Seems to me like the long term viability of Starlink (if it's not already profitable) will be assured if Starship meets its goals. They'll be able to launch way more satellites at once, for less per launch, and with faster turnaround.
If they're losing ones that were close to their max. life anyway that's possibly no great loss, however if they were newer satellites on top of expected attrition that's more of a concern.
https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/17055628292254106...
https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html
There has only ever been 350 starlink satellites that have deorbited, and only 8 within the last two months.
This is just wishful thinking without any data backing it up.
Which data are you looking for?
Some losses might be intentional for safety after damage or low propellant. They really can't afford to put any debris on their orbits.
Satellite phones (and I’ve confirmed this applies to the Huawei Mate 60) connect with satellites in geostationary orbits, meaning an altitude of about 35,786km, adding latency of around 240ms (35786km*2/c ≈ 238.74ms). This can be acceptable for some purposes, but harms things far more than you might imagine. (Source: personal experience with the Australian NBN SkyMesh or whatever it was called before NBN took it over, only once, about five years back. Look, a lot of the internet is located in the USA, and many things perform vastly worse from Australia than from the USA, e.g. several second page loads instead of under one second, and this satellite connection was basically that but even for stuff in Australia, and several times as bad for stuff in America.)
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.
I imagine it's preventable since the ISS and other large orbiters stay functional forever.
They could be bringing down the earlier versions of satellites intentionally to replace them with new ones.
Yes, the Sun doesn't care when the satellite was launched, but the current orbit of the satellite and drag profile will decide which ones come back down, if not also applied thrust.
https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/17055628292254106...
https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html
There has only ever been 350 starlink satellites that have deorbited, and only 8 within the last two months.
Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets
And while they raised a lot of money, it isn't actually that much. If they had 0 or negative margin on launches the company wouldn't be nearly sustainable.
That they made any profit at all is a damn miracle.
> Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets
There very clearly is. Every launch company has talked about this. The fixed cost for infrastructure, boats, launch teams and so on is absolutely huge. That is why so many New Space companies bet their company on launching often.
At the same time SpaceX is now recovering fairing on almost all launches. Landings have been perfect. Development is done. And Fixed cost are distributed over a whole lot of launches. They can now fly the newer cores 15-20 times.
The Upper Stage is the biggest cost, people estimate it between 5-15M. And then 10-20M in fixed cost, labor and recovery hardware amortisation. I think it can't really be more then 35M, I would guess less.
So if the company is breaking even, then its manufacturing & launch business must have good margins.
Which means, self launched rockets cost SpaceX noticeably less than their commercial pricing.
Beyond that it's mostly people's times and materials they have stockpiled for economies of scale.
I would guess the lost satellites cost a bit more to manufacture that to launch in a reused Falcon 9.
Anyway, my point was just that this stuff isn’t equivalent to Starlink. For what satellite phones do, GEO or whatever similar is fine, but the appeal of Starlink certainly requires that it be LEO.
If this is the case it would be too bad though, because Tiantong-1 is indeed geostationary (leading to suitability issues for emergency comms like needing visibility to the Southern horizon) but also only available in the China region.
Starship is part of economic equation (or just a diversion when it comes to starlink, as they were suppose to go bankrupt already if starship wasn’t flying biweekly last year, and people didn’t cancel their holiday plans to report to work, according to the Musk himself), but saying that it solves the profitability of the business, is like saying that low price of fuel solves profitability of the logistics business.
Not sure about the rest of that axe you wish to grind.
It’s exactly what op said and caused me to engage in this thread. “Seems to me like the long term viability of Starlink (if it's not already profitable) will be assured if Starship meets its goals”
And the spend about $2 billion on Starship per year.
So $6 billion in, $2 billion on Starship, $4 billion in other costs.
In 2022 they launched 61 times, which is $65 million per launch on average, they charge $67 million per launch.
They got $2 billion from NASA for 2022.
In 2022 they launched 3 crewed missions, 2 for NASA and 1 private.
Starlink isn’t their only income source.
That said, the satellites have an expected life of 5 years so it's not necessarily a big deal. Their planned constellation is so large that it's dependent on having a nearly continuous churn of replacement satellites.
* This is a bit of an oversimplification
Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch.
So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-s...
So if they all burned up today it would be around a 6% yearly increase, globally? (1663 / 5200 * 5). And that's probably the most forgiving estimate I could come up with, I think your ~20% number is more accurate for future projection purposes given most of the mass was launched in a much shorter timespan.
Then the real question is what effect does space dust have on the earth's atmosphere (if any).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Starlink_...
See how your argument is wrong ?
This is basically the reality of government leaders jetting in to global climate change conferences.
Lots of people incorrectly think that the upper atmosphere is pristine and you would never normally get metal up there. In fact thousands of tons of micrometeorites hit the earth each year, depositing lots of rock and metal up there.
This means that the burning satellites cause an increase in metals deposited in the upper atmosphere. We’re not going from nothing to many tones. We’re going from many tones to slightly more tones.
There is an open question if the increase is a problem, but it’s less likely to be a problem than if we were going from nothing to something.
4 or 5 years of lifetime for literal tons of satellites is definitely not sustainable