[mirashii]

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.

[adolph]

> 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).

[mirashii]

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.

[daniel-cussen]

Come on, 40 satellites is not all that much for Spacex.

[mirashii]

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.

[daniel-cussen]

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?