Re: [Starlink] Starship's 4th flight test was magnificent

[David Lang <david@lang.hm>]

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Alexandre Petrescu wrote:

> Le 10/06/2024 à 01:50, Dave Taht via Starlink a écrit :
>> 
>> [...] seeing starlink maintain connectivity through nearly it all of that 
>> plasma was amazing, too.
>
> I dont understand: the rocket body and head ('starship')  where connected to 
> starlink sats during flight?  Wouldnt be enough to transmit straight to 
> ground?  Or maybe the entire trajectory is too long too distanced from ground 
> receivers?

Yes, unlike other rockets, Starship has multiple starlink dishes on it and has a 
high bandwidth connection through them during it's flight. There are only so 
many ground stations around the world for rockets to talk to directly (and 
especially over the large oceans and Africa there are substantial gaps in 
coverage)

the Starliner flight for example, only had telemetry and audio, no video during 
it's flight. The first Starliner test flight had the capsule misbehaving furing 
one of it's gaps in coverage, which prevented controllers on the ground from 
fixing the problem fast enough to salvage the flight.

Also, during reentry, the plasma tha builds up blocks any radio down to the 
ground, and with anything other than a starlink, it even blocks radios up to 
satellites. A combination of the large size of the Starship, and the Starlink 
capabilities makes it the first rocket that is able to provide live feeds 
throughout the entire reentry.

For this mission, there were some gaps in the coverage, Elon has said they will 
be repositioning the starlink antennas on future flights to eliminate the blind 
spots and get continuous coverage.

The Polaris Dawn private flights are doing experimentation with laser tie-ins to 
the starlink constellations. NASA has the TDRS system to provide near global 
coverage, see this video from Scott Manley on the topic 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42GpWBSwjZM

David Lang

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