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Old November 25th 18, 01:49 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Default SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites

In article ,
says...

On 2018-11-24 09:31, Jeff Findley wrote:

I'll put one of my prior points more bluntly. SpaceX hired experts in
the field to design Starlink. Doing dumb things that random people on
the Internet can think of would run counter to that.


McCall argued that SpaceX's fancy lasers between satellites had more
capacity than a bundle of fibres could ever have. I was responding to
that, not whether SpaceX know what they are doing.

McCall seems to think satellites can rival ground fibre in terms of
capacity.

SpaceX may be designing their constellation very smartly and make major
improvements over existing satellite tech. But that doesn't make it
instantly better than what the groiund can offer in terms of capacity.


Dude, you're the one shifting arguments like room temperature mercury.
Starlink is going to kill terrestrial based fiber over long distances
because latency will be lower. Short term traders will be lining up for
this service. Obviously SpaceX won't want to oversell such that
customers are hurt by lack of capacity. But, that's why they are
planning a nearly 12,000 satellite network. You gain more capacity by
adding more satellites.

1. Musk isn't the one designing the system.
2. OMG the sky is falling because Musk might have taken a single puff!
He's got the reefer madness! SpaceX is doomed to failure! Sell all the
Tesla stock now!


No. It is more like "Musk is toying with his Twitter audience, not
realising it has serious impact on shareholders. And he got a pretty bad
spanking from SEC because of that.

And it is because Musk toys with his followers that I do not take what
he says all that seriously in terms of promises for future stuff.


Whatever. I'm of the age that enough people have toked at one time or
another to make it a non-issue. One video online doesn't make Musk an
addict despite the overreaction of some.

Besides, SpaceX is a private company. They have a different sort of
investor than the openly traded Tesla. Who he's really ****ing off on
the SpaceX side of things are people like Sen. Shelby. The Congressmen
who support SLS are livid at SpaceX's plans for the future because it's
going to eventually kill off their overpriced, expendable, pork-lifter.

Seriously though. Lots of very brilliant and successful people have
very odd personalities. Musk's Tweets are a prime example.


Which is why one should wait for actual accomplishements rather that
believe in an almost religious fashion everything Musk promises in his
tweets.


Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon 2 are more than enough for now. The
Falcons are cheaper than any other launch vehicles in their class and
have recaptured the majority of the global commercial launch market for
the US (something ULA could never do). And Dragon 2 is cheaper than
Boeing's Starliner. That's a huge set of accomplishments right there.

We'll see how Starlink goes because obviously it's not deployed yet and
therefore cannot be judged as a success or failure. But, bashing people
who want to see Starlink succeed by saying they "believe in an almost
religious fashion everything Musk promises in his tweets" is a bit off
the mark. What Musk Tweets clearly changes as the systems he's Tweeting
about evolve over time.

If it goes well with Starlink, revenue from Starlink will fund BFR/BFS
or whatever it's called today. That's what I *really* want to see
succeed. I'd really like to see a fully reusable TSTO reduce launch
costs even lower than Falcon. Besides, who else is going to build such
a thing? NASA? They're too addicted to their Congressionally mandated
fully expendable pork-lifter to think about reuse in a sane fashion.

Jeff
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