This is what the future of communication looks like. It's really a massive step forward. No one will have to die from exposure when their cars break down, no planes will go missing, and no more black spots in natural disasters. It is also quite dignified and civilised that we are using this technology first to help the most vulnerable.
Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. People will be really empowered by this technology, we just need more competition in this space. But one step at a time.
Also: simmer down Elon fans and haters, this is not only about Elon. Look at the bigger, global picture.
I don't know – would we risk Kessler Syndrome for a war? Win a piece of land and doom humanity for a hundred years of regress in space? Maybe, probably can't be ruled out.
As for jamming, is it feasible or practical to jam very large parts of the world? I can't imagine it would be. It seems to me like jamming would probably be used for specific military purposes and people would be left alone to communicate with each other otherwise.
It's not that I'm saying this could not be done. It could. But this is not the most likely scenario in my head. The immense benefit to all humanity is a very likely scenario, in contrast.
LoRa is another equally exciting technology that has a lot of potential in all the spaces I mentioned. I just can't currently imagine a reason it would go mass-market.
Of course we would. And anyway the Starlink constellation is low enough that even destroying the whole constellation would have a minimal impact after a decade.
With how close to earth Starlink satellites fly, it won't take hundreds of years. Without the occasional boost back into orbit, it'll only take a couple of years for them to fall back to earth. Same with most spy satellites. We can do without space internet for a few decades if we blow up several of these constellations.
As for further-away satellites (Iridium etc.), that's a bigger risk, but there aren't that many that make sense to target in a war.
If pieces got bumped into a higher apogee wouldn't their orbit end up with a lower perigee as well? If so I think that might actually be better for deorbiting quickly
Maybe not for Starlink itself, but its debris may be eccentric enough to hit satellites in higher orbits, thus causing an upward cascade of collisions resulting in debris clouds that do have a real possibility of remaining in orbit for many times the debris of Starlink.
Eccentric orbits mean higher apogee but also lower perigee, which for something at Starlink altitude likely means perigee is below the Karman line. Which means they'd deorbit within 90 minutes. So they'd only have one chance to hit something in higher orbit. You won't get enough collisions to start Kessler.
I mean, yes, absolutely! I wouldn't trust world leaders to understand Kessler syndrome, let alone care about it. If a world leader is comfortable killing hundreds of thousands of people to make their nation "safe", targeting civilian infrastructure, I have no doubt that they'd blow up some stuff in orbit.
To be clear, I don't want to risk it. I'd prefer we didn't live in such a warlike world. But the current world leaders are out here bombing nuclear plants and residential districts. A few satellites will feel very, very far away to them.
Yes. The military believes that our adversaries would attack their satellites. China, USA and India have demoed the capability to shoot satellites in non wartime, adding tons of debris.
LoRa will never take off since it doesn't have the bandwidth for wide usage. Short messages are the limit. It also can't replace this usage since there aren't nodes in the middle of the ocean. If anything, this will reduce the need for LoRa messaging.
Your enemy has sat communications. You don’t. Well, it’s unlikely you’re going to get sat communications - so what do you do?
It’s logical to take out enemy communications.
The other side of the coin is, the enemy with the satellite can try to offer you the use of them as well, so you wouldn’t feel the need to destroy them - but will they?
While I really really hope no one would be that stupid as to risk a Kessler syndrome... I think it's really likely in a very specific situation:
A non-space-dominant power (so not Russia/China/USA) gets into a tiff with someone using satellites. This player does have access to at least the vaguest concept of a ballistic missile. They take said missile and program it to fly into space (as most beyond the tactical level do), and detonate.
Nuclear or not, they don't even have to hit the satellite, they just have to throw up shrapnel. Hell, you can replace most of the explosive warhead with ball bearings. It may not immediately take down a specific satellite but it's almost assured to fuck space up.
And in case it's not obvious, this seems like a very North Korean type thing to do. Their missiles aren't terribly reliable or accurate (so far), but good enough to get into space and ruin everyones day for a very long time there after. They have, what, a single satellite? [1] when everyone else has hundreds? Why not level the playing field and assure no one can use any of them - given enough time.
