doesn't mean we're completely insensitive to where they end up. (That said, I have no idea if atmospheric Aluminium is actually a problem or not.)
I was watching a video the other day which happened to mention that sodium lasers are used to create artificial stars, used for calibration of adaptive optics in ground based telescopes. This works because one particular layer of the upper atmosphere is rich in sodium due to impact with sodium rich debris.
Obviously it requires a more scientific analysis but it does seem to me that burning a lot of shit on the atmosphere might be problematic.
It's postulated that the high aluminum content of satellites (for perspective, Bennu samples are only 1% Al), as oxidized Al2O3 particles in the stratosphere, catalyze chemistry that destroys ozone. But that's far from a quantitatively meaningful problem, at the current scale.
This source[0] says satellite reentries are about about 12% of the space industry's contribution to ozone depletion (the big one is chlorine from solid rockets), which in turn is 0.1% of the entire anthropogenic contribution; i.e. satellite reentries are ~0.01% of the total.
The sheer percentage increase in stratospheric AlO is still alarming.[0]
Satellite reentries in 2022 (ie mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels (with satellites adding 'only' 17 t/year), but megaconstellations could raise that to ~480% above natural levels (360 t/year).
This isn't a rounding error, it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition across the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
What else can this effect (as usual, discovered belatedly) beyond ozone? Hopefully it's nothing! But I guess we're gonna find out...
That's still much less than the aluminum from solid rockets, which have been ongoing since the 1970's. Per your own link,
> "In situ measurements showed evidence of a 1,000% increase in stratospheric aluminum levels from 1976 to 1984 (Zolensky et al., 1989), which was associated with the emission of hundreds of tons of such particles from solid rocket motors (SRM) during atmospheric ascent (Brady et al., 1994)"
If you follow Brady et al. (1994)[0], you'll read that every Space Shuttle launch (Table 1) deposited 112 tons of Al2O3 into the stratosphere (>15 km).
This isn't a new phenomenon at all; in fact the peak alumina pollution from in the past (112 tons per STS launch) exceeds the worst-case future estimates from academic research (360 tons per year from satellite reentries).
(/meta Coincidentally, I once linked that exact Brady paper on HN, three years ago[1]. Actually, long before the current social media fad for being concerned about satellites. At the time I wrote, and this has truly aged well, "No one ever gave a shit").
As I understand it, the concern is not just AlO but specifically nanoparticles with high reaction surface area and long lofting lifespans.
The importance of this distinction is acknowledged in Brady et al (1994):
>The exact chemical nature, as well as size distribution (and total surface area) of particles formed in rocket exhaust in the stratosphere is currently unknown. Preliminary experiments at Aerospace by L. R. Martin indicate that plausible particle compositions give highly variable rates of direct ozone destruction.
The 17 t/year and 360 t/year figures are specifically for AlO nanoparticles (formed by hypersonic ablation), whereas Brady et al gives numbers for all AlO particles, regardless of size.
> Satellite reentries in 2022 (mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels
Those findings are simulated, not observed. Hence "potential."
> it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition over the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
Perhaps a lot. Perhaps not much. It's a good question to study. But if this is an issue, it's solvable--carbon composite satellite structures could use a boost in demand and funding.
Interesting. Incidentally SpaceX is probably the most likely to preemptively adopt those measures.
Of all the megaconstellations, SpaceX has historically been the best at being a "good neighbor," with low orbits for debris and lots of engineering to reduce brightness.[0] But hype around SpaceX gives the real bad actors a pass, for example AST is much worse on brightness,[1] and OneWeb and Qianfan are much worse on debris risk.[2]
Because providing infrastructure to remote regions is incredibly difficult through other mechanisms. I don't believe it's hyperbole to say that -- for the goal of improving infrastructure access in some of the most remote and challenging places in the world -- Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years.
Starlink is easily one of my favorite engineering projects. I don't believe anybody has done it cheaper, better, or at wider scale than Starlink has.
I believe Starlink was used to guide Ukranian drones. I think this has nothing to do with poor people in rural areas and everything to do with ensuring deployed military devices work. Modulo of course the egotistical whims of an insane American billionaire hailing from aparteid south african descent.
>>Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years.
Better than gates' effort to eradicate malaria?
Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have, because it's slightly easier than paying OpenReach to connect them to proper network. And it's hard to imagine anyone else being their clients, at the prices that they charge.
Access to information has historically been a great equalizer.
Not to diminish Gates’ malaria efforts, but remote villages having access to information about malaria and prevention methods could be helpful. Along with techniques for filtering water, etc. Access to telehealth.
> Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have
Yeah, so our perspectives may differ a bit. My personal focus has primarily been with Africa, where Starlink is truly transformative. Demand for Starlink may be underwhelming in developed countries (such as your "rural England" example), while in underdeveloped countries, the demand regularly outstrips the supply [0]. I love that it's affordable enough for my African colleagues to use. In the last couple of weeks, I've had more than one full-motion screen-sharing video call to northern Nigeria (I.E., not the capital city) to do collaborative engineering. Even just a handful of years ago, this would not have been possible before Starlink was available.
I'm not casting any shade on malaria eradication -- that is awesome as well. I can love both things, but the subject here is Starlink, and I want to underscore how truly impressive and effective Starlink has been for advancing infrastructure in a quantum leap.
Improving African infrastructure has been an extremely difficult problem for a very long time (for a quagmire of reasons -- regulatory, power, cost, distribution, etc etc etc). I think most people in the developed world simply don't understand how challenging it is to live day-to-day without solid and reliable infrastructure, or how effective Starlink has been in improving that. Very few other projects have been THIS successful at THIS scale. I think more people should be aware of the good that it does.
It has been a disruptive technology in so many of the best ways.
Come to Australia, see the remote communities that were abandoned by NBN (well, gaslit and then completely screwed by Murdoch manipulating Abbot to sabotage the NBN). Starlink is literally a lifesaver for them.
If someone has the time, I'd love to see the total amount of lead added to the atmosphere by burning up satellites compared to the amount from other anthropogenic sources.
Rough napkin math would be negligible impact. The amount of lead in a satellite is very small, if not actually zero. The amount of lead added by burning coal is about 30 tonnes per day.
There is almost definitely a small, negligible amount of lead in the solder in them. Eg NASA requires a small (single digit I think) percentage of lead to prevent tin whiskering.
> (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)
v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
The V3's are the one's that need StarShip to deploy. But the current launch platform can take 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch vs the 60x v1.5's they did before.
Taking in account that the v2.0 Mini's are way more capably on a kg/capacity. And the tech keeps getting better. SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point.
Moats are for direct competition. China is not a competitor to spacex because the US government is spacex’s largest subsidy/customer. Put another way: nasa won’t be using Chinese rockets. Unless they bribe trump. Which could happen.
NASA ended up using Russian rockets because the Space Shuttle program got politically awkward. There is definitely a world where they'd use Chinese rockets.
Human CO2 emissions are well under 10% of natural CO2 emissions, and yet that additional amount has been enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 50% and substantially alter the planetary climate.
CO2 in the atmosphere is at a vastly larger scale than mass falling in from space, so that doesn't mean this is a problem, but that percentage certainly seems to indicate that the question should be studied further.
There is a limit how much satellites LEO/GEO can hold unless every satellite has perfect dodging system. Called as Kessler syndrome [1], and one estimate is around 70k satellites. So it is a race who can get the most satellites orbiting, because after a certain point, there is no "space" anymore, and anyone who tries to launch after that point, will be blamed for destroying the satellites of the others. Winner takes all.
That’s one single estimate, and the problem is much more nuanced.
For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches.
Conversely, collisions at much higher geosynchronous orbits can’t possibly create a dense debris field as the total area is immense, deorbit will take millions of years, and everything is usually moving at the same speed (the synchronous part).
The debris that ends up with equal or lower orbital energy than one of the satellites started with doesn't move up, that is true.
But all the bits the bits that end up with more energy than the orbit the satellites were on obviously do move up, and some bits will move up very substantially as we know from Mission Shakti debris: debris from that event at 300 km got apoapsis of up to ~2200 km.
> For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most.
That is way too long. The threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites. And there is always one which is on the highest level. What if that gets destroyed?
> Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years.
> They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
I think there is a misunderstanding about the whole term. If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition. So there must be some threshold where they aren't problem. What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects. Primary question is that whether that threshold matters on practice. If it is 70k, then it is certainly a problem, but who knows the exact number yet.
> Highest level?
There is always the one which is classified orbiting on the highest level in LEO. Also that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below.
Way beyond anything we can currently achieve with current and planned launch capacity or radio technology.
> that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below
Got it, altitude.
Yes, in theory. In practice, the odds of that happening are vanishingly low. If it did happen, the volumes we're talking about are still so big that you'd struggle to come up with a way to cause a third collision even if we remove satellites' abilities to marginally change their orbits.
> when scientist have been debating this for decades?
They have been. That's what I'm basing my arguments on.
You've been mentioning a ca. 70,000-bird limit. I think that comes from Bongers & Torres [1]. Their paper runs LEGEND (LEO-to-GEO Environment Debris Model). It does not distinguish between LEO and GEO. That's material because the natural decay period for an object in LEO is on the order of months to years, for LEO, to decades to centuries, for GEO.
Kessler in GEO? Real problem. If you wanted to be a space terrorist, you could probably engineer a cascade today that would make large sections of GEO unusuable for decades if not centuries. The point is that isn't possible for LEO, where you may make a mess in a few orbits for a few years at best.
> Quibbling isn't an argument
Sorry, wasn't quibbling. I genuinely couldn't tell what you meant by "highest level." (I was picturing a food chain, where big clouds of debris "eat" smaller satellites in their way.)
> If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition.
It's still a big problem to wipe out low orbit, but it's not a long lasting one.
> What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects.
Even if you crash a billion objects together at 300km, they're all going to go away in a few years. There is no threshold for semi-permanently ruining low orbit.
You can pack many, many satellites into the same orbit without any danger, for example – as long as they move in the same direction. Let's make it 1000 for this thought experiment.
On the other hand, just two moving in opposite directions are obviously going to crash.
So is the number of "safe satellites in all of LEO" 1000 or 1?
It purely depends of the density of objects. The whole definition of the Kessler syndrome is about the estimation when the density is too much to handle.
I don't know the specifics of starlink satellites but a rupture of any pressurized line has a chance of causing an unintended ascent. Thankfully in most cases the satellite is stabilized, so there is a good chance the satellite just gets a huge amount of rotational velocity added to it with no increase in altitude.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of basic orbital mechanics. That wouldn't cause an "ascent" like with an airplane or something. There will be a change in orbital parameters but a permanent change in orbital altitude isn't really possible in that scenario.
Whatever you do to launch an object higher, it will return to its original altitude once per orbit. If you want to stay high you first have to boost up and then you have to boost again half an hour later, which will happen just about never with debris.
It's a mass problem. Instead of imagining the gravity well as something moving away from earth out into the vacuum of space, think of it as a ball that needs to be rolled uphill - even if you give it a huge burst of energy, it's not going to go as far as you think from that one big push, and it's still going to roll back downhill. In order to make it out of the gravity well, you need a lot of focused, continuous energy over huge distances.
There are other factors, too - imagine you're trying to send a penny around the entire equator of the earth, and think of the largest possible explosion you could subject it to without vaporizing it. A stick of dynamite could launch a penny only around a half mile's distance around the equator, assuming ideal conditions, which is about .0025% of the circumference of the earth, which is 10% of the distance between the earth and the moon, and the moon is about 25% of the distance from which earth's gravity stops being a significant factor.
If you carefully deployed a large number of well timed series of dynamite sticks precisely located so that each blew up perfectly beneath the penny at its apex following each previous explosion - you'd need 150-300 sticks to get the penny out past the edge of the effective gravitational well, the point at which other factors in the solar system have the dominant influence - it'd effectively leave earth and start falling toward the sun. At any point closer to earth than that, it will slowly and inexorably return back to earth, reaching up to 25,000 mph before vaporizing itself in the atmosphere (if it fell from the outer edge). If you had no atmosphere, a clear shot, and the "ideal" penny cannon to launch it, you could hypothetically reach escape velocity with only a quarter stick of dynamite.
Incidental bursts of gas, or even outright exploding objects in space are not going to launch a bunch of stuff into much deeper orbit. There's a constant downward pull, and gas and dust creating drag and downward acceleration the closer in you get, and just vast, incomprehensible distances to travel under the influences of gravity. Getting things to go faster than 25,000mph, or reaching escape velocity, without vaporizing the thing you're trying to make go fast, requires as big a continuous explosion as you can make over as long a time period as possible.
I love that AI can whip up an xkcd style "What-If?" type scenario for these questions.
Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically. The satellites need to actively work to stay up. That means no Kessler syndrome there.
How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.
> Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically.
It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.
Humans are bad at intuiting exponents. There is roughly 200x more volume in LEO than there is between the ground and cruising altitude. Plane changes, moreover, take a lot of energy--you aren't going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
> going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
There is no infinite space. The problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems.
> problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems
The exercise, maybe. The problem? No. In LEO, which is where Starlink orbits, there is no known solution for causing a Kessler cascade that causes more than a few billion in damage. Space isn't infinite, but it's really big.
Again, a few hundred thousand planes land every day [1]. They operate in a volume less than 1% that of LEO. To approach the object densities where we start controlling an airspace, you'd need tens of millions of objects in LEO alone. We simply do not have--not have any roadmap to having--the sort of launch capacity required to keep 30 million objects in LEO at a time.
There are real problems with more Starlinks in space. Kessler cascades are not one of them.
I’m just a layman, but why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem? Like, if the current “layer” is too full, have the new satellites orbit further out?
The reason starlink are so low in the first place is its cheaper to launch to that altitude, you need way less signal strength for devices to connect to them and the round-trip latency is vastly improved. They're intended to be essentially disposable, they're going for shorter lifetime and iterating on hardware improvements faster.
The further out you get, there's less atmospheric drag and each satellite is in view of the ground stations for longer but the cost of launch is higher and latency becomes a big issue. People expect 50ms latency for internet access not 500ms.
WP says Low Earth Orbit is popular because it's cheap to get stuff there, the latency is low (speed of light starts to matter when you're a couple Earth diameters up) and bandwidth to the ground is high (I assume it's harder to send a signal a longer distance, even through vacuum)
radio bandwidth: higher frequencies travel a shorter distance and provide more bandwidth. so you get frequency contention and also you need your sats to be physically closer
latency: the further a sat is, the higher the latency. not an issue for text messages. a huge issue for phone calls and general internet tasks. the further you "push" your sat "back", the worst the user experience is
there's other issues too, like geostationary vs geosynchronous and coverage and exposure.
Low orbit is how star link is able to achieve their connections, isn't it? I think of they moved to normal telecom orbit the performance would be like normal satellite internet too
Not with a geostationary orbit. That must have a fixed radius. The problem is that satellites have to move to counteract the force of gravity to avoid falling out of orbit. But if they move too much or too little, then the satellite moves with respect to the earth and the orbit is no longer geostationary.
(Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer may well be incomplete or not fully correct.)
This has already been addressed as LEO is not geostationary
but to point as to why. Consider the earths equator rotates at a particular velocity so there is a particular orbital radius where the two cancel and NO energy is needed to fall around the equator at the same rate the equator is moving. That is a geostationary orbit.
LEO maxes out ~ 1,200 miles radius, geostationary is at little over over 22,000 miles radius.
This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?
It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats.
Quoting a older post i made on the subject:
-------
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
The scale of the Starlink constellation is really not what people expect when they think of satellites. To get a sense for just how many of these have already been launched, check out this interactive map.
True, but their demising technology appears to be quite good too. I had an interesting discussion at the Small Satellite conference in Utah with folks about demising and they mentioned starlink. "Good" demising has the 'slipstream' layer of the satellite burn up quickly on de-orbit and then the other bits are made purposely non-aerodynamic, especially with fastners which are designed to burn quickly to rapidly disassemble to satellite while it is still quite high so that the smaller pieces will have enough altitude to get to their "full demising" velocity on the way down.
The team I'm working with is just doing a cube sat which has pretty straightforward demising but overall it was interesting to see the thought and strategy that people put into this.
Yes. The sat people that I know in NL always show that same cradle-to-the-grave kind of thinking and it really influenced me how I'm looking at how other industries are dealing with this. It's funny because externalization is the name of the game in almost every industry and the only industry that actually goes off planet takes that 'what goes up must come down' again angle into account every step of the way.
Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?
Modern end-of-life satellite designs are made to cause "rapid disassembly" very high up in the atmosphere to trigger high friction on as many individual components as possible - down to fasteners. This promotes completely re-entry burn up of everything so what reaches the surface is dust that settles back down to the surface (or ocean floor) and eventually gets compressed into rock (over millions of years). Basically back to where it came from.
Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.
Idk anything specifically but something that comes to mind is we floated CFCs into the upper atmosphere for decades before we figured out that was doing terrible things up there.
As common as Starlink is… no one has sent that many satellites into space and before they even got approval, this was discussed at length. They would fire retrograde and deorbit, burning them up in the atmospheric re-entry.
There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.
Not really. It's a tiny fraction of the same potent ones that come from meterioids, and unimaginably small compared to what just the relatively few solid rocket booster launches. If you're concerned about aluminum oxide's impact on the ozone, you need to lobby for the end of solid rocket boosters log before you even consider demising satellites.
Short lifetime and quick re-entry is a great feature of vLEO constellations. No long term space junk. Compare that to MEO or GEO where sats are there pretty much forever (hundreds to thousands of years). Or even high LEO with many tens of years.
