Ah, so this is why Elon wanted the rural broadband bill killed.
Why provide a public service when some capitalist can squeeze every penny from that same service?
Well, we’ll provide the service once we buy it from them because they ran it into the ground as a vulture capital operation, and then once we’ve invested a trillion taxpayer dollars into fixing it up, we’ll sell it back to them for pennies.
It’s got to work this time!
I live in a rural area. We were thinking about starlink a few years ago, then fiber came to our area. Thank goodness. We’ve literally had no issues, speeds are amazing, and no price hikes.
Fibre is racist and woke, that’s what tramp said at least.
Given his steady diet of hamberders, I’m sure he does think fiber is woke
Hahahah
He love the uneducated.
He sure do… I mean, this can come off as a elitist by saying this, but you have to remember, Yankees live in their own shit and piss. They choose to be ignorant. They choose to be unsophisticated. They choose to look stupid on the world stage. We have every bit that we need to have a great society. We are a nation of idolaters. We worship idols. We are a nation of cults, just like an empire. Empires are filled with cults. We are an empty vessel of lesser things. A pit of despair for some. A Nation of extremes, peaks and valleys of exponential excrement.
I’m super jealous. I’m out here in Western Maryland and I’d be happy to see us get plain old telephone service.
I thought starlink was just an alibi company to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, and make SpaceX appear profitable on paper?
Starlink is owned by spaceX so they’ve never purchased a rocket, they just launch
And because of starlink SpaceX will be an insanely profitable company. Starlink is already bankrolling the very expensive starship development.
Who’s bankrolling starlink?
With xAI buying twitter and Tesla buying solarcity, Musk seems like he’s playing the walnut/pea game.
The original goal was that Starlink would be SpaceX’s cash cow. The demand for rocket launches is growing, but it can only grow so fast. If you’ve built the capability to launch so many satellites that you can’t find enough customers for all your launches, one option is to simply find ways to launch your own revenue-generating payloads into orbit. That was the original goal of Starlink, though it seems to be failing at that goal.
You are 100% correct except for
though it seems to be failing at that goal.
Starlink is expected to bring in 2 billion In profit this year, it is successful https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growing-rapidly-as-it-faces-a-moment-of-promise-and-peril/
And they basically destroyed the business model of all other spacecraft manufacturers, which relied heavily on the geostationary telecom market.
Starlink is bankrolling starlink, it’s expected to generate 12 billion In revenue this year with 2 billion of that being profit
Before it paid for itself spacex did and still does have a lot of very wealthy private investors willing to throw significant funds at the company
Then what, are you going to tell us next that going to Mars also was? Come on! /s
Leopards ate his… internet?
Starlink was never a viable business prospect. It never will be. Anybody who signed up to Starlink was just waiting for this to happen without knowing it.
well it might’ve worked if he didn’t turn out to be a fascist… but since most people don’t want to support that, kinda fucks up the business model.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
Exactly. The business isn’t remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.
Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it’s not going to grow.
What was the life expectancy of each satellite? I think I read something like 5 to 7 years. If we were talking about dozens of satellites I would say no problem, but thousands?
On https://satellitemap.space/ you can see the numbers pretty accurately under “status over time”. The current launch cadence is steady since mid 2022, and the burn rate is climbing to match. It seems to have a 5 year delay, but it’s possible the new satellites will last a little longer.
Which means that by mid 2027 earliest and mid 2029, the current “investment” in “growth” will have become the regular maintenance spending. And up to that point, maintenance costs will continue to climb to consume the entire investment budget.
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Starlink is already making more money than it costs to expand and operate, you are wrong. This is sustainable (financially) and counter to your beliefs over the next 10 years I’d wager the starlink network will balloon to many times its current size, 20,000 plus satellites in orbit.
SpaceX is the most successful company/entity in history that does space launch, it doesn’t cost them a whole lot of money to launch new batches of Satellites and that cost will continue to decrease as the Falcon 9 program continues to improve and as starship becomes operational over the next few years.
With how many government handouts though?
Starlink is already making more money than it costs to expand and operate, you are wrong.
Honestly, there are no realistic, reliable figures either way. There are plenty of guesstimates, and they show a profit now, but that with a very significant investment in growth. And that investment comes in large part from external sources, which means that when the happy time ends and the satellites fail at the same rate as they’re currently launches, they need to either make WAY more money, or rely on external funding.
and counter to your beliefs over the next 10 years I’d wager the starlink network will balloon to many times its current size, 20,000 plus satellites
Definitely, they’re on track to stabilize at around 36.000 with the current launch cadence. That’s where every new satellite is a replacement. But that doesn’t count money, which is the problem, and will be more of a problem when expenses replace growth.
and that cost will continue to decrease as the Falcon 9 program continues to improve and as starship becomes operational over the next few years.
Eh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Falcon 9 costs haven’t gone down in years. Falcon Heavy is supposed to be cheaper per ton, yet somehow is almost never used for Starlink or anything else. Starship isn’t even projected to be cheaper than Falcon 9 (I except in what are basically ads).
I won’t debate more on the finances because, like you said, they’re a private company and we can’t know for sure. However, reliable public estimates show starlink is profitable already or will be very soon.
Falcon Heavy is supposed to be cheaper per ton, yet somehow is almost never used for Starlink or anything else
Starlink already about maxes out the fairing capacity of the Falcon Rockets, so allowing more weight doesn’t do much besides increase cost. Same with other companies buying launch services from SpaceX. Usually they don’t need the extra capacity or margins heavy offers, although I wish me got more launches, they are always a treat to watch.
Starship isn’t even projected to be cheaper than Falcon 9
Maybe not, but that wasn’t my main point. They are already spending money on Starship and that isn’t going to change. It’s just soon they will actually be able to use that money they’re spending to make more money by launching more starlinks. With the significantly larger payload capacity, they will also be able to launch way sats per launch and also more capable sats with higher bandwidth or more onboard propellants for a longer operational life
I expect Starship will be used to launch many batches of Starlink while the vehicle is still in testing and expected to fail on occasion, If you think about it in that capacity, the launches are free since they are already going to be doing test launches.
reliable public estimates show starlink is profitable already or will be very soon
Where “reliable” is defined as “estimates that agree with what I’ve already psychologically decided has to be true for my identity to remain intact”.
Hero worship is one HELL of a drug. Rather like the ketamine your hero favours, in fact.
I do not like Elon musk
What do penny loafers taste like when you lick them?
Or are you more in favour of licking jackboots?
I literally canceled because of his fucking nazi salute. Not giving that pos any money
There’s a bunch of technology problems that make it undesirable, like the light and projectile pollution in leo
I mean, ultimately, that’s probably inevitable. We need to decide as a species whether we actually want to have a future in space in a big way. If you actually want to see a future where humanity spreads across the solar system, we’re going to need a vast infrastructure in orbit. That’s true no matter who is building that infrastructure. So…is it worth giving up that future just for the sake of ground-based astronomy? I would say no. Especially because the same technology and economies that lets you launch enough birds to ruin ground based astronomy also allows you to launch absurd numbers of space based astronomical telescopes.
That seems like a fair trade really. Again, this is just a limitation of the technology. Do you want to see a future where there actually are millions of human beings living and working off Earth? Then we’re going to have to give up ground based astronomy. Making low-visibility satellites can help a bit, but it’s a fundamentally intractable problem. And again, this is true regardless of who is building that big space infrastructure.
First, you don’t need tens of thousands of internet satellite in LEO to have an ambitious space program. The current mega-constellations are just a way for billionaires to build a new monopoly, and control internet access. It has nothing to do with getting humanity in the stars or whatever. Second, when are all these space telescopes coming? Launch cost is a very small fraction of building a space telescope because they are fragile, very large and complex pieces of equipment and getting them on a rocket is hard. Third, we will never see millions of human in outer space in our lifetimes. Earth is our only chance, at least for the overwhelming majority of us. So let’s protect it from sociopath billionaires.
Do you want to see a future where there actually are millions of human beings living and working off Earth?
Yes. AFTER we stop rushing headlong into making it uninhabitable on Earth.
No see other posts
I just generally doubt anything Musk does because of his track record. However, is there a particular reason why Starlink is inherently not viable? Could a competent person do it or it is fundamentally flawed? To put it another way is it cybertruck bad (yes people want electric cars but not a barely driveable dumpster held together with glue) or hyperloop bad (physics said no)?
It is closer to a hyper loop system. For the internet to have low enough latency it has to be put in quite a low earth orbit. That means we need more satlights to make coverage, ballooning costs. However that is not the part that kills it, it is that it is in such low orbit we can expect air resistance to significantly degrade orbits. There are too many satilights to reasonably boost them all, and when they start to degrade it will be too fast to reasonably replace them all.
That, and as they burn up upon re-entry, they’re fucking up the environment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-damage-earth-atmosphere
And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can’t add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there’s a harsh density limit to your subscribes.
I mean, the need for internet satellite is mostly in low density areas. In big cities fiber will always be cheaper and more reliable (except maybe in the US where operators are allowed to fuck you). I hate Musk and I guess Starlink is squeezing their monopoly position right now, but I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
Yeah, the big problem is that by definition most people live in the places where most people live. Urbanisation is over 80% in Europe and the US (and European countries hold a much looser definition of “urban” than the US).
To increase service to most people, you need to upgrade the entire world, which is expensive.
I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
I am. They’re reporting a profit right now because theyre calling the cost of new satellites as “investment” and not expenses. In a few years, when every satellite launched is a replacement, those “investments” become running costs, and there goes the profit.
Maybe a better answer is WiMax.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, the satellites do “reasonably” boost themselves, they have propulsion on board.
After 5 years yes they trash them, but that nots not cost prohibitive for SpaceX. Starlink is brining in a significant amount of money, and it doesn’t cost SpaceX all that much to launch a new batch to replace the old. You all seem to forget they are the cheapest and most impressive launch company to date.
What you and nobody else seems to understand is that every year SpaceX is launching more and more rockets and they will only continue to increase their launch cadence. In the next one or two years, they will start using Starship for Starlink launches, and that will significantly increase the amount of bandwidth they can add to the network per lanch.
I’m sure I’ll get hate because I’m defending an elon company but everyone here is plain wrong and just making shit up.
☝️ spitting facts. people love to hate, and complain about the “other side” being delusional. turns out, we ALL can be a little delusional.
Yep. Spitting facts like degenerative AI.
Hallucinated facts.
If you could actually dispute it without insulting the author then I would consider your input. But you can’t, because the facts are correct.
Not everyone needs super low latency. Satellite phones exist for a reason.
The number of people willing to put up with the round trip latency to GEO is relatively small. They would only do it if there’s no other option. There aren’t enough customers to justify the kind of mass deployment Starlink needs to be profitable.
You can put lots of sats in a low orbit and get low latency, but then they either need to be replaced every few years (the kind of capital expenditure that companies are allergic to in the long run) or self-boosting (expensive, and still eventually need to be replaced). You can put them in a higher orbit, but latency goes up noticeably, you need even more sats for coverage, and it’s more expensive to put them there. You can put them in GEO and use fewer sats, but latency goes through the roof. These are the options orbital mechanics and current technology allows.
If we had a space elevator or similarly cheap way to access space, then it becomes more viable. Note that while Falcon 9 and Starship potentially make it viable to build one of the space megastructure ideas that have been floating around for decades, it would also crater SpaceX’s business model. Chemical rockets would build their own demise (at least for launching from Earth, and there are probably better technologies for scooting around the solar system once you’re up there). Musk likely knows that and would fight it.
Or you can build fiber to peoples homes and leave satellites for Antarctica or the Himalayas or such. That works, too.
Too many words. What did you want to say exactly?
Wonderful. They can just talk to their server on the phone
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting. Further, it will also be disadvantaged to anything closer with ability to choose a cable medium. All this adds up to the most expensive infrastructure that exclusively targets very low population density areas and/or areas too poor to afford good Internet. The people that could afford to sustain this can afford to move somewhere with a bit more infrastructure or at least within reach of a terrestrial tower and have an even better result.