I'd be willing to be its in someones MAD playbook as well. It only takes a few hundred nukes to effectively end all life on earth, permanently. There are still 5,000 plus in both Russia and the US's stockpile [2], not to mention China, France and the UK has a couple hundred each. What do you do with some of those few thousand extra nukes? Detonate them in air and orbit to take out your Doomsday planes [3] and any potential orbital capabilities - just in case you survive.
But honestly, the Kessler Syndrome wouldn't really be a concern at that point since everything, including the roaches, would be a radioactive pile of glass.
By definition of going to war, they are willing to risk their very existence. Taking out satellites and making orbit entry fraught with hazards seems a very rational choice for many opponents on the world stage.
> This is what the future of communication looks like
Is there sufficient capacity?
For broadband Starlink has an upper limit on the density of its customers. By density I mean number of customers per km^2 rather than some prohibition against dumb people using Starlink :-)
Estimates of this limit vary. When I did a back of the envelope calculation a couple assuming all 12000 planned satellites get deployed I got 4.4 simultaneous people doing full speed downloads per km^2. I had to make some guesses for that, in particular the number of satellites visible. If the satellites were spread uniformly around the Earth then at any one time about 360 would be visible from any given location. But they aren't uniform. They have orbits that favor spending more time over the mid latitudes than the high latitudes. That increases the number visible from the mid and low latitudes and lowers the number visible from high latitudes. I just assumed an even 1000 at any one time in mid latitudes.
Others estimates are as high as 30 simultaneous people using full speed per km^2.
This is why providers of wired/fiber or terrestrial wireless broadband in decent sizes cities aren't worried about Starlink.
I'd expect Starlink LTE to have the same kind of limitation, albeit with very different numbers. The bandwidth needed for one 100 Mbps download would be enough for at least 1000 telephone quality voice streams, but I doubt the satellites have the same amount of bandwidth available over LTE as they do over whatever they are using for the internet stuff, so I don't see any way to get a good estimate.
Global picture doesn't work with people in charge of this. If someone shows substantial evidence of mental decline, would you want them anywhere near anything that has to do with global communications?
Planes have had access to sat Comms for decades. MH380 had it but it was deactivated. Most likely by a suicidal pilot. The engines had their own uplink that was still active. But Starlink isn't going to solve that kind of problem.
This doesn't change anything for aircraft because aviation has had this capability for decades.
Even light aircraft have ELTs and ADS-B, and larger aircraft operating in oceanic airspace also have real time position reporting via datalink over VHF radio and SATCOM.
> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service.
Satellite operators will continue deny service to particular areas whenever they're told to, just as they do today.
Eh? Planes going missing is because operators don't want to buy into satcom systems or the pilot pulled the fuses. Most US airlines fully know where their plane is at all times , complete with plane internal telemetry beamed to an engineering department at the airline.
> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service.
Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience.
> Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation.
Precisely. We don't exactly need the internet or cell service. We've got techniques and historical methods going back to the beginning of, unsurprisingly, recorded history.
> People will be really empowered by this technology
They're already empowered. This will mostly just convenience them.
>> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service.
>Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience.
"Internet shutdowns" like the ones in Kashmir involves all internet being shut down, not just a few sites being blocked on the ISP's DNS servers. That's hardly a "surface level inconvenience".
You've misunderstood me. People who have ears and mouths will communicate. Even if you blind and gag these, they will _still_ find a way to communicate, and to organize.
Put another way, these peoples lives are "not good," not because the Internet is hard to use, it's because of other factors. Which means improving their internet access will only _minimally_ improve their position.
I agree with the sentiment but LEO constellations like Starlink can and have been disrupted, via sub-orbital jamming. Not to mention that in actual large conflict surface to LEO missiles will simply destroy large amounts of satellite constellations.
Starlink is supposedly harder to jam than typical satellite comms due to its use of phased array communication. IIRC you need to either be flying overhead or putting out a ton more power in a ground based jammer to be effective.
And as the other user mentioned, no country at the moment has the kind of stockpile of ASAT weapons needed to wipe the constellation (plus, due to orbital dynamics, there's a limit to how quickly they can take out satellites).
Between trying to wipe the constellation and jamming it, it'd be far more cost effective to jam even accounting for the higher power requirements/lower jamming range.
There would also be other interesting options like capturing and using enough terminals to force the entire cell to be disabled. That has been one of the challenges SpaceX has had to deal with near the frontlines in Ukraine.
