(The sat-to-sat lasers open the theoretical [if not geo-politically feasible] possibility of going around nation-state firewalls... I maybe too optimistic. Such discussions should go to the main Starlink thread anyway.) This Starlink deployment appeared much more dynamic than previous ones. The second stage seemed to be spinning faster and harder, and the stack clearly started to change shape much quicker. In the past, you could barely see the sat-to-sat movements and the stack appeared to remain together much longer than this:
Look on the far left side of these images. And see the recent SACOM launch thread, even easier to see.
Please stop depending on weekday names to specify how recent a Starlink SpaceX launch was: if we are caught only half a week away from an article written half a week from a launch, we could be mistaking the article for the wrong launch.
Seems like a charity could offer to fund local businesses that get rid of the damn mice and pay more for less mice than more mice (to not have perverse incentive to keep the mice around). I'd tend to stay away from cats, since I'm pretty sure animals farm their prey, but even if the cats were stupid enough not to farm the mice, once finished with them, they'd move on to the birds. In fact, the cats would probably eat the birds at the same time as eating the mice, too. Robots could isolate the mice, but let's not give those robots to any corporations or governments.
The local thugs would just locate you by your antennas. (Fahrenheit 451. (Special credit for those who can figure out if antennas are good or bad.))
Probably yeah on moving to the main thread...but since I’m too lazy: ISLs don’t do anything for unlocking customer base. If anything they hurt because the ability to provide service around a nation state’s firewall can be a full stop non starter. Like all satellite operators for all manner of services, Starlink must get country-by-country approval to operate and, ISLs is not, Starlink will not illegally provide service. Could you imagine an American satellite company dumping open internet on China? FWIW, Without ISLs there’s the potential to serve a country from a gateway(s) within its borders and thus within the walls of oppression, though it’s hard to imagine Starlink entertaining that concept.
I am sure that commercial starlink service will be restricted by country laws, and where necessary will use gateways within the countries boarders. US military StarLink will use ISLs and other downlink capabilities as needed, but this traffic will be separated. Starlink satellites over a restrictive country could still pass ISL traffic, without any local country traffic going through the ISL. I am sure that Starlink will have the ability to detect the user station physical location, and restrict gateway access based on it. Thus you can not buy a "Canada" Starlink terminal, and smuggle it into China, and get wide open internet in China. I even suspect that maritime v will have the ability to detect if your are too close to let's say China, and will automatically restrict your gateway access while physically near China. Smuggling Satellite TV receivers is one thing, as it a broadcast only system, but any form of uplink would be very carefully controlled. Do you really think SpaceX would want to miss out on the Chinese or Russian Internet market, the Satellites will be overhead either way, the bandwidth can either be sold or not, basically for the cost of Gateway installations. -Harry
I was looking at 'Tristan da Cunha' using Google map and noticed that the little rock next to it called 'Inaccessible Island' and strangely Google reports the presence of an Apple store?
I wonder if this will help to implement satellite communication to provide airplane 'black box' recording? New Black Boxes Offer Ability to Send Real-Time Data From Plane Crashes International Inc. is introducing a new line of aircraft cockpit and flight-data recorders that offer more data-storage capacity and the ability, for the first time, to use satellites to retrieve accident information in real time. Historically, many airlines have balked at the cost of securing the required satellite links. But transmission costs are expected to drop with the advent of new, low-altitude satellites under development for broadband connections.
That’s the problem with crowd sourced data, jokers are always around. Meanwhile it takes forever to get What used to be legitimate dead businesses off those maps since no one is officially in charge of the business listing anymore.
I would encourage you to more thoroughly consider the operational (let alone geopolitical) complexity of the scenario you’re imagining. This Chinese government could give a *sugar* that the sats are overhead. They’re not in the business of enabling internet access, they’re in the business of controlling content access. So, any SpaceX solution would necessarily have to comply with their content control measures, and that necessarily manifests as something more than SpaceX pinky swearing to a ‘trust us’ promise. At a minimum China would want satellite telemetry access to verify all ISLs within view of Chinese gateways are turned off. Of course, that’s not something SpaceX would want to do and definitely not something US regulations would allow, but then again, it’s not something that would satisfy Chinese officials. They, most likely, will want full authority over the satellites and quite probably, full access to all the traffic flowing through the satellites. Even more of a non starter for SpaceX and Uncle Sam. All that of course ignores the fact that CASC and CASIC (among others) are working on [state funded] internet constellations. Those will no doubt be crappy versions of starlink, and why on earth would China want to allow better foreign service to compete with their state funded—and controlled—solutions?