Almost everything is higher than the ISS. The ISS is at quite a low altitude and would deorbit on its own after several years if it didn’t get a regular boost.
Controlled deorbiting works like anything else; the sats ensure their orbits don’t intersect the ISS or anything else (not too hard since space is so big). Uncontrolled is a different story, and should be a rare occurrence. But the ISS can (and regularly does) maneuver out of the way of other objects.
Finally got Starlink setup at my home. Went from an Internet connection ranging between 3mbs to 10mbs with 80-100ms latency to 40mbs to 100mbs with 30-40ms latency.
$40 more than what I was paying but absolutely worth it. I’m amazed the latency is so low on a satellite connection.
Awesome! That makes at least two SDMB Starlink users.
What were you on before? Some crappy DSL service? 4G?
Dark_Sponge - The low latency is because the satellitess are much lower than geosynchronous satellites.
I used to use Hughes, I’m keeping the dish up and account open for now (though I changed to the cheapest you can go). My confidence in Starlink is high though. I want to see how it does in the winter, but I understand that it melts snow off of itself.
We ditched our DirecTV and got ChromeCast modules for our TVs. We stream everything now. We’re saving money.
The latency should get better with the next-gen Starlink satellites, which will enable peer communications between satellites using lasers.
This should eventually he the fastest way to move data from one side of the planet to the other. Much better than transcontinental fiber.
A friend of mine who had been stuck on dial-up for years (rural property that has just missed multiple state/Federal government backed broadband expansions, including one that ran fiber to within about 1000’ of the turn off to his neighborhood) got Starlink about 6 months ago. He’s always been a big gamer, he actually was able to mostly play games on dial-up (dial-up ping isn’t horrible its downstream/upstream is, but most games the files are client side so they don’t use as much bandwidth as you would think–voice comms eat up bandwidth fast though), but he would have to take his Xbox to a friend’s house to download every patch because they just can’t be downloaded on dial-up. For the first couple of months he noticed Starlink would drop out for like 60-100 seconds every so often. Not so much it made things unplayable, but it was one issue with the service. But otherwise it was a huge quality of life concern.
He says he gets regular notifications that they’ve added more satellites to the “swarm” and that has decreased the frequency of the cut outs, I think he says they’re down to being pretty rare now, but if you are actively using your connection for like 24 hours you’ll still see a couple. For the vast majority of internet uses a brief 1 minute interruption a couple times a day is very inconsequential, especially given the huge benefits of Starlink versus typically terrible satellite internet service or dial-up (which are most Starlink customers main alternatives.) If you’re right in the middle of a competitive online game, it’s going to suck because you’ll disconnect from a 1 minute spike, but they are down to being pretty rare it sounds like at least in the Mid Atlantic area.
It was a small town ISP using wireless antennas. I’m in a rural area and live a few miles out of range for cable, fiber, and DSL so it was the only option available (besides satellite). My son lives in town 5 minutes away and gets 100mbs for half the price.
So far it’s been extremely reliable. I tried some online gaming last night and my pings to the server were in the 60s which is night & day from what I was seeing before.
Friend down the road and I are computer professionals working from home. This has been a life saver. Anyway, he keeps a very close eye on down time and such. And today, he had some down time for the first time in ~ 6 months. He did some digging and thinks that a big, big patch was applied this morning.
Things are good now.
Access to space that’s routine and cheap enough to populate LEO that densely also means that various proposed means to clear out debris can be tested and implemented. It’s already been proposed to use Starship to remove derelict satellites.
As for astronomy… well, it may suck but I think that by the 22nd century all leading-edge astronomy will have to be space-based anyway, Maybe there’ll be a tax to subsidize the costs of launching observatories to high orbit or the Moon.
One of the biggest upsides to this is that it’s finally some real competition for land-based internet providers too. Those places that were close enough to have some internet but not close enough to have a choice of internet will finally see some competition.
As far as the kessler syndrome thing goes, from what I understand, starlink satellites are actually a sufficiently low orbit that, should something like that happen, gravity will clear the debris within a relatively short timespan (years, not days or weeks, but still relatively short) compared to higher orbits.
