On Tue, 2022-03-01 at 15:18 -0500, Tom Beecher wrote:
Starlink however forgets that Russia does have anti satellite weapons and they probably will not hesitate to use them which will make low earth orbit a very dangerous place when Russia starts blowing up the Starlink birds. I applaud the humanitarian aspect of providing Starlink service, unfortunately there are geopolitical realities like access to space which is likely to be negatively impacted if and when Russia starts shooting down these birds. Fortunately if they start shooting down the birds the debris will burn up in a year or so unlike geosync orbit where it would stay forever.
Russia is not going to be using up it's anti-sat weapons to take down commercial internet birds. Let's use a little common sense here.
+1 There are a lot of birds which translates to a number of weapons that are likely an unnecessary expense at a time where the greatest expense is focused on the ground.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 2:57 PM Scott McGrath <smcgrath@starry.com> wrote:
Starlink however forgets that Russia does have anti satellite weapons and they probably will not hesitate to use them which will make low earth orbit a very dangerous place when Russia starts blowing up the Starlink birds. I applaud the humanitarian aspect of providing Starlink service, unfortunately there are geopolitical realities like access to space which is likely to be negatively impacted if and when Russia starts shooting down these birds. Fortunately if they start shooting down the birds the debris will burn up in a year or so unlike geosync orbit where it would stay forever.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 1:44 PM Phineas Walton <phin@phineas.io> wrote:
This is more of a brand image / marketing stunt for Starlink. A pretty ingenious way to market which will heavily pay off long term. To them, this is cheap for how much attention it’s getting them.
Phin
On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 6:36 PM Crist Clark <cjc+nanog@pumpky.net> wrote:
So they’re going to offer the service to anyone in a denied area for free somehow? How do you send someone a bill or how do they pay it if you can’t do business in the country?
On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 4:39 PM Jay Hennigan <jay@west.net> wrote:
On 2/28/22 16:17, Michael Thomas wrote:
As a practical matter how does this help? You need to have base stations/dishes, right? Can they be beefy ones that can pump out gigabytes that would be capable of backfilling the load? Or would it need to be multiple in parallel? Wouldn't that bandwidth be constrained by the number of visible satellites in the constellation? I wonder if they've ever even tested it with feeding into an internet facing router. Could tables on the satellites explode?
If there aren't fixed Internet-connected earth stations line- of-sight to the satellite that's serving the remote terminal, Starlink will relay satellite-to-satellite until a path to an Internet-connected earth station is in reach.
From the linked article:
"Musk has previously stressed Starlink’s flexibility of Starlink in providing internet service. In September, Musk talked about how the company would use links between the satellites to create a network that could provide service even in countries that prohibit SpaceX from installing ground infrastructure for distribution.
As for government regulators who want to block Starlink from using that capability, Musk had a simple answer.
“They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said."
-- Dennis Glatting Numbers Skeptic