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SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites



 
 
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  #21  
Old November 24th 18, 03:31 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
Default SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites

In article ,
says...

On 2018-11-23 14:43, Jeff Findley wrote:

You're assuming the lasers are the bottleneck. On what basis are you
making this assumption?


If satellites A B and C feed data to D who must then forward the data to
E, then the D to E link will be 3 times oversubscribed if the first 3
links are at capacity.

Again, if they have single wavelength in the laser, this is small amount
of capacity by today's standards.


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.

You keep throwing up these hand-waved arguments like no one at SpaceX
has ever thought of these things.


And you keep assuming that because Musk tweets stuff while high on
cannabis or other, it must mean that SpaceX has not only thought of
potential problems but also solved them.


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!

Look J.F., I know people who smoked a bit of wacky tobaccy in high
school in the 70's and they still managed to get security clearances for
their jobs (those interviews are quite thorough). If the government
denied clearances to everyone in the 70's to took a puff or two, no one
from that generation would have ever gotten security clearances and our
military would still be flying F-15s and F-16s instead of F-22s and soon
to be F-35s.

I poimt to you those tweets where Musk announced Telsa was going
pro9vate and that he had found investors to take it private (which cost
him his job as chair).


So sorry, I take what Musk brags about with a grain of salt.


I'm so sorry that the reefer madness terrifies you so much. Those
states that have made recreational use legal (state laws, not federal)
are just going to devolve into chaos and disorder. I guess that means
the US high tech industries are all doomed since so much of them are
centered in California and other states where m.j. is now legal.

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

But then again, have to actually read President Trump's Tweets? Holy
crap there's some serious crazy in there (and President Trump reportedly
doesn't drink or do drugs). If you went just by the president's Tweets,
the US would be completely doomed. But we're not, are we?

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.
  #22  
Old November 25th 18, 01:49 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
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
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.
  #23  
Old November 25th 18, 07:13 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Posts: 10,018
Default SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites

JF Mezei wrote on Sat, 24 Nov 2018
18:23:43 -0500:

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.


I argued no such thing. Once again your deficient reading skills and
defective intellect appear to have betrayed you.


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


I don't feel particularly responsible for how things seem to a nutter
of your magnitude.


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.


Please point to where anyone made such a claim, you pestilential
prevaricating possum.

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.


So what are YOUR "actual accomplishments", Mayfly, other than being
known for stupid posts and the taking the rather preposterous
anti-vaccine position?


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson
  #24  
Old November 25th 18, 12:20 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Posts: 10,018
Default SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites

JF Mezei wrote on Sun, 25 Nov 2018
03:03:36 -0500:

On 2018-11-24 19:49, Jeff Findley wrote:

Dude, you're the one shifting arguments like room temperature mercury.


Again, McCall and you claim this satellite system will be better than
ground based.


Again, your deficient reading skills and defective intellect have
betrayed you, since neither one of us has said any such thing.


I responded it will be very limited capacity compared to ground,


No, you tried to claim it will be as limited as your Canadian service,
which is simply false.


at which POint McCall threw insults at me and I had to defend.


I'm sorry you find THE TRUTH insulting, but even if you do there is no
one forcing you to 'defend'.


Sicne he
doesn't seem to understand concepts such as WDM, he may be an expert at
staellites, but definitely not on ground comms.


Go look up the bandwidth of the internet backbone, you havering loon.



Starlink is going to kill terrestrial based fiber over long distances
because latency will be lower.


You're allowed to have that view if you want. But launching 12,000
satellites will force SpaceX to charge an arm and a leg for that reduced
latency, assuming it materialises and is reliable enough.


You're actually arguing two different things here. One of them is
semi-valid. The other claims the laws of physics are incorrect.
Starlink WILL have lower latency. The laws of physics say so.
However, I disagree with Jeff that this will be sufficient to pull in
customers. I seriously doubt anyone cares that much about relatively
small differences in latency.

Once again, BFR/BFS allows launching these satellites for less than
$40,000 each. The fact that we're talking about 12,000 of them and
producing several thousand of them a year will make them much cheaper
to build than current satellites.



planning a nearly 12,000 satellite network. You gain more capacity by
adding more satellites.


No. You gain more capacity by adding ground stations.


Hogwash. Again, you obviously don't understand Starlink well enough
to even be in this discussion.



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.


I think SLS won't need SpaceX to quietly become unfunded and go away
once senators have found a new shiny project to create jobs in their state.


