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by perihelions 1462 days ago
They also say Starlink fully lost 40 satellites to solar weather (were decelerated rapidly enough to burn up in the atmosphere, before their orbits could be rescued). There's a range of outcomes.

Thread about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 (488 comments)
1 comments
mirashii 1462 days ago
For those who don’t click through to the other thread, I’d say that solar weather contributed, but the root cause was more an overzealous safe mode induced by the operations team that didn’t leave time to recover. A better operations plan would’ve shortened the safe mode duration to ensure that they attempted to raise their orbit even if it meant deploying during the solar event. Letting safe mode destroy the satellite to mitigate a probabilistic risk is just bad planning. Take the chance and deploy anyways and hope you get lucky.
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adolph 1462 days ago
> Take the chance and deploy anyways and hope you get lucky.

If they got unlucky they might have spiked a space in which another satellite could have orbited (no pun intended).

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mirashii 1462 days ago
There’s not really a shortage of space, even in LEO. This isn’t a place where Kessler syndrome or orbital slots are really a concern.
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daniel-cussen 1462 days ago
Come on, 40 satellites is not all that much for Spacex.
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mirashii 1462 days ago
Even on the cheap end of estimates at 250k/each, that's still 10 million in hardware alone, not to mention launch costs, opportunity cost of delaying operations, etc.

But really, that's neither here nor there, the point of the comment is that a combination of an unexpected solar storm and the operations procedures followed for dealing with them lead to a possibly unnecessary loss of satellites. Just because they have more doesn't mean they're happy about losing out on millions of dollars of hardware.

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daniel-cussen 1461 days ago
10 million USD is an acceptable loss at that scale against other tradeoffs. Launch costs are low, so plus these sats aren't as expensively made because their supremacy (meaning their height off the ground here, that's my intent with that word) does not cost their weight in gold.

Same as Tesla crashes versus speed versus manufacturing cost, versus everything, tradeoffs. Are they justified or not?

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