Starlink satellites are vulnerable to repeated uplink transmitting their preamble code (which is public and the same across any user terminal). The satellites are so tuned to that code you can jam them through their receive sidelobes.. taking out all beams on the satellite.
No government currently exists that has nearly enough rockets to impact Starlink. There is a big difference between doing individual tests and taking down a constellation of 1000s.
You don't need to hit every satellite. You only need to create a lot of debris, and that'll do it for you. Alternatively the radiation from a nuclear blast could take out a big chunk of the network, which is presumably why Russia is working on orbiting nuclear weapons.
Actually its not that easy even if you did create some debris. Orbit is much bigger then people think. And these sats are much smaller then people think. Without propulsion lots of that stuff quickly drops below the level of the sats. Sats can also raise their orbit in response and fly corrections.
Even modest investment in better tracking could massively improve crash avoidance. It would take far more then a handful of sats to truly impact the functioning of the network. And even more to complete take it out.
Russia is working on everything if you believe their marketing. I seriously question if any work on 'orbital nuclear weapons' is anything other then marketing. And its questionable how effective that would actually be.
This isn't as easy as people think. A country like Russia might have some readiness of nuclear weapons. And maybe a small readiness of anti-sat weapons, but not anywhere close to enough to attack a network like Starlink. Preparing for something like that simply wasn't a thing anybody considered necessary until 2020 and Russia certainly hasn't invested huge amounts of money in that since then and given their recent success with rocket development, I not sure how effective it would have been even if they had.
I was curious why direct-to-cell hasn't been enabled everywhere, and it looks like it's because AT&T claims it would cause them an 18% decrease in network throughput/capacity. AT&T petitioned the FCC to block direct-to-cell rollout because of this.[1] SpaceX responded that AT&T's estimates of interference are incorrect, and that AT&T fails to account for many factors. Also, SpaceX argues that the public good of having cell phone access in remote areas outweighs the slight reduction of network capacity in areas with existing coverage.[2]
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. All else equal, adding more cell towers to an area will increase interference and decrease performance for existing networks, but I doubt it will be as bad as AT&T claims. Also T-Mobile made a deal with SpaceX to be the sole network with direct-to-cell for the first year after rollout. It seems more likely than not that AT&T is trying to hurt their competition using the FCC. If a different cell network had gotten an exclusive contract, I'm sure it would be T-Mobile petitioning the FCC to block direct-to-cell rollout.
No branch of the US government keeps statistics on how many people get lost in the wilderness and die each year, but it's definitely in the hundreds and possibly over 1,000.[3] Considering how often a working cell phone could save them, I think it's worth enabling direct-to-cell everywhere.
SpaceX lobbied for radio regulatory changes to hamper competitors, the competitors (AST Spacemobile) overcame that and has their own satellite system that comply with the agreed upon regulations, Verizon and AT&T are customers in the US, then SpaceX wanted its now non-regulatory compliant satellite cluster to do the same thing but the FCC just points to SpaceX’s own contribution to the standards as reason not to change it - which seem like good reasons, power level, interference, the usual
This emergency authorization is a raison d’etre to justify what SpaceX is now trying to do
I’m glad the infrastructure is there for the affected area, the politics behind it are amusing and should be scrutinized
There's a lot of posts like this who are fans of AST Spacemobile because they own stock. SpaceX did not lobby for any radio regulatory changes to hamper competitors. Additionally Verizon and AT&T are themselves AST Spacemobile investors.
If you're going to write this type of post you should clarify whether you have stock ownership in the company as many people have HUGE conflicts of interest on this given ASTS's rapid rise and meme stock status.
It also hasn't been enabled everywhere yet because the associated constellation is not complete yet. Current service is probably going to be intermittent. Basically, it's just better than nothing when in an emergency like this.
It's an excuse to establish 'facts on the ground' that the technology is useful which makes it harder to rollback via bureaucracy if it cuts into telco profits.
Starlink is partnering with T-Mobile for this, so they're definitely going to be careful to only send signals to areas that are actually lacking in towers anyways. And this is great incentive for carriers to cooperate to make roaming cheap and preferable over satellite.
The cell antennas are omnidirectional but the satellites are phased array. They aren't going to be that narrow, but they can avoid, for example, a city that already has extensive coverage. Remember, these are meant for out in remote areas or in areas of cell outtages, not for downtown in a major city.
