SpaceX Starlink Factory In Texas Will Speed Up Production of Dishy McFlatface (arstechnica.com) 88
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SpaceX says it is building a factory in Austin, Texas, to design systems that will help make satellite dishes, Wi-Fi routers, and other equipment for its Starlink satellite broadband network. The news comes from a job posting for an automation and controls engineer position flagged in a story Tuesday by local news channel KXAN. "To keep up with global demand, SpaceX is breaking ground on a new, state of the art manufacturing facility in Austin, TX," the job posting said. "The Automation & Controls Engineer will play a key role as we strive to manufacture millions of consumer facing devices that we ship directly to customers (Starlink dishes, Wi-Fi routers, mounting hardware, etc)."
The factory apparently won't make the dishes and routers on site but will instead design systems that improve the manufacturing process. "Specifically, they will design and develop control systems and software for production line machinery -- ultimately tackling the toughest mechanical, software, and electrical challenges that come with high-volume manufacturing, all while maintaining a focus on flexibility, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use," the job posting said. Starlink is in beta and is serving over 10,000 customers, and it has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy up to 5 million user terminals in the US. SpaceX calls this piece of hardware "Dishy McFlatface," and it receives transmissions from SpaceX's low-Earth orbit satellites. Starlink has been charging $99 per month plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. Starlink recently began taking preorders for service that would become available in the second half of 2021.
The factory apparently won't make the dishes and routers on site but will instead design systems that improve the manufacturing process. "Specifically, they will design and develop control systems and software for production line machinery -- ultimately tackling the toughest mechanical, software, and electrical challenges that come with high-volume manufacturing, all while maintaining a focus on flexibility, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use," the job posting said. Starlink is in beta and is serving over 10,000 customers, and it has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy up to 5 million user terminals in the US. SpaceX calls this piece of hardware "Dishy McFlatface," and it receives transmissions from SpaceX's low-Earth orbit satellites. Starlink has been charging $99 per month plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. Starlink recently began taking preorders for service that would become available in the second half of 2021.
What they need (Score:2)
is a small portable antenna you can plug your phone or tablet into.
Re:What they need (Score:4, Funny)
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watch this space
I see what you did there.
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They're not even ready for trucks, RVs, and boats, though that is obviously coming. This would be ideal for those, as well as for in-flight WiFi on airplanes. Many people assumed this would replace AT&T for connectivity in Tesla cars, but cellular coverage is much better in many environments where there are obstructions blocking direct satellite contact. Besides the antenna size, that's also what will stop this from being an option for phone service.
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Would it be any harder to receive than satellite radio? I rarely had issues with that in my car. I don't recall it cutting out unless I was going under a bridge or something. Unlike the radio though, most everything you'll stream over the internet will be buffered for the few seconds you're under the bridge.
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The motors just get the plane oriented in roughly the right direction during installation. It doesn't move much, or at least it shouldn't, after it is installed.
All real-time tracking is done by the phased array.
There are a lot of trade-offs in a design like this. The good news is that you can usually trade processing for stuff you want, which means that faster CPUs and better software should give them headroom over time.
Re: What they need (Score:3)
Re: What they need (Score:1, Offtopic)
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$100 per month for unlimited traffic is very good by satellite internet standards. It is however expensive compared to what most urban users pay for broadband.
As you say it's a matter of speculation what their long term pricing strategy will be, I suspect a lot depends on whether they can drive down the cost of "dishy".
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It was suppose to be a low-cost option for rural people but ended up being one of the most expensive ways to access the Internet. Could be early adopter prices, who knows.
It's definitely early adopter pricing. SpaceX even admitted publicly they were having trouble assembling the phased array antennas at anything like the cost they had hoped for. The job listing tangentially refers to that problem—they want better factory automation, to get manufacturing costs down. It's definitely quite expensive right now. If they can get it down to the price of a typical cable modem, they'll be doing extremely well. More likely it will always cost more than that, just because it
Re: What they need (Score:1)
What SpaceX needs to do is build the items in the USA, not build a "factory" that designs things.
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"What SpaceX needs to do is build the items in the USA, not build a "factory" that designs things."
What you need to do, is understand that they design the robots that will build the items, humans need not apply.
Lessons learned. (Score:1)
Hopefully this plant will have a massive backup power plant next door.
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The problem is when it hits closer to 99.9%; completely agree that four nines is great for almost everything. Many Texas utilities are closer to 99.5% for large blocks of residential customers after the last fiasco, averaged over 10 years!!
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Depends on what window you want to look at. I live in Houston and so far this year, it was out for 3 days during the winter storm, plus another 12 hours a couple days ago for no discernible reason.. That's something like 97.2%.
