Because the constellations use radio and because their orbits mean that their signals could affect all countries the US as the licensing authority has to approve their use. The FCC is the body that does this. Similarly the licensing authorities in other countries have to deal with the systems that they authorise.
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NEWS: Update on the catastrophic server crash: https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/587701/
The mortal danger Starlink poses to space travel.
- Thread starter Justin Swanton
- Start date
Wayne Mack
Well-Known Member
Sounds like an interesting occupation for a space opera novel: Space Sanitation Engineer. Runs a cleaning device for orbital lanes. Perhaps takes bribes because it would be a shame for anything to happen to that brand new satellite.
LostCosmonaut
Active Member
Not a fan of Starlink, between the debris risk and the interference with astronomy. The FAA should try to pressure Musk to scale it back a bit. That said, Starship could be a game-changer, and I'm very excited to see it start sending up payloads for bargain prices.
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It is a game changer, assuming that it does work, which it will eventually, if it doesn't already. Musk will be running a freight service to the inner solar system. He owns businesses which can use the ship to space service. He will not charge his own companies to use the ship to space service, as well as back to Earth at some point in time. He will charge others to use his service, companies he will be competing against.
Normally there would be some kind of conflict of interest issue but I would say that the argument will be put forward that shipping stuff into space is not the same as shipping stuff around the globe, and so it is not covered by any existing laws. The same way corporations were allowed to say that cell phones were not the same as telephones and so 100 years of regulations were tossed out the window overnight. Which means that Musk can charge his competitors for shipping their space project materials whatever he wants to, while his projects will not have the same costs attached to them. He could also give his projects a high priority while giving his competitors a lower priority.
I don't know if Musk has thought about it, but his tunneling equipment would be the ideal kind of thing to bring to the Moon or Mars where working outside on the surface brings on all kinds of severe problems caused by the surface dust. Putting roadways and infrastructure underground right from the start would bypass those kinds of problems.
Christine Wheelwright
Well-Known Member
Curious what makes you say this? Is it not equally possible that he will run out of money and expertise before the enormous problems are solved? As for digging tunnels on Mars, or even getting there in the first place; not in my life time or in Musks!
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I say this because of how far he has gotten so far. He has his own agenda and he wants to do this in his lifetime. He is not out to clean up the world environmentally which puts him on track with the robber barons of the past. People pay him to beta test drive his "self driving" cars. Without that kind of support I doubt the program would have gotten as far as it has. I would suspect that everything he does is connected in some grand scheme way and not just a bunch of one off accomplishments. We will see what the StarShip does. The Russians pushed the envelope all the time when they were running a viable space program. It was hard on the people but they did it anyway, and it worked.
As far as tunneling as a way of operating on the Moon, it's not an option. The dust is abrasive in several dimensions and definitely unhealthy. Working outside will require the use of multiple airlocks and cleaning stations to keep the dust out of whatever infrastructure is built. That alone will use a lot of effort just to make a healthy living area. It would be better to not go out in it at all. If everything is done on the surface that will make everything that much more difficult to get done.
As far as tunneling as a way of operating on the Moon, it's not an option. The dust is abrasive in several dimensions and definitely unhealthy. Working outside will require the use of multiple airlocks and cleaning stations to keep the dust out of whatever infrastructure is built. That alone will use a lot of effort just to make a healthy living area. It would be better to not go out in it at all. If everything is done on the surface that will make everything that much more difficult to get done.
Harpo
Getting away with it
I can't believe I've missed this thread so far. Ok, full disclosure: I work for the UK Space Agency and one of my primary areas of work is in space robotics and debris removal. We (and other agencies) are funding mission studies looking at the removal of debris from orbit - and by debris, we are specifically meaning registered assets that are flying in LEO. I've been involved in another programme developing ADR (active debris removal) tech using autonomous navigation and capture to remove spent apogee kick motors from LEO. These are about the size of a kettle, and are jettisoned after use.