I know what you think is wrong.


At this point, BFR/BFS is still much more vapourware than SLS/Orion.


Not so much. When has SLS ever flown the real operational article?


SpaceX doesn't even have manned Dragon in operation yet.


That's a NASA problem, not a SpaceX problem.


Yes, Musk has bragged about prototype tanks.


Well, let's see. They've demonstrated they can build the tanks.
They've built and tested engines. They've built the manufacturing
tooling to produce the main hull structures and started setting up the
manufacturing facility.


And yes, it is still way
too early to say whether the project will work as originally advertised,
be scaled back, or devolve into a Falcon Super Heavy project.


It will pretty much 'work as advertised' or they'll cancel it. It's
not going to be 'scaled back'. They're on the third (I think) design
iteration and it's gotten around 10% BIGGER, which is not 'scaling
back'. As for your 'devolve' path, that's rather like claiming that
if the Boeing 747 project had run into difficulties it would have
'devolved' into a project to produce 737s. It's a preposterous
notion.


But just
as you can criticise me for having doubts, I can criticise you for
having full confidence Musk will deliver BFR/BFS as advertised in the
original presentation.


The difference between the two positions is that we assume they're
going to try to do what they've said they're going to do and look at
progress while you assume they won't try to do what they've said
they're going to do and ignore all facts, preferring to assume that
these projects are run by and designed by idiots.


And no, Starlink will not give Musk oodles of money to develop BFR/BFS.
Certaiuntly not in the time frame of the BFR/BFS development.


I'm inclined to agree here. It's rather a chicken and egg problem if
they're relying on Starlink to fund BFR/BFS.


Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon 2 are more than enough for now.


Dragon 2 not yet flying.


Only because NASA is dragging their feet on the manned version and
they haven't used up all the Cargo Dragon V1 in stock yet so don't
need to fly the cargo version.


Yes, SpaceX has made huge accomplishements. and "huge" is an
understatement. But that does not garantee that BFR/BFS will be
delivered as promised.


I view it more as a matter of 'when' rather than 'if'.

snip airplane example

Things that are different are not the same.


So you can blindly believe SpaceX will succeed in scaling its experience
to the biggest rocket ever built and won't be late, will remain on
budger. You're free to believe that.


Oh, I think it will probably be 'late' when compared to Musk's usual
optimistic scheduling and I tend to use the high estimate of what it
will cost to develop. You are NOT free to make **** up and claim
other people have said it, as you do above.


I am free to be mor realistic and not bet my life on that because the
odds of SpaceX hitting major snags are high and the end result may be
scaled back project, or major financial problems.


To be 'more realistic', you would have to actually know something
about the topic and take facts into account. You do neither. Instead
you squawk about how the sky will fall based on assuming that SpaceX
will deliberately do the most stupid things possible.

We'll see how Starlink goes because obviously it's not deployed yet and
therefore cannot be judged as a success or failure.


Yet McCall and you criticise me for not being sure it will be a success
with infinite capacity and latency so low traders will be willing to pay
billions for a simple data link.


You're a lying little ****. Neither one of us has said anything
remotely resembling the preceding.



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.


Yet, you still believe he will deliver BFR/BFS with the same
capacity/functiosn ., budget and timeframe as originally announced when
he announded that project.


You need to stop telling other people what they 'believe'. If you
want to know what they believe, you need to ask them AND THEN PAY
****ING ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY SAY TO YOU.

Your preceding comment about what people 'believe' is just another one
of your scrofulous lies.


--
"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of
your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."
-- Mark Twain
  #25  
Old November 25th 18, 03:07 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,307
Default SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites

In article ,
says...
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon 2 are more than enough for now.


Dragon 2 not yet flying.


The uncrewed orbital Dragon 2 test flight is just a little more than a
month away and is scheduled for Jan. 7, 2019. The crewed test flight is
targeted for June 2019.

Space.com Spaceflight
SpaceX's 1st Crew Dragon Test Flight to Launch Jan. 7, NASA Says
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer - November 21, 2018 04:16pm ET
https://www.space.com/42514-spacex-f...aunch-january-
2019.html


Starliner's uncrewed test flight is scheduled for March 2019 and its
first crewed test flight is scheduled for August 2019.

It won't belong now. NASA has a hard deadline due to them stopping the
purchasing of Soyuz capsules. Russia is so cash strapped there really
aren't any extras. And the lead times are so long on Soyuz that even if
NASA went to them today with cash in hand, it wouldn't help much.

