Yeah it holds if your starting point is at ~same radius from the centre of the earth as your orbit. Which is close enough for LEO.
I.e. if you have something orbiting in some orbit and you doubled the kinetic energy, it would (just barely) escape.
The SpaceX Thread
- Thread starter daveklingler
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I.e. if you have something orbiting in some orbit and you doubled the kinetic energy, it would (just barely) escape.
If only they weren't having problems with production scaling of raptors - so a 'oh only 2x SLS mass to orbit at half the cost' expendable could at least give them an external customer.
Appears to be similar to the early Tesla Roadster problems - executives lying to the Board and shareholders.
The only way they go bankrupt (in the next few years at least) is if the global economy crashes so hard nobody has any money to put into it. Starlink, cheap reusable space access, and the Mars colony are each once in a generation type investment opportunities. They all have the potential for hundreds or thousands of times return on investment over the next few decades. It's not overstating things to say that SpaceX has a pretty decent chance of being one of those "We own everything outside the gravity well" mega corps we see in scifi. That something like that could happen seemed absurd a decade ago, but they don't have any competitors, even nation states, and this is absolutely one of those things where the first mover wins. Even if they can't "own" things like colonies and asteroids (we'll see how the politics of all that shakes out), if they are the only ones that can get people and things there and back (not to mention some space internet Starlink variant), they might as well because they will be talking a hefty cut of everything.
So yeah, if they can't get the Raptor issues sorted quickly they are going to be burning through cash at a ridiculous rate with no way to make it back until they get Starship flying, but they won't have any shortage of cash infusions.
The Mars colony is right up there with Florida swampland in terms of one in a generation investment opportunities.
It will be interesting to see what happens if SpaceX has the capability to put astronauts on the moon before NASA can. Will Musk be content with being a key piece of the NASA system or will he poke his main benefactor in the eye by beating them to it to stroke his ego?
While I mostly agree with your post, I don't see why this part should be true. First mover wins usually applies when there's some strong network effect, or due to the creation of a standard that others can't copy (for whatever reason). But in the case of transportation to Mars, I think the first mover mostly gets stuck being too far ahead of the rest of the business ecosystem. In this case that means insufficient demand (Starship is ready, payloads aren't), and no proven way to make money. Venture capital isn't particularly concerned about profitability (it's all about the growth), but just about every other type of funding (which all have lower financial costs) wants some sort of clear ability to be payed back. Second-mover, even if they are years late to the party, won't face those issues.
Starlink too doesn't seem particularly prone to a "first mover wins" scenario. SpaceX has a big advantage for Starlink -- they have the lowest $/kg to orbit. But when someone eventually matches Starlink, I don't think SpaceX will have a locked-in advantage from having been first mover. SpaceX may instead spend years bashing down regulatory barriers, only to see the second-mover get ushered right in because they present a form of competition.
The tide will turn on massive constellations of satellites and you'll have wanted to already have yours up and working.
Pretty good chance there won't be a third player of consequence.
Pretty good chance there won't be a third player of consequence.
Usually it means a predicted reversal of conditions. For example "The stock market may be crashing, but the tide will turn!" - meaning they expect the market to go positive again instead of continuing negative.
That said, I also don't understand what Mark086 means with that post.
"Vast satellite constellations are alarming astronomers"
https://www.economist.com/international ... stronomers
"Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites risk blocking out the stars, astronomers warn"
https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/comp ... ews/968155
"Soon, 1 out of every 15 points of light in the sky will be a satellite"
https://theconversation.com/amp/soon-1- ... ite-170427
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... atellites/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/spacexs-s ... d-fix-that
It's would be easy to consider that the first couple of players get their constellations and maintenance; but that rest get blocked out by environmental concerns.
https://www.economist.com/international ... stronomers
"Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites risk blocking out the stars, astronomers warn"
https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/comp ... ews/968155
"Soon, 1 out of every 15 points of light in the sky will be a satellite"
https://theconversation.com/amp/soon-1- ... ite-170427
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... atellites/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/spacexs-s ... d-fix-that
It's would be easy to consider that the first couple of players get their constellations and maintenance; but that rest get blocked out by environmental concerns.