Not a real thing. (It was proposed as a possibility. We searched the parameter space. Mostly in the context of militaries trying to figure out how to deny orbits to an adversary. It's really difficult, to the point that even if one were intentionally trying to cause Kessler cascades, they wouldn't deny an adversary access to orbit.)
Although it could become risky enough that the cost mitigation becomes untenable. For example, I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood so dangerous that I have to pay to cover my house in thick armor plating just to avoid being collateral damage of the violence shenanigans outside my front door.
> it could become risky enough that the cost mitigation becomes untenable
What cost mitigation are you referring to?
> thick armor plating
It makes about as much sense to armor a satellite as it does a plane. (Much less, actually, given the fuel costs are higher, energies in orbit are higher and densities orders of magnitude lower--to approximate the global density of airplanes in LEO, we'd need something like 4mm satellites up there. To approximate the density of controlled airspaces in LEO, we need about 10x that.)
> violence shenanigans outside my front door
Where the closest object to your front door is 10+ miles away.
I’m not sure you’re describing a different scenario, since I don’t think anyone was ever only concerned about a future where there’s a 100% chance of a launch being prevented by debris.
> NOAA said the stratosphere contains an unexpected quantity of particles with a variety of exotic metals. The scientists believe the particles come from satellites and spent rocket boosters as they are vaporized by the intense heat of reentry.
My start-up is called Strato Mines - collecting rare earths from 120km above earth. Willing to give 1% at a 100B valuation to any qualified investor.
If this worries you, ban solid rocket boosters before you ban satellites. The real ozone damage from the space industry is not demising satellites, it's solid rocket booster pollution.
"Oh no: There's metal satellites falling from orbit! Also: wanna buy a metal coin, they were sent to the edge of space!". I find the juxtaposition more amusing then I probably should.
This article [1] indicates that they burn up at altitudes between 37-50 miles above the surface. If so, that's well above the 40,000' that planes normally fly.
[Disclaimer: Not a hater, just a Nerd looking at data.]
And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.
On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.
Why is that? Simple maths.
Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.
So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.
"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.
But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.
Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.
You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.
> "But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)
(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)
Was this AI generated?
> The cable itself costs virtually nothing
Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?
> due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months
Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.
> people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.
v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024.
v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.
The sat-to-sat laser links are used to provide connectivity on the open ocean and in remote parts of Australia and Argentina that are beyond the range of any ground station. They're definitely working but AFAIK they are only used when necessary so if you're within range of a ground station your traffic will never use laser links.
Oops, forgot one important thing: Sure, why do additional hops if you can see the base station. But what about shared state? Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working, that state should be shared between neighboring sats.
Inter-satellite links simply provide additional (time-variant) paths, which doesn't inherently relate to shared state.
You seem to be under the impression that inter-satellite links somehow imply a self-organizing mesh topology that preserves terminal-to-gateway associations at any cost (including that of extra in-space hops), but that does not necessarily follow from the existence of ISLs.
In other words, your observation of occasional routing instability causing higher-layer issues is perfectly compatible with working ISLs.
[Due to the part of the spectrum I am on, I do not have believes or opinions.]
The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc.
But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself.
Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?
You're equating occasional dropouts (which can happen for all kinds of reasons even in bent-pipe topologies) with the absence of inter-satellite links. That makes no sense.
The empirical way to test for the existence of ISLs would be to go to the middle of an ocean, safely out of reach of any ground station, and see what happens. If you get a connection, that can only be due to ISLs.
It seems like your actual complaints are with network/routing stability, and you're drawing invalid conclusions from there.
Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? Hard to find it without getting lost in "Troubleshoot your starlink device" SEO hell.
> Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working?
The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
"The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work."
Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...?
The idea is coming from "reality", Starlinks own reporting, industry talks, tech press etc.
Anyway, to shorten this we can agree that we have different definitions of what one expects from having a dedicate backbone. I would expect seamless handover amongst other things, which I have never ever seen, and unless you show me a video recording of a 24h Starlink session with MTR running I simply will trust the data I have over a random claim.
As said elsewhere in this thread: It is extremely hard to find detailed benchmarks from happy Starlink users. Next to all positive content is paid content. And a quick look at trustpilot & co clearly hint that there a huge chunk of Starlink customers might be unhappy. And even if it's just because their online gaming sessions getting interrupted on every Sat hand-over, which exists in reality, but not in your mind :)
Seriously, if you have access to any benchmark data sources, please gimme. I'm not here for "winning" an argument. Data, Data, Data.
It's quite fascinating, there's people who's only (or first) experience with Starlink is via lasers and there's people on the Internet who'll tell you it doesn't work (I forgot to mention Georgia and Kazakhstan)
I've given you links to the data you want and someone that can get it for you (and has monitoring stations).
I've also mentioned several places you can travel to do your own testing.
If you want to believe Tristan de Cunha or the Falkland Islands or Bhutan or Antarctica can be served by anything other than lasers, (get a map) I don't know what else to call that but religion.
I'm not giving more weight to anything. I've pointed you in the right direction but I don't think even internal tools from SpaceX would change your mind even though geography should be enough.
I don't even want him to entertain my data or observations.
He can go to or recruit a user in territories that can be only served via laser in 2025,(I've listed 10 at least so far) install a computer that boots to desktop and remotely test his theories.
His base argument is no one can hold a phone call or run a game without interruptions every 120 seconds on Starlink if they are served via lasers (two more countries, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia) not because of packet drops but because of session terminations. Now I can understand the possibility of broken middle boxes, but the thing is we'd see the effect in our applications before even bringing out any network analysis tools.
He's also skipped the users doing BGP over the lasers. Doesn't BGP have sessions?
He's pretending not to understand geography or distances.
I'm very fascinated especially given the existence of community gateways on several islands that can only be served by lasers regardless of the presence of ground stations.
A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.
Erm. That person has posted a detailed explanation on how he has measured.
How can this be ridiculous? Is it ridiculous because the data does not match your believes...? Confirmation bias?
It's Data. And it hints, amongst other things that they have seen the same that I am seeing on every single Starlink installation I got my hands on so far: There is no active handover, and no shared state between Sats.
And you are referring to the wrong layer, talking about the ground station. Of course that does not move, and does not forget about your IP. Wrong layer.
It's about the Satellites (!) not doing an active handover and not sharing L2 state, like it would the case for any meshed network, no matter if cellular or WiFi. The analogy here would be a WiFi access point or a cell tower, and you roaming from one to the next while having a phone call, not having any drop-outs. That's the industry standard for Wireless. Starlink isn't there (yet).
If you don't think that true data is true, check ARP table of the MAC of your gateway IP changing after handover.
You appear to be a happy Starlink user - so do you care to share some 24h benchmark with us to prove your claims? I would highly appreciate that!
So far sadly none of the "But it works!" people has been able or willing to provide a benchmark on their own setup. `
Again: I am not here to win and argument. But to change my conclusions, I need data that hints at my conclusions potentially being wrong. As explained elsewhere in this thread, due to lack of serious benchmarks, most of this is based on anecdotical data points.
And this link form wired is about something completely unrelated - getting more stable coverage by using multiple different providers. It does not even mention Lasers.
You also clearly do not know what Layer 2 on the ISO/OSI model is.
But you are in total rage mode.
Triggered because the actual data invalidates what your cult says? :)
Sorry, will ignore you from now on. Again: Religion is not my cup of tea, bold claims on powerpoint presentations neither, I prefer to use data. We simply do not share a model of the world that is compatible to discuss these kind of things. No harm done, but no thank you :)
That person is measuring periodic packet drops (which can also be caused by e.g. having an incomplete view of the sky), and you're drawing unsupportable conclusions on "session drops" from that. (The word "NAT" does not even occur in the observation thread you've linked!)
I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)
> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too
Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.
You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.
Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).
You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.
Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :)
And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high.
(See for example the article that this very thread is about.)
Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse:
These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money".
And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;)
Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again.
So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.
Your revenue figures are consumer only. And while you're generous on utilization factor, we capitalised the TCO up front while amortising revenue, and then reduced asset tenure to worst case observed during development.
Flex up to 4 years, let $1mm TCO be paid up front and the rest amortised, and reduce utilisation to 80% ($80k/month revenue) and IRR shoots up to 73%. Take TCO to $3mm ($1mm up front, $2mm amortised), reduce utilisation to 75% and we're still over 20%.
> while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium
Well, yes. Starlink connections are more profitable and you can't scale selling internet to Belgium into a Starshield defence contract. Or selling to airlines and cruise ships and yachts and mining operations, all of which pay more than a Belgian.
> some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again
Starlink doesn't sense in densely-populated areas of the EU or Asia. (And the equivalent for SpaceX would be ridesharing Starlink on someone else's flight.)
> Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example
If you have the scale. You're underestimating the risk that comes from having to place infrastructure up front.
Your analysis is pretty solid. But I don't think it's taking into account the fact that you can build multibillion-dollar telecoms business on a few tens of millions of high-paying customers.
I guess we can agree that the comparison between Sat internet and physical links depends a lot on the physical situation in the target region, and the regulatory frame work.
And please keep in mind that while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink. It's worth remembering here that all Sat Internet companies prior to Starlink had failed and needed to be rescued with tax payer money.
I don't have exact numbers, and it's a bit muddy due to state subsidiaries, but in Germany the average cost to connect a subscriber in a medium density town with fiber, with given that nothing was prepared and you have to open the street etc appears to be in region of €/$ 2,000 or so.
I don't know if that is done in the US, but also in Europe we now do "trenching". It has some downsides and pitfalls, but this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively.
> while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink
Absolutely. It's why I think assuming the WACC of a highly-leveraged telecom (around 10%) is appropriate.
> this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively
Fibre makes sense where there is density. It's higher capacity and cheaper. That doesn't mean it makes sense everywhere. And a lot of that everywhere will pay a lot of money for connectivity.
The global telecom market generates trillions of dollars of annual revenue [1]. There is a lot of fruit for the picking.
> you no longer can comment on HN without someone trying to invalidate valid points by claiming you not being human
I made this mistake, but I'll defend it by pointing out that I've gone a few comments deep on HN, thinking through and citing and engaging in good faith, only to realise I wasn't talking to a human but to a bot. (Then the commenter gets defensive about using a bot, hallucinations and all.)
Instead of taking it as a personal insult, maybe interpret it as your comment having inspired someone to engage effortfully with what you said.
All of this is regulatory stuff. Your state has the option of making it expensive and a PITA or not.
In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.
True. And starlink is a way to bypass all your/my local regulatory hurdles. They had to deal with several very large regulatory hurdles, and then they're golden. No dealing with every little town separately.
Not true really. You will hit regulatory hurdles if your rockets explode in other countries too often :)
And: RF spectrum is HIGHLY regulated.
Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.
Yes, you have read that correctly: 17 Billion for 300 MBit/s.
So you're telling people to live with bad/no Internet connection now (due to local regulations) because of hypothetical future problems with their viable alternative in the future?
Easy advice to give from the outside, especially (presumably) from a place with great fiber options.
> Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.
That's L-band spectrum for direct-to-device services, which comes at a heavy premium due to its advantageous physical properties and inherent scarcity (the entire L-band has fewer Hz of spectrum than what Starlink alone is already using in the Ka band). Ka-band spectrum is much, much cheaper. You're comparing the cost of real estate for factory/campus on a green field hours away from everyone with that of a high street storefront.
> The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky
You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.
And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).
> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.
How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?
> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?
And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.
> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.
Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.
Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
> Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.
So there is demand :)
> As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time
Are you arguing that everybody reporting successfully using it far away from land is part of some conspiracy? How else would SpaceX get away with claiming that they have global coverage?
> I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
Installing a new satellite terminal on the outer hull of a commercial aircraft costs millions, including the lost time spent in the hangar, and that's to say nothing about all the required certifications.
That said, Hawaiian Airlines have been using it for a few months now. Seems to be working great, and their routes are also definitely not possible to cover from LEO without inter-satellite links.
No conspiracy, but let's say that it is rather hard to get proper benchmarks done by actual users, and one has to rely on a lot of anecdotical data. Have you seen any real-life benchmark reports with traceroutes, measure downtime, handover time etc that impressed you in a positive way? If so, please share.
Hawaiian Airlines - very interesting. Sadly wrong side of the planet for me to test it myself :)
It very well might be possible that the intra-links are only used for special customers like airlines for now, and not for consumers, and that this is the reason that all people I know who use Starlink still handover downtime...
"Handover downtimes" for stationary or mobile users? If they're stationary, that's not something inter-satellite links are needed for or would help with.
Right now Starlink claims to be operating a mesh, but they are not. If they would want to build a mesh, Inter-sat links for NOT be used used to pipe through bandwidth to the "best" base station. It would be used for shared state to be able to prepare a handover. Synching state obviously is much easier and more stable if the neighboring sats can talk directly, instead of sharing it over their slow, high latency and lossy base stations.
…what? Where do you see the claim that they are running a mesh? Why would they do that?
The main point of inter-satellite links is to provide coverage to areas beyond single-hop (subscriber to satellite to ground station) coverage. (Theoretically they can also be used to provide extremely low latency intercontinental routing, but for most traffic, the goal would be to minimize routing in space.)
Since the entire constellation is known a priori, all paths can be precomputed centrally, just like in a non-moving network, and that routing information can then be propagated to terminals and satellites. There’s no need to dynamically make complex “mesh” routing decisions at the edge.
802.11r controls faster key exchanges in 802.11 roaming scenarios – what’s the relation to satellite ISPs?
It seems like you have some axe to grind with Starlink and are collecting evidence through that lens.
Can not reply to your anymore, guess we are nested too deep now?
I think we are simply talking about two different things here.
I mentioned 802.11r not due to the key exchange implementation details, but to point to the general point: Seamless handover requires shared state between cells.
This is not about static vs dynamic routing, you are thinking on the wrong layer here. We are in L1+L2 land.
On Starlink, the last time I tested a handover between two Sats in 2025 still involves a downtime of at least 5 seconds, and both L2 info and NAT state being lost.
In regards of axes: I am not much into emotions. Of course the data says that Elon Musk is the cancel cell that will play a huge part in destroying the western civilization. But as I do not like the western civilization and humans in general much, this does not trigger much emotions.
And even if I hated Elon Musk: We are talking about technology, R&D and implementation details here (which I enjoy!). I do not have emotions on IP protocols and such :)
No, in reality it's really very simple: My data says that Starlink just is not worth it. It is not commercially feasible. It pollutes the space with tons of trash that will harm productive future space missions and projects. It's highly overrated and overhyped. It's very hard to find positive reviews that haven't been paid for.
Or, executive summary: Starlink is a dead end, and without the Elon cult nobody after looking at a hypothetical business plan would invest.
And finally: Anecdotical evidence collected from my own tests and those of friends all says: It's just shitty. However: That of course depends on your use case. For some an 8 seconds drop-out might mean "patient dead". For others it might be "I will retry loading this after grabbing a cup of coffee". My peer group might have higher standards than others.
Of course Sat internet has its place as a niche business. But as you surely are aware in the US it was and is tried to steal tax money meant to build fiber by claiming Starlink would be equivalent. And you might also remember that if someone would not have pulled the emergency break, you know would have air traffic controllers seeing planes with 100ms+ of latency AND every now and then losing contact to all airplanes for 8 seconds.
And all of this has been tried before. Over in Europe, we 10 years ago had those fights where Viasat & co claimed to be an alternative when we got the "basic human right to broadband".
What's different this time is the cost and time to orbit. SpaceX has been able to launch every three days in 2025. Viasat, Iridium, and everyone else who came before didn't have that. I don't have your spreadsheet to plug that bit of data into, and it's balanced by the number of satellites starlink needs, but governments tend to have a lot of money to keep the things they rely on running.
Analysts that I've seen estimate that Starlink is already profitable and will remain so. Unless you can explain the differences between your math and their math, this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory.
As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.
Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.
Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:
Yes, for example, via a battery-operated "Mini" terminal a month or so ago in extreme rural Finland, ~1km from the Russian border, while photographing wolves & bears.
That's also my opinion - it will probably never be profitable - it's a great product, but the economics are not right - and that's why no other provider did this (even though they have the tech).
What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.
You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.
Sorry, I was referring to the general stock market (mostly AI) bubble.
As for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts. We can just trust what Elon is willing to share with us.
What does a stock market bubble have to do with the profitability (i.e. not the valuation) of any given company?
Are you arguing that the demand in Internet connectivity in rural/remote areas is somehow caused by an investment bubble as opposed to a long-term stable need?
No, I don't think there is any relationship there.
I'm saying that I highly doubt the real profitability of SpaceX / Starlink, and we will only see if it's really as good as they say, once the bubble pops and there is no inifinite capital, and maybe some accountability.
Sure, just like xAI is never raising any money (according to Elon). All of his companies are very tightly interconnected, so you should see them as a whole.
0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions.
Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc.
One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.
Could we say the same about flights to Hawaii? Small number of people take lavish vacations, everyone else gets the pollution.
It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).
We should. A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems.
A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader
Personally, I've never suffered from satellite plasma or light pollution from satellites, or spectrum allocation. I suspect most of the 100% are like me.
Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution and that advancement is a driving force behind your modern life. So you have (or will) suffer indirectly over time.
> Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution
Has it?
Destroying the Amazon destroys information. Light pollution simply raises the cost of our accessing it. I suppose one could model this out to some effect on deep-space astronomy's productivity. But if that effect is real--and I've seen zero evidence it is--the solution is a tax on satellite launches to fund more observatories.
OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness."
These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or geographic, putting more observatories are higher latitudes. Or even statistical, by launching space-based calibration telescopes, or building more array-based observatories.)
This paper shows how in 2023 scientists were already annoyed by this, that they had to accommodate this into their observations, and adjust their measurements accordingly. Suffered (past tense) may be hyperbolic, but it isn’t untrue either.
