Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news

[David Lang <david@lang.hm>]

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the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2 satellites, 
they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a Falcon 9.

I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship later this 
year.

Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of Starlink having 
positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023

David Lang

On Sun, 30 Apr 2023, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:

> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 05:48:20 -0700
> From: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Reply-To: Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
> To: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Subject: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
> 
> 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
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