That’s the main problem, yes. Starlink is not going to be useful to anybody living in a city. There’s no need for expensive, low-grade Internet when you can for a fraction of the price just get physical connection. I mean … your apartment building is not going anywhere anytime soon, right? So that’s 60% of your prospective market gone. (The people who travel and want to use it, and the weirdos who orally service Kaptain Ketamine, are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the market size Starlink needs to pay for operations so they can be ignored for analysis.)
So about 40% of the planet lives in rural areas, and that’s the only market of any size that’s going to be a credible one for Starlink. The people who live on the edges of that already have technology available to connect. My uncle, living way off in the boondocks near Vanderhoof, for example, has a direct microwave link. He’s not going to be using Starlink; it’s literally an order of magnitude more costly than what he’s got. Similarly most of mainland China (well in excess of 80%) has 5G coverage with 100% coverage due by the end of the 2025. That’s a sizable chunk of that rural market gone too! So cut away that 40% to … let’s be generous and say 20%. (I’d actually guess closer to 15%.) That’s who’s left for needing a Starlink-like service.
But that’s not the only problem …
Oopsie! It turns out that worldwide about 10% of the world’s money rests in rural areas. (In the USA it’s actually closer to 8.5%, but let’s be generous again. It won’t matter.) The very people who would be the target market for Starlink can’t afford Starlink. So even if all of the 40% rural inhabitants around the world had to use Starlink, most of them wouldn’t because it’s too expensive. And Starlink’s prices aren’t dropping; they’re doing the opposite.
In the mean time, as shown in China, the alternatives aren’t sitting there idle. While Starlink balloons its operational costs and maintenance costs, other countries are also spreading 5G coverage, or microwave relay coverage, or fibre networks, or, or, or. They’re going to cut into Starlink’s revenue either by taking customers away or forcing prices down.
Starlink is not a viable business.
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting.
I mean…so what if the birds only last 5-7 years? My only real concern is that they’re not made with environmentally damaging materials. Let them fall over the South Pacific and be atomized on the way down. It really depends on how cheaply you can launch them. All infrastructure has a finite life span. 5-7 years is lower than most terrestrial infrastructure, but this is all a function of launch costs. If those can be made cheap enough, the concept is perfectly viable.
Closer to the latter than the former.
I wouldn’t discount people with brains coming up with something Starlink-like that is viable enough that it could at least eke out an OK profit, but Musk can’t do anything right.
It is a viable business product, latest estimates are Starlink will bring in a revenue of 12 billion in 2025 with about 2 billion being profit. Of course it’s not a public company so we don’t get official numbers, but you’re flat out wrong.
It is absolutely not a viable business product. All those numbers don’t hold up to even a giggle test when you count the costs of launches alone, not to mention ground operations, etc. Currently Starlink is alive only because of subsidies on these items. When (not if) the subsidies end, Starlink will return to losing hundreds of dollars on every terminal sold.
The fact that prices are jumping up now already kind of hints that it’s entering a sales death spiral. Costs go up. Customers go down. Income goes down. Costs go up. Etc. etc. etc.
Starlink is a failure as a business, and as is usual for a Kaptain Ketamine company the “numbers” they cite range misdirection to flat-out fiction.
You keep showing how you don’t know anything about this, there are no subsidies on these items. Starlink is owned by SpaceX, so it is essentially free to launch besides the fuel it costs to launch. They are going to spend the money on operations, no matter what. If you want to call that a subsidy fine, but it’s a subsidy that’s never going away.
Secondly, prices have not gone up for the most popular plan that normal folks have. Prices were only raised for customers that do not have a fixed location, such as people who use their dish on a boat or RV.
Third, It’s funny how confident you are when the fact is that this is such a good business model that other companies are desperately trying to fill the space as competitors.
Amazon’s Kupier just starter launching their network, and have significantly greater launch costs than starlink because they do not own the launch vehicles, still Kupier will print money for Amazon in 10 years. You are talking out of your ass.