What I'm saying is that if it really does interfere with LTE in a significant manner, then T-Mobile, a carrier partnering with Starlink, has a large incentive to work with them to reduce that interference.
Your phone provider definitely has to have a roaming agreement. Without that, your phone won’t attach to any 3G network and beyond (3G introduced mutual authentication).
GSM remains vulnerable to all kinds of bad things since it only authenticates the phone/SIM to the network but not otherwise).
Starlink is nice but does the US not possess an air platform that can loiter while providing mobile phone service? Seems like a useful thing to have for civil defense. Wasn't Project Loon supposedly capable of covering a state-sized area with 4G coverage?
We know with certainty that major disasters happen like clockwork every year, but that would decrease the amount we can pay our carriers CEOs and it's not like there's any profit potential from this, carriers don't have SLAs where people impacted by outages are owed anything.
More practically for civil defense, national guard will have their own radios, and the amateur radio guys all said they've been prepping for this role? Have they succeeded in that goal?
Well, the US doesn't run any phone companies... a bettee question is why don't the telephone companies own or borrow a dirigible to provide emergency services. Hazards of dirigibles in huricane season might be part of it, of course.
It requires larger antennas. Starlink had to launch the V2 satellites which are larger and have new, big antenna for Direct-to-cell. They were meant for Starship, but that was delayed so they developed V2 Mini for Falcon 9. The version with antenna started launching beginning of year. My understanding is that are close to numbers for providing global coverage.
That's amazing, I'm having trouble believing that a mobile phone's antenna can talk to space, 500km away. Do you know what sort of bandwidth these will have?
But just to clarify, because I'm also having a hard time imagining this, an LTE antenna in a cell phone can beam data to a satellite and have it picked up? Even at whatever low kbps? That is insane to me!
There are IoT devices that can talk to geostationary satellites, and these are roughly 100 times further up (36000 km vs. 300-1000 for LEO)!
I have one that’s significantly smaller and lighter than a smartphone, antenna and all.
These satellites partially make up for the distance by deploying huge antennas, sometimes augmented by large reflector meshes that can only unfold in space.
As far as I'm aware, the V2 minis are different from the DTC sats. V2 mini just has expanded network bandwidth. DTC are a specific variant of the V2 mini with the hardware needed for DTC. Not all V2 launches, even now, are DTC variants.
If you look at the kidme5, samegene321, and george23 accounts in this discussion you'll note that they predominantly comment about Musk in Musk-related threads (usually SpaceX, it seems), often sporadically with large delays between when they make comments (weeks and months). They also post the same things as each other (though this is non-obvious, kidme3 deleted the content of one of their dead comments, but it's verbatim what samegene321 posted). It's either an individual or a coincidentally very narrowly-focused group of people who not only think the same, but write the same.
There's a much stronger correlation: these accounts (plus a couple others—who are also active in this thread) all comment about one highly specific, niche topic which absolutely no one else on HN does. It's the claim that the Bush-era NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin, is a unrecognized key figure behind SpaceX' founding.
Just query "spacex mike griffin", and it's exactly these accounts (and people who reply to them).
Yes, more (very obviously connected, they're literally posting the same comments) accounts have turned up and gone more in that direction after I made my initial comment.
There was a similar set of users I've been involved with on Reddit that got banned on Reddit for sock puppeting and similarly on Wikipedia who got banned for sock puppeting.
I feel like I can spot musk-bashing astroturfing a mile away because they repeat the exact same criticisms that made big headlines but aren't actually true, but there's maybe like a tiny nugget of nuance to the topic, and it's repeated forever and ever like it's fact and Elon is literally hitler and tesla doesnt actually exist and space isn't real too and elon is just lying to you.
but also he's a xenophobic, transphobic asshole who supports politicians eroding really basic rights and liberties for people, so fuck em
If you tie yourself to a specific politician, especially in a massively polarised environment, you're going to alienate many people, and it's hardly like Musk wasn't controversial before twitter and his swing to MAGA.
I believe it's fair and based on recent changes in musk's political outlook which many disagree with. His public persona really didn't used to be like this, and he never would have been so popular in the first place if that was the case.
Some are bothered by his positions that explicitly want to roll back rights for people while others are bothered by his current "government aid is bad" position given how much such aid he has received.
I'm guessing if he actually lived the beliefs he said he used to have more people with support him.
