Just was down for an hour or so, and looks like they’re having some systemic issues right now. Hope they get it resolved since our phones go through it also.
As the article says, some of the satellites don’t have the oomph to get out of the low orbit due to recently increased atmospheric density.
Only the Starlink satellites that pass initial testing in orbit are allowed to raise themselves to operational orbits around 550 kilometers (340 mi), where a failed satellite will instead take years to deorbit.
Although mildly unfortunate for SpaceX, it does demonstrate that their strategy works. These satellites should come down in weeks due to the low altitude–i.e., no contribution to space debris. It would have been the same if they had a bad batch of satellites or there was some other failure.
The geomagnetic storm was predicted, but apparently more severe than they thought it would be. They took a bet and lost this time. Not a huge deal, though, given that it’s only 40 satellites out of ~2000 (so far).
I might have used a different adjective in front of ‘unfortunate’ for the lost of $10-20M worth of satellites and a wasted Falcon 9 launch with a value probably somewhere in that same ballpark. I realize it isn’t a huge sum compared to overall corporate revenues, but a $30M writeoff is at least somewhat unfortunate rather than just mildly.
The possibility of losing the JWST has recalibrated my expectations for “unfortunate” 
.
Or any traditional telecom satellites on traditional launches.
Build and launch included, they are easily going to be pushing a billion dollars each.
Losing a few dozen satellites and having it only cost 10-20 million is a massive game changer.
Here’s some video of one of the satellites reentering over Puerto Rico:
I was going to suggest that was more likely an upper stage, but this guy agrees that it’s probably a Starlink:
There was a Falcon 9 upper stage that could have almost fit, but the inclination was too far off.
Ukraine is now getting Starlink service. I’m amused at how casual the whole process is:
Nothing like a war to fast-track any concerns about radio frequency allocations and such. I guess some people in the West are going to have their terminal deliveries delayed by a bit, though…
Yes, Starlink will be a danger to humanity if that humanity is manning Russian hardware. I imagine there’s some sort of military organization to the west of Ukraine that has no problem using the internet and feeding the Ukrainians satellite or drone data for target and counter-insurgency purposes.
it also becomes a clever way to bypass any restrictions an oppressive regime might have on posting to social media. I imagine soon it will be the standard for journalists to do live news or upload footage in the field.
Well, yes, but then we get into the philosophical, “both sides” aspects of censorship.
The right-wing blockades in Canada these past few weeks certainly increased my support for Internet censorship or some sort of control (on conspiracy sites, on foreign supporters of the protests – including Elon Musk --, on funding channels). But I don’t want China or Russia to impose censorship.
Does the Starlink company follow the laws on Internet providers where it offers the service ? Even the laws (in the U.S. or elsewhere) that require spying on some customers or blocking them ? Is there a big button to stop doing so, somewhere in a corner office at SpaceX HQ ?
The terminals have arrived (not bad–2-day delivery to a warzone):
Yes. SpaceX has not intentionally provided service where they are not allowed to. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes with Ukraine, but I expect they were going through the normal, usually slow process of certification with them (probably at low priority), but got some kind of expedited approval due to events. Honestly, it may have been nothing more than verbal confirmation with the expectation that the details will be worked out later. But I don’t see them doing the same with Russia or China or wherever where it’s clear they aren’t welcome.
Looks like they got the dishes working almost immediately:
Pretty neat. And all it needs is ~100 W of power. Faster internet than you can get in much of the US, working fine in the middle of a warzone.
It’s very easy. There is no ‘set up’. The biggest difficulty for me was getting my ass on the roof, and then running the cable.
The speed is great.
As I understand, everything is smart. So the system will know where the dish is, and so can enforce geographical limitations should the company need to adhere to them.
I guess the next question is how directional the beam is, whether it’s easy to hide from prying radio-location finders looking for ground stations? I presume in worst circumstances you could construct a large metal horn or fence around the base station antenna so there would be less of the more horizontal leakage?
Huh, I guess my question is, how secure are the satellites themselves?
Could someone hack them? If they could, would they be able to start aiming them at other people’s satellites and space stations?
What, like Captain America et al reprogramming the Operation Insight helicarriers? Than what? I’d think that ground intercept would be easier and more likely to get you useful information than trying to intercept data in transit.
They use phased-array antennas; effectively a tight-beam. So highly directional. That said, there’s always some inevitable leakage, so a determined adversary could still find it.
I guess you could hide yourself from ground detectors by building a Faraday cage thing–but it would still have to be pretty open since the satellites are moving around constantly. It would be hopeless against detectors in the air.
Hard to say for sure, but probably pretty secure. It’s not all that difficult to build a provably secure system–what’s difficult is building security into consumer-facing systems like computers and cell phones. But in terms of maintaining control over their own satellites? Relatively easy to get right.
The latest generation of Starlink satellites have laser links. Individually they aren’t very powerful, but maybe if you aim enough of them in one spot…
Like I said, use them as weapons against other stuff in orbit.
There’s more than just the satellites in orbit, there are ground facilities as well. These ground facilities are manned by people, who can be tricked, bribed, or extorted into doing things that give over control to a third party.
Not a huge concern, but this being a thread about whether Starlink is a danger, it’s something that I have thought of a bit.