This 2023 paper is also issuing a warning, that if this continues without mitigation, ground based astronomy will be affected. They have the calculations to prove that. What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise.
Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy. I seriously doubt we will ever have one. And that the predictions of worse astronomy will become true, externalized into a type of internet you could have gotten with traditional cable, fiber optics, or a 5G radio tower.
EDIT:
> But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options.
The paper I cited does that. In the abstract they say:
> We present calculations of the potentially large rise in global sky brightness from space objects in low Earth orbit, including qualitative and quantitative assessments of how professional astronomy may be affected.
and inside the paper they devote a whole chapter (chapter 5) to possible mitigations which is titled:
They have calculations that show this is how our models play out.
> What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise
Could become. They're not talking about mitigation because we haven't observed the problem yet.
> Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy
Again, where is the "scientific advancement" that "has suffered"?
You wanted to see the computations, I provided you with them and instead of admitting that you were wrong, you responded by casting doubt on their models. This doesn’t strike me as arguing in good faith. But very well, 5th on my list of the same search term gave me this:
Vera C. Rubin Observatory – Impact of Satellite Constellations
The Vera Rubin Observatory came online only this June, but they were complaining about Starlink already last year, and provided preliminary observation how they affected their observations, and how they plan on mitigating it.
Both the 2023 paper and the Vera Rubin Observatory statement call for a set of policies to mitigate the effect of these satellites. However policymakers have not enacted any of these other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution (I don‘t know whether or not they were defunded by DOGE; although if they were, that would seem like a criminal conflict of interest). And I have my reservations about the willingness of governments in the world to come together and set the universal regulatory framework required to enforce these proposed mitigations.
Note that increased exposure time required because of these satellites will affect the number of available operations, which in turn will decrease the amount of astronomy done with this telescope. I want to note especially the conclusion:
> Overall, large numbers of bright satellites — and the necessary steps to avoid, identify, and otherwise mitigate them — will impact the ability of LSST to discover the unexpected.
When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy. You better have a good reason for that (other then protecting the wealth of billionaires).
> You wanted to see the computations, I provided you with them
No, you didn’t. I asked for evidence this had happened. I read the ‘23 paper two years ago. It’s neat. But it’s a model. We don’t have great model parameters for high-atmosphere nanoparticles. We also have great surveillance of the ozone layer, and aren’t seeing damage.
> other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution
Yeah, I agree with this. (It may have been DOGE’d.)
We need to know what we’re up against. We need to know if it’s a problem that call for a pause, or a mandate that aluminum structures to transitioned to steel and carbon, or if the problem goes away as satellites get bigger and burn up less.
> When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy
I really am not. I’m taking them at their word that this is a potential problem. Again, if you have evidence this is currently a problem, the language I originally objected to, I’d love to see it.
The scientists and engineers are raising the alarm that this will become an issue if nothing is done, we should not simply ignore them until they are proven right, like we are doing to climate scientists. So much damage can be prevented.
A single terminal could serve an entire African village. It's also serving use cases in the Ukraine war, ships at sea, Antarctic research stations, numerous aerospace and military use cases, and so on. DTC is provide texting and emergency services to countless people who might need it in an emergancy, like we saw in North Carolina.
Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund the Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
I'm quite confident if it was anyone besides Elon behind spacex, we'd be hailing starship(cross fingers it works out) as one of the most exciting things we've ever done. And we should be, because it is.
It's something for humanity to be excited about and root for. What happened to wanting to achieve things? Having things to look forward to, build toward and be proud of is healthy for society. Must we aspire to and dream of nothing because there's suffering on earth, is that what it is? Why can't we take it as the objective good it is that we're trying to push technological boundaries that will unlock more advancements in science? In what world does HN not want that?
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
A single astronaut with a shovel could do more science in a couple days than all the probes combined in the last 54 years (Which have barely scratched the surface). For all we know there are literal fossils a few meters below the surface but none of our technology had the ability to even start looking.
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
I strongly disagree.
If "Starship to Mars" is a possibility, then so is "Starship to the asteroid belt". It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit" - and that's very close to orbital mining of metals that are rare and valuable on Earth.
> It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit"
To put this into perspective, an Earth-Mars round trip costs about 15 km/s; Earth-main Belt about 13 km/s.
You'd need to add Δv for returning the mass of the asteroid. But you get your reaction mass for "free."
(To be clear, we are hundreds of billions of dollars of capex and decades away from asteroid mining. But the work to get there is decently in line with the work we would need to establish a logistical chain to Mars and back.)
You're discounting the fact that building Starship, if successful, has a non-zero chance of taking Musk away from Earth forever. That's a huge potential positive.
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.
> If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly
...Starlink and SpaceX are funded through investments and taxes. When they launch a non-profit's satellite I guess, indirectly, through donations, too.
Also, what? Why is the funding source a measure of value?
>The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars?
And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life. I seriously doubt any colony on Mars would be viable long-term. If life on Earth is wiped out, the colony on Mars will very likely wither and die soon after without continued support from Earth.
Any colony on Mars is going to be so exponentially more fragile and fraught with problems for sustaining life, that the suggestion that it's somehow going to save humanity is ridiculous.
How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Not that much, I think, but maybe you have some inside scoop that the rest of us don't know about.
No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO.
> How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now?
Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communications outside our ecology versus based on wires strung through it.
Let's reverse the question. For the environmental impact of space launch, what else do we do that's more-agreeably useless?
Bullshit. Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony. I've never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites. They even made movies about it:
>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."
It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.
Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.
There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.
It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.
> Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony
Could this reflect your media diet?
> never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites
That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
> pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments
V3 doesn't fit on smaller rockets. And Starship's launch costs promise to be much lower than the Falcons.
> why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why
It could reflect SpaceX's bad PR. I read plenty of news sources, and the most that makes it out there is how the latest Starship blew up, yet again. Not great PR. And beyond that, the scope of the thing is to go to Mars. It's up to SpaceX to get the PR out there, not for me to seek out niche news sources. But thanks for trying to make this about me failing instead of SpaceX failing at PR.
>That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
Not wild at all. And let's be real, I seriously doubt you read "newspapers".
I did a Google search for "SpaceX Starship" and nowhere in 8 pages of results did I see anything mentioning Starlink. In fact, one of the results was for the SpaceX Careers page, which says:
>"Work on the Starship program developing the vehicles that will enable large groups of people to travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Life at SpaceX. At ..."
So even SpaceX is selling it as going to Mars, and not about launching Starlink satelites.
But this entire conversion is completely pointless, so I won't be responding to this thread anymore with anything but a canned lame response. You've been warned.
Umm, a lot. Do you know how many cubesats falcon has launched? Did the space station help humanity? Now imagine a bigger one(s) faster. Bigger satellites- do you know how much of James Webb design and difficulty was around packing into tight space? Bigger satellites, big enough for new wavelengths. Big interferometer setups. Microgravity for bio and pharma crap. Better for particles far enough away to be unaffected by earth magnetic field.
Do you agree science is good for humanity? Do you like James Webb? The other things mentioned above? I'd guess yes to all based on your username. How is getting more mass into space of questionable benefit?
If starship works, which everyone on earth should be hopeful and excited about, we get more mass for cheaper into space. It's the equivalent of new funding(falcon has brought down launch costs sooo much) while also unlocking previously inconceivable experiments/instruments. Who doesn't like more science funding? Who doesn't like new experiments and instruments?
I would like to see stats how many people got new connections via traditional infrastructure. I bet that number is much higher, probably even an order of magnitude higher.
This is HN, so I should probably look for the data my self...
EDIT:
In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 billion. Starlink grew by only a 1/100 of that in absolute terms, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period, majority of users in the USA already had access to the internet via traditional infrastructure.
I tried to find how many StarLink users got internet access (or even high speed internet access) that didn’t have one before, but I couldn’t find the numbers. Somebody could correct me, but I very much doubt that number is high enough to consider StarLink to make even a blimp in providing internet to new users.
EDIT EDIT: I was off by a factor of 100 in initial EDIT, see child post.
> In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 Starlink grew by a similar absolute amount, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period,
Is this some AI answer or did you foobar this math by a factor of 100?
StarLink got 2 million new subscribers in 2024. Meanwhile the internet got 200 million new users. So even if every new StarLink subscriber would be a new internet user (which is obviously not true) they would still only account for 1% of new internet users. The real number is off course much much much lower.
This is definitely a small number. But I don't think it tells the whole story. Not every n+1 is the same. New satellite hookups in rural places, especially poor rural areas, combat zones, emergency situations etc. are more impactful than a new wired hookup in a city where there's already wifi in the library, for example.
> It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
Now it is up to you to show that this has outsized influence on impoverished communities.
According to ITU[1] the number one factor for lack of internet access is economical. The price of internet access can be reduced with traditional infrastructure, but governments are often unable or unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring faster and cheaper internet connectivity to underserved areas. StarLink should in theory fit perfectly here, but in reality very few people from underserved communities, especially in impoverished areas, can afford StarLink, and keep being underserved. What makes this even worse is that in the rich countries (like the USA and Australia) underserved communities that had been promised infrastructure to bring the broadband internet are facing delays and cancellations because politicians believe the community can get StarLink instead (when in fact they cannot afford it). This is known as the Uber effect (from when politicians used Uber as an excuse to cancel public transit projects).
If the community can't afford Starlink, surely they can run Fiber and buy equipment from Ciena and Nokia (Huawei outside the US) to light it up themselves since it's more affordable than Starlink in your view.
That is not the point. These communities depend on their state for their infrastructure, the state was (hopefully) able to provide them with garbage disposal, sewage, electricity, running and clean drinking water. The state should also provide them with quality telecommunication infrastructure.
You've mentioned the uber effect about 100 times now, I get it. I honestly don't know just how mad (I'd wager not very) the average city resident is that they have uber now instead of maybe some shitty transit system with two routes out of 20 promised in 15 years 500% over budget. I do VERY MUCH wish we built solid, modern, useful public transit on budget in a reasonable amount of time. But it's honestly wishful thinking at this point.(3)
Similar story for deploying broadband, especially last mile. The government hasn't been very good at that from everything I've seen (1, including starlink's failure).
As for starlinks deployments, I can't find good numbers, so perhaps I was overconfident. I wish I could find more examples, it seems like they could be doing much more than they are, but they are a for-profit company. Given that it can serve rural, poor, otherwise disconnected communities, would you be for or against using starlink to serve them through some government-backed/subsidized efforts?(2)
(1)
---The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)
RDOF is one of the most recent and troubled examples. It was a $20.4 billion initiative to bring high-speed broadband to millions of unserved homes and businesses.
Massive Defaults and Questionable Winners: In the first phase, the FCC awarded $9.2 billion to over 300 companies. However, major problems quickly emerged.
LTD Broadband: The single largest winner, provisionally awarded $1.3 billion, was ultimately denied the funds by the FCC in 2022. The FCC determined that the company, a small fixed-wireless provider, failed to demonstrate it had the technical and financial capability to deliver the promised fiber-to-the-home service to nearly 600,000 locations.
Starlink (SpaceX): The fourth-largest winner, provisionally awarded $886 million, also had its award rejected by the FCC. The agency cited that the satellite technology was "still developing" and questioned its ability to meet the program's long-term speed and latency requirements.
Widespread Defaults: By 2023, bidders had defaulted on their commitments for over 23% of the locations they had won in the auction, leaving millions of Americans in limbo and forcing the FCC to try and reclaim those areas for future funding.
---The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) - 2009
This program, part of the 2009 Recovery Act, was a grant-based system rather than a reverse auction, but it provides a clear example of budget and delivery failures.
"The Road to Nowhere": One of the most infamous examples was in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Telephone Authority was awarded a $36.7 million grant to build a fiber network. Years later, a report from the Department of Commerce's Inspector General found that after spending $28 million, the project had connected only 70 customers, was nowhere near completion, and was plagued by mismanagement.
"200 Terminals for Amazon Communities: In Brazil, Starlink has provided at least 200 terminals to schools and healthcare centers in remote Amazonian communities, providing a vital link for education and telehealth."
(3) Of course, I predict one possible retort that it's these very same "oligarchs" that are tearing down the government and rendering it unable to build public infrastructure, thus lining Musk's and friends' pockets. To that I'd say, look at very blue california's high speed rail. Yes, trump did just take away some their funding, but it's been like 20 years now? And they're about 300% over budget, and their timeline doesn't even including full completion, but we can safely say 15+ years behind schedule. I'm not blaming democrats, I'm saying there's a systemic problem with state capacity. It is, very sadly, just not reasonable to expect much from the government when it comes to building public infrastructure.
I’ve seen you post about the “last mile” problem before on this thread, and I think you may be misunderstanding the problem and the solutions to it. The last mile is a problem in public transit where people who live in sparsely populated area and commute to higher density areas, where high quality or high capacity public transit opportunities exist for every leg of the journey except the last mile to their home (think Edgewood WA. to the Sounder train station in Puyallup). In case of transit the infrastructure exists for most of the way, but it is costly to provide transit options to connect with the infrastructure, the last mile in that case can be a rideshares, park-and-ride, ride hail, dockless scooters, etc.
In telecommunication the last mile is when a high capacity wire extends to a nearby (sub)urban center, but not to your house because you live 10 miles away from there (I know about the issue in the USA of having a wire across the street and have to pay ridiculous sums to connect it to your house; but that is a different issue). If you solve it by bypassing the wire altogether and opt for satellite instead, that is not really the last mile is it. A last mile would be to put up a 4G tower (or a few 5G towers).
An analogy in the transit space would be that because of the last mile issue, you opt instead to drive the whole way.
The last mile problem is a generic concept in any networked system with certain common, naturally arising topology. I do not misunderstand it in the least. You're right that that putting up towers would be a (recent) solution in many places. Satellite is also a solution that applies anywhere (maybe not the poles?) and which requires less built infrastructure, which, again, we're not good at (in the US). But given the assumption that I don't understand what I'm talking about, I don't see this conversation going anywhere productive so I'm stopping here.
If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities (this is exactly the ReConnect program is). Starlink is not that, it is a classic case of privatizing profits by socializing hidden externalities, in this case to the entire world. Externalities in the form of pollution that will cost us all more than fiber in the long run. Funny story though, Starlink was awarded a $900M subsidy to provide rural USA internet access. In the end, that money was not given because the FCC found that Starlink "failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service.". So no, it is not about screwing rural people, it's about not getting taken advantage of by fat cats and grifters like Elon.
> If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities
Running cables across out land is less impactful than lofting satellites?
Per the article, Starlink runs 8k satellites with an average life of 5 years. They launch in payloads of 20-40 satellites. That's 50+ launches per year if everything goes perfectly. About a million pounds of kerosene per launch. Plus everything else that goes into the rockets and satellites. Then the pollution impact from the launches and reentries. Then the eventual need to clean up LOE to avoid Kessler Syndrome. So yeah, well understood ground tech may be cheaper over the lifecycle. At a minimum, it should be a reasoned choice, not environmental debt pawned off by the richest man in the world.
...but sure, for the sake of argument, maybe it's only a quarter million lbs of kerosene 50 times a year, upper atmospheric pollution, and LEO crowding that gets solved by HN comments. ...instead of a dumb cable that doesn't come with a side of funding a billionaire neo-nazi. My bad.
The last mile problem is difficult and expensive. I think satellites are a good solution to it. As for SpaceX fucking up that contract, that sucks and is no good.
Also worth considering is the Uber effect of public infrastructure. Meaning that politicians may use the existence of StarLink as an excuse to delay or cancel public projects which would otherwise have delivered broadband internet to under-served areas via traditional infrastructure.
This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.
Traditional infrastructure is a proven method of bringing both the availability to uderserved areas, as well as bringing the costs down for those already served.
StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.
In some ways, where we're used to seeing borders of countries, the new borders of opportunity largely are performant and accessible internet access.
Depending on the area of the world, wireless and other options that exist that are likely sub par. It is on every continent including North America.
Some regions of the world have aggressively invested in fibre in rural areas.
We can see in parts of the world where there is a lot of investment (and interactions with govt for permits, etc) in physical infrastructure, whether its coax for cable tv and internet, copper for phone lines (and ADSL), wireless doesn't always have a nice way in.
There are places in the world that didn't get as much wired infrastructure put in and were able to jump up to much better wireless.
Satellite based internet as a category provides an additional coverage where "traditional" infrastructure hasn't made it yet. This can be wires or other wireless.
Take this argument to it's conclusion. Take any point in history and freeze infrastructure. The only option we give ourselves is building more of that same type and maintaining it? So, more riders and more horses to carry messages, but no telegraph? Or maybe more accurately, keeping the medium the same, never using planes or trucks to deliver mail?
I don‘t follow how that is the conclusion, nor do I understand your analogy.
Broadband internet via cables, fiber optics, and radio towers is state of the art in telecommunication infrastructure. Satellite is both slower, more limited, and more prone to various disruptions. The capabilities of the wires and the radio towers is also improving. 5 years ago we didn’t have 5G towers, and 20 years ago fiber optics seemed a distant dream. The only thing freezing traditional telecommunication infrastructure in place are dreams of low earth orbit satellites which will never materialize.
If I understand your analogy correctly (which I‘m not sure I do) this is like looking at the new technology of pneumatic tubes and stipulating that all postal delivery will be done using this new technology in the future, and we may as well stop funding the national postal service, remove mail-rooms from our ships and trains, because somebody will build a pneumatic tube that will deliver mail door to door between New York and Chicago.
I actually don‘t believe this. But some politicians do, and that does real damage when they take funding away from actual infrastructure projects which would have otherwise benefited under-served communities with high speed internet.