The issue is, while the haters do seem like they are the standard outrage machine, I dont think people who are not into politics realize how batshit insane the Republicans side has gotten, which Musk is solidly a part of.
We are used to living this relatively cushy life, where we think that everyone is entitled to the political opinion, and we seem to take it for granted like its never going to change. But in reality, if Trump wins, it may very well be the end of American democratic experiment, and set us on the path towards a much lower standard of life. If EU and other markets start losing faith in US economy because we have a dictator in power, you better believe you are going to feel that, cause nobody will give a shit about the tech sector.
Like, its REALLY fucking bad right now with how close the polls are, and its scary that many peoplendont realize this fact.
So I dont think that at this point and time, its wise to chalk up all the hate rhetoric as just online outrage. People should be outraged. Vote blue downballot in November, and maybe once MAGA movement dies, we can go back to some form of normalicy.
Women are dying because of anti-abortion positions being espoused by these republicans.
People aren't just outraged. Millions are terrified.
There's a 50% chance come November 9th that my girlfriend and I have to have a very serious discussion about how we will protect her rights and literal safety, that we have to make serious sacrifices to go somewhere safer, including leaving family.
I have friends that would have to go into literal hiding, living fake lives to not get systemically harmed and targeted.
Project 2025 damn near calls for my execution, and the execution of people I love, for things that no well adjusted people consider wrong.
America had a blatant and clear taste for actual full blown Nazism in the early 1900s, and people don't seem to realize that it was never rooted out, just made quiet for a few decades. We LOVE eugenics.
Musk is also spreading the "this might be the last election you ever vote in" meme, which is pure projection from the extreme right wing that has taken over so much of the USA. So I have a large amount of derision for provocateurs like Musk, who can simply fly his private jet to another country if the USA becomes embroiled in civil war. https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-claims-during-trump-081...
I utterly loathe the people that would cause violence and stolen elections, and musk is one of them.
And, to the people that would back the extreme right: they will turn on you the very nanosecond it becomes convenient to them.
> "this might be the last election you ever vote in" meme
To be fair the left is saying the same, because Trump will end democracy, this time for real.
I am not American, so often only the crazy/extremist views reach me over the ocean, but I did read over the past years the hope in leftist circles, that migrants will make Florida and Texas first a purple and then blue.
Musk is, to say the least, polarising, and thus attracts a lot of people who take either highly favourable or intensely sceptical stances on everything he says. These two groups then feed off each other - those critical of Musk often feel compelled to counterbalance what they see as overly charitable interpretations of his statements or the actions of companies associated with him, and vice versa I guess.
In this particular topic, Musk has a history of being... opportunistic to disasters and tries to 'help out' to various degrees of success (see his weird mini-sub saga for the thai cave rescue, and Starlink's involvement in Ukraine/Russia war).
Personally, I think he's a terrible human being who uses his platform to spread vile hate which is incompatible with a modern world, and I tend not to separate the art from the artist (if you could call either of them that). But otherwise I'm not brigading out here.
Predates it by many years. It actually even predates the cave submarine, but strongly intensified then and increased roughly constantly until the present day.
Because Musk as a person is a huge liar, fraud and a major disappointment with a messiah complex to boot ?
We could be looking at these developments with excitement, instead many of us think about how he is going to use this tech to fuck more things up and justify more immoral behaviour. He is a real life Bond villain.
5.
Defendant Musk has openly admitted that his leadership philosophy is that the ends—here, Tesla’s mission of “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy”—justify the means, or fraudulent and unlawful business practices, so long as they keep a company afloat.
He also tweeted this two years ago…
For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally Apr 28, 2022
It makes me nervous such a guy is in control of so many things…
Russia having starlink to use drones to bomb Ukrainian soldiers, for example. Buying Twitter to spread lies and conspiracies is another. Calling a hero a “pedo guy” because he didn’t agree with his approach.
When Ukraine attacks Russian sites, they’re often finding starlink terminals in the debris. They know they’re using them to control drones and other equipment. They’re supposed to be sanctioned under US law.
What’s wrong with lawyers ? Is Musk some how above all lawyers ?
Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. People will be really empowered by this technology, we just need more competition in this space. But one step at a time.
Also: simmer down Elon fans and haters, this is not only about Elon. Look at the bigger, global picture.