As for the astronomy issues… I like astronomy and the study of space, I think it’s a fascinating field we should definitely pay attention to. But for fast, reliable internet anywhere on the planet, I would encase the earth in an opaque sphere if it came to that. I think the value to mankind of having solid internet speeds and reliability anywhere in the world is higher than that of earth-based astronomy.
Yes, and also all the Starlink satellites have their own manoevering capability and can be de-orbited at any time.
I’m a fairly serious amateur astronomer, and what I’ve heard is that Starlink is only really a problem for an hour or two after dusk - when it’s dark(ish) on the ground but the satellites are still illuminated by the sun, like noctolucent clouds. And serious astronomy/astrophotography sucks anyway until after that point - too much residual light. I do imaging in the dead of night with a narrow field scope, and I have not had any kind of problem.
As far as I kmow, the majority of the impact woild be on a branch of astronomy studying asteroids, where observations are made around twilight. For most everyone else, Starlink shouldn’t have that much of an impact. A few extra frames will get thrown away out of image stacks occassionally. The only scope I worry about is the LSST, which images huge chunks of the sky at once. But that means they must already have processes for filtering out satellite noise.
This is a small price to pay to bring the internet to the poor and isolated around the world.
Starlink has a few key advantages in this sense:
Small nitpick, it’s air drag and not gravity that brings them down. The pull of gravity is almost the same between 500 km and 1000 km, but the air density is orders of magnitude different. With no drag, a satellite will remain on orbit for (almost) forever.
Loathe though I am to weigh in against SoaT, this is not a tragedy of the commons—it is the tragedy of unregulated access. Historically, “the commons” was usually closely regulated and controlled by those who shared it.
There’s nothing unregulated about it. Satellites are probably one of the single most highly regulated businesses on Earth. Well, off Earth.
One could argue that it remains under-regulated relative to what it should have, given the scale involved, but no aspect from it is remotely unregulated.
Someone has to come first when it comes to developing megaconstellations. They’re going to happen anyway. SpaceX has a highly polished safety culture and so I’d rather it be them forging ahead to learn the best practices rather than just about anyone else. Would anyone rather Amazon be the one going first?
My response was solely about the concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” which is not the same as "unrestricted access to a resource,
which is the sense SoaT used it. Good poster name/post, though!
You should look up Eleanor Ostrom. She won a Nobel prize lookjng at how ‘commons’ are managed in places without much regulation, and found that people are actually pretty good at managing the commons all by themselves.
My point exactly. I’ve read her work and like it a lot. I would add that you and I may be hung up on what we mean by restricted and unmanaged; I would say, along with Elinor Ostrom, that the commons is in fact highly restricted re access and carefully managed in a democratic fashion by the people who use it. You may be thinking by “restricted” and managed I mean “restricted and managed by a government,” but I don’t.
It’s old, but Irene Spry wrote an article titled “The Tragedy of the Loss of the Commons” about First Nations amd Métis in Canada and the unrestricted access “given” by the Canadian state to whites. A friend of mine has written on the Atlantic cod fishery to show that when it was a commons managed by local fishers, it was sustainable; it was destroyed when it was opened up to capitalist fishing companies with no interest in the local people or economy and which “strip mined” the fishery.
I believe future generations will condemn us for eternity for selling, the one free thing we thought no one could ruin, the vision of the stars that we have shared with every generation on earth!
We won’t be able to plead ignorance on the exploitative nature of capitalism or of the danger of yet another form of pollution, we are all well aware of what a disaster can result from the marriage of these two things. But more bandwidth and lower internet fees, is all it takes!
Agreed. Assuming there will be future generations.
That’s fair, but “tragedy of the commons” has a specific idiomatic meaning that refers to unregulated commons. It may well be that real-world commons usually develop a set of rules among the participants that allows them to be managed effectively. But that’s as a response to the “tragedy of the commons”, which is more of a game-theoretic thing.
Formal laws aren’t always required. Various types of social pressure may be enough. Or simple violence against those who break the norms. The danger is with commons (say, international fisheries) where there are essentially no feedback mechanisms. The very notion of “tragedy of the commons” essentially posits that these mechanisms must exist in some form.