When I say LEO satellite internet won‘t materialize, I mean that it won‘t serve everybody. It will always be an expensive option which in best case will be subsidized for only a portion of the people that actually need it. LEO satellite is not the future of telecommunication infrastructure, it is lacking in almost every way next to traditional infrastructure. The only thing it is better at is a) marketing and b) providing internet to rich people in their yachts or in their mansions 10 miles out of the suburb.
I am advocating for state funded infrastructure. So no, never will I be extolling this technology, especially not if it changes hands from the worst billionaire on the planet to the second worst billionaire on the planet.
Musk and his right-wing propaganda platform plays a big part in the destruction of Western democracy. He deserves the hate he is receiving. Providing internet to an insignificant fraction of the global population does not even begin to offset that.
I am not convinced that Starlink will continue to exist long term. They reported break even in 2023 but I don't think that included the ongoing cost of replacing satillites.
They reported cash flow positive. "Cash flow positive" is a much stronger statement than "profitable" because it doesn't let you play games with amortization. So it included the ongoing cost of replacing satellites plus 100% costs of putting up new ones for future use where normal accounting would allow you to amortize those costs.
SpaceX is obviously quite profitable. They're obviously spending many billions annually on salaries, Starlink launches and Starship development yet they haven't raised significant money via debt or equity financing rounds in the last few years.
Starlink is operated by Starlink Services, LLC which allows SpaceX to play all sorts of accounting tricks by mixing in engineered contracts with SpaceX.
That's how SpaceX justifies its launch capabilities. Their strategy of using assembly line techniques to build reusable rockets make no sense unless there is a lot of stuff to launch. Satellites are crazy expensive, and the launch represents only a smaller part of the total budget, so even if the launch was free, there is only so much demand.
Starlink is more than half of SpaceX launches, building their own demand.
And replacing satellites regularly was the plan. I don't know how they did their report, but they certainly budgeted it internally. SpaceX is a private company, they tell you what they want to tell you.
Starlink is not publicly traded. That lowers the bar on transparency so we're all relying on estimates and press releases which are mostly marketing vehicles. Absent rela quarterly financial reports I think most of this is still in the realm of opinion.
Current Starlink satellites are 800-970kg[1] and 100% of their mass is vaporized on reentry, so 1-2 satellites a day would be approximately 1.5 tons per day added to the atmosphere. The atmosphere's mass is 5.15 quadrillion tons. Even if satellite vapor stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take approximately 10,000 years before it reached 1 part per billion.
This is correct from the perspective of direct health hazards, but there are still plausible risks. We know from history you don't need a lot of mass to cause global problems, if the material is catalytic.
If the vaporized satellites were entirely converted into a compound that was as damaging to the ozone layer as the most potent CFC (R-12 [1]), and the compound stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take 5,000 years to reach current atmospheric concentrations of R-12.[2]
Vaporized satellites really don't seem like a concern.
The first is that IIUC, CFCs release chlorine atoms which catalyze ozone, whereas aluminium oxide catalyzes the creation of chlorine atoms from chlorine reservoirs, which then go on to catalyze ozone. I loosely believe at this point after some sketchy research and maths that this makes it around two orders of magnitude more potent.
The second is that these particles are produced directly in the upper atmosphere. I couldn't give you a number for how much that changes things, but I assume it's nontrivial.
The final point I've noticed is that mass to orbit has been increasing at a rapid exponential rate recently, and it would not surprise me at all to soon see an extra order of magnitude on it.
Worst-case, that could change your 5,000 year figure to just a couple. I don't think it's that bad, I'm not overly concerned about this issue, but given ozone depletion is a legitimate existential threat and the numbers don't immediately make it seem impossible, I think it's worth paying attention to.
My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?
The highest numbers I can find for the final Starlink constellation is 40,000 satellites. Let's assume Starlink and its competitors have constellations totaling 100,000 satellites, and satellites need to be replaced every five years, and each satellite weighs 1 ton. That means 20,000 tons of vaporized satellites per year. The atmospheric emissions would be 3.88 parts per billion per year. This would still be less than the mass of asteroids and space dust that burn up in the earth's atmosphere every year.
If the reentering satellites were somehow transformed entirely into chlorine gas that somehow stayed in the atmosphere forever, we would reach the OSHA permissible exposure limit of 1ppm after 250 years. Chlorine is detectable by smell at 3ppm, which would take 750 years.
It's very likely that the vast majority of the vaporized satellites are inert, as they are basically incinerated on reentry. It's also likely that most of of the vaporized satellite does not stay in the atmosphere for very long. The only way this could be a problem is if the satellites emit a long-lived compound that catalyzes a reaction in the atmosphere, similar to how CFCs destroy the ozone layer. So far, the only candidate for that is aluminum oxide particles, and solid rocket boosters create more of that than reentering satellites. (Fortunately aluminum oxide isn't nearly as bad for the ozone layer as CFCs, and SpaceX does not use solid boosters.)
Also once you are launching tens of thousands of tons to orbit per year, it starts to become feasible to build infrastructure in space. Satellites at the end of their service life contain valuable raw materials. It would likely become cheaper to refurbish or recycle them rather than deorbit and launch new ones.
The real world concentrations of all of the elements that are in a satelite, dont go up by any measurable amount dues to space X sattelites burning up. What does have a huge impact is climate change causing industrial waste sites to dry up and spread dust, or just the inevitable increaes due to more human activity and mining for our resouce heavy consumption, especialy anything with chips, and batteries, exotic alloys in screens
True. But getting outside of starship there's still Solid Rocket Boosters burning, insulating foams, explosive bolts and ablative parts dropping all over the place, and farings sitting in oceans waiting for recovery. It's not that much mass, but neither is the worrisome parts of a burning up satellite parts
Hold on, are you saying that burning rocket fuel produces little to no pollution? As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments? That's pretty surprising to me assuming I'm understanding correctly.
> are you saying that burning rocket fuel produces little to no pollution?
There are high-atmosphere effects we don't yet understand. RP-1 produces soot, particularly when burned fuel rich. And methalox still releases methane since again you're not burning your fuel perfectly.
But the simplicity of non-hypergolic non-kerosene rocket fuel chemistries like the ones SpaceX uses is they burn remarkably clean. You don't get a bunch of additives producing weird neurotoxins, or incomplete combustion inventing organic compounds in the high atmosphere.
(I'm ignoring cryogenic fuels, which literally produce water vapour as an exhaust because liquid hydrogen is a bastard.)
> As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments?
No. Starship releases like 360 tons of CO2 per launch [1].
That said, nobody is launching a million rockets a day. We might get to like 3 or 4 a day in our lifetimes. Barring some novel economic opportunity in space, launch emissions are likely to remain negligble for the foreseeable future.
"What’s not usual is the atmospheric fallout. The fiery re-entry of even one Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide vapor, a compound that erodes the ozone layer. A new study finds these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022, and the Great Re-entry Event increases this pollution even more.
To put this into perspective: Before the first Starlink launches began in 2019, only about 40 to 50 satellites re-entered per year. SpaceX just brought down ten years' worth in only six months, adding an estimated 15,000 kilograms of aluminum oxide to the upper atmosphere."
https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=05&month=08&...
Shout out to NEKAAL for watching the skys and keeping our little speck of dust a bit safer from the vast reality of space.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Apparently earth soaks up ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day.
So with 1-2 starlink satellites producing 30kg each dissipate each day, that's adding about 10% to this figure.
I'm not sure if the cosmic dust aluminum finds itself in the same places up there as the dissipating starlink aluminum. Maybe that could be figured out from the above paper.
This could have a significant effect, I don't know.
wow your post gave me a bit of perspective. The distribution might really matter here.
Are those ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day uniformly distributed, and if not how big are those clouds of aluminum oxide that the earth is travelling through? Those 30kg from the satellites are going to be extremely concentrated and therefore take longer to "soak up".
Yeah, I didn't think much of it at first but you pointing out that the 400-800kg is likely spread widely (if not evenly) across much of the earth's surface while the 30kg is landing in one spot, is an interesting point.
I wonder how much aluminum oxide we get though from disintegrating meteors and other impacts every day. Quick search suggests 50-100t of mass from meteors on average each day - similar total to the dust. Those might be more concentrated and analagous to the starlink satellites.
The fact that they quantified everything here except for the amount of ozone this actually destroys tells me that it's completely insignificant.
I'll refrain my usual snark and just link the same link from the linked article you apparently read.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...
So you're doing the same thing?
Either make a meaningful argument or stop insinuating through omission that there's a real problem here. You're not only insulting the intelligence of your readers but also, thereby, undermining your cause.
The article you linked is garbage. Its authors find (of course not controlling for multiple comparisons) an effect that looks statistically significant if you p-hack it just right, then juxtapose it with overdetermined and badly simulated South polar vortex behavior to create the false impression that these satellites are killing the planet.
The real motivation behind pieces like this is personal enmity towards Elon Musk. It could not be more obvious. These people pollute our intellectual commons and degrade whatever remains of their intellectual honesty to run tendentious pieces that let them tell their friends they're sticking it to bad rocket man.
Why are NOAA and NASA funding this stuff?
A lot of people including you were oblivious to this significant re-entry event until it appeared in the news.
So off-hand dismissals and taking this personal will not help your case.
Also, since you brought him up, where are the studies of the environmental impact of satellite launches and space debris funded by Elon Musk?
Is the argument "planet big satellite small defund NASA"? In that case I'm going with the article.
Are we going to debate him on his argument or only on his character? Shoot the messenger I guess.
I would like to see the argument, too.
What character?
ad hominem
What?
[flagged]
> It's well established these oxides lead to degradation of the ozone layer, are you disputing that fact?
“The ozone layer is mainly found in the lower portion of the stratosphere, from approximately 15 to 35 kilometers (9 to 22 mi) above Earth” [1]. Satellites break up around 75 km AGL [2], with most burning up “between 60 and 80 kilometers (37–50 miles)” [3].
So Idk! I don’t think anyone else does—these seem to be novel nanoparticles. We need to study it. If it’s a problem, that’s solvable—carbon composite satellite structuring could use funding. What we can’t do is just assume it’s terrible because items novel because that basically precludes space flight.
> Do you always have a meltdown whenever someone brings up something that upsets your worldview?
Happy to unflag once this unnecessary bit is removed.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer
[2] https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Clean_Space/Space_debris_fe...
[3] https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/Can-We-Solve-the...
> dissipated in the atmosphere...an obvious lie
What do you think the word "dissipates" means? Antimatter annihilation? Some other mass to energy conversion? That atoms making up re-entering satellites obviously aren't going to disappear.
> Since when did pollution from fires become a controversial topic?
"Fires"?
This whole discussion is like people with a hatred of religion going around saying we have to abolish the Catholic Church because votive candles produce soot. A study showing that would not motivated by earnest and dispassionate scientific curiosity about the laws of the universe, but by a desire to achieve a political end.
The public should fund foundational research, not partisan apologetics.
How much ozone is being destroyed by 15000kg of aluminum oxide vapor? Is it a meaningful amount?
On the scale of the Earth, my completely uninformed intuition is that 15k kg of alumina doesn't feel that significant. I'd guess that rocket production and launch emissions are way more harmful. But don't know.
Earth receives ~50,000 kg/day of cosmic dust (our mid-range assumption), 30 kg is 0.06% of that daily amount.
This is kind of that 'climate change skeptic' argument that CO2 is only a tiny percentage in the atmosphere, 0.04%, so anything humans have done to that tiny percentage is therefore negligible. But we've had a massive impact by increasing that tiny percentage by 50% causing climate change.
But how much of that is aluminum? Probably <0.5%.
Nit: You're off by about a factor of 3 because it's 14.6 t/day.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-s...
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Apparently around 1.4%.
So the starlink satellites dissipating could increase the aluminum oxide arriving up there by ~10% - depending which numbers are correct I suppose it could be anywhere from like 3-30%.
If we're really concerned with heavy metals and particulates added to the atmosphere we should also be considering all of the weather modification projects that go on effectively unregulated.
NOAA collects reports[1] of what is done in the US but they don't officially regulate it. They currently have 1,113 reports publicly available.
[1] https://library.noaa.gov/weather-climate/weather-modificatio...
IIRC there recently was a white paper about the environmental affects of the metallization of the upper atmosphere by satellites - not just those burning up, but the general emission over time of tiny particles of metal from all satellites.
However, quick Google now I can find research which has determined pure rare earth metals in the upper atmosphere coming from satellites and boosters and so on, but nothing about the consequences, and I thought I recalled something about consequences.
> Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to 5 satellite reentries per day
Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)
“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not accounting for energy, which natural burn-up has more of, or incomplete burn-up, which reduces the atmospheric effects of artificial mass.)
Broadly speaking, we don’t seem to be in a problematic place in respect of the atmosphere. Where improvement may be required is in moving from splashdown, where we sink space junk in the ocean, to targeted recovery.
[1] https://starlink-stories.cdn.prismic.io/starlink-stories/Z3Q...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-next-gen-starlink...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
I hear 10% increase on a global constant and that doesn't sound like peanuts. If we increase 10% each few years that might be a problem? I don't know anything about whatever field studies this but given that LEO constellations born yesterday even that 2% increase in stuff coming from the skyes sounds significant to me.
Short answer is we're still theorizing. Models suggest we might see accumulation. But we might not, or it might not accumulate at relevant altitudes. (Current LEO satellites burn up before hitting the ozone layer.)
The same could have been said about pollution from the industrial revolution compounding and hurting the atmosphere, but that never played out, right???
edit: okay I misunderstood what everyone meant
> please recall that the mass of de-orbiting man-made satellites came from the earth in the first place.
Then again, so are CFCs, CO2, radioactive materials...
Just because some elements naturally occur on Earth doesn't mean we're completely insensitive to where they end up. (That said, I have no idea if atmospheric Aluminium is actually a problem or not.)
I was watching a video the other day which happened to mention that sodium lasers are used to create artificial stars, used for calibration of adaptive optics in ground based telescopes. This works because one particular layer of the upper atmosphere is rich in sodium due to impact with sodium rich debris.
Obviously it requires a more scientific analysis but it does seem to me that burning a lot of shit on the atmosphere might be problematic.
I don't see anyone worrying about planetary mass. I'd be more concerned about atmospheric effects.
Is that what you say when you litter? "I don't see a problem with plastic in the ocean, it came from the Earth in the first place".
Is that really what people are concerned about though?
Asking from a place of ignorance on my part, but does the chemical composition of the satellites versus asteroids/dust have any adverse effects?
It's postulated that the high aluminum content of satellites (for perspective, Bennu samples are only 1% Al), as oxidized Al2O3 particles in the stratosphere, catalyze chemistry that destroys ozone. But that's far from a quantitatively meaningful problem, at the current scale.
This source[0] says satellite reentries are about about 12% of the space industry's contribution to ozone depletion (the big one is chlorine from solid rockets), which in turn is 0.1% of the entire anthropogenic contribution; i.e. satellite reentries are ~0.01% of the total.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...
Satellite reentries in 2022 (ie mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels (with satellites adding 'only' 17 t/year), but megaconstellations could raise that to ~480% above natural levels (360 t/year).
This isn't a rounding error, it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition across the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
What else can this effect (as usual, discovered belatedly) beyond ozone? Hopefully it's nothing! But I guess we're gonna find out...
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...
That's still much less than the aluminum from solid rockets, which have been ongoing since the 1970's. Per your own link,
> "In situ measurements showed evidence of a 1,000% increase in stratospheric aluminum levels from 1976 to 1984 (Zolensky et al., 1989), which was associated with the emission of hundreds of tons of such particles from solid rocket motors (SRM) during atmospheric ascent (Brady et al., 1994)"
If you follow Brady et al. (1994)[0], you'll read that every Space Shuttle launch (Table 1) deposited 112 tons of Al2O3 into the stratosphere (>15 km).
[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA289852.pdf
This isn't a new phenomenon at all; in fact the peak alumina pollution from in the past (112 tons per STS launch) exceeds the worst-case future estimates from academic research (360 tons per year from satellite reentries).
(/meta Coincidentally, I once linked that exact Brady paper on HN, three years ago[1]. Actually, long before the current social media fad for being concerned about satellites. At the time I wrote, and this has truly aged well, "No one ever gave a shit").
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812863
As I understand it, the concern is not just AlO but specifically nanoparticles with high reaction surface area and long lofting lifespans.
The importance of this distinction is acknowledged in Brady et al (1994):
The 17 t/year and 360 t/year figures are specifically for AlO nanoparticles (formed by hypersonic ablation), whereas Brady et al gives numbers for all AlO particles, regardless of size.Nice username btw.
> Satellite reentries in 2022 (mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels
Those findings are simulated, not observed. Hence "potential."
> it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition over the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
Perhaps a lot. Perhaps not much. It's a good question to study. But if this is an issue, it's solvable--carbon composite satellite structures could use a boost in demand and funding.
Interesting. Incidentally SpaceX is probably the most likely to preemptively adopt those measures.
Of all the megaconstellations, SpaceX has historically been the best at being a "good neighbor," with low orbits for debris and lots of engineering to reduce brightness.[0] But hype around SpaceX gives the real bad actors a pass, for example AST is much worse on brightness,[1] and OneWeb and Qianfan are much worse on debris risk.[2]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNc5yCYth5E&t=1717s
[1] https://spacenews.com/astronomers-raise-interference-concern...
[2] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...
i still don’t understand why we need huge constellations of satellites at all
Because providing infrastructure to remote regions is incredibly difficult through other mechanisms. I don't believe it's hyperbole to say that -- for the goal of improving infrastructure access in some of the most remote and challenging places in the world -- Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years.
Starlink is easily one of my favorite engineering projects. I don't believe anybody has done it cheaper, better, or at wider scale than Starlink has.