ESA has recorded about 128,000,000 pieces of man-made debris orbiting the Earth. The vast majority of these are very tiny, less than 10cm in width / diameter. As someone said above, there are around 8000 satellites orbiting the Earth, and of these, around 2700 are operational. The ones that are operational don't really pose a problem; they have collision avoidance / alert systems and possess propulsion systems (either chemical or electric) to aid station-keeping. This includes Starlink. The problem comes from the non-operational ones (ie the dead ones) which are no longer communicating with Earth. The poster child for space debris is ENVISAT, a European environmental monitoring satellite that stopped communicating with Earth around a decade ago. ENVISAT is about the size of a tennis court.
However, as Harpo says, space is big. Even if there are 128,000,000 million man-made objects up in various orbits (LEO, GEO, and MEO) there are around 128,000,000 human beings living in Japan. And Japan is not the same size as space. So they are pretty well spaced out. The further thing to note is that the majority of these things will eventually (after 25-50 years) fall into a graveyard orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
All of which is not to say that space debris isn't a problem - it is. The big focus now is on prevention rather than cure. There eventually will be a market for missions such as the ones I've described once there is sufficient political will to make it happen (at the moment there isn't), but there is a big push towards developing more modular technologies that will enable spacecraft to be upgraded, repaired, maintained, and even salvaged and recycled in space. If all goes well we might see small-scale test (demonstrator) missions showing this sort of thing before the end of the decade.
As for Musk, I'm rather an admirer of his. If he reminds others of the robber barons of the past, he reminds me of the Nikola Teslas and Howard Hugheses of the world. True, he's convinced the US Government to underwrite his operations considerably, but the US doesn't do that unless they see huge strategic advantage in doing so. He may well crash and crash hard (I hope he doesn't), but he'll still be the giant shoulders upon which the next generation of space operators (and particularly commercial space operators) stand.
ESA has recorded about 128,000,000 pieces of man-made debris orbiting the Earth. The vast majority of these are very tiny, less than 10cm in width / diameter. As someone said above, there are around 8000 satellites orbiting the Earth, and of these, around 2700 are operational. The ones that are operational don't really pose a problem; they have collision avoidance / alert systems and possess propulsion systems (either chemical or electric) to aid station-keeping. This includes Starlink. The problem comes from the non-operational ones (ie the dead ones) which are no longer communicating with Earth. The poster child for space debris is ENVISAT, a European environmental monitoring satellite that stopped communicating with Earth around a decade ago. ENVISAT is about the size of a tennis court.
However, as Harpo says, space is big. Even if there are 128,000,000 million man-made objects up in various orbits (LEO, GEO, and MEO) there are around 128,000,000 human beings living in Japan. And Japan is not the same size as space. So they are pretty well spaced out. The further thing to note is that the majority of these things will eventually (after 25-50 years) fall into a graveyard orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
All of which is not to say that space debris isn't a problem - it is. The big focus now is on prevention rather than cure. There eventually will be a market for missions such as the ones I've described once there is sufficient political will to make it happen (at the moment there isn't), but there is a big push towards developing more modular technologies that will enable spacecraft to be upgraded, repaired, maintained, and even salvaged and recycled in space. If all goes well we might see small-scale test (demonstrator) missions showing this sort of thing before the end of the decade.
As for Musk, I'm rather an admirer of his. If he reminds others of the robber barons of the past, he reminds me of the Nikola Teslas and Howard Hugheses of the world. True, he's convinced the US Government to underwrite his operations considerably, but the US doesn't do that unless they see huge strategic advantage in doing so. He may well crash and crash hard (I hope he doesn't), but he'll still be the giant shoulders upon which the next generation of space operators (and particularly commercial space operators) stand.
Danny McG
"Anything can happen in the next half hour!"
Very useful for drawing circlesYou mean, like a map made out of paper and a compass?
