Tin tin News

[bxr140]

Whike Tim Farrar is a pessimist and seems to have a SpaceX problem (check out his body of work on both), he’s also usually right.

Twitter

 

[HVM]

You made typo there, it's full of shite, how the sentence should end. Opinion pieces and nothing more; retweeting mr. Spiegel tells it all...

 

[bxr140]

Opinion pieces and nothing more...

I sympathize with the frustration associated with having to sort out fact vs opinion; whether you or I like it or not that the tweet contains some pretty specific underlying points that anyone would be hard pressed to call "opinion".

Call it spin? Smear? Agenda-driven? Premature conclusions? Probably all of the above. But...its hard to explain why both A and B are (or were, two months ago) still in their initial orbits, half the altitude of where they're supposed to operate.

Eric Ralph on Twitter

 

[oneday]

Perhaps they’re experimenting with a lower orbit because that would provide faster ping?

Just a shot in the dark.

 

[bxr140]

Perhaps they’re experimenting with a lower orbit because that would provide faster ping?

Anything's possible, though I suspect latency isn't what's driving the current orbit. I think Elon once said they were previously operating at ~25ms, and that would have been at their current ~500km altitude. Farmer's Math says raising the orbit to their planned ~1100km would add ~4ms onto the round trip. Even if you fudge that to an additional 10-15ms, that's still a pretty solid link.

There's also some practical reasons you'd want to be higher too--notably, the higher orbit will increase the duration of each pass over a ground station, which would increase the amount of testing they could do each pass. When you're only talking about minutes a pass to begin with, seconds make a difference. Completely from memory I think at ~500km you're looking at something like 7 min of contact per ground station pass.

What's surprising to me is the apparent disconnect between a historically very open communication from SpaceX and Elon (especially with things that aren't going as planed), the most recent SpaceX party line of "its all good" for the pathfinders, and a clearly off-nominal planned activity of the pathfinders. The cynic in me wonders if Elon finally got the "dude, maybe STFU for a while" message...

Anyway, the more interesting question here is whether SpaceX can satisfy their filings/plans with the ITU and FCC who are expecting them to demonstrate at the higher altitude, and the even more interesting question is if that even matters anymore. These mega constellations are all breaking new ground of international law and its unlikely (or at least I hope it is unlikely) the ITU and/or FCC are going to shut down multi-billion dollar endeavors because of a few clerical issues. Especially when, at least with SpaceX, the progress is more than pushing paper through design reviews and such--they actually have stuff on orbit!