I believe Starlink was used to guide Ukranian drones. I think this has nothing to do with poor people in rural areas and everything to do with ensuring deployed military devices work. Modulo of course the egotistical whims of an insane American billionaire hailing from aparteid south african descent.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
>>Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years.
Better than gates' effort to eradicate malaria?
Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have, because it's slightly easier than paying OpenReach to connect them to proper network. And it's hard to imagine anyone else being their clients, at the prices that they charge.
> one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects
That claim does not exclude Gate’s projects or any other as being superior. You’re looking for conflict that isn’t there.
Starlink is used all over the world, by regional governments, NGOs and companies where it’s too expensive for individuals.
You might well find that rich English people are subsidizing the project for poorer people elsewhere.
Access to information has historically been a great equalizer.
Not to diminish Gates’ malaria efforts, but remote villages having access to information about malaria and prevention methods could be helpful. Along with techniques for filtering water, etc. Access to telehealth.
> Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have
Yeah, so our perspectives may differ a bit. My personal focus has primarily been with Africa, where Starlink is truly transformative. Demand for Starlink may be underwhelming in developed countries (such as your "rural England" example), while in underdeveloped countries, the demand regularly outstrips the supply [0]. I love that it's affordable enough for my African colleagues to use. In the last couple of weeks, I've had more than one full-motion screen-sharing video call to northern Nigeria (I.E., not the capital city) to do collaborative engineering. Even just a handful of years ago, this would not have been possible before Starlink was available.
I'm not casting any shade on malaria eradication -- that is awesome as well. I can love both things, but the subject here is Starlink, and I want to underscore how truly impressive and effective Starlink has been for advancing infrastructure in a quantum leap.
Improving African infrastructure has been an extremely difficult problem for a very long time (for a quagmire of reasons -- regulatory, power, cost, distribution, etc etc etc). I think most people in the developed world simply don't understand how challenging it is to live day-to-day without solid and reliable infrastructure, or how effective Starlink has been in improving that. Very few other projects have been THIS successful at THIS scale. I think more people should be aware of the good that it does.
It has been a disruptive technology in so many of the best ways.
* [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408457
Come to Australia, see the remote communities that were abandoned by NBN (well, gaslit and then completely screwed by Murdoch manipulating Abbot to sabotage the NBN). Starlink is literally a lifesaver for them.
Because it's a way to provide communications from space with acceptable total throughput and latency.
Bloomberg ran a piece about this in March: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
The satellites are mostly metal and silicon I would guess, not too different from asteroids.
[dead]
If someone has the time, I'd love to see the total amount of lead added to the atmosphere by burning up satellites compared to the amount from other anthropogenic sources.
Rough napkin math would be negligible impact. The amount of lead in a satellite is very small, if not actually zero. The amount of lead added by burning coal is about 30 tonnes per day.
There is almost definitely a small, negligible amount of lead in the solder in them. Eg NASA requires a small (single digit I think) percentage of lead to prevent tin whiskering.
> almost definitely a small, negligible amount of lead in the solder in them
Emphasis on negligible. Assuming 0.07 to 0.28 ppm lead [1] in meteoroids, space is dosing us with half to 2 kg a year [2].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001670...
[2] https://earthsky.org/space/tons-of-extraterrestrial-dust-fal...
> (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)
v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
The V3's are the one's that need StarShip to deploy. But the current launch platform can take 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch vs the 60x v1.5's they did before.
Taking in account that the v2.0 Mini's are way more capably on a kg/capacity. And the tech keeps getting better. SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point.
> "SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point."
Starship is the moat SpaceX needs to be developing today to stay ahead of where the Chinese competition will be in 5-10 years.
Moats are for direct competition. China is not a competitor to spacex because the US government is spacex’s largest subsidy/customer. Put another way: nasa won’t be using Chinese rockets. Unless they bribe trump. Which could happen.
NASA ended up using Russian rockets because the Space Shuttle program got politically awkward. There is definitely a world where they'd use Chinese rockets.
> China is not a competitor to spacex because the US government is spacex’s largest subsidy/customer
SpaceX has loads of international launch and connectivity customers. China undercutting SpaceX would significantly compromise its prospects.
A 2-10% increase seems like a hell of a lot.
Human CO2 emissions are well under 10% of natural CO2 emissions, and yet that additional amount has been enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 50% and substantially alter the planetary climate.
CO2 in the atmosphere is at a vastly larger scale than mass falling in from space, so that doesn't mean this is a problem, but that percentage certainly seems to indicate that the question should be studied further.
See the first comment in this thread about aluminum oxide and the ozone layer. It’s not so much the amount, but what it is.
Why is a 2-10% increase a small amount? What increase would be too much?
There is a limit how much satellites LEO/GEO can hold unless every satellite has perfect dodging system. Called as Kessler syndrome [1], and one estimate is around 70k satellites. So it is a race who can get the most satellites orbiting, because after a certain point, there is no "space" anymore, and anyone who tries to launch after that point, will be blamed for destroying the satellites of the others. Winner takes all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
That’s one single estimate, and the problem is much more nuanced.
For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches.
Conversely, collisions at much higher geosynchronous orbits can’t possibly create a dense debris field as the total area is immense, deorbit will take millions of years, and everything is usually moving at the same speed (the synchronous part).
The debris that ends up with equal or lower orbital energy than one of the satellites started with doesn't move up, that is true.
But all the bits the bits that end up with more energy than the orbit the satellites were on obviously do move up, and some bits will move up very substantially as we know from Mission Shakti debris: debris from that event at 300 km got apoapsis of up to ~2200 km.
> For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most.
That is way too long. The threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites. And there is always one which is on the highest level. What if that gets destroyed?
> threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites
Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years.
They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
> there is always one which is on the highest level
Highest level?
> Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years.
> They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
I think there is a misunderstanding about the whole term. If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition. So there must be some threshold where they aren't problem. What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects. Primary question is that whether that threshold matters on practice. If it is 70k, then it is certainly a problem, but who knows the exact number yet.
> Highest level?
There is always the one which is classified orbiting on the highest level in LEO. Also that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below.
> What is that threshold?
Way beyond anything we can currently achieve with current and planned launch capacity or radio technology.
> that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below
Got it, altitude.
Yes, in theory. In practice, the odds of that happening are vanishingly low. If it did happen, the volumes we're talking about are still so big that you'd struggle to come up with a way to cause a third collision even if we remove satellites' abilities to marginally change their orbits.
> Way beyond anything we can currently achieve with current and planned launch capacity or radio technology.
How are you so sure, when scientist have been debating this for decades?
> Got it, altitude.
Quibbling isn't an argument.
> when scientist have been debating this for decades?
They have been. That's what I'm basing my arguments on.
You've been mentioning a ca. 70,000-bird limit. I think that comes from Bongers & Torres [1]. Their paper runs LEGEND (LEO-to-GEO Environment Debris Model). It does not distinguish between LEO and GEO. That's material because the natural decay period for an object in LEO is on the order of months to years, for LEO, to decades to centuries, for GEO.
Kessler in GEO? Real problem. If you wanted to be a space terrorist, you could probably engineer a cascade today that would make large sections of GEO unusuable for decades if not centuries. The point is that isn't possible for LEO, where you may make a mess in a few orbits for a few years at best.
> Quibbling isn't an argument
Sorry, wasn't quibbling. I genuinely couldn't tell what you meant by "highest level." (I was picturing a food chain, where big clouds of debris "eat" smaller satellites in their way.)
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
> If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition.
It's still a big problem to wipe out low orbit, but it's not a long lasting one.
> What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects.
Even if you crash a billion objects together at 300km, they're all going to go away in a few years. There is no threshold for semi-permanently ruining low orbit.
> still a big problem to wipe out low orbit
You're not wiping out LEO, but a particular LEO.
Why would there be a single numeric threshold?
You can pack many, many satellites into the same orbit without any danger, for example – as long as they move in the same direction. Let's make it 1000 for this thought experiment.
On the other hand, just two moving in opposite directions are obviously going to crash.
So is the number of "safe satellites in all of LEO" 1000 or 1?
No it's not. Kessler simulations show those chain reactions happening over multiple decades.
It purely depends of the density of objects. The whole definition of the Kessler syndrome is about the estimation when the density is too much to handle.
Maybe this is helpful: https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-the...
I don't know the specifics of starlink satellites but a rupture of any pressurized line has a chance of causing an unintended ascent. Thankfully in most cases the satellite is stabilized, so there is a good chance the satellite just gets a huge amount of rotational velocity added to it with no increase in altitude.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of basic orbital mechanics. That wouldn't cause an "ascent" like with an airplane or something. There will be a change in orbital parameters but a permanent change in orbital altitude isn't really possible in that scenario.
Whatever you do to launch an object higher, it will return to its original altitude once per orbit. If you want to stay high you first have to boost up and then you have to boost again half an hour later, which will happen just about never with debris.
You'd still have an eccentric orbit intersecting some "higher" ones periodically, no?
Certainly less dangerous than something "going the wrong way" in a given orbital shell, but not sure if it's completely negligible either.
For the lucky few pieces that launch at just the right angle, they'll spend a few months or years intermittently intersecting higher orbits.
But almost all the debris will either stay close to the original orbit or burn up within hours.
It's a mass problem. Instead of imagining the gravity well as something moving away from earth out into the vacuum of space, think of it as a ball that needs to be rolled uphill - even if you give it a huge burst of energy, it's not going to go as far as you think from that one big push, and it's still going to roll back downhill. In order to make it out of the gravity well, you need a lot of focused, continuous energy over huge distances.
There are other factors, too - imagine you're trying to send a penny around the entire equator of the earth, and think of the largest possible explosion you could subject it to without vaporizing it. A stick of dynamite could launch a penny only around a half mile's distance around the equator, assuming ideal conditions, which is about .0025% of the circumference of the earth, which is 10% of the distance between the earth and the moon, and the moon is about 25% of the distance from which earth's gravity stops being a significant factor.
If you carefully deployed a large number of well timed series of dynamite sticks precisely located so that each blew up perfectly beneath the penny at its apex following each previous explosion - you'd need 150-300 sticks to get the penny out past the edge of the effective gravitational well, the point at which other factors in the solar system have the dominant influence - it'd effectively leave earth and start falling toward the sun. At any point closer to earth than that, it will slowly and inexorably return back to earth, reaching up to 25,000 mph before vaporizing itself in the atmosphere (if it fell from the outer edge). If you had no atmosphere, a clear shot, and the "ideal" penny cannon to launch it, you could hypothetically reach escape velocity with only a quarter stick of dynamite.
Incidental bursts of gas, or even outright exploding objects in space are not going to launch a bunch of stuff into much deeper orbit. There's a constant downward pull, and gas and dust creating drag and downward acceleration the closer in you get, and just vast, incomprehensible distances to travel under the influences of gravity. Getting things to go faster than 25,000mph, or reaching escape velocity, without vaporizing the thing you're trying to make go fast, requires as big a continuous explosion as you can make over as long a time period as possible.
I love that AI can whip up an xkcd style "What-If?" type scenario for these questions.
Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically. The satellites need to actively work to stay up. That means no Kessler syndrome there.
How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.
> Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically.
It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.
> closer to earth you are, less space there is
Humans are bad at intuiting exponents. There is roughly 200x more volume in LEO than there is between the ground and cruising altitude. Plane changes, moreover, take a lot of energy--you aren't going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
> going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
There is no infinite space. The problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems.
> There is no infinite space
Straw man.
> problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems
The exercise, maybe. The problem? No. In LEO, which is where Starlink orbits, there is no known solution for causing a Kessler cascade that causes more than a few billion in damage. Space isn't infinite, but it's really big.
Again, a few hundred thousand planes land every day [1]. They operate in a volume less than 1% that of LEO. To approach the object densities where we start controlling an airspace, you'd need tens of millions of objects in LEO alone. We simply do not have--not have any roadmap to having--the sort of launch capacity required to keep 30 million objects in LEO at a time.
There are real problems with more Starlinks in space. Kessler cascades are not one of them.
[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...
> Space isn't infinite, but it's really big.
Space isn't infinite in the same way that 64 bit integers aren't infinite. Both are infinite for typical usecases.
> They can't all orbit on exactly the same level.
Sure they can: Leading/trailing each other is quite common. Intersecting orbits are riskier, but also possible without inevitable collisions.
I’m just a layman, but why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem? Like, if the current “layer” is too full, have the new satellites orbit further out?
> why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem?
Because there isn't a problem. LEO contains more than 200x the volume of commercial airspace.
We run out of spectrum and launch capacity well before Kessler cascades become a problem.
The reason starlink are so low in the first place is its cheaper to launch to that altitude, you need way less signal strength for devices to connect to them and the round-trip latency is vastly improved. They're intended to be essentially disposable, they're going for shorter lifetime and iterating on hardware improvements faster.
The further out you get, there's less atmospheric drag and each satellite is in view of the ground stations for longer but the cost of launch is higher and latency becomes a big issue. People expect 50ms latency for internet access not 500ms.
WP says Low Earth Orbit is popular because it's cheap to get stuff there, the latency is low (speed of light starts to matter when you're a couple Earth diameters up) and bandwidth to the ground is high (I assume it's harder to send a signal a longer distance, even through vacuum)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit see "Use"
Automatic EOL (end of life) deorbiting is a feature not a bug.
I will again note that if Saber Tooth tigers had put things in the orbits we have, it would still be our problem.
very simple explanation but there's a few issues
radio bandwidth: higher frequencies travel a shorter distance and provide more bandwidth. so you get frequency contention and also you need your sats to be physically closer
latency: the further a sat is, the higher the latency. not an issue for text messages. a huge issue for phone calls and general internet tasks. the further you "push" your sat "back", the worst the user experience is
there's other issues too, like geostationary vs geosynchronous and coverage and exposure.
Low orbit is how star link is able to achieve their connections, isn't it? I think of they moved to normal telecom orbit the performance would be like normal satellite internet too
They originally planned to be about 1100km up. They are currently about 550km up. Plenty of possible layers in between...
Another 500 km won't affect latency much. It'll be around 3 more ms per round trip.
That's not a bad latency addition, you're right. Good note
Not with a geostationary orbit. That must have a fixed radius. The problem is that satellites have to move to counteract the force of gravity to avoid falling out of orbit. But if they move too much or too little, then the satellite moves with respect to the earth and the orbit is no longer geostationary.
(Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer may well be incomplete or not fully correct.)
Starlink satellites aren't geostationary.
The parent comment wasn't specifically addressing Starlink.
This has already been addressed as LEO is not geostationary but to point as to why. Consider the earths equator rotates at a particular velocity so there is a particular orbital radius where the two cancel and NO energy is needed to fall around the equator at the same rate the equator is moving. That is a geostationary orbit.
LEO maxes out ~ 1,200 miles radius, geostationary is at little over over 22,000 miles radius.
A land grab. That might explain the desire to put anything in space, even something useless like mirrors to reflect sunlight
This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?
It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats.
Quoting a older post i made on the subject:
-------
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
They keep the satellites relatively low for latency, and that means they still need a lot of them for line-of-sight coverage, right? They have plans to add 15,000 more satellites. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/starlinks-ambiti...
They had global line of site coverage long ago, but with limited capacity. Now they're growing capacity.
But if they're adding larger capacity ones that still have the same failure mode, then the "1 to 2 a day" becomes even worse right?
Or are those larger ones also ones that have a longer shelf life?
The scale of the Starlink constellation is really not what people expect when they think of satellites. To get a sense for just how many of these have already been launched, check out this interactive map.
https://satellitemap.space/
(~8,500 actively in orbit)
Deorbiting the v 1.5 has a far lower chance of anything hitting the ground than the bigger ones.
True, but their demising technology appears to be quite good too. I had an interesting discussion at the Small Satellite conference in Utah with folks about demising and they mentioned starlink. "Good" demising has the 'slipstream' layer of the satellite burn up quickly on de-orbit and then the other bits are made purposely non-aerodynamic, especially with fastners which are designed to burn quickly to rapidly disassemble to satellite while it is still quite high so that the smaller pieces will have enough altitude to get to their "full demising" velocity on the way down.
The team I'm working with is just doing a cube sat which has pretty straightforward demising but overall it was interesting to see the thought and strategy that people put into this.
Yes. The sat people that I know in NL always show that same cradle-to-the-grave kind of thinking and it really influenced me how I'm looking at how other industries are dealing with this. It's funny because externalization is the name of the game in almost every industry and the only industry that actually goes off planet takes that 'what goes up must come down' again angle into account every step of the way.
Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?
Modern end-of-life satellite designs are made to cause "rapid disassembly" very high up in the atmosphere to trigger high friction on as many individual components as possible - down to fasteners. This promotes completely re-entry burn up of everything so what reaches the surface is dust that settles back down to the surface (or ocean floor) and eventually gets compressed into rock (over millions of years). Basically back to where it came from.
Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
Not to mention the temperatures they'd be burning up at. How much would survive of toxic chemicals?
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.
Wonder how it compares to the volume and elements of the meteorites we’re constantly hitting?
ChatGPT says we get between 50 and 100 metric tons of material a day, mostly silicates and iron/nickel metals.
Not really. What are your concerns?
Idk anything specifically but something that comes to mind is we floated CFCs into the upper atmosphere for decades before we figured out that was doing terrible things up there.
Indeed, working as intended. SpaceX said at the beginning that this was how they would “clean up” older gen sats.
Is this a common approach? Seems strange this happens on such a scale now without much scrutiny.
As common as Starlink is… no one has sent that many satellites into space and before they even got approval, this was discussed at length. They would fire retrograde and deorbit, burning them up in the atmospheric re-entry.
https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S...
The reentry thing is more or less intentional.
There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.