My default economics-think brain says that there should certainly be a viable second competitor, especially given the deep pockets of most likely candidate (Amazon), but it'll be tough for that second service to make much money I'd think. Haven't seen much in the way of demand forecasting. The capital costs of 5 figures of sats, especially launch, is so daunting that you'd have to have some pretty rock-solid demand forecasting in favor of it, given the likelihood the incumbent Starlink will be able to drop 400+ sats in a single Starship run with nothing but fuel and range cost launch expenses (and lots of amortization.) Bezos can afford to put a constellation up out of pure spite even if the demand doesn't make it profitable, but not many others could or would. And unless SpaceX hits bad regulatory headwinds, they could just dump even more sats into Starlink to soak up that demand at a much lower cost than any newcomer.
Yep. I'll continue to dream of a robotic exploration mission finding a Monolith or some other alien artifact that procs a new Great Space Race, since I can't imagine any other reason to spend trillions to put any significant number of people on Mars. LEO, sure... I'd put money on finding profitable uses for microgravity manufacturing eventually. But there's just no money to be made on Mars. I'd love to be proven wrong.UserJoe":3ncecvl3 said:
I'm not going to read all of them - the two I read are just clickbait "tempest in a teapot". Nothing that hasn't been hashed and rehashed in our discussions here, and ignoring the very effective mitigation approaches that Starlink is taking.
They are all recent and updated because of a paper being release out of Saskatchewan by an astronomer who was involved with building a simulation of worst case scenarios.
It's entirely possible it'll move the needle on these types of projects. (In spite of those of us who believe it's hyperbolic)
It's entirely possible it'll move the needle on these types of projects. (In spite of those of us who believe it's hyperbolic)
The thing is, competitors are going to have to catch up on satellite tech, user terminal tech, and launch costs. They will also be fighting an uphill battle on branding and PR, because by the time anyone has a competitor operating literally everyone, everywhere will know about Starlink. I also suspect competitors are going to have a hard time getting spectrum allocated, because Starlink will be able to tell governments, "you can either give them some spectrum and maybe have a network in a few years, or give up spectrum and we turn it on tomorrow" (the satellites will necessarily have to be able to handle very wide range of frequencies to cover different countries as they orbit). I could also see a lot of countries giving Starlink exclusive licenses for LEO internet, because it's one of those things that makes sense to be a regulated monopoly rather than competitive. It's something I'm sure counties like France would hate to have to rely on a US company for, but they also definitely aren't going to have the money to put their own constellation up. It will be a case of jumping onboard Starlink or getting left behind.
Investment-wise it's also going to be a much better bet to jump in bed with a successful Starlink than to dump the billions necessary into the second or third competitor, because traditional satellite communication companies have all gone bankrupt one or more times.
My guess is that in 10 years we'll have Starlink, some second rate competitor that has a tiny marketshare and is barely making money if they are at all, and then China.
All the astronomy stuff is vastly overblown. Aside from that, the bottom line is astronomy is much better done from space anyway, and with Starship operational "cheap" satellite observatories will finally be possible. We can put dozens of them up in Earth Sun L2. The surface of the Earth is a really shitty place to do astronomy from, even if we had the skies from the 1800s. Hell, I would not be surprised at all if SpaceX funded some themselves, just to shut everyone up about it.
Conversely there's other companies looking at this market with structural advantages for those things like Samsung.
Hm, I think you're overblowing this. The current Ku and Ka bands are directional enough Starlink is able to share the sky with geostationary satellites. Going forward everyone including SpaceX seems to be looking at V/W band, which are even more directional.
Geostationary satellites can be separated by less than a degree, a LEO constellation gets an extra dimension to spread out and they're moving to smaller wavelengths.
Not entirely true. Space works better with certain wavelengths and optical clarity, ground can throw a lot more collection area at the problem. They're good at different things. Kinda sucks that capitalism can destroy a global resource and kneecap existing infrastructure without having to take responsibility for the replacement.
Launch costs are the thing. It's a huge advantage for SpaceX, and they've got at least four or five years to push that advantage -- and they will.
But the other tech? It's cheaper for the second-mover to reach equivalent tech, or even surpass it, than it was for the first-mover to initially develop it. The second mover hires experienced talent and does as much reverse engineering as they can. Having a head-start doesn't count as a first-mover advantage, so long as the second mover can catch up (enough) on a reasonable timetable. You can be sure that every other LEO internet company has bought starlink terminals and torn them apart. They won't necessarily leap-frog SpaceX, but their development costs will be lower and profitablity sooner. The thing that typically gives a first mover an advantage here is patents -- you patent all the ways to do something that you can think of, then tie up anyone who tries to follow with lawsuits. I don't think SpaceX will utilize that particular first mover advantage. Or at least, not heavily.
