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I'm certainly happy to have my interpretation-o-meter recalibrated, but I pretty clearly hear "General such-and-such says Falcon has saved the DOD $40B in defense satellite launch costs". Its ultimately somewhat irrelevant because even if we rack in non-DOD state funded launches--basically...

No question Falcon is cheaper for US taxpayers, but there's some context missing from that statement. Out of the all the launches F9/FH has to date, 25 of them (or less...?) have been DOD (USAF/USSF/SDA/NRO/etc). In round numbers, DOD probably spends $100M per Falcon. Round numbers, let's say...

Why? Its a Mars mission mission with a total budget (including launch) of $80M.

Thinking about this one a little more, if it were me, I’d prioritize minimizing DF battery capacity--and thus mass and volume--based on: Maximum discharge rate during flight. This one's basically the same problem space as Tesla batteries (sometimes) limiting the maximum acceleration of the...

A corollary data point: The space industry builds in what most here I suspect would consider unfathomable margin into battery sizing. For decades the gold standard on satellites has been to limit per-orbit DOD to 20%--usually that's marked against the nameplate or, even more conservatively...

The locals in the valley are generally not sensitive. They're all generally agricultural and just happy to be employed, or they make their livelihood off of VAFB in some way or another...so...more rockets is more job security. There's really very little publicly accessible land use affected...

Pretty reasonable concerns/requests there by the CCC.

Somewhat adjacent, but as a data point practical/real in (or near in) service electric thrusters are typically in the 10-25km/s range. Aspirational is upwards of 50km/s. (Erosion at the business end of the thruster is a major life limiter at those velocities; while obviously not the same...

Forgive my Slick Willy paraphrase, but it depends on what one's definition of "predictable" is. I'd contest that it largely is already. The infrastructure is pretty mature (obviously they're still building out V2M, but they can also do basic math on burn rates) and the recurring cost to...

Yes. How is that applicable to my response?

Don't think I've seen this elsewhere here Cool to see the oscillations from the solar array's drive motors (mostly the axis rotating around the sat), and also how the mass participation is large enough that the whole satellite is reacting in kind. (If you focus on where the earth horizon meets...

I did a quick Googs of Merlin and speculation is +10-20% on total mass for the longer nozzle. 0th order then, it’s a ~150-300kg upper (or so) on raptor.

True the cut the nozzle size, but that’s a different trade space. The short vac nozzle is solely a cost saving measure, explicitly leveraged in a situation where every kg doesn’t matter.

Yeah? What I've said boils down to: In approaching the ISL design space, SX followed their well established (and oft lauded, especially here) practice of not over designing, over speccing, or over building the equipment. SX only creates a thing to do what it needs to do rather than take the...

For sure. And of course you need them to get up there in the first place (though maybe that can be done with just vac raps for some vehicles?). It's certainly going to be interesting to see where SX goes with the concept of application specific variants. It's plausible early on (the first...

KSC is fine, to be clear...just a bit of pedantry going on...

Yep. SX could build out internal capability and get into (for instance) the optical/SAR imaging game. They could try to leverage their brand (high volume, low exquisite-ness, fast iterations), but...that's not really where the money is in imaging. Planet has made a decent go at low-res...

That's to be expected. It's not like we're talking an order of magnitude difference between that extreme case and the operating case. The Starlink ISL's were designed to work with distances in the ~2000km (and shorter) range and I think everyone would be surprised if they couldn't close the...

Indeed. All of Starlink was designed on the edge of radiation tolerance. They pushing the limits across the board on everything (not just radiation tolerance), and they don't waste time/effort/money/resources on margin. They only spend money on uprated/radhard EEE parts where it's...

That's right. We're a year if not years away from starship being properly operational, let alone trying to land anything on the moon, to say nothing of going to Mars. That's the bottom line here. Starship's primary design point is to put a bunch of starlinks into LEO. Certainly that...

Since I see we're looking to find fault and not recognize context (again), feel free to expand on the parameters of the laser comm experiment on Polaris dawn.

Appreciate the link supporting my assertion. Polaris Dawn is going to be geometrically compatible with Starlink and VERY short mission life.

I'd guess multiple sensors--visible light imaging for sure, but also thermal (probably fast tracking--like following a missile), maybe specific elements/gasses, sensors to track other satellites... Almost surely The Establishment is building all of them (Raytheon, L3 Harris, etc.), which is how...

SLC40 is still part of CCAFS (CCSFS...) yeah? Or did I miss a land transfer to KSC?

Not wrong, but to try and clear up some conflation: The maximum data rate at the device is a function of the maximum per-beam data rate being shared by the number of users in the beam. (Obviously, its not just straight division) The actual data rate realized by the device is the above...