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Man, I dream of living in a world in which our biggest (or even a top-10) environmental concern is “debris from LEO burning up in the atmosphere”.
Yes, most of us are pretty angry at/disappointed in Elon these days but there are better places to focus than this.
Some chemicals can be extremely potent climate problems. Starlink does represent an astronomical increase in these metals etc in the atmosphere.
Not really. It's a tiny fraction of the same potent ones that come from meterioids, and unimaginably small compared to what just the relatively few solid rocket booster launches. If you're concerned about aluminum oxide's impact on the ozone, you need to lobby for the end of solid rocket boosters log before you even consider demising satellites.
Short lifetime and quick re-entry is a great feature of vLEO constellations. No long term space junk. Compare that to MEO or GEO where sats are there pretty much forever (hundreds to thousands of years). Or even high LEO with many tens of years.
It’s weird to hear the term “forever” to refer to thousands of years in the context of space.
Yes, it is much better to error on the side of losing satellites, versus making future space travel impossible.
> versus making future space travel impossible
Not a real thing. (It was proposed as a possibility. We searched the parameter space. Mostly in the context of militaries trying to figure out how to deny orbits to an adversary. It's really difficult, to the point that even if one were intentionally trying to cause Kessler cascades, they wouldn't deny an adversary access to orbit.)
Although it could become risky enough that the cost mitigation becomes untenable. For example, I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood so dangerous that I have to pay to cover my house in thick armor plating just to avoid being collateral damage of the violence shenanigans outside my front door.
> it could become risky enough that the cost mitigation becomes untenable
What cost mitigation are you referring to?
> thick armor plating
It makes about as much sense to armor a satellite as it does a plane. (Much less, actually, given the fuel costs are higher, energies in orbit are higher and densities orders of magnitude lower--to approximate the global density of airplanes in LEO, we'd need something like 4mm satellites up there. To approximate the density of controlled airspaces in LEO, we need about 10x that.)
> violence shenanigans outside my front door
Where the closest object to your front door is 10+ miles away.
I’m not sure you’re describing a different scenario, since I don’t think anyone was ever only concerned about a future where there’s a 100% chance of a launch being prevented by debris.
> NOAA said the stratosphere contains an unexpected quantity of particles with a variety of exotic metals. The scientists believe the particles come from satellites and spent rocket boosters as they are vaporized by the intense heat of reentry.
My start-up is called Strato Mines - collecting rare earths from 120km above earth. Willing to give 1% at a 100B valuation to any qualified investor.
If this worries you, ban solid rocket boosters before you ban satellites. The real ozone damage from the space industry is not demising satellites, it's solid rocket booster pollution.
"Oh no: There's metal satellites falling from orbit! Also: wanna buy a metal coin, they were sent to the edge of space!". I find the juxtaposition more amusing then I probably should.
That means there must be launching to orbit equivalent replacement, not daily of course.
Indeed, SpaceX often has multiple launches of Starlink sats a week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
A launch every 3 days all throughout 2025. Simply incredible.
Are they hot enough to cause forest fires when they hit the ground? I can't imagine that they would completely vaporize from that low orbit.
Can this become dangerous for airplanes? Or are they fully burned up before reaching that low altitude?
This article [1] indicates that they burn up at altitudes between 37-50 miles above the surface. If so, that's well above the 40,000' that planes normally fly.
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...
There's typically only a small amount of matter that makes it down intact, and they usually aim to deorbit in the middle of nowhere (eg Point Nemo)
It sure would be nice if we found out if this mattered before it does.
[Disclaimer: Not a hater, just a Nerd looking at data.]
And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.
On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.
Why is that? Simple maths.
Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.
So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.
"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.
But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.
Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.
You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.
> "But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)
(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)
Was this AI generated?
> The cable itself costs virtually nothing
Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?
> due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months
Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.
> people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.
Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok?
Anyway, yes, I am a human.
And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.
The sat-to-sat laser links are used to provide connectivity on the open ocean and in remote parts of Australia and Argentina that are beyond the range of any ground station. They're definitely working but AFAIK they are only used when necessary so if you're within range of a ground station your traffic will never use laser links.
Oops, forgot one important thing: Sure, why do additional hops if you can see the base station. But what about shared state? Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working, that state should be shared between neighboring sats.
Inter-satellite links simply provide additional (time-variant) paths, which doesn't inherently relate to shared state.
You seem to be under the impression that inter-satellite links somehow imply a self-organizing mesh topology that preserves terminal-to-gateway associations at any cost (including that of extra in-space hops), but that does not necessarily follow from the existence of ISLs.
In other words, your observation of occasional routing instability causing higher-layer issues is perfectly compatible with working ISLs.
Accepted.
> Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working
Imagine Amazon 10x'd its ingress/egress fees between regions.
You're not getting new sessions period.
Starlink switches beams every 15 seconds and satellites every 120 seconds.
You keep your sessions through both. Lasers or no lasers
I will not disagree as I can not verify this claim. Have you tested it yourself or have a source which has some tech proof on that one?
Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?
[Due to the part of the spectrum I am on, I do not have believes or opinions.]
The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc.
But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself.
Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?
You're equating occasional dropouts (which can happen for all kinds of reasons even in bent-pipe topologies) with the absence of inter-satellite links. That makes no sense.
The empirical way to test for the existence of ISLs would be to go to the middle of an ocean, safely out of reach of any ground station, and see what happens. If you get a connection, that can only be due to ISLs.
It seems like your actual complaints are with network/routing stability, and you're drawing invalid conclusions from there.
Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? Hard to find it without getting lost in "Troubleshoot your starlink device" SEO hell.
> Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working?
The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
> intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology
Iridium has been successfully doing it for a quarter of a century now.
An even simpler answer is Starlink is available in locations too far from ground stations.
Ergo they are served via laser.
Cook Island
Ascension Island
Iran
Venezuela
Cuba
Galapagos/Easter Islands
Vanuatu
Eastern Ukraine
Syria
Lebanon
Iraq
Iqaluit
Antarctica, as South as the South Pole
Tristan de Cunha
The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work.
"The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work."
Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...?
The idea is coming from "reality", Starlinks own reporting, industry talks, tech press etc.
Anyway, to shorten this we can agree that we have different definitions of what one expects from having a dedicate backbone. I would expect seamless handover amongst other things, which I have never ever seen, and unless you show me a video recording of a 24h Starlink session with MTR running I simply will trust the data I have over a random claim.
As said elsewhere in this thread: It is extremely hard to find detailed benchmarks from happy Starlink users. Next to all positive content is paid content. And a quick look at trustpilot & co clearly hint that there a huge chunk of Starlink customers might be unhappy. And even if it's just because their online gaming sessions getting interrupted on every Sat hand-over, which exists in reality, but not in your mind :)
Seriously, if you have access to any benchmark data sources, please gimme. I'm not here for "winning" an argument. Data, Data, Data.
I've pointed out where you can get the data from a professor.
You can also fly to one of the many Islands (or Iqaluit) I've mentioned and do your testing.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...
It's quite fascinating, there's people who's only (or first) experience with Starlink is via lasers and there's people on the Internet who'll tell you it doesn't work (I forgot to mention Georgia and Kazakhstan)
You really will hear everything on the Internet.
You are aware that you are giving more weight to photos done of a powerpoint presentation over actual data points?
Sorry, that's not a path I am willing to follow. Religion is not my cup of tea.
I've given you links to the data you want and someone that can get it for you (and has monitoring stations).
I've also mentioned several places you can travel to do your own testing.
If you want to believe Tristan de Cunha or the Falkland Islands or Bhutan or Antarctica can be served by anything other than lasers, (get a map) I don't know what else to call that but religion.
I'm not giving more weight to anything. I've pointed you in the right direction but I don't think even internal tools from SpaceX would change your mind even though geography should be enough.
please talk to "panuvic". pan &a@t& uvic.ca he's a networking prof.
Here's the data you've been asking for and dodging like I didn't post.
https://old.reddit.com/user/panuvic/submitted/
Serious question: If you are not willing to entertain anybody else's data or observations, why should anyone entertain yours?
Is there any input whatsoever that could change your foregone conclusions? If not, what's the point of this discussion?
I don't even want him to entertain my data or observations.
He can go to or recruit a user in territories that can be only served via laser in 2025,(I've listed 10 at least so far) install a computer that boots to desktop and remotely test his theories.
His base argument is no one can hold a phone call or run a game without interruptions every 120 seconds on Starlink if they are served via lasers (two more countries, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia) not because of packet drops but because of session terminations. Now I can understand the possibility of broken middle boxes, but the thing is we'd see the effect in our applications before even bringing out any network analysis tools.
He's also skipped the users doing BGP over the lasers. Doesn't BGP have sessions?
Why did this country https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=602234895877639&vanity=61560... switch to a product that's so bad it's unusable
> Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...?
Did those islands have Starlink until lasers?
He's pretending not to understand geography or distances.
I'm very fascinated especially given the existence of community gateways on several islands that can only be served by lasers regardless of the presence of ground stations.
Here is an example thread of someone having done the measurements of v3 vs mini:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_...
Have a look at the downtimes of the system.
A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.
This is ridiculous.
How's service delivered to the South Pole?
Iqaluit?
As long as your traffic is terminated at the same POP, you won't get any session terminations.
And Starlink tells you when your public IP changes anyway
Erm. That person has posted a detailed explanation on how he has measured.
How can this be ridiculous? Is it ridiculous because the data does not match your believes...? Confirmation bias?
It's Data. And it hints, amongst other things that they have seen the same that I am seeing on every single Starlink installation I got my hands on so far: There is no active handover, and no shared state between Sats.
And you are referring to the wrong layer, talking about the ground station. Of course that does not move, and does not forget about your IP. Wrong layer.
It's about the Satellites (!) not doing an active handover and not sharing L2 state, like it would the case for any meshed network, no matter if cellular or WiFi. The analogy here would be a WiFi access point or a cell tower, and you roaming from one to the next while having a phone call, not having any drop-outs. That's the industry standard for Wireless. Starlink isn't there (yet).
If you don't think that true data is true, check ARP table of the MAC of your gateway IP changing after handover.
You appear to be a happy Starlink user - so do you care to share some 24h benchmark with us to prove your claims? I would highly appreciate that!
So far sadly none of the "But it works!" people has been able or willing to provide a benchmark on their own setup. `
Again: I am not here to win and argument. But to change my conclusions, I need data that hints at my conclusions potentially being wrong. As explained elsewhere in this thread, due to lack of serious benchmarks, most of this is based on anecdotical data points.
There's lots of users in laser only areas doing RTC via VOIP or video. Some of them on Ships in the Persian Gulf (look up SEA-2. https://www.wired.com/story/us-navy-starlink-sea2/)
That person has posted an install in a moving vehicle with the antenna inside.
Do you think I can't read or what?
The ground stations don't handle user IP addresses or even IP packets.
They are strictly layer 2 from the user perspective and traffic is terminated at POP's.
Here's a scientist that does actual work, not the nonsense you've been posting as "data".
https://www.reddit.com/user/panuvic/submitted/
I gave you his email.
I've pointed out to you where you can travel to test laser service yourself.
I'm not saying "but it works"
I pointed out to you places that can't be served without laser connectivity.
It's like asking me to prove the earth isn't flat.
And this link form wired is about something completely unrelated - getting more stable coverage by using multiple different providers. It does not even mention Lasers.
You also clearly do not know what Layer 2 on the ISO/OSI model is.
But you are in total rage mode.
Triggered because the actual data invalidates what your cult says? :)
Sorry, will ignore you from now on. Again: Religion is not my cup of tea, bold claims on powerpoint presentations neither, I prefer to use data. We simply do not share a model of the world that is compatible to discuss these kind of things. No harm done, but no thank you :)
You can't get service to them on Starlink without lasers.
I gave you more than one link. I gave you an email to a prof.
I started working at a Telco at 13 and got my CCNA there ages ago within a summer break.
You've demonstrated a lack of understanding of basic geography.
Go get your money back from your tutors.
That person is measuring periodic packet drops (which can also be caused by e.g. having an incomplete view of the sky), and you're drawing unsupportable conclusions on "session drops" from that. (The word "NAT" does not even occur in the observation thread you've linked!)
So, yes, confirmation bias.
> I believe that YOU are a bot
I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)
> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too
Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.
You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.
Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).
You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.
Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :)
And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high.
(See for example the article that this very thread is about.)
Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin...
These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money".
And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;)
Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again.
So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.
> I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers
Your revenue figures are consumer only. And while you're generous on utilization factor, we capitalised the TCO up front while amortising revenue, and then reduced asset tenure to worst case observed during development.
Flex up to 4 years, let $1mm TCO be paid up front and the rest amortised, and reduce utilisation to 80% ($80k/month revenue) and IRR shoots up to 73%. Take TCO to $3mm ($1mm up front, $2mm amortised), reduce utilisation to 75% and we're still over 20%.
> while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium
Well, yes. Starlink connections are more profitable and you can't scale selling internet to Belgium into a Starshield defence contract. Or selling to airlines and cruise ships and yachts and mining operations, all of which pay more than a Belgian.
> some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again
Starlink doesn't sense in densely-populated areas of the EU or Asia. (And the equivalent for SpaceX would be ridesharing Starlink on someone else's flight.)
> Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example
If you have the scale. You're underestimating the risk that comes from having to place infrastructure up front.
Your analysis is pretty solid. But I don't think it's taking into account the fact that you can build multibillion-dollar telecoms business on a few tens of millions of high-paying customers.
I guess we can agree that the comparison between Sat internet and physical links depends a lot on the physical situation in the target region, and the regulatory frame work.
And please keep in mind that while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink. It's worth remembering here that all Sat Internet companies prior to Starlink had failed and needed to be rescued with tax payer money.
I don't have exact numbers, and it's a bit muddy due to state subsidiaries, but in Germany the average cost to connect a subscriber in a medium density town with fiber, with given that nothing was prepared and you have to open the street etc appears to be in region of €/$ 2,000 or so.
I don't know if that is done in the US, but also in Europe we now do "trenching". It has some downsides and pitfalls, but this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively.
> while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink
Absolutely. It's why I think assuming the WACC of a highly-leveraged telecom (around 10%) is appropriate.
> this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively
Fibre makes sense where there is density. It's higher capacity and cheaper. That doesn't mean it makes sense everywhere. And a lot of that everywhere will pay a lot of money for connectivity.
The global telecom market generates trillions of dollars of annual revenue [1]. There is a lot of fruit for the picking.
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/global-t...
> Was this AI generated?
It's crazy to me that people use AI to generate comments for social sites of all things, but here we are.
I find it even more crazy that you no longer can comment on HN without someone trying to invalidate valid points by claiming you not being human. :)
To be honest, while I took it lightly, others might feel pretty insulted by such claims. De-humanizing someone stinks.
> you no longer can comment on HN without someone trying to invalidate valid points by claiming you not being human
I made this mistake, but I'll defend it by pointing out that I've gone a few comments deep on HN, thinking through and citing and engaging in good faith, only to realise I wasn't talking to a human but to a bot. (Then the commenter gets defensive about using a bot, hallucinations and all.)
Instead of taking it as a personal insult, maybe interpret it as your comment having inspired someone to engage effortfully with what you said.
>are funded with tax-payer money
This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.
>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?
>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber
All of this is regulatory stuff. Your state has the option of making it expensive and a PITA or not.
In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.
True. And starlink is a way to bypass all your/my local regulatory hurdles. They had to deal with several very large regulatory hurdles, and then they're golden. No dealing with every little town separately.
Not true really. You will hit regulatory hurdles if your rockets explode in other countries too often :)
And: RF spectrum is HIGHLY regulated.
Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.
Yes, you have read that correctly: 17 Billion for 300 MBit/s.
So you're telling people to live with bad/no Internet connection now (due to local regulations) because of hypothetical future problems with their viable alternative in the future?
Easy advice to give from the outside, especially (presumably) from a place with great fiber options.
> Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.
That's L-band spectrum for direct-to-device services, which comes at a heavy premium due to its advantageous physical properties and inherent scarcity (the entire L-band has fewer Hz of spectrum than what Starlink alone is already using in the Ka band). Ka-band spectrum is much, much cheaper. You're comparing the cost of real estate for factory/campus on a green field hours away from everyone with that of a high street storefront.
> The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky
You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.
And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).
> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.
How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?
> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?
And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.
> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.
Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.
Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
> Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.
So there is demand :)
> As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time
Are you arguing that everybody reporting successfully using it far away from land is part of some conspiracy? How else would SpaceX get away with claiming that they have global coverage?
> I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
Installing a new satellite terminal on the outer hull of a commercial aircraft costs millions, including the lost time spent in the hangar, and that's to say nothing about all the required certifications.
That said, Hawaiian Airlines have been using it for a few months now. Seems to be working great, and their routes are also definitely not possible to cover from LEO without inter-satellite links.
No conspiracy, but let's say that it is rather hard to get proper benchmarks done by actual users, and one has to rely on a lot of anecdotical data. Have you seen any real-life benchmark reports with traceroutes, measure downtime, handover time etc that impressed you in a positive way? If so, please share.
Hawaiian Airlines - very interesting. Sadly wrong side of the planet for me to test it myself :)
It very well might be possible that the intra-links are only used for special customers like airlines for now, and not for consumers, and that this is the reason that all people I know who use Starlink still handover downtime...
"Handover downtimes" for stationary or mobile users? If they're stationary, that's not something inter-satellite links are needed for or would help with.
You are very wrong here:
Right now Starlink claims to be operating a mesh, but they are not. If they would want to build a mesh, Inter-sat links for NOT be used used to pipe through bandwidth to the "best" base station. It would be used for shared state to be able to prepare a handover. Synching state obviously is much easier and more stable if the neighboring sats can talk directly, instead of sharing it over their slow, high latency and lossy base stations.
