[Starlink] a bit more starship news

[Dave Taht]

Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M

Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
(and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]

This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
offshore*, in the comments.

Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
projecting 4-5 flights this year.

https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536

I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
size.

Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)

[1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536

--
AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC