Elon for whatever reason is insane enough to dump a lot of cash in industries which everyone said was a dead end and then has been lucky enough to prove the old guard wrong.
- Nobody had 'given up' on reusable launch vehicles. SpaceX (to their credit) just made it a core requirement in Falcon9 design from the outset, and was able to execute it. - Nobody had 'given up' on electric cars before Musk pushed the original founders of Tesla out. - Musk took Solarcity in the opposite direction (down) as the rest of the US solar industry grew. - Starlink still hasn't proven any of the 'old guard wrong'. Is Starlink operational? Yes. Has he proven it to be a viable business? No. (In fact, if you basic math on the numbers they espouse, it can't be.) Same for pretty much everything musk does, including starlink. So if
there is anything at all "revolutionary" here it's the insistence on ignoring conventional wisdom. I think it might be borderline insanity, but it seems to work for him.
It 'seems to work for him' because : 1. He is a showman, and good at it. 2. When something is delivered, it's only because of him. When something isn't, it's always because of someone/something else. On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 11:02 AM Forrest Christian (List Account) < lists@packetflux.com> wrote:
Like I said, they're calling it revolutionary. Didn't say it was.
However the idea that you can build spaceships which are fully reusable was certainly around the industry, but the consensus was largely "we tried, it costs too much, so we're sticking with one use rockets". Elon for whatever reason is insane enough to dump a lot of cash in industries which everyone said was a dead end and then has been lucky enough to prove the old guard wrong.
Same for pretty much everything musk does, including starlink. So if there is anything at all "revolutionary" here it's the insistence on ignoring conventional wisdom. I think it might be borderline insanity, but it seems to work for him.
On Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 3:46 AM Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@gmail.com> wrote:
Musk didn't do anything revolutionary, besides launching a shload of LEO satellites.
NASA and DoD have been working for long time on optical space communications, last year LCRD was launched and preliminary tests using it as a relay showed 622Mpbs, this year NASA will include on one of the cargo missions to ISS ILLUMA-T that will be installed at ISS and it is expected to provide 1.24Gpbs or more using LCRD as a relay with the two ground stations, one in HI, and one in CA.
DoD/NRO have been working on this for some time now, but any information is in the top secret blackhole.
-J
-Jorge
On Jan 23, 2023, at 1:54 AM, Forrest Christian (List Account) < lists@packetflux.com> wrote:
I think the thing they're calling revolutionary is the idea of those links being directional lasers.
It makes some sense... if you can basically emit the same signal you'd shoot down a strand of single mode but aim it through the mostly vacuum of space in the exact direction of your neighbor then you've got something... Essentially the equivalent of a fiber optic network in space.
For fun I tried plugging in some frequencies of light into a doppler calculator. Unfortunately that's where my "would the relative speed that mere mortals could attain make enough of a difference to affect a typical optical receiver" investigation ended as I'm mobile right now and can't do the rest of the work very easily. I'd be curious if the relative speed would be enough to cause enough shift to move it out of the pass band if a typical dwdm channel.
And, I agree that little of what musk takes credit for is revolutionary. But what I do think he deserves credit for is being insane enough to try things everyone says is unworkable and failed in the past and somehow making at least some of them work. Having more money than God helps too.
On Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 8:55 PM Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:
Yes re: Iridium. Contrary to what the Chief Huckster may say, inter-sat comms are not some revolutionary thing that he invented.
It’s also not likely to function anything like they show in marketing promos, with data magically zipping around the constellation between nodes in different inclinations. Unless they have managed to solve for the Doppler effect in a way nobody has thought of yet.
On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 18:25 Crist Clark <cjc+nanog@pumpky.net> wrote:
I suspect, although I have no references, that satellite to ground connectivity is probably more “circuit-based” than per-packet or frame.
Iridium has done inter satellite communication for decades. I wonder if it wouldn’t be something very similar. Although it would be totally on-brand for them to do it some “revolutionary” new way whether it actually makes any sense or not.
On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 3:06 PM Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 2:45 PM Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
I read in the Economist that the gen of starlink satellites will have the ability to route messages between each satellite. Would conventional routing protocols be up to such a challenge? Or would it have to be custom made for that problem? And since a lot of companies and countries are getting on that action, it seems like fertile ground for (bad) wheel reinvention?
Mike
Unlike most terrestrial links, the distances between satellites are not fixed, and thus the latency between nodes is variable, making the concept of "Shortest Path First" calculation a much more dynamic and challenging one to keep current, as the latency along a path may be constantly changing as the satellite nodes move relative to each other, without any link state actually changing to trigger a new SPF calculation.
I suspect a form of OLSR might be more advantageous in a dynamic partial mesh between satellites, but I haven't given it as much deep thought as would be necessary to form an informed opinion.
So, yes--it's likely the routing protocol used will not be entirely "off-the-shelf" but will instead incorporate continuous latency information in the LSDB, and path selection will be time-bound based on the rate of increase in latency along currently-selected edges in the graph.
An interesting problem to dive into, certainly. :)
Thanks!
Matt