Wouldn't the fuel burn alone for decelerating a used satellite intact for recycling be ludicrous (and just as polluting) compared to just letting it fall into the atmosphere and mostly burn up, other than possibly toxic metals and stuff)?
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If you sent a Starship up and it did many (say 100 or more), then no.
Fuel burn is critical, which is why the idea is to mine/recycle/repurpose geostationary satellites in their geostationary orbit, leaving you with a geostationary space station, platform, super satellite, telescope, parts depot or whatever. The satellites aren't brought to Earth for recycling, but are instead recycled in place.
So once you get your Starship out to the geostationary graveyard orbit, where all the dead satellites are supposed to park, the only delta-v you need to expend is to move the satellites from their position in that orbit to a different position in that orbit - a collection point. That fuel cost is trivial and is dominated by how quickly you want to move satellites around. If the Starship is robotic, you could be very patient and move around at 100 km/hour (28 m/s) relative to the graveyard orbit velocity, taking 4 days to move 10,000km along that orbital path. It doesn't take that much fuel to bump a Starship by 28m/s.
Once you've got all your satellites at the collection point, you start in on disassembling, melting, degassing, whatever. The materials there are valuable only partly because they consist of gold, silicon, aluminum and so forth. Perhaps their greatest value is that they are already accelerated to geostationary orbit.
That amount of mass may be a rounding error by the time Starship gets fully in-gear. They may be lofting millions of tons of stuff a year, making the existing mass in geostationary orbit completely uninteresting. At that point, they may send up Starships just to bring that stuff back down so it can be put on display in various museums. Given the number of items, they may be donated to grade schools as curiosities.
they are going to need volatiles for reaction mass. perhaps they will use TransAstra or their technology, mine asteroids for volatiles for dirty ice such
example
company
how works example (no im not an investor)
Qatar Airways is adding free Starlink to all its planes. 350 Mbps top speed for passengers
It will map out obstructions over the next 12ish hours and you can view that in the app.
Or, use the live obstruction feature and pretend things are 10 feet shorter.
Short answer, yes.
Slightly longer:
- Not sure the context of the "decelerating burn", and applying a heavy dose of pedantry, note that the higher the orbit the slower the velocity. So a satellite going to a higher orbit (including a GEO going to a higher graveyard orbit) does indeed burn in the velocity direction to decelerate...but a satellite that wants to come back down (from GEO, or from LEO for re-entry) burns against the velocity direction to accelerate.
- It's near impossible to maths exactly how long a GEO would take to re-enter the earth's atmosphere, but it's easily in the hundreds of thousands and likely millions of years.
- To your actual point, yes, the energy and raw materials required to bring a GEO back down to earth (refining/expending propellant, building the vehicle, etc.) could be put to FAR better uses for quite some time. It's kind of a shitty thing to say, but GEO trash really is tomorrow's problem. There's no real problem there today from a congestion (let alone Kessler) perspective, there's little value in the equipment or material of the trash up there, and there's no practical way to retrieve the trash.
- GEOs aren't actually made to be demisable, so having them burn up in the atmosphere is not an awesome solution.
You wouldn't want to send anything like a starship to clean up GEO--or really any orbit--at least with the intent of returning the equipment/material to LEO/earth. The ideal transport is a really small "this one's all tank" space tug powered by electric propulsion...and, really, powered by some to-be-discovered low-environmental-impact propellant vs the relatively rare Xe or Kr we use today (those elements are extracted from earth's atmosphere.)
Where starship could come into play is actually re-earthing the trash instead of just having the stuff atomize into the atmosphere. There's still some complicated logistics especially from GEO--notably, orbital inclinations--but instead of returning a going-to-launch-it-anyway Starship empty, it could be magically stuffed with trash brought down to a tenable altitude by a fleet of the aforementioned undertaker tugs.
It’s become a competitive advantage for hiring employees now…
Interesting paper to come out at a conference in Jan on Starlink's ISL performance. While 99% isn't exactly impressing the network geeks, it seems like a pretty good first gen achievement and could be ok long term given the web of redundancy. (As with all tech and especially space stuff, those 9's get exponentially expensive.) They're also likely operating well below 100gbps, but that's also not really a major factor since most traffic won't use the ISL network and, again, there's a massive web of redundancy/pathways.
Related good news is that the other ISL players (Tesat is a big one, Mynaric is another) are doing pretty well also. Their hardware is generally more robust than starlinks internal design, which hopefully encourages aspiring mega constellations to pump the brakes on simply hucking more and more satellites up while still allowing them to provide orders of magnitude more service vs legacy concepts. (IMO, as I'm sure I've opined in the past, we REALLY REALLY need to find a balance between SX's extreme "disposable economy + we got there first!" approach to a constellation vs the legacy industry "Guarantee me this thing is going to work in 15 years when the technology is obsolete anyway before you cut one piece of metal".)
Related good news is that the other ISL players (Tesat is a big one, Mynaric is another) are doing pretty well also. Their hardware is generally more robust than starlinks internal design, which hopefully encourages aspiring mega constellations to pump the brakes on simply hucking more and more satellites up while still allowing them to provide orders of magnitude more service vs legacy concepts. (IMO, as I'm sure I've opined in the past, we REALLY REALLY need to find a balance between SX's extreme "disposable economy + we got there first!" approach to a constellation vs the legacy industry "Guarantee me this thing is going to work in 15 years when the technology is obsolete anyway before you cut one piece of metal".)
Abstract says over 99% uptime. The significance of which varies by what up-time means.
Do you mean you think the links aren't 100Gbps, or that they aren't saturated?
Starlink has achieved break even cash flow
And, SpaceX will have "will have launched a a majority of all satellites cumulatively from Earth by next year."
Wow... a single new player to satellites will have launched more than all of the earth's countries in all of history in ~5 yrs.
Ambassador Cruise Line is adding Starlink to its fleet.
Ambassador Cruise Line adopts Starlink Wi-Fi
Ambassador Cruise Line adopts Starlink Wi-Fi
dhanson865
Well-Known Member
Starlink now has a standard "dishy" with no motor.
Who is eligible for new Starlink Standard?
At this time, the ability to purchase the Starlink Standard Kit is by invitation only to a small group of early customers in the US. We are unable to accommodate order requests from customers who did not receive an invitation.
Stay tuned for updates on the wider release of this product!
Who is eligible for new Starlink Standard?
At this time, the ability to purchase the Starlink Standard Kit is by invitation only to a small group of early customers in the US. We are unable to accommodate order requests from customers who did not receive an invitation.
Stay tuned for updates on the wider release of this product!
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Interesting. So it does not need to physically orient itself to optimize its connection to the constellation. Or does the user do the positioning based on guidance from the Starlink app?
dhanson865
Well-Known Member
the app will offer guidance but a smart user could do it by dead reckoning and be OK, the phased array antenna does the heavy lifting if it's pointed anywhere close to optimal.
Same is true for the motorized versions if you disable the motor or the motor fails and you manually orient it.
Though the app doesn't offer any help for those currently, the app will offer help on the new non motorized version. No telling yet if that same mode will be an option if the app knows you have a motorized dish
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