SpaceX And/Or Rocketry In General

SpaceX's Starlink internet service has been running their "Better than Nothing Beta" for months now, with thousands of users.

That test was restricted to people in a pretty small geographic area, where geometry and their choice of initial orbital inclination worked together to make service more nearly continuous in the early days than elsewhere.

Sometime recently, quite likely in the last day or so, StarLink has been accepting orders.  I don't know how wide a geographic area, nor for what countries, they'll accept orders, but if you find this intriguing, or possibly actually want to use the service, you may want to hustle right over to StarLink.com and place an order.

Here's the deal:

You provide them an email address, the street address of the location to be served, and a credit card number to which the initial, refundable US $99 deposit is charged.  They tell you, based on the location, approximately when they intend to offer service there.   For my location in Albuquerque, NM, that statement reads "Starlink will begin offering service in your area beginning mid to late 2021".

You can get a refund of the deposit at will, without reason.  Once service starts, the stated fee is $99/month.

The system will have limited user density capacity.  This should be not much of an issue in the remote unserved areas to which it is best suited, but for people who just hate Comcast who live in cities, it is a reason to sign up right away, as they specify a first-come-first-served provisioning policy.

I don't usually volunteer for moderation, but if this post is too close to advertising and needs to be deleted, I'll not argue.  But I do think some people reading about it here may be interested to hear of it.

Antennas don't well in my area either so they've been putting them on the ground instead of on roofs lately and even promised service during storms as long as they and you have power. My neighbor got one before the last hurricane came thru, the eye wall went right over me as a Cat 1, and he had service the whole time and the dish is still standing.

Some interesting reports have come in from potential customers going to Starlink.com to sign up for service in the last day or two.

One user who lives in Wisconsin, so on a latitude where the satellite density was already high enough to support the beta test months ago, reported that instead of being asked for a $99 deposit and being given an approximate service date in the future, the page was ready to bill him $579.  We all think that means they not only had dense enough satellites and an adequate ground station, but had a User Terminal kit ready to ship him.

One user and his brother, both living in South Africa, were able to make pre-orders and paid their deposits.  Their service availability projection was for 2022.

South Africa in round terms is at a similar southern latitude to Australia.  I suspect that in both cases a limiting factor for the provision of initial service may be setting up backhaul.   While the original system concept was thought to depend heavily on laser Inter-satellite links, those proved difficult and expensive to build.  There are just a very few (maybe only two) satellites with test ISLs flying, and very recently the first ten near-polar inclination birds went up with ISLs which will actually have to be used to provide far-North and far-South service.  But in the meantime, your signal is meant to go up to a (very) nearby satellite and go right back down to a StarLink ground station, which has to have an exceedingly high capacity connection to backbone Internet.

If StarLink succeeds, I suspect that at least a couple of the Australian participants in Einstein may find it a nice alternative in price/capacity to existing service offerings in their location.  So far StarLink has not even hinted at usage caps, nor at extra-usage pricing about the base $99/month.  (OK, surely there will be some in the future, but I'll guess they will be generous). Elon has said in the last day or two that their intention is to provide service worldwide at the same prices--allowing for currency translation, taxes, and shipping.  The user terminal is neither small nor light, so the shipping bit might push up the initial payment rather higher than the $579 to Wisconsin if you live halfway up K2 or such.

I'm with iiNet and pay $99 AUD per month for unlimited access ( no quota and no throttling ). The hardware is part of our National Broadband Network rollout and is fibre-to-the-node, said node being about 200m away over copper. I'm near a major city. It's pretty reliable. No case for StarLink for me ..... but there are a whole lot of small pockets of NBN unserviced areas in the desert/outback that could be.

Cheers, Mike

SN10 in the series of Flying Water Towers of Boca Chica (more formally, StarShip) flew today.  This time they lit three engines for the final flip from skydiver unpowered descent to landing.  That is one more than strictly needed, with software in place to choose what to shut down based on what is working, the better to actually land rather than again "making a crater in the right place".

Looked pretty good to me.  There were moments of discolored exhaust during ascent which had me wondering whether an engine might be burning a bit off-nominal, and there was a not exactly tiny fire burning near or at the base of the vehicle shortly after landing for a few tens of seconds, but otherwise, I did not notice anything amiss.

So very, very much has to work almost exactly right just for the thing to fly up to 10 kilometers and land intact on a piece of concrete about the size of a medium house lot.

On to supersonic.  On to energetic re-entry (the thermal tiles so far have not needed to do anything more than stay attached).

[Edit to add:  So after sitting on the ground with the immediate post-crash fire seeming to be out for some time, it just blew up.  A sudden energetic event that sent the whole vehicle flying upward.]