I see you responding to many of my comments, it shows you are unreasonably upset about something that shouldn’t upset you. Yes Elon musk is a horrible person that will hopefully die soon, doesn’t change the fact SpaceX and Starlink are both incredibly successful and will continue to be in the future.
Also last I read the cost to manufacture a terminal was now lower than the cost they sell them at, and that will continue to drop as production scales up (because there is significant demand despite what you may believe)
You’ve got your head so firmly placed up your ass you’ve adapted to breathing methane directly.
When it’s all finished, and operating, that’s when the next Democratic government should take it from him. One person, especially one demonstrated to be mentally unstable, should not control the world’s Internet.
And this is why capitalism utterly sucks at providing public services.
It’s not really capitalism anymore if the CEO runs the government too.
Idk what else the USA has to do to show the obvious oligarchy y’all have.
Even if the politicos unironically started referring to themselves as oligarchs, a significant population of US citizens would likely either take it as a joke and hand-wave it away, or take it as further proof that that’s just what you do to get ahead.
“Radical feminists” on tumblr are calling themselves fascists because they are happy with the porn ban.
Masks are off, “radical feminism” was always a front.
I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to.
Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.
你会写英语，不懂英语。
Huh. Aneurysms that make you write in Google-translated other languages. Cool.
你也不懂汉语？你的名字是”张殿李”？你说不说汉语？你是中国人吗？
Masks are off, “radical feminism” was always a front.
You want to see rampant anti-male gender bigotry in play? Bring up - and be in favour of - “paper abortions”, and watch the hate flow.
Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely in favour of giving women abortion rights. But giving rights to only one gender and blatantly denying those exact same rights to the other is the dictionary definition of gender bigotry.
And while I may not want porn and smut to be trivially accessible to non-adults - and have absolutely no use for it, myself - I also wholeheartedly support the right of any legal adult to consume that content.
I think this anti-porn movement is just really Elon and billionaire funded Christian organizations covert woke attempt to keep the people breeding. He wants them desperate, bare-footed and pregnant. I’m all for the paper abortion. I’m adopted. The person that cares for you is the one that is your parent. In this day and age it requires a lot of mental strength to be a parent, especially on a shoestring budget. Some people with their magical thinking, their lack of mathematics and their hormones might poke a hole in the condom or stuff some of that cum right back into their body. There’s traps everywhere and it’s not just in relationships. I come from the crowd who would rather deal with feminism through the lens of gender studies where both sides are taken into account with the like a sprinkling of some sociology. Also, you know, America’s full of many cultures, so what I’m really looking for is just Government staying where government should be. Definitely a separation of church and state. I think Americans are not realizing that the powers at the top are doing what they did in other countries with religious extremism right back to their own Country, the USA. This is called the Imperial Boomerang.i feel like I’m running through the labyrinth as the minotaur is chasing me. What is down is up and what is up is down. People caught in faux paradoxes because they live in a vacuum. The billionaire is looking down on the unholy garden… People are not paying attention close enough to our social ills. One thing leads to another. There is a reason why things are the way they are.
I think this anti-porn movement is just really Elon and billionaire funded Christian organizations covert woke attempt to keep the people breeding.
The other part of this is control. The more unreasonable control by Big Gov that people have already accepted, the more additional control they will be willing to submit to.
It’s a litmus test, a part of a wedge designed to normalize authoritarianism and societal control so that “deviants” can be more easily identified for violent elimination/unaliving, and the population as a whole can be made to go in only those directions that those in power deem “acceptable”. The ultimate objective is to create a population where most if not all uncritically accept deeply invasive directives from above without question or objection.
Republicans have quite literally started using Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual instead of the cautionary tale it actually is.
And for the party of “muh rights”, it sure is wildly hypocritical for Republicans to want to control every consenting and private aspect of people’s sexual lives.
You want to see rampant anti-male gender bigotry in play? Bring up - and be in favour of - “paper abortions”, and watch the hate flow.
Oh, wow… That’s some alpha bro shit right there. You deserve whatever hate comes your way for that.
Oh, wow.… That’s some alpha bro shit right there. You deserve whatever hate comes your way for that.