COUNTDOWN RUNNING...
SpaceX and Boeing are running out of time to fly astronauts into space
By Tim Fernholz, July 17, 2018
https://qz.com/1328927/spacex-and-bo...f-time-to-fly-
nasa-astronauts-to-iss-warns-the-government-accountability-office/

From above:

Pressure is rising on Boeing and SpaceX, the two companies trying
to prove the US can still fly humans to space. Both are expected
to miss a November 2019 deadline for producing spacecraft
certified as safe enough to transport astronauts-which means
NASA, humiliatingly, could end up locked out of the
International Space Station next year.

Tick-tock.

Yes, SpaceX has made huge accomplishements. and "huge" is an
understatement. But that does not garantee that BFR/BFS will be
delivered as promised.


I never said BFR/BFS was a sure thing. I even admitted that Starlink
isn't a sure thing either. The only thing that's 100% sure in life is
death (morbid as that may be).

The A 380 is a good example


No, not really. A-380 came into the market at a time when super-jumbos
just aren't in as much demand as they used to be. It also came into the
market which had been dominated for decades by the Boeing 747. Airbus
missed the market for super-jumbos, so all of the issues with it just
seem much worse than they would have if demand for super-jumbos was
still very high.

If anything, BFR/BFS is more like the Boeing 747. It will be a "bet the
company" sort of project when precisely because there is no current
commercial market for a launch vehicle that big.

And Airbus had governments to goto to find funding when a project is
delayed and needs more money. SpaceX doesn't.


Which is why I said *if* Starlink is successful, SpaceX will have the
revenue it needs to fund BFR/BFS. Hell, if Starlink is successful,
SpaceX will *need* BFR/BFS in order to completely launch and maintain
their nearly 12,000 satellite constellation and remain ahead of
competing constellations (none of which will have the benefit of SpaceX
launches without a mark-up for profitability).

It's good to be the lowest cost launch provider. SpaceX has only
cracked half of the reuse nut (the easiest half). I have no doubt that
the BFS/Starship portion of BFR/BFS will be difficult to develop. But
nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

So you can blindly believe SpaceX will succeed in scaling its
experience to the biggest rocket ever built and won't be late,
will remain on budger. You're free to believe that.


I *never* said that I believed that (because I don't). SpaceX schedules
slip and budgets increase just like every other aerospace provider who's
pushing the edge of the envelope (be it in engineering or the flight
envelope and BFS will push both).

I *did* say that the BFR/Super Booster (whatever it's called) will be
little more than a scaled up Falcon 9 booster only with composite
LOX/methane tanks and Raptor engines. So even there you've got
technical risk. But the risk is still not a lot, IMHO, given the flight
regime of the first stage.

And the reason I pointed out that the development risk in the booster is
relatively low is because you kept proposing lashing together Falcon 9
first stages Kerbal Space Program style to do the job because you
thought that would be easier than designing a new stage. That proposal
makes zero sense because the booster is the relatively easy part and
lashing together lots of liquid stages Kerbal Space Program style (moar
struts!) is daft in the real world. Instead, simply design your liquid
fueled stage to be the size you need, which is the same diameter as the
BFS/Starship upper stage which will initially use sea-level Raptors (so
both the engines and tooling will already be there!).

Again, as I said above, the *big* challenge will be the BFS/Starship
portion. No one has built and flown anything quite like it, so SpaceX
has a huge challenge in front of it. That reusable upper stage is *the
key* to a fully reusable TSTO.

Yet McCall and you criticise me for not being sure it will be a
success with infinite capacity and latency so low traders will
be willing to pay billions for a simple data link.


No, you're being bashed for your straw-man arguments trying to make
Starlink sound like it won't be possible to deploy and be profitable.

Yet, you still believe he will deliver BFR/BFS with the same
capacity/functiosn ., budget and timeframe as originally announced
when he announded that project.


I never said that either. Why do you insist on putting words in my
mouth?

I want to see BFR/BFS succeed as a fully reusable TSTO. That would be a
first and would lower launch costs significantly. I never said I
believed SpaceX would deliver on time, on (development) budget, and with
the same capabilities as originally announced.

In fact I've said if BFR/BFS is 1/10th as reusable as SpaceX wants it to
be (i.e. they have to refurbish it 10x as often as they would like), it
would *still* be better than any expendable launch vehicle in its class.
Such a vehicle would be economically sustainable and could still have a
flight rate of dozens each year with just a few copies of the hardware
being built every year.

