[acdha]

It certainly points in that direction but it does make me wonder what it’d look like with n>1. Anything crewed would be more conservative but you’d also want that for other things - it’d be really bad if you had a correlated failure on an entire satellite network after a freak event or because a problem only showed up, say, 4 years in.

[patrickwalton]

I think the networks actually get more reliable not less, because they're designed to be redundant and you have so many nodes one failure is tolerable. That's how it is for us at www.careweather.com.

I guarantee Starlink isn't using components from the 1990s.

[acdha]

Oh, I’m sure they’re big on redundancy. I mentioned correlated failures, however, because that has multiple failure modes and the one I was thinking about is something like physical degradation: redundancy doesn’t help if all of your redundant nodes have a component which fails at roughly the same time. There’s a reason why storage admins learned to mix hard drive brands and manufacturing batches in RAID arrays, and that problem is much harder to solve in space.