Ah, another gender bigot, I see.
So tell me, why should one gender be absolutely denied what the other gender is fully allowed to do? Especially when - aside from the current lack of artificial wombs - BOTH genders could have the exact same rights?
Explain it to me in a way that doesn’t have you come across as a supremely bigoted female supremacist.
Explain it to me
Aren’t we entitled? No. Go away.
I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to. I’m also very sorry to hear about your getting hit in the head by a shovel as an infant, thus causing you to say really stupid things as well.
Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.
I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability *to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to*. I’m also very sorry to hear about your getting hit in the head by a shovel as an infant, thus causing you to say really stupid things as well.
Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.
Imagine being someone so bereft of any viable counter-argument, that the only possible response is an ad hominem.
And receiving ad hominems is a great way to identify intellectual bankruptcies in others. When the puerile and solipsistic insults come out, you know you’ve gotten under their skin in ways they have no rational or logical adult-level responses for.
CEO running the government is late stage capitalism.
Simply put.
Capitalism is antithetical to public services, at least according to Milton Friedman.
monopolism* utterly sucks at providing public services (except for some governmental monopolies because those can be democratically controlled)
once the starlink monopoly is broken this will happen less and less because if they raise prices the customers can switch to a different system from another company and spacex will lose money.
I am unsurprised. I thought it would take longer for it to become outrageously priced, but here we are. this specific pricing is extra crazy IMO.
In any case, I scoffed at the pricing when it was almost reasonable during their trial phases… Back then IIRC it was like $100-150 usd/mo. or something… That’s too much for me already. Seems like they’ve previously increased it to around $200-300 and now they’ve lost their damn minds.
Star link was never economically sensible, price hikes were inevitable. There’s just too few people in their target audience and too many satellites that are simply too costly to maintain at the levels they previously had. I hoped, for the sake of anyone who required starlink for a reasonable Internet connection speed, that the business plans and corporate users would shoulder most of the cost, but here we are.
I think it’s between $120 a month for home use and $165 a month for RV / travel use.
If I go to the website right now, I see $189 for the “roam” plan.
Your numbers seem off.
Regardless, my comments are based on the image in the OP
My numbers are from my Starlink app.
I wouldn’t use this service unless I literally had no other option. But sadly “no other option” is why they are able to jack up the prices and change the terms and conditions as they feel like with impunity.
What’s worse is, because it’s an option. The work that was being done for other reliable works will be put on indefinite hold. Musk monopolized our orbit. He needs to be brought before an effective tribunal and have his decision scrutinized harshly. I know, I know. “But he won’t”. If everyone had that attitude we would still be riding horses so help or shut up.
Yup, were i live it’s not even that rural but I only have 1 option and it’s basically double the price it should be if I was in a competitive market… 300 down 30 up for $100.
Yep. Got one for my mother who lives in remote Jamaica so we could check on her after hurricanes.
Amazon is launching a competing service on its own satelites.
Ooh, I love rushing towards Kessler Syndrome.
We’re trying to speed run it, any%.
Nah, we’re going straight for the 100% speed run
These satellites are generally in a pretty low orbit to keep latency down. They’ll all eventually reenter once they run out of fuel.
Maybe they’ll collide with each other.
Probably, and well be forever imprisoned on the planet in that scenario because we won’t be able to launch anything for a long long time again.
Those LEO satellites don’t even stay 10 years in orbit without additional orbital maneuvers. It’s not forever.
It’ll act like nuclear fission in a reactor. Once a critical point is reached where a few satellites collide, their debris will spread and cause cascading collisions with other satellites. Some of that debris will quickly fall out of orbit but it may take hundreds of years for the rest to deorbit.
Is it not possible that an impact at LEO could send debris into higher orbit potentially hitting more satellites?
Not likely. Gravity is pulling it all in all the time.
LEOs are at 500km.
GPS are at 26,000km.
GEOs are 35-40,000 km.
Came here to say this in a way clunkier fashion. The orbit levels aren’t even in the same neighborhood.