Christine Wheelwright
Well-Known Member
I have so many questions. Does it really matter if something gets hit by an object the size of a tennis court or a 1/2 ounce piece of plastic travelling at 15,000 mph? Game over either way, surely? The people of Japan may not be bumping into each other all the time, but they aren't moving around in an agitated state like gas molecules. Yes, I can place tens of millions of points into three dimensional space without them coinciding, but surely it is a completely different mathematical conundrum when time and movement is taken into account. Is Elon Musk contributing to your Agency's research into eventually clearing up his junk? And wasn't Tesla a scientific genius with limited interest in business, while Musk is businessman of sorts and certainly not a scientist or engineer. I don't see much of a comparison there.
Regarding Musk, I think we have to ask ourselves; at what point does irrational exuberance and optimism about products under development become outright fraud?
There's somebody who's never been to Tokyo!
Yes, most likely game over, though with caveats for materials etc. Depends on the altitude of the objects in question whether it would actually lead to a Kessler scenario. Starlink is reasonably low altitude (compared to, say, Kuiper or Oneweb) so the chances of it causing a Kessler Syndrome scenario are extremely low. The higher up you go, the chances of a Kessler Syndrome scenario being caused in the event of a collision rises, but the chances of the actual collision occuring are reduced by orders of magnitude. So it's a trade-off.
You're right, the maths is different when it's all up in orbit (and I don't get into the mathematics of orbital mechanics). A "close shave" between orbiting objects is deemed to be a distance of 10km between the two objects in question. Most things are tracked. Only around 2700 of the things orbiting Earth are active, and they are the things that can be controlled and kept in station ie they can be moved if something is deemed to be coming a little too close for comfort.
No.
Fair enough, it's not a great comparison in that respect (IIRC Musk is a physicist of some description and perhaps has some expertise in software engineering though I forget the detail). What I meant was that the true value of their work wouldn't become apparent until the next generation come along and begin to actually exploit it.
NASA wouldn't underwrite a fraudster and entrust them with significant contracts for commercial launches. NASA aren't idiots. One person's irrational exuberance is another's perfectly rational exuberance.
Christine Wheelwright
Well-Known Member
No, I've never been to Tokyo (other than for a flight transfer at the airport, which was busy enough if I recall correctly).
Obviously Space X has a viable rocket capable of carrying payloads for NASA which has given it contracts as a result. What they think of Musk's business practices is unknown. Remember this is someone who fraudulently claimed to have Saudi funding to take Tesla private at an inflated price leading to a clear bump in stock value (SEC.gov | Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges; Tesla Charged With and Resolves Securities Law Charge). He later said the fine was worth it.
He is currently being sued by Tesla investors over the purchase of SolarCity (Tesla shareholders want Elon Musk to pay $13 billion for role in acquisition of SolarCity). The case alleges he overpaid for this outfit, breaking his fiduciary duty to Tesla. SolarCity was not in good financial health. Also, from USA Today:
"At the time of the all-stock purchase, Musk was SolarCity’s largest stakeholder and its chairman. In what the plaintiffs call a clear conflict of interest, SolarCity had been founded by Musk and two of his cousins, Lyndon Rive and Peter Rive."
He persistently makes ridiculous claims for his company's technology, using the present tense to describe tech that he simply does not have or, in many cases, will never have. He even somehow got away with calling a diver in Thailand 'pedo guy', winning the resulting libel case.
I could go on forever about this stuff. It is all public record.
I think he has been a very lucky boy so far, and I doubt it will continue.
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The only fraud about Musk is his talk, his actions more than demonstrate the ability to get real things done that are changing the course of civilization in a meaningful way. While he does ask, conjole, or scheme ways of getting money, he has more than enough to do what he is doing. Maybe not enough to do what he wants to do, but enough to succeed. The only thing green about him is the color of his money.