See IEEE 802.11r for the equivalent for WiFi.
…what? Where do you see the claim that they are running a mesh? Why would they do that?
The main point of inter-satellite links is to provide coverage to areas beyond single-hop (subscriber to satellite to ground station) coverage. (Theoretically they can also be used to provide extremely low latency intercontinental routing, but for most traffic, the goal would be to minimize routing in space.)
Since the entire constellation is known a priori, all paths can be precomputed centrally, just like in a non-moving network, and that routing information can then be propagated to terminals and satellites. There’s no need to dynamically make complex “mesh” routing decisions at the edge.
802.11r controls faster key exchanges in 802.11 roaming scenarios – what’s the relation to satellite ISPs?
It seems like you have some axe to grind with Starlink and are collecting evidence through that lens.
Can not reply to your anymore, guess we are nested too deep now?
I think we are simply talking about two different things here.
I mentioned 802.11r not due to the key exchange implementation details, but to point to the general point: Seamless handover requires shared state between cells.
This is not about static vs dynamic routing, you are thinking on the wrong layer here. We are in L1+L2 land.
On Starlink, the last time I tested a handover between two Sats in 2025 still involves a downtime of at least 5 seconds, and both L2 info and NAT state being lost.
In regards of axes: I am not much into emotions. Of course the data says that Elon Musk is the cancel cell that will play a huge part in destroying the western civilization. But as I do not like the western civilization and humans in general much, this does not trigger much emotions.
And even if I hated Elon Musk: We are talking about technology, R&D and implementation details here (which I enjoy!). I do not have emotions on IP protocols and such :)
No, in reality it's really very simple: My data says that Starlink just is not worth it. It is not commercially feasible. It pollutes the space with tons of trash that will harm productive future space missions and projects. It's highly overrated and overhyped. It's very hard to find positive reviews that haven't been paid for.
Or, executive summary: Starlink is a dead end, and without the Elon cult nobody after looking at a hypothetical business plan would invest.
And finally: Anecdotical evidence collected from my own tests and those of friends all says: It's just shitty. However: That of course depends on your use case. For some an 8 seconds drop-out might mean "patient dead". For others it might be "I will retry loading this after grabbing a cup of coffee". My peer group might have higher standards than others.
Of course Sat internet has its place as a niche business. But as you surely are aware in the US it was and is tried to steal tax money meant to build fiber by claiming Starlink would be equivalent. And you might also remember that if someone would not have pulled the emergency break, you know would have air traffic controllers seeing planes with 100ms+ of latency AND every now and then losing contact to all airplanes for 8 seconds.
And all of this has been tried before. Over in Europe, we 10 years ago had those fights where Viasat & co claimed to be an alternative when we got the "basic human right to broadband".
What's different this time is the cost and time to orbit. SpaceX has been able to launch every three days in 2025. Viasat, Iridium, and everyone else who came before didn't have that. I don't have your spreadsheet to plug that bit of data into, and it's balanced by the number of satellites starlink needs, but governments tend to have a lot of money to keep the things they rely on running.
>steal tax money
I just realized you're trolling.
Have a great day.
>It's very hard to find positive reviews that haven't been paid for.
You could try contacting people in places where it's pretty much the main/a major provider.
Kiribati, Galapagos, Iqaluit, Ukraine, Pikangikum, Vanuatu, Falklands
I really can't tell if you're deep into motivated reasoning here to protect your foregone conclusions or are just trolling.
please talk to "panuvic".
pan &a@t& uvic.ca
I believe he's a University professor in Canada. Working on this data wrt OneWeb and Starlink.
United, Zipair, Hawaiian, Qatar.
The lasers work and I really don't know where you got the idea they don't.
They've worked since at least late 2022.
We're in 2025
Analysts that I've seen estimate that Starlink is already profitable and will remain so. Unless you can explain the differences between your math and their math, this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory.
Gimme your source URL, please.
As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.
Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.
Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/starlink.com
At this point Starlink's active customer base is rating their service to be worse than... cancer, I guess?
>> Also, have you actually used Starlink?
Yes, for example, via a battery-operated "Mini" terminal a month or so ago in extreme rural Finland, ~1km from the Russian border, while photographing wolves & bears.
It worked great.
Mad respect!
Top ISP in USA
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/best-isps-2025
> this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory
Nothing in their analysis is conspiratorial. It's flawed. But not alleging conspiracy.
That's also my opinion - it will probably never be profitable - it's a great product, but the economics are not right - and that's why no other provider did this (even though they have the tech).
Let's see what happens once the bubble pops.
> once the bubble pops
What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.
You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.
Sorry, I was referring to the general stock market (mostly AI) bubble.
As for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts. We can just trust what Elon is willing to share with us.
What does a stock market bubble have to do with the profitability (i.e. not the valuation) of any given company?
Are you arguing that the demand in Internet connectivity in rural/remote areas is somehow caused by an investment bubble as opposed to a long-term stable need?
No, I don't think there is any relationship there.
I'm saying that I highly doubt the real profitability of SpaceX / Starlink, and we will only see if it's really as good as they say, once the bubble pops and there is no inifinite capital, and maybe some accountability.
They aren't raising money.
What's there to pop?
Sure, just like xAI is never raising any money (according to Elon). All of his companies are very tightly interconnected, so you should see them as a whole.
> for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts
SpaceX has audited financials. They're not published, but they leak a lot.
Yes, and Elon companies are well known for leaking reliable information.
> Elon companies are well known for leaking reliable information
SpaceX isn't leaking their own financials.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks, you're right.
0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions.
Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc.
One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.
Could we say the same about flights to Hawaii? Small number of people take lavish vacations, everyone else gets the pollution.
It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).
After just coming back from a trip to Maui, yeah you can totally say the same about flights to Hawaii.
We should. A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems.
A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader
> A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems
There is a reason these taxes are popular among rich countries and opposed by emerging ones.
Personally, I've never suffered from satellite plasma or light pollution from satellites, or spectrum allocation. I suspect most of the 100% are like me.
Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution and that advancement is a driving force behind your modern life. So you have (or will) suffer indirectly over time.
> Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution
Has it?
Destroying the Amazon destroys information. Light pollution simply raises the cost of our accessing it. I suppose one could model this out to some effect on deep-space astronomy's productivity. But if that effect is real--and I've seen zero evidence it is--the solution is a tax on satellite launches to fund more observatories.
Your response is not in good faith - this is very easy to google.
> this is very easy to google
Then it should be easy to cite. Astronomers have complained. But I haven't seen anyone link that to output, including the complaining astronomers.
Search term: "low earth orbit satellite effects on astronomy" first result:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01904-2
OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness."
These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or geographic, putting more observatories are higher latitudes. Or even statistical, by launching space-based calibration telescopes, or building more array-based observatories.)
This paper shows how in 2023 scientists were already annoyed by this, that they had to accommodate this into their observations, and adjust their measurements accordingly. Suffered (past tense) may be hyperbolic, but it isn’t untrue either.
This 2023 paper is also issuing a warning, that if this continues without mitigation, ground based astronomy will be affected. They have the calculations to prove that. What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise.
Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy. I seriously doubt we will ever have one. And that the predictions of worse astronomy will become true, externalized into a type of internet you could have gotten with traditional cable, fiber optics, or a 5G radio tower.
EDIT:
> But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options.
The paper I cited does that. In the abstract they say:
> We present calculations of the potentially large rise in global sky brightness from space objects in low Earth orbit, including qualitative and quantitative assessments of how professional astronomy may be affected.
and inside the paper they devote a whole chapter (chapter 5) to possible mitigations which is titled:
> Mitigations: potential gains and risks
> They have the calculations to prove that
They have calculations that show this is how our models play out.
> What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise
Could become. They're not talking about mitigation because we haven't observed the problem yet.
> Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy
Again, where is the "scientific advancement" that "has suffered"?
> seriously doubt we will ever have one
Based on what?!
You wanted to see the computations, I provided you with them and instead of admitting that you were wrong, you responded by casting doubt on their models. This doesn’t strike me as arguing in good faith. But very well, 5th on my list of the same search term gave me this:
Vera C. Rubin Observatory – Impact of Satellite Constellations
https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa...
The Vera Rubin Observatory came online only this June, but they were complaining about Starlink already last year, and provided preliminary observation how they affected their observations, and how they plan on mitigating it.
Both the 2023 paper and the Vera Rubin Observatory statement call for a set of policies to mitigate the effect of these satellites. However policymakers have not enacted any of these other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution (I don‘t know whether or not they were defunded by DOGE; although if they were, that would seem like a criminal conflict of interest). And I have my reservations about the willingness of governments in the world to come together and set the universal regulatory framework required to enforce these proposed mitigations.
Note that increased exposure time required because of these satellites will affect the number of available operations, which in turn will decrease the amount of astronomy done with this telescope. I want to note especially the conclusion:
> Overall, large numbers of bright satellites — and the necessary steps to avoid, identify, and otherwise mitigate them — will impact the ability of LSST to discover the unexpected.
When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy. You better have a good reason for that (other then protecting the wealth of billionaires).
> You wanted to see the computations, I provided you with them
No, you didn’t. I asked for evidence this had happened. I read the ‘23 paper two years ago. It’s neat. But it’s a model. We don’t have great model parameters for high-atmosphere nanoparticles. We also have great surveillance of the ozone layer, and aren’t seeing damage.
> other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution
Yeah, I agree with this. (It may have been DOGE’d.)
We need to know what we’re up against. We need to know if it’s a problem that call for a pause, or a mandate that aluminum structures to transitioned to steel and carbon, or if the problem goes away as satellites get bigger and burn up less.
> When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy
I really am not. I’m taking them at their word that this is a potential problem. Again, if you have evidence this is currently a problem, the language I originally objected to, I’d love to see it.
The scientists and engineers are raising the alarm that this will become an issue if nothing is done, we should not simply ignore them until they are proven right, like we are doing to climate scientists. So much damage can be prevented.
I think your attempted connection between astronomy and modern technological conveniences is pretty thin.
Does your phone have a camera on it?
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Unless you don't breathe air, you can't make the first statement with absolute certainty.
"Workin' in these coal mines ain't hurt me none no-how."
A single terminal could serve an entire African village. It's also serving use cases in the Ukraine war, ships at sea, Antarctic research stations, numerous aerospace and military use cases, and so on. DTC is provide texting and emergency services to countless people who might need it in an emergancy, like we saw in North Carolina.
Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund the Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless. If that's what rich people want to spend their money on, go nuts.
I'm quite confident if it was anyone besides Elon behind spacex, we'd be hailing starship(cross fingers it works out) as one of the most exciting things we've ever done. And we should be, because it is.
It's something for humanity to be excited about and root for. What happened to wanting to achieve things? Having things to look forward to, build toward and be proud of is healthy for society. Must we aspire to and dream of nothing because there's suffering on earth, is that what it is? Why can't we take it as the objective good it is that we're trying to push technological boundaries that will unlock more advancements in science? In what world does HN not want that?
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
A single astronaut with a shovel could do more science in a couple days than all the probes combined in the last 54 years (Which have barely scratched the surface). For all we know there are literal fossils a few meters below the surface but none of our technology had the ability to even start looking.
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
I strongly disagree.
If "Starship to Mars" is a possibility, then so is "Starship to the asteroid belt". It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit" - and that's very close to orbital mining of metals that are rare and valuable on Earth.
> It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit"
To put this into perspective, an Earth-Mars round trip costs about 15 km/s; Earth-main Belt about 13 km/s.
You'd need to add Δv for returning the mass of the asteroid. But you get your reaction mass for "free."
(To be clear, we are hundreds of billions of dollars of capex and decades away from asteroid mining. But the work to get there is decently in line with the work we would need to establish a logistical chain to Mars and back.)
> Starship to Mars is near useless
Apollo to the Moon was near useless by that metric. We wouldn't have Starship to orbit if we hadn't gone to the moon.
You're discounting the fact that building Starship, if successful, has a non-zero chance of taking Musk away from Earth forever. That's a huge potential positive.
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.
> If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly
...Starlink and SpaceX are funded through investments and taxes. When they launch a non-profit's satellite I guess, indirectly, through donations, too.
Also, what? Why is the funding source a measure of value?
Like SLS?
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
I beg to disagree. I see no value at all. This must be one of those accelerationist or extropianist/utilitarian beliefs.
>The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars?
And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life. I seriously doubt any colony on Mars would be viable long-term. If life on Earth is wiped out, the colony on Mars will very likely wither and die soon after without continued support from Earth.
Any colony on Mars is going to be so exponentially more fragile and fraught with problems for sustaining life, that the suggestion that it's somehow going to save humanity is ridiculous.
The primary benefit of Starship is a sizable reduction of the cost of getting mass to orbit, not Mars dreams.
That's a bit of a re-branding.
How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Not that much, I think, but maybe you have some inside scoop that the rest of us don't know about.
> That's a bit of a re-branding
No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO.
> How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now?
Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communications outside our ecology versus based on wires strung through it.
Let's reverse the question. For the environmental impact of space launch, what else do we do that's more-agreeably useless?
Bullshit. Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony. I've never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites. They even made movies about it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+movie+mars&oq=spacex+...
Google tells me exactly this:
>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."
It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.
Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.
There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.
It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.
> Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony
Could this reflect your media diet?
> never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites
That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
> pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments
V3 doesn't fit on smaller rockets. And Starship's launch costs promise to be much lower than the Falcons.
> why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why
Starship isn't an interstellar platform...
>Could this reflect your media diet?
It could reflect SpaceX's bad PR. I read plenty of news sources, and the most that makes it out there is how the latest Starship blew up, yet again. Not great PR. And beyond that, the scope of the thing is to go to Mars. It's up to SpaceX to get the PR out there, not for me to seek out niche news sources. But thanks for trying to make this about me failing instead of SpaceX failing at PR.
>That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
Not wild at all. And let's be real, I seriously doubt you read "newspapers".
I did a Google search for "SpaceX Starship" and nowhere in 8 pages of results did I see anything mentioning Starlink. In fact, one of the results was for the SpaceX Careers page, which says:
>"Work on the Starship program developing the vehicles that will enable large groups of people to travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Life at SpaceX. At ..."
So even SpaceX is selling it as going to Mars, and not about launching Starlink satelites.
But this entire conversion is completely pointless, so I won't be responding to this thread anymore with anything but a canned lame response. You've been warned.
Umm, a lot. Do you know how many cubesats falcon has launched? Did the space station help humanity? Now imagine a bigger one(s) faster. Bigger satellites- do you know how much of James Webb design and difficulty was around packing into tight space? Bigger satellites, big enough for new wavelengths. Big interferometer setups. Microgravity for bio and pharma crap. Better for particles far enough away to be unaffected by earth magnetic field.
Do you agree science is good for humanity? Do you like James Webb? The other things mentioned above? I'd guess yes to all based on your username. How is getting more mass into space of questionable benefit? If starship works, which everyone on earth should be hopeful and excited about, we get more mass for cheaper into space. It's the equivalent of new funding(falcon has brought down launch costs sooo much) while also unlocking previously inconceivable experiments/instruments. Who doesn't like more science funding? Who doesn't like new experiments and instruments?
I'd wager many of those connections are serving much more than one person, considering they're often hubs in rural areas. But screw them.
It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
I would like to see stats how many people got new connections via traditional infrastructure. I bet that number is much higher, probably even an order of magnitude higher.
This is HN, so I should probably look for the data my self...
EDIT:
In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 billion. Starlink grew by only a 1/100 of that in absolute terms, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period, majority of users in the USA already had access to the internet via traditional infrastructure.
I tried to find how many StarLink users got internet access (or even high speed internet access) that didn’t have one before, but I couldn’t find the numbers. Somebody could correct me, but I very much doubt that number is high enough to consider StarLink to make even a blimp in providing internet to new users.
EDIT EDIT: I was off by a factor of 100 in initial EDIT, see child post.
> In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 Starlink grew by a similar absolute amount, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period,
Is this some AI answer or did you foobar this math by a factor of 100?
Whoops, a standard off by a factor of 100 error.
StarLink got 2 million new subscribers in 2024. Meanwhile the internet got 200 million new users. So even if every new StarLink subscriber would be a new internet user (which is obviously not true) they would still only account for 1% of new internet users. The real number is off course much much much lower.
This is definitely a small number. But I don't think it tells the whole story. Not every n+1 is the same. New satellite hookups in rural places, especially poor rural areas, combat zones, emergency situations etc. are more impactful than a new wired hookup in a city where there's already wifi in the library, for example.
You made the statement:
> It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
Now it is up to you to show that this has outsized influence on impoverished communities.
According to ITU[1] the number one factor for lack of internet access is economical. The price of internet access can be reduced with traditional infrastructure, but governments are often unable or unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring faster and cheaper internet connectivity to underserved areas. StarLink should in theory fit perfectly here, but in reality very few people from underserved communities, especially in impoverished areas, can afford StarLink, and keep being underserved. What makes this even worse is that in the rich countries (like the USA and Australia) underserved communities that had been promised infrastructure to bring the broadband internet are facing delays and cancellations because politicians believe the community can get StarLink instead (when in fact they cannot afford it). This is known as the Uber effect (from when politicians used Uber as an excuse to cancel public transit projects).
1: https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24...
If the community can't afford Starlink, surely they can run Fiber and buy equipment from Ciena and Nokia (Huawei outside the US) to light it up themselves since it's more affordable than Starlink in your view.
That is not the point. These communities depend on their state for their infrastructure, the state was (hopefully) able to provide them with garbage disposal, sewage, electricity, running and clean drinking water. The state should also provide them with quality telecommunication infrastructure.
