Does anyone have this? And how well does it work? Article here. SpaceX's new, smaller Starlink satellite-internet dish is a rectangle - take a look at the new design
If you never really come out of beta testing stage, how many lives have you improved?Gotta give musk credit for improving peoples lives
Starlink dropped the beta program last month. Of the 1800+ satellites launched so far, the overall failure rate has been a bit less than 2.5%, or about typical for the satellite industry as a whole. The initial ~5% failure rate has rapidly dropped with each successive launch. The initial launches also included testing and sacrificial sats that were deliberately de-orbited for internal and NASA testing purposes. SpaceX has been working closely with amateur and professional astronomy organizations to minimize the impact of their satellites by reducing reflectivity and other measures.
Yet the kits aren't much easier to get now than they were a year ago. They're dribbling out pretty slowly.
At least two entire generations have been de-orbited. The first was pretty much a test mule and there weren't many of them but the second was pretty much at scale.
While paint can improve the visibility of the satellites so that they're less likely to be spotted by the naked eye, it doesn't uncover what they block.
Chip shortages are slowing production of the user terminals. It's hard to ramp up production for a worldwide market without the raw materials needed. Starlink currently has 900,000+ subscribers and could hit a million by the end of the year.
Quite a few of those satellites are in geostationary or otherwise very predictable orbits. We're talking about adding thousands more and having them racing hither and yon as well as altering their orbits as necessary to avoid collisions.
Every one of the Starlink sats operates in a very predictable orbit. There are even public web sites that track them. The only sats that are running "hither and yon" are the ones that have been deactivated or failed and lost communications and/or power that have been there for years. Heck, I saw a complaint not long ago from an astronomer that was upset because the ISS passed through his long exposure shot and ruined it. A few minutes research, and he would have known exactly when and where it would be overhead. If you think the LEO sats are going to be a huge problem, then maybe you should be talking to the folks at NASA, RFSA, ESA, CNSA, and the other space agencies, since apparently they're not that concerned...
A couple of corrections to my post. The 900,000 figure above should have been 100,000+, and Starlink could hit a million by the end of 2022, not this year.
At least until they see an impending collision and change their orbit. The question is whether they change back or keep going in the new orbit.
All active satellites are capable of maneuvering when needed. An anti-collision maneuver rarely requires a major orbital change. The Starlink sats receive anti-collision updates as needed from the ground stations, and the laser links will add more reliable communications in those areas where there are no ground stations, such as mid-ocean.
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