I'm gonna start a separate ramblin tread just for space stuff.
They got Starship towed to Christmas Island. Couldn't go east to Oz because of wind and current in their faces. Christmas Island was much closer, and a better direction. A big Norwegian Tug went and snatched em up. A coupla other boats assisted. So, now we wait to see what SpaceX does. Plenty of options. Christmas Island is pretty tiny, but it does have an airport.
Starships don't come with tow line attachment points. They had fun tryna hook up to it without fuckin it up and it sinkin. 😏
Here's that tug. Go Norway.
Wide view. They ended up near Indonesia.
Nice. That would be ideal if they can grab that very valuable piece of equipment. That is a crazy addition to all of the new satellites and space travel. Space Debris and shit just re-entering our atmosphere and hopefully burning up or not landing in downtown Manhattan. Crazy ass humans and our toys.
It landed EXACTLY where it was supposed to. It just wasn't expected to survive. Usually the fireball is the celebrated exclamation point to a successful flight. I honestly don't think SpaceX had a plan for this.
Yeah, I didn't mean that one. The actual space programs do a great job of re-entry and calculating the landings. The big one landed right in San Diego where it was supposed to...
What I am talking about is the actual space debris. With a million satellites up there, I often see articles about chunks of this space debris making a re-entry, hoping to burn up, but pieces X, Y and Z are going to land somewhere in Siberia.
So, this is just some non-sensical sci-fi kinda book stuff. But I have read about the ideas of so much space material in our orbitz, that it can all be targeted and used in attacks and what not. A little far fetched, but nobody owns space, yet anyway. So people can put whatever they want up there.
Speaking of which, My home internet bill keeps going up and up, so I looked into Starkink. And man, while it's cool and all, it's fucking expensive. 55$ a month for a basic 100MB plan, which is too slow for me, the wife, 2 kids, 5 TVs streaming, 15 devices, cameras, yada yada.... $75 for 200 MB and the plus service, 500MB-1Gig is $135. So, not exactly the "savings" i have been hearing so much about on their internet ads. I need at least 500MB to do what we need to do on a normal basis, and starlink isn't priced very well at this point. I thought the whole point was that a billion people would all feed off the expensive satellites and we would all be paying $50 a month for fast internet. Not the case.
@zach619 I think Starlink is systematically fillin in areas of the planet as they go. Different orbits and stuff. I don't know the specifics, but speeds vary depending on location for now.
I watched some shippin expert go into crazy detail about the Starship rescue. They rigged this elaborate ring of bumpers around a 15 story tall rocketship, then hooked the towline to THAT. They tried goin east to Oz for like 2 weeks, but could only make 2kts into the current and wind. Couldn't rip apart the rocket.
So, they rerouted. Halfway to Christmas Island, they hadda stop and wait out the weather. They ended up takin the bumpers off, hookin the tow rope around one of the dang ROCKET motors, and pullin it the rest of the way like that. You can see there ain't no bumpers in the final pics.
Oh, yeah. Space debris is gettin wild. There's companies that are gonna be flyin little cleaner upper satellites soon. Snatch stuff and send it down to a specific spot in the ocean and shit.
Ok. I'm just gonna add on the end here. Don't sound like cheap internet on Starlink to me. At least not yet. If your house was in some major boonies that hardly even had electricity, maybe a great thing. Looks like maybe it's not time yet for Starlink for everyone. I'm fairly sure it's gonna work out later.
I DO, however, have a moderate predisposition against 10 zillion satellites in the sky. I know there's miles between em, but it seems sorta weird to surround Earth with a net or web of things traveling several miles per second. I think I saw that SpaceX has put more satellites in orbit than everyone else in history combined. Like half of what's up there is Starlink.
Yeah, I am not sure about it. What I do know, locally anyway, is that the remaining "legacy" internet companies in my area: Spectrum and Sparklight have been fighting to get better fiber optics in the area and all that. So, I signed up for 500MB a couple years ago on a promotional "$50" per month thing. I don't look at the bills really, but I saw one come through last month and it was like $140. So I have to call them and negotiate again. I have no cable/TV serving. All streaming, so this is just internet...
And on XM radio and on podcast commecials, all I hear is "Starlink internet, anywhere in the world at blazin fast speeds, starting at $20 per month". I mean, I guess you get it for free if you are in Ukraine, yikes....
I am confident that the satellites have the bandwidth to hit anywhere on earth really, but what I assume they are trying to do is recoup the startup costs, which I am sure are in the billions for all the satellites and tech involved.
But it's just not a good looking coming into the market with the same price, if not higher than traditional markets. The beauty of this is supposed to be that one satellite handles like 100 million customers or whatever it is.... The recoup on the company needs to be a slow play.
Also, if you are in the middle of Africa, I am sure it's free. If you live in rural Mexico, it's probably $5 a month... But if you are in the US, you are going to foot the bill for the 100,000,000 Ukrainians getting free war-time internet service and all the other hand outs.
I just expected something a little different than that. I am all for Elon hooking up people that need it, but not at the expense of the rest of us. I am sticking to my current provider.
Just to clear up a concept... The satellites you aim a TV dish at are stationed over 20k miles up over the equator. They stay over one spot on Earth. One satellite could serve millions of people. It would be slow AF for internet, though.