I've posed this elsewhere, but what is Musk really accomplishing in the space tech department? Thus far, all he can do is launch satellites and humans into LEO and reuse the launchers. Launching into LEO is decades-old technology. The reusability hasn't brought the cost down to any significant degree. The point of reusing launchers isn't to get cool videos of them landing at Cape Canaveral, but to make spaceflight exponentially cheaper, and he hasn't done that. His Dragon flight costs far more per astronaut than the old Russian Soyuz, bumped into orbit by the 70 year old Proton, did before Russia started charging the US exorbitant fees. In the early 2000s it originally charged about $23 million per seat on the Soyuz, compared to Musk's $60-67 million per seat on the Dragon.
Looking at Starship, I keep asking myself, what is it for? You don't need something that size to land men on the Moon and it's not fit for a Mars trip. Common Sense Skeptic breaks down its design and points out two major flaws (among others): no shielding and no artificial gravity, both essential for a two-year round voyage. Musk isn't going to build a million man city on Mars, sorry. Just getting a handful of astronauts there will cost something in the region of a trillion dollars, and there's no way the US government has the political will to hand over that kind of money.
The big problem with manned spaceflight is that there's nowhere to go. And building a habitation anywhere in space or on any planet that can keep a reasonable number of people alive indefinitely is way, way past what any government or group of governments can afford. There isn't any return for all that vast outlay and once the glamour wears off, which is pretty quick, the bottom line will be economics. Nobody is going to sign trillion-dollar cheques just to keep a few dozen or hundred people alive on the Moon or on Mars.
Once LEO is filled with satellites (needing regular replacements, sure) all you will be left with are probes and telescopes to cross a few more t's and dot a few more i's. One day the penny will drop...
Looking at Starship, I keep asking myself, what is it for? You don't need something that size to land men on the Moon and it's not fit for a Mars trip. Common Sense Skeptic breaks down its design and points out two major flaws (among others): no shielding and no artificial gravity, both essential for a two-year round voyage. Musk isn't going to build a million man city on Mars, sorry. Just getting a handful of astronauts there will cost something in the region of a trillion dollars, and there's no way the US government has the political will to hand over that kind of money.
The big problem with manned spaceflight is that there's nowhere to go. And building a habitation anywhere in space or on any planet that can keep a reasonable number of people alive indefinitely is way, way past what any government or group of governments can afford. There isn't any return for all that vast outlay and once the glamour wears off, which is pretty quick, the bottom line will be economics. Nobody is going to sign trillion-dollar cheques just to keep a few dozen or hundred people alive on the Moon or on Mars.
Once LEO is filled with satellites (needing regular replacements, sure) all you will be left with are probes and telescopes to cross a few more t's and dot a few more i's. One day the penny will drop...
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Christine Wheelwright
Well-Known Member
Justin, we may have disagreed over More, but I am 100% aligned with you on Musk.
The problem with Musk is that he doesn't have a precise mission profile to dictate the design of the Starship. The Apollo mission (like every other space mission) had a very precise objective: get two men on the Moon for a few hours and then get them back to Earth. Everything was designed round that precise objective and they did their job, albeit at enormous expense. But the Starship isn't designed around anything. It's big and glamorous and can land on the ground (more or less) but what's its mission profile?
More, yes...I see I need to do more work...
Attachments
It's becoming increasingly clear that this is the big deal-breaker in manned spaceflight: if the Solar System had a habitable planet or moon, governments would pay astronomical amounts of money to set up viable self-sustaining colonies on it that would eventually be able to pay back the investment in terms of raw resources or even manufactured products. But there's nowhere habitable, so Earth will have to create and maintain at enormous cost viable habitats for - necessarily - small numbers of people who could never hope to produce anything that could repay a fraction of the debt. It's a non-starter.
Harpo
Getting away with it
Probably our nearest current equivalent (though at a much smaller scale, and more local etc etc) is the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The first buildings were used for about twenty years, then they moved to a dome for about thirty years until they moved again a decade or so ago.
I don’t know how much it costs to keep a few scientists alive in a very hostile environment, but they’ve already been doing so at the South Pole for over sixty years.
It’s just an example
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