After Hurricane Ike my power was out for a solid two weeks, which puts it at a maximum 96.1% reliability for that year, possibly less if there were outages outside of the hurricane (I don't remember.)
Most years won't be that bad, but it's pretty obvious that some kind of investment an
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But yeah after such a massive outage it would take years to earn back those 9's.
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It was the power to the pumps that fed gas into the generators that was the biggest problem - far bigger than (and the cause of) homes and hospitals losing power. In days not too long past, those pumps ate the fuel they were pumping, making them immune to blackouts.
If they hadn't been converted to grid-power, Texans would be laughing about getting their week of winter out of the way early in the century.
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Musk has this covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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"Hopefully this plant will have a massive backup power plant next door."
They have a "big banana" battery.
Re:Rain? (Score:4, Informative)
From beta testers, rain and snow in the air and cloud cover don't seem to be too much of a problem. Degraded speed if the rain/snow is bad enough, but not interrupted service. Too much snow accumulating on the dish can cut service, but the dish is self-heating (from the radios consuming power, not dedicated heating elements), and they've said that they'll be adding firmware support for bumping up the power to melt snow faster when it needs it.
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> (from the radios consuming power, not dedicated heating element
There have definitely been firmware updates to improve "snow melt mode", so it's not merely a side effect.
Mount your dish where icicles will fall away, not bridge to the deck. The motors should not be prevented from moving by ice. The included tripod is not tall enough for certain climactic conditions.
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"Honey, the porn is out again, send the kids out to wipe down the antenna!"
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The dish isn't actually a dish, the surface is completely flat. It's actually a phased array antenna, so some sort of wiper system could theoretically work. However, at the moment, the snow melt system they put in the firmware appears to work well enough based on beta feedback.
In terms of the weight, remember that the motors don't move the thing during operation, only during initial setup. All the actual beam steering is done electronically via the phased array antenna.
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I had satellite TV for a decade, and rain would not hurt the signal bad enough, a few obscure channels I would lose briefly but so what. What killed the signal would be a tree limb growing in the way or it not being aimed precisely. The only serious outages I had were with the typical fights against Starz or other media holders over how much the satellite and cable companies should pay.
Now this would be great for download I suspect, but I don't know how they're planning on doing uploads. Current satelli
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It's pretty different from satellite TV, becaues that was a single satellite in a fixed position that you had to point a dish at. Starlink isn't actually a dish, it's a flat phased-array antenna. The motors will point the dish in roughly the right direction, and then the actual beam steering is done electronically using the phased array. Something like trees will block it for the duration that the beam between you and the satellite moves through the tree branch. The signal would then be clear again once the
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Ah, and tree cover is a blocker, the dish must be set up where it has a sufficiently unobstructed view of the sky. How much of a gap in the trees is required will reduce over time as they get more satellites up there, but for now it needs a pretty open view of the sky.
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Ah, and tree cover is a blocker, the dish must be set up where it has a sufficiently unobstructed view of the sky. How much of a gap in the trees is required will reduce over time as they get more satellites up there, but for now it needs a pretty open view of the sky.
A friend is getting it sometime in the near future - I'll have to keep checking in with him. It will definitely not work for me. Bummer.
The good news is, there is a lot of new fiber being strung in our area. So I'll go with that if it runs by my house.
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The Starlink app is pretty neat, you can try downloading it to see if you have coverage. Basically you can go to where you will put the dish and use it uses augmented reality to draw on the screen on the camera feed where the bounds of the reception will be, and then anything intruding inside that region will be an obstruction to the dish. You don't need the service AFAIK, you can use the app to check in advance if you've got enough of a view. But yeah, it currently needs a very broad view, which will reduc
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The "starship" came down way way WAY too fast. Now if you're watching on TV it looks great but that's because the cameras were a long ways away. Basically the ship guided and steered itself correctly except for slowing down enough. This is like a billion dollar game of Lunar Lander.
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The "starship" came down way way WAY too fast. Now if you're watching on TV it looks great but that's because the cameras were a long ways away. Basically the ship guided and steered itself correctly except for slowing down enough. This is like a billion dollar game of Lunar Lander.
Good analogy!
One of the things I was wondering about - when we're landing on Mars in a couple years, How are the new martians going to get down from their lofty perch and get to the surface of their new home? rappel?
Re:Rain? (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, I worked in aerospace manufacturing. One of the aircraft I worked on (very minor amount) is at Udvar-Hazy. Admittedly I'm not going to see it from a layman's perspective.