You could end up with some elliptical orbits that send debris through those layers. But they would also likely make that debris more likely to enter the atmosphere when they come back down. Plus, the higher the orbit, the more space available in total in that orbit, so the lower the chance of a collision.
Yes, but…
So the most basic way orbits work, the faster you go, the higher your orbit. Any collision has to conserve momentum, so any collision will be a net deceleration.
There WILL be things that get ejected at higher velocity, but most would cause the orbit to decay instead.
Also, while there are thousands of satellites up there, they really aren’t very close to one another.
You’d need to put a LOT of really small pieces of debris, like a shuttle exploding, to cause them to spread over LEO to a point where the random collisions really out things under threat.
It’s possible of course. But Starlink satellites orbit at around 500 km and LEO ends at 2000km. It requires a significant amount of energy to push things from 500km high out of LEO. And even if debris flies out of LEO it will still come down to lower orbits and get affected by drag since it doesn’t orbit in a perfect circle. If the debris hits satellites in higher orbit it will most likely be satellites that are in LEO as well and thus still be affected by orbital decay. The higher things are in LEO the longer it takes to come down, but it’s still not forever.
Decay times grow very quickly though. At 500km altitude a debris falls back in a few months up to a couple of years, but at 800km you are looking at centuries.
Upside to that is it ensures the billionaires can’t escape and are stuck here with the rest of us who are getting increasingly angry.
We already had undersea mashed potato billionaire, I bet space mashed potato billionaire tastes much better.
Maybe with enough space junk we can reflect enough sunlight to stave off global warming.
Maybe we just need stronger spacecraft. I look forward to a future where every trip to space goes through the trash zone where you hear the continuous pattering of small satellites smashing against the hull.
Fortunately, they’re all pretty low orbit, so it isn’t super permanent…
It’s also not as if we can’t launch spacecrafts at all, as long as your destination is high orbit the chances of collision are low.
Good
Maybe that forces ppl to actually care about climate change…
That would be marvelous
I dont think he meant Kessler syndrome would be amazing. I think he is saying it would be amazing if a spacex rocket and a amazon rocket ran into each other.
I agree, he didn’t. I don’t get what you’re trying to say though?
He said a crash would be amazing and I contextualized that there’d be grave consequences if that happened, so it probably wouldn’t be that amazing.
Like a train crash. You can’t look away, and if the only co sequences were that musk and bezos lost money, looked stupid, and everyone else got a pretty fireworks show, it WOULD be amazing. Additional consequences do put a damper on that though.
If you’re sick of funding billionaire douchebags, Telsat (formerly Telsat Canada, a Canadian crown corporation and responsible for the first communications satellite Anik-A1 in 1972) will be live with Telsat Lightspeed in 2026. Faster, better, and far more ethical.
Imagine paying for data caps for home internet.
No thank you. I’d take DSL over that if I was rural
Oh, now it’s worse than every satellite internet company I know. Shame I recommended it to someone because I thought it would be reliable and remain cheap.
I’m one of those people for who Starlink very much is the only option. I moved from Northern Virginia to Western Maryland. This land used to be state park and all it has is electricity and mail delivery. No water, no sewage, no telephone, no internet other than cell hotspot or Starlink. It sucks but I have to try and separate my distaste for Musk with the engineers and people who actually run Starlink day to day, because at the end of the day the service is pretty damn good. The only issue I have (besides the price) is with VoIP traffic; but SIP acts fucky even with Cat5/6 sometimes so idk. I looked up the current policy and at least in the US they do not have a soft data cap. They did when the service initially launched AFAIK but that’s been replaced with a more general “network management” policy (throttling, etc) . https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1470-99699-90?regionCode=US
Just gonna let you know, if ya have 5g available more specifically T-Mobile then ya can get an at home 5g router. It is most definitely cheaper and may have lower latency, though I don’t know how their network is on the East coast furthest east I’ve gone is Utah.
T Mobile is amazing on the east coast.
I often find situations where I have service when my partner in Verizon does not.
I really miss t-mob from living in northern virginia. I’m up in the Appalachian mountains tucked between two peaks. There was a plan at one time to utilize the old 800mhz band for some sort of municipal internet (since 800mhz can either punch through the rock or “ride” along the earth, been too long since RF school to remember). But as far as I know nothing ever came of it.