That's just a fact based on the economics of reuse.

But supporters of SLS don't get that. They think we're going to expand
out into the solar system via once or twice per year launches of a
system that costs $2+ billion a year. That's just not economically
sustainable. That's precisely why Saturn V was canceled and precisely
why SLS will eventually be canceled.

What I want to see is a large, reusable, TSTO replace SLS so that NASA's
manned spaceflight program can *finally* get out of LEO and back to
actually exploring the solar system.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.
  #26  
Old November 26th 18, 09:11 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,018
Default SpaceX gets FCC approval to deploy thousands more internet satellites

JF Mezei wrote on Sun, 25 Nov 2018
22:35:27 -0500:

On 2018-11-25 06:20, Fred J. McCall wrote:

Again, your deficient reading skills and defective intellect have
betrayed you, since neither one of us has said any such thing.



I'll just note that you 'cleverly' removed the 'thing' you claimed we
both said, which was NOT the following:


So, you're now denying stating that ground based fibre strand can't
support more than 100gbps ?

Are you still denying a fibre strand with WDM can support multiple
concurrent 100gbps links ?


Nope. You see, unlike you I am capable of actually paying attention
to what other people write.

Now, did you look up the bandwidth of the internet backbone links?


This discussion is happening because you denied current commercial
capaciies on ground based fibre links in order to support your claim
that the Starlink will compete against ground lasers


No we are not and you are a liar, since I never said any such thing as
the preceding (which you will now remove from your quote and claim the
'thing' is something else, as you did above).


You made those asserions without knowing at what capacity the magical
Musk lasers will have between satellites. (generally speaking, the
longer the distance between laser and receiver, the lower the capacity.


Since I never made any such assertion, you are a liar.


Then again, you don't even seem to iunderstand the difference between
capacity and speed of light.


I don't feel particularly responsible for how things 'seem' to your
defective intellect, which has obviously crossed two different
discussions.


No, you tried to claim it will be as limited as your Canadian service,
which is simply false.


Never claimed it would as AS limited. What I claimed is that Musk's
dream won't magically unleash unlimited capacity that will replace
ground based links.


Since no one said it would, what you 'claimed' was just a little
opaque to the rest of us who speak regular English.


The limited spectrum between ground and satellites
will limit capacity ...


No, that's not the limiting factor.


... and economics will limit how many ground stations
you can afford to have. (and eventually, the broadcast footprint of a
satellite betwene itself and ground station will limit how close ground
sations can be to each other, as well, if they re-use the same spectrum
as used for retail service, then each ground station will represent a
dead zone where you can't obtain retail service.


What utter poppycock! Or are you claiming to be rebutting something
no one has said again?


So they need to
strategically position their ground stations to not only be near ground
based Internet majors "hubs", but also to not prevent retail serviec to
those traders who will allegedly queue up for that reduced latency
service no matter the price.


You seem to be obsessed with 'ground stations' while ignoring
everything you've been told that network experts (of which I am not
one) have said about the Starlink network. Let me repeat some numbers
I've given before that I'm sure your goldfish mentality either never
comprehended or forgot as soon as you read it, Mayfly. Starlink (by
itself) has the capacity to handle 50% of the total internet backhaul
on the planet. Starlink (by itself) can handle 10% of the total
traffic for even the 'densest' geographic area.


In other words, if you want to sell London to New York links, you may
not be able to put ground stations near either city. If they use
different spectrum fr the uplink vs retail connections, then this is not
an issue, assuming the satellite that is above has 2 radios with
antennas pointed to ground, one for retail connections and one for the
uplink.


Yes, if an idiot like you designs the system, there will be all sorts
of problems. Fortunately, I suspect they're not hiring idiots like
you for that job.


Go look up the bandwidth of the internet backbone, you havering loon.


There is no single internet backbone. Go lookup what _the_ "Internet"
means. I'll be professional and omit gratuitous insults.


In other words, you don't even know enough to understand the question,
much less answer it.



You're actually arguing two different things here. One of them is
semi-valid. The other claims the laws of physics are incorrect.
Starlink WILL have lower latency. The laws of physics say so.


But you only take a very narrow view of latency. Much of the latency
isn't actual transit time but time through each router, especially when
they are congested. You are considering only transit time on a Geman
autobahn where the speed limit is speed of light. You fail to consider
the time spend waiting in queues at toll booths, and slowing down when
going through interchanges to switch to another road.