The state can give them Starlink.
eg Quebec, Nunavut, Wales, New Zealand, Zimbabwe.
Both actual users and Governments paying for it value it in ways you don't
You've mentioned the uber effect about 100 times now, I get it. I honestly don't know just how mad (I'd wager not very) the average city resident is that they have uber now instead of maybe some shitty transit system with two routes out of 20 promised in 15 years 500% over budget. I do VERY MUCH wish we built solid, modern, useful public transit on budget in a reasonable amount of time. But it's honestly wishful thinking at this point.(3)
Similar story for deploying broadband, especially last mile. The government hasn't been very good at that from everything I've seen (1, including starlink's failure).
As for starlinks deployments, I can't find good numbers, so perhaps I was overconfident. I wish I could find more examples, it seems like they could be doing much more than they are, but they are a for-profit company. Given that it can serve rural, poor, otherwise disconnected communities, would you be for or against using starlink to serve them through some government-backed/subsidized efforts?(2)
(1) ---The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) RDOF is one of the most recent and troubled examples. It was a $20.4 billion initiative to bring high-speed broadband to millions of unserved homes and businesses.
Massive Defaults and Questionable Winners: In the first phase, the FCC awarded $9.2 billion to over 300 companies. However, major problems quickly emerged.
LTD Broadband: The single largest winner, provisionally awarded $1.3 billion, was ultimately denied the funds by the FCC in 2022. The FCC determined that the company, a small fixed-wireless provider, failed to demonstrate it had the technical and financial capability to deliver the promised fiber-to-the-home service to nearly 600,000 locations.
Starlink (SpaceX): The fourth-largest winner, provisionally awarded $886 million, also had its award rejected by the FCC. The agency cited that the satellite technology was "still developing" and questioned its ability to meet the program's long-term speed and latency requirements.
Widespread Defaults: By 2023, bidders had defaulted on their commitments for over 23% of the locations they had won in the auction, leaving millions of Americans in limbo and forcing the FCC to try and reclaim those areas for future funding.
---The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) - 2009 This program, part of the 2009 Recovery Act, was a grant-based system rather than a reverse auction, but it provides a clear example of budget and delivery failures.
"The Road to Nowhere": One of the most infamous examples was in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Telephone Authority was awarded a $36.7 million grant to build a fiber network. Years later, a report from the Department of Commerce's Inspector General found that after spending $28 million, the project had connected only 70 customers, was nowhere near completion, and was plagued by mismanagement.
(2) https://techafricanews.com/2025/06/18/starlink-proposes-us27...
https://southernafricantimes.com/rwanda-and-spacex-sign-agre...
"200 Terminals for Amazon Communities: In Brazil, Starlink has provided at least 200 terminals to schools and healthcare centers in remote Amazonian communities, providing a vital link for education and telehealth."
(3) Of course, I predict one possible retort that it's these very same "oligarchs" that are tearing down the government and rendering it unable to build public infrastructure, thus lining Musk's and friends' pockets. To that I'd say, look at very blue california's high speed rail. Yes, trump did just take away some their funding, but it's been like 20 years now? And they're about 300% over budget, and their timeline doesn't even including full completion, but we can safely say 15+ years behind schedule. I'm not blaming democrats, I'm saying there's a systemic problem with state capacity. It is, very sadly, just not reasonable to expect much from the government when it comes to building public infrastructure.
I’ve seen you post about the “last mile” problem before on this thread, and I think you may be misunderstanding the problem and the solutions to it. The last mile is a problem in public transit where people who live in sparsely populated area and commute to higher density areas, where high quality or high capacity public transit opportunities exist for every leg of the journey except the last mile to their home (think Edgewood WA. to the Sounder train station in Puyallup). In case of transit the infrastructure exists for most of the way, but it is costly to provide transit options to connect with the infrastructure, the last mile in that case can be a rideshares, park-and-ride, ride hail, dockless scooters, etc.
In telecommunication the last mile is when a high capacity wire extends to a nearby (sub)urban center, but not to your house because you live 10 miles away from there (I know about the issue in the USA of having a wire across the street and have to pay ridiculous sums to connect it to your house; but that is a different issue). If you solve it by bypassing the wire altogether and opt for satellite instead, that is not really the last mile is it. A last mile would be to put up a 4G tower (or a few 5G towers).
An analogy in the transit space would be that because of the last mile issue, you opt instead to drive the whole way.
The last mile problem is a generic concept in any networked system with certain common, naturally arising topology. I do not misunderstand it in the least. You're right that that putting up towers would be a (recent) solution in many places. Satellite is also a solution that applies anywhere (maybe not the poles?) and which requires less built infrastructure, which, again, we're not good at (in the US). But given the assumption that I don't understand what I'm talking about, I don't see this conversation going anywhere productive so I'm stopping here.
If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities (this is exactly the ReConnect program is). Starlink is not that, it is a classic case of privatizing profits by socializing hidden externalities, in this case to the entire world. Externalities in the form of pollution that will cost us all more than fiber in the long run. Funny story though, Starlink was awarded a $900M subsidy to provide rural USA internet access. In the end, that money was not given because the FCC found that Starlink "failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service.". So no, it is not about screwing rural people, it's about not getting taken advantage of by fat cats and grifters like Elon.
> If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities
Running cables across out land is less impactful than lofting satellites?
Per the article, Starlink runs 8k satellites with an average life of 5 years. They launch in payloads of 20-40 satellites. That's 50+ launches per year if everything goes perfectly. About a million pounds of kerosene per launch. Plus everything else that goes into the rockets and satellites. Then the pollution impact from the launches and reentries. Then the eventual need to clean up LOE to avoid Kessler Syndrome. So yeah, well understood ground tech may be cheaper over the lifecycle. At a minimum, it should be a reasoned choice, not environmental debt pawned off by the richest man in the world.
> About a million pounds of kerosene per launch
Quarter of a million pounds kerosene per Falcon 9. Zero for Starship, which burns methane. (And thus emits pure methane, CO2 and water vapor.)
> the eventual need to clean up LOE to avoid Kessler Syndrome
Not a thing. (Search this comment thread for the term. There are good answers on the current state of research.)
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2024/09/12/spacex-launches-...
...but sure, for the sake of argument, maybe it's only a quarter million lbs of kerosene 50 times a year, upper atmospheric pollution, and LEO crowding that gets solved by HN comments. ...instead of a dumb cable that doesn't come with a side of funding a billionaire neo-nazi. My bad.
You'd have no problem with Kuiper if SpaceX owned Corning, Ciena and Nokia and was running Fiber.
To the left with your nonsense.
The big very visible clue is SpaceX launched over 100 times in 2024 and 2025.
Why estimate when you can count?
The last mile problem is difficult and expensive. I think satellites are a good solution to it. As for SpaceX fucking up that contract, that sucks and is no good.
SpaceX didn't fuck up the contract.
You can tell because SpaceX delivers those requirements in 2025 ahead of the 2026 deadline.
Starlink is delivering the set that was said to be impossible by 2026 today in 2025.
Also worth considering is the Uber effect of public infrastructure. Meaning that politicians may use the existence of StarLink as an excuse to delay or cancel public projects which would otherwise have delivered broadband internet to under-served areas via traditional infrastructure.
This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.
Economics is the study of ...
It's less about percentage.
Economic opportunity is largely shifting towards not only having internet access, but performant internet access.
Costs will come down. There will be alternatives.
But they might have taken much longer to come to market without something like this.
I'm not a fanboy, but there's obviously a lot of people who have worked hard to make Starlink a reality.
Traditional infrastructure is a proven method of bringing both the availability to uderserved areas, as well as bringing the costs down for those already served.
StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.
In some ways, where we're used to seeing borders of countries, the new borders of opportunity largely are performant and accessible internet access.
Depending on the area of the world, wireless and other options that exist that are likely sub par. It is on every continent including North America.
Some regions of the world have aggressively invested in fibre in rural areas.
We can see in parts of the world where there is a lot of investment (and interactions with govt for permits, etc) in physical infrastructure, whether its coax for cable tv and internet, copper for phone lines (and ADSL), wireless doesn't always have a nice way in.
There are places in the world that didn't get as much wired infrastructure put in and were able to jump up to much better wireless.
Satellite based internet as a category provides an additional coverage where "traditional" infrastructure hasn't made it yet. This can be wires or other wireless.
Take this argument to it's conclusion. Take any point in history and freeze infrastructure. The only option we give ourselves is building more of that same type and maintaining it? So, more riders and more horses to carry messages, but no telegraph? Or maybe more accurately, keeping the medium the same, never using planes or trucks to deliver mail?
I don‘t follow how that is the conclusion, nor do I understand your analogy.
Broadband internet via cables, fiber optics, and radio towers is state of the art in telecommunication infrastructure. Satellite is both slower, more limited, and more prone to various disruptions. The capabilities of the wires and the radio towers is also improving. 5 years ago we didn’t have 5G towers, and 20 years ago fiber optics seemed a distant dream. The only thing freezing traditional telecommunication infrastructure in place are dreams of low earth orbit satellites which will never materialize.
If I understand your analogy correctly (which I‘m not sure I do) this is like looking at the new technology of pneumatic tubes and stipulating that all postal delivery will be done using this new technology in the future, and we may as well stop funding the national postal service, remove mail-rooms from our ships and trains, because somebody will build a pneumatic tube that will deliver mail door to door between New York and Chicago.
"The only thing freezing traditional telecommunication infrastructure in place are dreams of low earth orbit satellites which will never materialize."
Do you truly believe this statement, literally?
I actually don‘t believe this. But some politicians do, and that does real damage when they take funding away from actual infrastructure projects which would have otherwise benefited under-served communities with high speed internet.
When I say LEO satellite internet won‘t materialize, I mean that it won‘t serve everybody. It will always be an expensive option which in best case will be subsidized for only a portion of the people that actually need it. LEO satellite is not the future of telecommunication infrastructure, it is lacking in almost every way next to traditional infrastructure. The only thing it is better at is a) marketing and b) providing internet to rich people in their yachts or in their mansions 10 miles out of the suburb.
Their problem isn't LEO.
If SpaceX sells Starlink to Amazon and buys Corning, Ciena and Nokia, they'll be extolling the virtues of LEO Megaconstellations
I am advocating for state funded infrastructure. So no, never will I be extolling this technology, especially not if it changes hands from the worst billionaire on the planet to the second worst billionaire on the planet.
i.e just make Kuiper owned by the Feds in this example.
No, not because of Elon. But I can see how you think so.
Musk and his right-wing propaganda platform plays a big part in the destruction of Western democracy. He deserves the hate he is receiving. Providing internet to an insignificant fraction of the global population does not even begin to offset that.
Or you know, we could use wires..
I am not convinced that Starlink will continue to exist long term. They reported break even in 2023 but I don't think that included the ongoing cost of replacing satillites.
They reported cash flow positive. "Cash flow positive" is a much stronger statement than "profitable" because it doesn't let you play games with amortization. So it included the ongoing cost of replacing satellites plus 100% costs of putting up new ones for future use where normal accounting would allow you to amortize those costs.
SpaceX is obviously quite profitable. They're obviously spending many billions annually on salaries, Starlink launches and Starship development yet they haven't raised significant money via debt or equity financing rounds in the last few years.
Starlink is operated by Starlink Services, LLC which allows SpaceX to play all sorts of accounting tricks by mixing in engineered contracts with SpaceX.
Independent estimates are for $5B of profit on $10B of revenue for Starlink for 2025.
You don't get numbers like that by subsidizing it from the ~$1B/year launch business.
https://www.advanced-television.com/2025/10/01/forecast-8-2m...
The money has to show up somewhere.
Starlink has to continue existing.
That's how SpaceX justifies its launch capabilities. Their strategy of using assembly line techniques to build reusable rockets make no sense unless there is a lot of stuff to launch. Satellites are crazy expensive, and the launch represents only a smaller part of the total budget, so even if the launch was free, there is only so much demand.
Starlink is more than half of SpaceX launches, building their own demand.
And replacing satellites regularly was the plan. I don't know how they did their report, but they certainly budgeted it internally. SpaceX is a private company, they tell you what they want to tell you.
SpaceX was a top launch company pre Starlink.
Their accounting does include that cost.
This year will generate whole digit billions of actual profit. Every satellite they launch, including replacements, increases those profits.
Starlink is not publicly traded. That lowers the bar on transparency so we're all relying on estimates and press releases which are mostly marketing vehicles. Absent rela quarterly financial reports I think most of this is still in the realm of opinion.
Does this create pollution? I don't think I want to inhale satellite dust.
Current Starlink satellites are 800-970kg[1] and 100% of their mass is vaporized on reentry, so 1-2 satellites a day would be approximately 1.5 tons per day added to the atmosphere. The atmosphere's mass is 5.15 quadrillion tons. Even if satellite vapor stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take approximately 10,000 years before it reached 1 part per billion.
So basically it's not worth worrying about.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#v2_(initial_deploymen...
This is correct from the perspective of direct health hazards, but there are still plausible risks. We know from history you don't need a lot of mass to cause global problems, if the material is catalytic.
If the vaporized satellites were entirely converted into a compound that was as damaging to the ozone layer as the most potent CFC (R-12 [1]), and the compound stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take 5,000 years to reach current atmospheric concentrations of R-12.[2]
Vaporized satellites really don't seem like a concern.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodifluoromethane#Enviro...
2. https://gml.noaa.gov/hats/graphs/graphs.html
There are a few exacerbating factors.
The first is that IIUC, CFCs release chlorine atoms which catalyze ozone, whereas aluminium oxide catalyzes the creation of chlorine atoms from chlorine reservoirs, which then go on to catalyze ozone. I loosely believe at this point after some sketchy research and maths that this makes it around two orders of magnitude more potent.
The second is that these particles are produced directly in the upper atmosphere. I couldn't give you a number for how much that changes things, but I assume it's nontrivial.
The final point I've noticed is that mass to orbit has been increasing at a rapid exponential rate recently, and it would not surprise me at all to soon see an extra order of magnitude on it.
Worst-case, that could change your 5,000 year figure to just a couple. I don't think it's that bad, I'm not overly concerned about this issue, but given ozone depletion is a legitimate existential threat and the numbers don't immediately make it seem impossible, I think it's worth paying attention to.
Yet?
My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?
The highest numbers I can find for the final Starlink constellation is 40,000 satellites. Let's assume Starlink and its competitors have constellations totaling 100,000 satellites, and satellites need to be replaced every five years, and each satellite weighs 1 ton. That means 20,000 tons of vaporized satellites per year. The atmospheric emissions would be 3.88 parts per billion per year. This would still be less than the mass of asteroids and space dust that burn up in the earth's atmosphere every year.
If the reentering satellites were somehow transformed entirely into chlorine gas that somehow stayed in the atmosphere forever, we would reach the OSHA permissible exposure limit of 1ppm after 250 years. Chlorine is detectable by smell at 3ppm, which would take 750 years.
It's very likely that the vast majority of the vaporized satellites are inert, as they are basically incinerated on reentry. It's also likely that most of of the vaporized satellite does not stay in the atmosphere for very long. The only way this could be a problem is if the satellites emit a long-lived compound that catalyzes a reaction in the atmosphere, similar to how CFCs destroy the ozone layer. So far, the only candidate for that is aluminum oxide particles, and solid rocket boosters create more of that than reentering satellites. (Fortunately aluminum oxide isn't nearly as bad for the ozone layer as CFCs, and SpaceX does not use solid boosters.)
Also once you are launching tens of thousands of tons to orbit per year, it starts to become feasible to build infrastructure in space. Satellites at the end of their service life contain valuable raw materials. It would likely become cheaper to refurbish or recycle them rather than deorbit and launch new ones.
The real world concentrations of all of the elements that are in a satelite, dont go up by any measurable amount dues to space X sattelites burning up. What does have a huge impact is climate change causing industrial waste sites to dry up and spread dust, or just the inevitable increaes due to more human activity and mining for our resouce heavy consumption, especialy anything with chips, and batteries, exotic alloys in screens
Unfortunately right now we just don't know how it will affect things.
But, it WILL affect things in climate and atmosphere.
https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html
"Pollution" is what this is
[dead]
The launches are probably significantly worse!
> launches are probably significantly worse
Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.
True. But getting outside of starship there's still Solid Rocket Boosters burning, insulating foams, explosive bolts and ablative parts dropping all over the place, and farings sitting in oceans waiting for recovery. It's not that much mass, but neither is the worrisome parts of a burning up satellite parts
Hold on, are you saying that burning rocket fuel produces little to no pollution? As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments? That's pretty surprising to me assuming I'm understanding correctly.
> are you saying that burning rocket fuel produces little to no pollution?
There are high-atmosphere effects we don't yet understand. RP-1 produces soot, particularly when burned fuel rich. And methalox still releases methane since again you're not burning your fuel perfectly.
But the simplicity of non-hypergolic non-kerosene rocket fuel chemistries like the ones SpaceX uses is they burn remarkably clean. You don't get a bunch of additives producing weird neurotoxins, or incomplete combustion inventing organic compounds in the high atmosphere.
(I'm ignoring cryogenic fuels, which literally produce water vapour as an exhaust because liquid hydrogen is a bastard.)
> As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments?
No. Starship releases like 360 tons of CO2 per launch [1].
That said, nobody is launching a million rockets a day. We might get to like 3 or 4 a day in our lifetimes. Barring some novel economic opportunity in space, launch emissions are likely to remain negligble for the foreseeable future.
[1] https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/news/elon-musk-rocket-emitte...
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At this point, Im just waiting to find out that Falcon launches aren't actually that much cheaper in reality, and are just heavily subsidized.
You'll be waiting a long time, because that is simply not true.
And is literally Russian propaganda older than the 2022 Ukraine invasion.