Unfortunately we only get AT&T and maybe a whiff of T-Mobile once in a blue moon. Gotta go a few miles into town to get reliable service, especially if you want 5G. Thanks though.
So this is what I did for a long time at my folks place out in the boonies.
- Get yourself another line with unlimited data.
- Buy yourself one of these: GL.iNet GL-MT3000 or GL.iNet GL-AX1800
- Connect the phone to the USB slot.
- Turn on the phone’s USB tethering option.
- Go into the router’s admin page and tell it to use USB tethering as the WAN option.
Hows that work if there is no signal?
OP states the get AT&T signal. You live out in the country, you have to get creative. Find the spot where signal is strong, plop your phone there. Mine at the time hung in front of a window.
Unfortunately, for me the spot where the signal is strong is ~250 feet up on top of a mountain. We had a cell booster that worked great on 3G but I’m not real keen on spending another $150 on a new repeater that may or may not pick up a signal from our roof. Another fun aspect of being out in the country is that I’m living in a converted pole barn which has a metal “skin” with double layer mylar foil/foam insulation that makes it quite difficult for signals to get inside. There’s no mesh so it’s not a full Faraday cage but it creates a lot of attenuation.
The AT&T hotspot is actually data capped, higher ping, and quite slow since we only have HSPA+ (4G) way out here. We used a hotspot while we were on the wait list for Starlink and just knowing there was a data cap made it pretty unpleasant to use. I should have specified that in the original post.
I do this with the same router when there are internet outages (thanks Cablevision).
It works great to get everyone in the house happy.
We’re having a pretty nasty thunderstorm right now and it barely misses a beat. I swear I’m not a musk shill lol, I just remember 3G hotspots and how much worse this would have been.
I like a little bit of chaos and uncertainty, rather than allowing a billionaire to price gouge me. To each their own though, I suppose. But the problem is, if one guy does something, then that means the other guy down the street’s gonna have to do it or go out of business. I need the herd to pay attention.
Also don’t hack me plz
Yep, Starlink is the only internet that works out here. In WV, can confirm.
Not even a flat rate for that money
He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake…
🎼 He sees you when you’re pooping.
He knows when you’re online…
He knows when you’ve been fash or woke
So be fash for tesla’s sake 🎶
Slide to switch plan
Ooooh, that’s cutesy.
How about “Point a firearm at the screen and scowl menacingly to cancel the service”
this slide to switch sums up Elon’s perspective on tech, he will want something super impractical and unnecessary implemented as long as he thinks it is cool
Oof, my current data consumption for the past 30 days is 1.2 TB on buttery smooth 1Gb fiber. I can’t imagine being bound to 500 GB like is the 2007 dark ages.
I haven’t thought about a data cap in years once I was lucky enough to get fiber in my house.
Same as you: symmetrical 1gbps up and down, baby.
What I think is crazy: at your 1 gigabit per second speed, if you use your full speed for only 3 hours you will go over your data limit. For the month.
You only get capped if you on one of the lite or priority tariffs.
Lite is fair, you paying less so you get less, not everybody needs a huge data allowance especially if its a backup or other infrequently used service.
Priority is where it gets squirrelly. You only really need priority if you in a high density area for starlink as you will get throttled, but you don’t really need priority if you aren’t unless you absolutely need to rinse the performance all the time. I typically get about 200mb down and 25mb up, but this can drop to 80mb and 10mb during peak times.
This isn’t the end of the world for me as being able to access high speed internet anywhere, even on a boat is the most important thing. Sure I would like the sync 1gb I have at home while out, but its more than enough when I am away from home in the middle of nowhere.
Obviously I would rather not use starlink at all because fuck Musk and fuck the way the starlink sats are in low orbit for star gazing, but I do not have anything remotely comparable for even his inflated prices.
People always say use 4G or 5G, when I often dont even get 2G and I am reliant on wifi calling via the starlink. I have a proper external 4G antenna and its still shit when properly in the middle of nowhere.