None of that sounds likely to me. Governments take a long time to free up spectrum from lower-importance uses. They're not just going to have it sitting around waiting to hand over to SpaceX as soon as it's needed by them. By the time the spectrum is available, any second movers may be far enough along to bid on it. SpaceX may outbid them in some countries / markets, but I don't think any government will have a preference for giving spectrum to the current market leader just-because. Governments like competition, unless politicians are paid to think otherwise. Do you think SpaceX is likely to spend big on lobbying to ensure they get a preference on future spectrum offerings?
If France has two US-based companies to choose from, they're going to license additional spectrum to SpaceX over second-mover because why?
As for SpaceX getting all the free-press, sure, they will. And all the hit-pieces too. Once second-mover's constellation is running, yes they have to pay for advertising, but they have a simple pitch: "Like Starlink, but Y", where Y can be anything from "Not run by that asshole Musk" to "$5 a month cheaper" to "Without those growing pains that everyone reported on about Starlink (but which were solved two years ago)".
They'll invest in both, to the degree they're able. SpaceX has launch cost advantage, no doubt. Others will have a lower-dev cost second-mover advantage. If SpaceX kept their launch cost advantage, but someone else had already pioneered the LEO internet market, then as a second-mover SpaceX be in a better, not worse, position.
I think we'll see low profitability for both SpaceX and its competitor anywhere that they are directly competing and there is sufficient bandwidth available to meet demand. LEO internet is ridiculously heavy on fixed costs, but once you've sunk your money into launching the constellation, it's tempting lower your prices until the birds are operating at full capacity in a given region. So long as everyone is capacity-constrained everyone will stay fatly profitable. As soon a capacity exceeds demand in a particular region, prices will plummet. That is, I think competitor's revenue will fall in sync with each other, it won't be one gets rich while the other starves.
In more urban areas, where there just isn't enough spectrum to satisfy demand, both will remain profitable indefinitely.
SpaceX advantage will be scale due to cheap launch costs.
They'll be onto v2 sats and 3rd shell before any competition gets anything up and running.
They'll be churning out a million consumer units a year before the competition have anything up and running.
Its tricky to convince consumers to spend more for a worse service.
They'll be onto v2 sats and 3rd shell before any competition gets anything up and running.
They'll be churning out a million consumer units a year before the competition have anything up and running.
Its tricky to convince consumers to spend more for a worse service.
Once you get past the highly-knowledgeable, bleeding-edge adopter market, it's super easy (barely an inconvenience). You just say you're better. With an asterisk.
The asteriskin USA usually points to some anti competitive legislature they've bought ...
I was quite surprised Saturday night when I looked up and saw this week’s Starlink launch overhead. First time seeing a Starlink train and I am not sure I did a particularly effective job explaining it to my tech-averse people pleasing mother in law.
Handheld iPhone 13, pleasantly surprised how the phone and its software created only a sorta-potato image.
SpaceX launches don't even get a post anymore (IXPE). The banality of LEO...
Ars may be behind or understaffed, especially over the weekend...
SpaceX launches Starlink satellites from California on unusual coast-hugging trajectory
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/12/18/s ... rajectory/
(and live as of the particular time this post was made)
Live coverage: SpaceX ready to launch Turkish comsat from Cape Canaveral
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/12/18/f ... us-center/
SpaceX launches Starlink satellites from California on unusual coast-hugging trajectory
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/12/18/s ... rajectory/
(and live as of the particular time this post was made)
Live coverage: SpaceX ready to launch Turkish comsat from Cape Canaveral
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/12/18/f ... us-center/
On one of the launches the rocket was being used for the 11th time.
Seems quite reasonable. Takes time to compose 18,000 responses (even with a lot of copy/paste) and then the FAA needs time to review.
SpaceX can use the extra time to research Elon's new idea for StarShip.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-upgrade-plans-elon-musk-2021/
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-upgrade-plans-elon-musk-2021/
Nah - you don't do 18k responses.
"The project recieved 12.5k responses generally in favor of the project, and 6k generally opposed. Substantive responses brough up the following categories of concerns
a) sound/noise <blahblahblah>
b) dune impacts <blahblahblah>
c) transportation impacts ... etc"
So specific, different points are addressed, general points are addressed, but you don't really need to compose a reply for every single one.
alterSchwede
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Thank you for posting that! I clicked through at T-54 seconds.
Is this another 53 sat launch?
Is this another 53 sat launch?