Starlinks are down low, a coupla hundred miles up. They're only over you for a few minutes. Depending on where you are, there's always at least a few you can connect to. The receiver somehow controls the handoff or sharing between satellites. So, you're constantly switchin between the satellites in this cloud. 🛰
Just to clear up a concept... The satellites you aim a TV dish at are stationed over 20k miles up over the equator. They stay over one spot on Earth. One satellite could serve millions of people. It would be slow AF for internet, though.
Starlinks are down low, a coupla hundred miles up. They're only over you for a few minutes. Depending on where you are, there's always at least a few you can connect to. The receiver somehow controls the handoff or sharing between satellites. So, you're constantly switchin between the satellites in this cloud. 🛰
Yup, same idea as modern "Mesh" wifi systems as well as any modern WiFi system. It's the same idea that I use when wiring entire marinas or restaurants with cables and wifi....
You have a main server/modem/router, from there, it goes into switches and then fan out for hundreds of yards in every direction with actual data cables. And along those lines, they connect, let's say every 400 feet to a WiFi router that is plugged directly into the main network switch. You can extend this as far as you want to. So, for instance, in our big Marina, I have 16 different routers positioned throughout the property. And all of them communicate back to the mother ship, so as a guest walks from one side of the marina to the other, they are actually passing by a half dozen different routers that all feed them the same data signal. The devices using these routers (phones in this case, but to compare to starlink, the routers are the satellites) never know the difference and they never know that they are shuffling between different access points. Their IP stays the same the entire time, and the connection is seemly, I.E. Your kid's Youtube Video won't buffer as you pass from access point to access point.
And the devices in this case, for our purposes, are the Starlink Modems that would be in your house.
It's the exact same idea. As the earth rotates, you pass by, let's say, 14 satellites each day, but they are spaced out in a way that the coverage areas overlap, and as soon as you become less than 50% close to "Satellite 14", your connection will automatically move to "Satellite 15" which has now become 51% closer to you than Satellite 14....
And so on...
So, it's the exact same idea as any wireless communications, but just on a larger scale....
So, to that point, Starlink has the necessary Satellites in place to offer wigi to everyone in the USA, seamlessly, 24/7, 365. And even if a Satellite goes down, the area in which these Satelittes can cover is so vast, that you would still not see much of a difference in signals if you had to go from #14 to #16 because #15 got blown up by the Chinese.
Or whatever.....
There has got to be some serious math involved for them to keep the Satellites in completely sync with the earth rotation, as that angle changes little be little every hour of every day....
Like, are there other Satellites on a high latitude reading that cover Russia, or Alaska? Or is simply lining the equator with them enough to produce a signal from there to the poles. Interesting stuff.
Eventually, Starship is posta be the way Starlink floods the zone with satellites. They got a Pez dispenser that spits out satellites. Like the candy. It's called a Pez dispenser. Haha
First video is a quickie view from a Starlink satellite as it got Pezzed out.
Here's a quick inside view. There's way more detailed ones, but they're longer.
There's been a recent trend for private industry to be very involved in military stuff. They can be much more agile, plus they already got the satellites up and runnin. It's workin ok I reckon.
But, like Lee Corso said... Not so FAST, my friend. Don't be surprised if private companies facilities or equipment become valid military targets if SHTF one day. Space Force is probably gonna end up with Popo satellites keepin things safe up yonder. They see China's satellite gettin too close to some private bird sendin Taiwan shots to us... Fly over there and get in the way. We've already seen Chinese or Russian satellites followin other people's shit around up there. China mostly. They got more money. 😶🌫️
I'll get back with an attempted easy answer to your Starlink stuff, Zach. The main point for now is it's not they park satellites over you anywhere to cover so many people. They're zippin by on basically the same orbit height as the space station. I think you've seen that fly by. Coupla minutes and it's gone. Maybe 6, 7min max. For Starlink to fully go off, it's tens of thousands of little satellites so there's always a bunch close to you. It's not there yet.
The latitude question later... That's trickier. 😶🌫️
Ok. The latitude question... Start with imagine a satellite orbiting the earth DIRECTLY over the equator. It would never pass over anywhere else N or S. Just stay at 0° latitude. If that satellite is far enough away, 20k+ miles, it takes a whole day to orbit the earth. It stays over the exact same spot. So you can point your DirecTV dish at one spot.
Now, we're gonna do 2 things.
First, the Starlinks are flyin like 300mi up and orbiting the planet 16x a day. Like the ISS we watch because it's HUGE.
Second... Imagine instead of the satellites over the equator, you start to add an angle from it. If it's 20°, the satellites will swing above and below the equator 20°. If it's 51.6°, they swing above and below to 51.6°. The ISS is on what's called a 51.6° orbital inclination. It won't get any closer to the poles than that. If you look at the orbit lines, they scoot over with each pass.
If you live under the max N or S spots, ends up you get more satellites over your house. Instead of one ISS, it's 1000s of Starlinks. They can put em into certain orbital inclinations to maximize signal at specific latitudes. I don't know the specifics, but Starlink definitely considered the latitude of potential customers when they started this. Both sides of the equator. They're hittin first places first, and eventually it'll be everywhere. Prob even crazy ass orbits over the poles.
I hope this picture helps.
More geeky shit about Starlinks. There's different batches at different inclinations. I just don't remember the specifics. Gonna put a few more pics in here.
This website has some really cool space trackin shit. The different colors are batches of Starlinks in various orbital inclinations.
Closer view
Another closer in
What was just flyin over my house
