Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

https://tiblur.com/post/462038779695576304265368

by max_hammer • 3 years ago

76 76 3 years ago

bagels6• 3 years ago

Is this intentional? Is it just happening for newly launched satellites?

vasco• 3 years ago

If you read the article you can answer both of your questions. The Sun has no intentions, and solar flares don't choose cohorts of satellites.

complex_exp• 3 years ago

How do solar flares burn satellites? I thought they just mess up the ionosphere and inhibit communication.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

I read the article and have no clarity still. They say it correlates with increased sun activity but no actual proof.

bagels6• 3 years ago

The article doesn't say when the satellites that are being lost were launched.

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.

Timshel• 3 years ago

It might not choose but we don't know how similar those cohorts are. It's not the same situation if they already improved the shielding and only old satellites are impacted.

npunt• 3 years ago

Lost $250M using the advertised launch price of $67M for Falcon 9, which of course is way higher than what it actually costs SpaceX.

fooker• 3 years ago

The fuel costs about half a million.

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.

elihu• 3 years ago

Don't they waste the upper stage on Falcon 9 launches? (That being one of the reasons they want to transition to using Starship.)

6nf2• 3 years ago

The fairings alone add another million. The whole upper stage is not re-used at all.

m_mueller• 3 years ago

does it? why can they then sell it for not much more and run a profit?

inemesitaffia2• 3 years ago

Profit is price - cost

Rebelgecko2• 3 years ago

There's reason to be skeptical of that. I think their most recent profitable quarter (maybe their only profitable quarter?) was with a profit margin of ~3%.

Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets

Nevermark• 3 years ago

SpaceX puts a lot money into research and development, and build out of infrastructure for future use.

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.

panick21_2• 3 years ago

Not really questionable. They are building Starship, Starship infrastructure, new factories for Starlink, upgrading existing factories, designing new Starlink version, deploying Starlink ground infrastructure, selling Starlink terminals at negative mergin, at a are developing Raptor v3 and commissioning the factory for it. And of course most of those launches are for Starlink so they don't really produce profit.

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.

pbmonster• 3 years ago

...and completely ignoring cost of lost hardware. Aren't those satellites several $100k a piece?

vardump• 3 years ago

I think they're prepared to lose satellites, that's the nature of large swarms.

Some losses might be intentional for safety after damage or low propellant. They really can't afford to put any debris on their orbits.

kvdveer• 3 years ago

IIRC debris is not a major concern in the orbits Starlink is using. There is a non-trivial amount of atmospheric drag. This will slow down anything without active propulsion, causing them to drop from orbit, and eventually burn up.

modeless2• 3 years ago

Lost 200 but launched 345, almost all of which are the latest upgraded version. The satellites are designed to last 5 years (the lifetime is limited by propellant because of atmospheric drag at their low altitude) and the first batches were launched 4 years ago now. As the constellation matures they will be de-orbiting satellites about as fast as they launch them.

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.

threatripper• 3 years ago

How many satellites can be launched at once? I assume that the number of satellites per orbit will be limited and changing the orbit would take extra fuel that either the launch vehicle or the satellite has to provide.

bagels6• 3 years ago

They typically launch 60 on Falcon 9, last time I checked.

raesene92• 3 years ago

The article says average of 50

usrusr3• 3 years ago

Launch way more, and I'd imagine the sweet spot for the amount of fuel each satellite gets to shift up considerably: with a launch the size of starship they can saturate the orbits reasonably reachable from that launch for decades (spares remain in higher orbits with less drag I think) and giving one satellite more fuel is cheaper than deploying two satellites with less fuel each. And achieve far more than twice the runtime, because the fuel complement in today's starlinklings is certainly quite far from 100% mass fraction. The current compromise is far quick global reach running on F9, with a generous dose of iteration.

youngtaff• 3 years ago

Until all those sats re-enter, burn up and pollute the upper atmosphere

raesene92• 3 years ago

What's not clear from the article is whether the ones lost were old ones or newer ones.

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.

justapassenger3• 3 years ago

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.

This is just wishful thinking without any data backing it up.

onethought6• 3 years ago

Starship is substantially bigger than falcon 9, with significant more mass to orbit capability. And runs on a cheaper propellant. Also Elon has publicly stated starlink s long term viability requires starship.

Which data are you looking for?

mlindner2• 3 years ago

It's unfortunate that this misinformation is being upvoted on this site. The headline is completely incorrect, as is the statistics they're using to base the article on.

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.

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

That's about a 4.4% loss (200 of 4500 satelites which are expected to have a life of 5 years), and the internal cost to Starlink of a new launch is probably far less than the $67 million 'retail' cost of a SpaceX launch.

codegladiator• 3 years ago

So we have reached that stage of Universal Paperclips

jefozabuss• 3 years ago

Be careful googling this if you have a weak resistance to incremental games like I do as some hours will fly by quicky...

eunos2• 3 years ago

Speaking of Starlink, what piqued my interest is that Huawei Mate 60 incorporated satellite call module without being bulky. It is not yet able to do data transfer but in case they can, isnt that practically a portable starlink equivalent?

inemesitaffia2• 3 years ago

More like Iridium

cf141q5325• 3 years ago

Thanks for mentioning that. Its the pro version and it apparently entails voice and text. Which makes it sound more like satellite phones then internet over satellite. Still, quite the interesting feature.

chrismorgan2• 3 years ago

Starlink is low earth orbit, around 550km up, adding best-case latency of under 4ms (550km*2/c ≈ 3.67ms). That allows an excellent service.

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.)

wkat42422• 3 years ago

The mate 60 uses beidou sats which are not quite geostationary but also in a pretty high orbit.

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.

eunos2• 3 years ago

There's a a Chinese plan for Guo Wang equivalent

https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Going forward what is the expected yearly attrition rate? So how much have they spend a year to keep replacing the natural losses of their satellites?

grouseway• 3 years ago

Is this because they are making a trade-off between surving some amount of solar flare activity vs increasing satellite weight by hardening them to radation?

I imagine it's preventable since the ISS and other large orbiters stay functional forever.

mlindner2• 3 years ago

It's unfortunate that this misinformation is being upvoted on this site. The headline is completely incorrect, as is the statistics they're using to base the article on.

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.

Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer

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