Only in so far as Verizon/ATT mobile services compete with Comcast/Spectrum wired services...which is to say: not to any material degree. Sure, some folks forgo fixed internet service and just rely on their mobile provider for all of their at-home demand, but most folks [that have the ability]...

Yeah that part is no problem. The issue is that “LEO” is pretty ill defined. It’s kinda as specific as saying “I live in the suburbs”. Having a reference orbit to which each vehicle is evaluated better normalizes performance comparisons. In years past ISS has been the quasai standard, but...

Some of those numbers are quite wrong, fwiw. It’s also useful to anchor these kinds of comparisons on a reference orbit, which these are not.

Sleep analytics?

I wonder if the Ragin’ Cajun’s twin brother is actually one of ULA’s most significant assets? If nothing else, he knows better than anyone else how to navigate “the way things work” for American rockets. He knows the rules of the game, he has good relationships with the players in the game...

Feels like there’s an opportunity to incorporate weeble technology into the next lander.

Starlink system capability, at least for the most part, is limited by the aggregate capacity of the user beams, not the gateway beams. The user beams are indeed formed by a phased array (the gateway beams are not); the size/angle of each beam is almost exclusively a function of the number of...

Signal strength is ultimately a function of regulation, not geometry. SX is maxing out PFD/signal strength already, at least in high density (and thus high revenue) areas, so there’s no dee-bee gains to be had by changing altitude. From a system perspective the concept of 350km sats is largely...

Yes, and the corollary to more profit on Vulcan because motors are at cost is that for the same profit they can reduce price and get closer to F9. There’s also the total lift capacity that’s a big near term upside. A major conversation with any non-SX launch provider is always “when can I...

H3 tries to not blow up again tonight at 722E/422P

The electric one?

While true that they're very divergent in core philosophies, this is literally one of the most SX things Blue has done. SX's driving principal across all of their development workstreams is basically "why go for the Full Monty when a Quarter Monty will do?" Why make the hopper(s) look like...

There’s a thread on TMC for New Glenn.

FWIW the fairing is not THAT much bigger than NOVA. NOVA has a reasonably wide footprint from the static landing legs (vs deployable, a la LEM) and as such makes a good go at filling the F9 fairing diameter. The main body obviously is much smaller, but still it's a well massed vehicle for...

Exactly. James Carville desperately wants to find new owners for the company he runs. The issue, at the risk of beating the horse, is that nobody with any sense is going to find value in ULA unless it’s at wholesale. FWIW it is in reference to the significantly variable number of solids...

The good news is that the iterative nature of SX allows them to decouple “get it right” with “get it light”, so they're likely not concerned about impact to payload capacity right now for the various day on day tweaks.

Could be, but it is most unlikely that the fat ISL pipes in the swarm of satellites above any cruise ship (or collection of cruise ships) are the limiting factor in capacity. Could be, but it's most unlikely that a cruise ship needs a gateway sized pipe for it to act as a local cache (vs many...

Looks like SX wants to test out maritime gateways This actually isn't a great development. The only way a gateway in the ocean works is as an up-down-up-down repeater (or, I suppose, if it's hacked into an undersea cable...). There are few practical reason SX would contemplate this kind of...

That's exactly right. I haven't compiled 2023 data yet (and I don't know that I will...) but when you look at data from 2012-2022 the number of global medium+heavy launches hasn't really changed once you take out starlink (and SX only launched 6 more non-starlinks for 33 total in '23 vs 27 in...

The timeline is way long to "Mars colony", as is the reality of getting to significant launch frequency (anything half as close to what F9 is today) but in general until SX starts hucking stuff beyond earth orbit I'd expect handful of operational ships and boosters at any one time. Maybe 3-5...

Got it. The answer is a pretty strong no. The real differentiator in Starlink over other ISPs is the actual infrastructure; at least relative to end users there really isn't much SX can bring to the table using the same fiber infrastructure some other ISP can use. Starlink serving as an...

Can you clarify the product/service you're imagining Starlink offer?

IFE is, unfortunately, a flip of the switch. Not unlike the MH370's transponder that was [almost certainly] nefariously shut off... That said, apparently Globalstar/Apple satellite find my service works on an aircraft. One could surmise that any future Iridium based D2D might be able to do...

If it ain’t Boeing, I’m not going (to get there)

In addition to what's above, it's worth noting that radiation tolerance generally goes down with advancing technology. The physical size of old school electronics makes them inherently more tolerant than the tight packaging of today's tech. For instance, for the same size old vs new component...