In 2027 an asteroid flattened Manhatten. So much for Space Force, bunch of worthless budget sponges.
Continuous improvement by SpaceX.
aeneas
2990
Meanwhile in little old NZ
RichVR
2991
Oh I, I love the night launch
I got to booster
On the space flight, oh yea
Oh, I love the night launch
I got to booster on the space flight, oh yea!
You are silly person…
And now I can’t get that out of my head.
Fantastic, and reminds me of Tom Jones doing…
SpaceX has their first Starlink production set (beta version of production anyway) of low-orbit Internet satellites ready to launch possibly on Wednesday. They have a requirement with the FCC to launch a large number quickly (~12,000 by 2027) to keep radio frequency slots reserved for it.
So, people had expected that they would be miniaturizing them and packing them tight, but would be limited by space inside of the fairing. Turns out, they managed 60 per launch stacked flat, something like double what I was expecting.
He says 6 more launches will be needed for light coverage and 12 more for moderate coverage. SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell recently said they expected a few more of these launches still this year depending on customer demand for other launches.
Menzo
2996
Even at 60/launch, they’ll need 200 launches in 8 years. That’s a dramatic increase from what they’re doing now. I mean that’s 25 launches a year just filled with these satellites.
Yeah, I should have said it was an extreme number.
Another way to look at it is that there are currently roughly 4,000 satellites total in orbit and only around a third of those are active. 12,000 is quite a large constellation to maintain even if most are very small and in low orbits. And there are other companies planning to launch 500-1000 satellite Internet constellations as well.
That’s a lot of devices. How is Space so close to the Earth regulated?
By an old treaty that makes all the signing nations responsible for regulating all launches by anyone in their borders along some generally-agreed guidelines. There’s a UN committee that draws up some proposed rules, but each country deals with the details.
In the US, it’s the FAA and FCC that deal with most of it. For Starlink, the FCC (since they’re communications satellites) has SpaceX doing extra studies to figure out how to keep the space debris threat low enough. SpaceX only has provisional permission to start launching these but has to provide stronger certification that they’re dealing with it correctly as they go.
Lots of details from the latest step in the process:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/03/spacex-higher-necessary-safety-starlink-constellation/
Menzo
3002
SpaceX launching these 60 satellites tomorrow at 10:30pm EDT.
Launch is now 11 EDT and satellite deployment (by intertia, spinning the stack of slim satellites) starts just over an hour later and will be in the webcast.
Scrubbed due to high upper level winds. They will try tomorrow apparently.
It took them two launch dates to do it, but they finally got the first Starlink launch into space. The booster landed (for the third time, which is wild), and in half an hour or so, they’re going to turn their spinning satellite launcher on and almost instantly become one of the largest satellite operators out there. Still time to catch the stream, if you’re interested.
Menzo
3007
Payload deployment is in 15 minutes!