You don't seem to understand, well, much of anything. Nor do you seem
to be able to differentiate between me and Jeff. Nor do you seem to
understand how networks actually work (they're not highways and data
packets aren't automobiles, no matter what Al Gore may have said).


If Musk sells satellite to satellite retail service (which doesn't use a
ground station), then the 2 end points may have reduced latency, but it
also means all satellites must start acting as routers instead of
swicths since not all traffic is going to the satellite that has link to
a ground station.


What utter poppycock!


Introducing routing in each satellite adds latency.


You don't appear to understand the difference between a router and a
switch.


Yes, on the ground, New York to Los Angeles takes longer than New York
to Chicago. But there will be cases when latency to Los Angeles will be
less than latency to Chicago. (congested links for instance).


So what? The network experts are predicting that Starlink will
typically be around 25 ms latency. Now go check your connection (mine
is currently running around 22 ms).



Once again, BFR/BFS allows launching these satellites for less than
$40,000 each.


Vague empty fictional promise on twitter. Until BFR/BFS flies, we can't
know the cost to launch each kg of payload. Remember that those costs
include amortization of the development and testing costs. And those are
unknowns.


Horse****. Analysis by people who do rockets for a living. If
BFR/BFS comes anywhere close to its designed capability, you can get
reasonably close numbers for this.


The fact that we're talking about 12,000 of them and
producing several thousand of them a year will make them much cheaper
to build than current satellites.


That is like the argument that because the fur coat is on sale, you need
to buy it.


Horse****.


12,000 cheaper satellites could still be very much more
expensive than 1 very expensive satellite.


Yes, and monkeys might fly out your butt.


The A380 example I provided ...


Is irrelevant. Things that are different are not the same.


So, while SpaceX has excelled with their small Falcon9, it does not
automatically mean that they will excell at a rocket of a scale they
have never done before (and a BFS of a scale nobody has ever done before).


'Small' Falcon 9? Really? There is never a guarantee of success, but
that's certainly the way to bet in this case. They've proven out the
difficult technologies (tanks, engines).


Not so much. When has SLS ever flown the real operational article?


They'd have 1 test flight of SLS, haven't they ?


No, they haven't. The first test flight will (currently) be in 2020.


They've had drop test
of Orion. That is more than BFR/BFS.


OK, so we know gravity will affect Orion. This should not be a
surprise to anyone and I'm pretty sure we can bet that BFS will be
affected by gravity without dropping it to check.


Well, let's see. They've demonstrated they can build the tanks.


Do you REALLY know the actual results of the tank tests they have made?
Musk stated the exceeded the max pressure test in destructive testing.
This is good. But if BFR/BFS is to achieve the economics that are
promised, re-usability becomes essential for many many many flights. So
has SpaceX published results of how those tanks are doing in multiple
fill/empty cycles? If not, then nobody in the public can claim SpaceX
has the tanks succesfully tested and ready for production.


And we're back to the Mayfly ignorance of how science and engineering
works. For Mayfly, everything MUST fail until its operational, at
which point I guess he must always be astonished.



It will pretty much 'work as advertised' or they'll cancel it. It's
not going to be 'scaled back'. They're on the third (I think) design
iteration and it's gotten around 10% BIGGER, which is not 'scaling
back'.


10% bigger isn't necessarily good news. Could mean the thing will be
heavier than originally predicted.


I should have said "10% longer", but whatever. If it' "heavier than
originally predicted" (and it probably will be; most aerospace
vehicles are) one way to deal with that is get more fuel on board,
which you do by (tada) making the vehicle physically bigger to hold
more fuel. I suspect this is what is going on with the most recently
announced changes. BFR changed very little other than to get very
slightly longer. BFS on the other hand got significantly longer and
the engine configuration changed.



As for your 'devolve' path, that's rather like claiming that
if the Boeing 747 project had run into difficulties it would have
'devolved' into a project to produce 737s. It's a preposterous
notion.


Core 747 development was funded by the US military. When Military
decided to not buy it, Boeing decided to continue development and create
commercial passenger and cargo planes with it.


That's about half true. While the initial concept of the 747 came out
of a DoD competition (which Lockheed won and which became the C-5),
that doesn't mean that the military paid. Frequently initial design
studies are funded out of B&P money, which is internal to the company.
Since Boeing made it through the first downselect, that would likely
be where government money got significantly involved. Boeing didn't
"decide to continue development and create a commercial passenger and
cargo plane". That was pretty much always the plan, since they'd been
asked by airlines for a larger capacity aircraft.


The reason for the hump was to put the cockpit out of the way so cargo
can be loaded through the nose.


Again about half true. There are other ways to "put the cockpit out
of the way" and both Lockheed and Douglas did it differently than
Boeing. You know there's a passenger lounge up there, right?

And despite all that, it didn't become a Boeing 707 with an extra
fuselage (a design that was apparently actually proposed at one point
for the A-380; two A-340 fuselages pasted together side by side).


The 747 was state of the art for those days, so they knew how to
design/make it.


Nope. For example, it required new and much more powerful engines.


The A380 was beyond state of the art, hence Airbus
having to delay the official project launch for many years in the 1990s
until they develop enough new tech to make the 380 possible.


According to Airbus, the major cause of delay was "the complexity of
the wiring in the aircraft". Now, how long had we been putting wiring
in aircraft at that point? To that I would add the mad merry go round
of structures that had to go on among the countries involved so that
everyone would get their piece of the industrial pie.

Note that Boeing had been involved in a design study for a Very Large
Commercial Transport aircraft with several of the companies that
teamed for the A-380 effort. Boeing withdrew after a couple of years
because they projected development would cost around $15 billion and
didn't think that could be recovered by the commercial market for such
and aircraft.


The problem is that by pushing the state of the art only till the plane
can be airworthy, it didn't push enough and the 380 ended up being too
heavy to deliver on all the prmised performance advantages over smaller
planes.


They couldn't figure out how much the wiring would weigh? How long
have we had gravity?

Airbus mismanaged the whole thing, too. Remember that $15 billion
that Boeing thought it would take to develop such an aircraft? Airbus'
initial estimate was €8.8 billion, around 20% less than Boeing thought
it would take (and without all the round robin bull**** with
structures that Airbus did). Actual cost? Somewhere north of £16
billion, or around 66% MORE than Boeing estimated. Because of WIRING.


SpaceX is in the same sitiuation.


Not even close. Again, they've already tested the hardest parts.


It is pushing the state of the art to
design/built the BFR/BFS, and in the case of BFS, pushing it by a huge
amount. How far they can afford to push the state of the art remains to
be seen amd that will determine not wheter it is built or not, but how
much cargo it can carry or how many times it can be re-used.


Wrong. If they can't get close to the current design performance,
they just won't build them. What do you think would be the point?


And the longer it takes to develop and test the new technologies that
are required for BFR/BFS, the more cash it takes.


Usually true, but not a given. However, this is why I expect around a
2 year slide in BFR/BFS and use the $10 billion upper limit of the
range for development costs instead of the optimistic lower end of
SpaceX figures (orbital flights in 2020, Mars cargo flights in 2022,
manned Mars mission in 2024 with a development cost of $3 billion).


The difference between the two positions is that we assume they're
going to try to do what they've said they're going to do and look at
progress while you assume they won't try to do what they've said


I haven't said that.


Not in so many words, but your constant caviling makes your position
obvious.


Your unwaivering blind faith in Musk pushes you to
insult anyone who doesn't have the same faith that he will deliver
BFR/BFS exactly as promoted.


You're lying again.


If Musk announced he was about to develiop a Galaxy clas sstarship with
transparent aluminium windows and a warp engine, you'd believe him
because in the past, SpaceX has always delivered.


Well, nothing succeeds like success, so if he announced such a thing I
wouldn't bet against him. Of course, I could engage in the same sort
of 'logic' you use above and say that if Musk announced he was going
to take a **** you'd have dozens of medical reasons for why he might
not be able to.


Musk is moving to unchartered territory and I accept the BFR/BFS project
may or may not turn out exactly as promised. And I asccept that not
everything Musk tweets is factual, a lot of its is just PR stunts to
anmuse his twitter audience.


Your inability to tell the difference is YOUR problem.


Only because NASA is dragging their feet on the manned version and
they haven't used up all the Cargo Dragon V1 in stock yet so don't
need to fly the cargo version.


The fact, beyond your faith is that Dragon 2 has not flown. It may be
all ready and held only by paperwork, or it may have failed some NASA
tests and needs further fine tuning. Not the type of thing that is made
public so you or I can't know either way. So blind faith in Dragon 2
being ready is wrong.


It's the former and it's public. Testing was completed successfully a
while back and the tested hardware has been delivered to the Cape.
Both the unmanned test and the first manned flight are firmly
scheduled and NASA doesn't do that on blind faith.

But perhaps monkeys will fly out your butt...


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson
 




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