I'd call it a partially successful landing. Yes, a perfect landing would be better. But if they got the data they needed, the overall launch, test vehicle and goals were complete successes. In this case, they were able to take off, flip, the flaps worked, engines mostly seemed fine. Landing legs not so much, which was a known and publicly acknowledged shortcoming. I have no insider knowledge but from watching the launches, my guess is the launch goals were to refine the flaps, engine gimbal and obviously landing approach. It is pure speculation, but I suspect they hit their expected metrics. I suspect SN11 or SN12 will be fine. So again, partial success on landing, potentially completely successful project milestone
For someone with an manufacturing background, this is the equivalent of 27 tractor trailers being put into bundles of 9, stacked 3 high. For normal aerospace, this would have been a multi-decade project at 10 to 100 times the cost. I don't know how normal folks would consider the landing or particularly care, but I am extremely impressed. I wish them the best and do hope SN11 through SN15 are very successful.
In my current occupation, I'm already working on very rough budgetary numbers for hopefully purchasing a lot of uplinks from Starlink. Hopefully for 2022, but probably 2023. Their claims of potential eventual 10GE downlinks is enough for us to at least spec out potential hardware purchases somewhere around 2023-2025. If SpaceX does get low latency satellite to satellite direct communication working, we expect to pay them a lot of money because we have facilities on the opposite side of the world and we'd love lower latency network links than fiber.
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After SN11, they're going straight to SN15. They got enough data from SN8 and SN9 to skip what they're going to test in 12-14. SN15 is using a different stainless steel and a different manufacture technique.
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I have it. Rain and snow and clouds are no problem. You do need a clear view of a part of the sky that is free from obstructions, they have an app that you can use to find good locations to place the antenna.
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Yep, exactly why I can't use the service. When I got the email from Starlink, I got out my credit card & was ready to order... then I stopped myself & thought it might be better if I at least read the FAQ. Unobstructed view needed, get the app & check. I got their app for my phone & as I suspected, no possible why can I install that dish anywhere on my property that would work. The trees are taller that the highest peak of our rather tall 2 story condo. It just won't work.
Now I am think
Re:Rain? (Score:5, Informative)
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Musk didn't have to "find a loophole in the laws of physics". The fact is that the physics involved are more favorable for satellites in LEO than those in GEO. First of all, given the MUCH shorter distance to cover, it is within the realm of possibility to overcome some rain fade with a simple power boost.
Well, We shall see. I've been on the back end of RF disasters, and they've all started out with dismissing questions about some basic physics. But just like say - Broadband over power line, and I'll be very happy if I'm wrong. It sounds like Spacex has all of the problems ironed out, and people will have internet connectivity at that 99 percent level.
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Well, We shall see. I've been on the back end of RF disasters, and they've all started out with dismissing questions about some basic physics. But just like say - Broadband over power line, and I'll be very happy if I'm wrong. It sounds like Spacex has all of the problems ironed out, and people will have internet connectivity at that 99 percent level.
Whether or not it actually works is no longer theoretical. There are thousands of dishes installed now, including some in the UK. There are enough of them that surely some HAM would have complained if it were as disastrous as broadband over powerlines.
Apropos of nothing, it's really weird referring to it as a dish when the antenna elements are not actually a dish. It's flat. The dish shape is a convenient form factor to shroud the various bits that are mounted behind the antenna array, including the aim
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Whether or not it actually works is no longer theoretical. There are thousands of dishes installed now, including some in the UK. There are enough of them that surely some HAM would have complained if it were as disastrous as broadband over powerlines.
You're not paying attention, and assuming that I was talking about the interference potential. I was talking about how there are technical issues that might be a problem. BPL ultimately failed because it brought DSL level internet that could be knocked out by a trucker with a 5 watt CB radio.
Will rain fade affect Starlink? People assure me that it iwll defnitely not be affected by rain fade. If so, they need to share their invulnerability with the world - And one of Muskie's scienist needs a Nobel prize
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Will rain fade affect Starlink? People assure me that it iwll defnitely not be affected by rain fade. If so, they need to share their invulnerability with the world - And one of Muskie's scienist needs a Nobel prize too - But hey - Y'all know a lot more about this stuff than I do and if you say it's good, I'll declare defeat and say that Styarlinkk i9s immune to rainfade, and do some research to correct the inaccuracy of previous research.
Starlink is affected but not disabled by rain fade. Invulnerable, it isn't. How badly affected it ultimately is remains to be seen. Phased array antennas have unusual performance characteristics compared to discrete antennas, and there's a lot of software involved. And it also helps that they're FCC licensed for 14 watts of transmit power from their terminals, which is quite close to what geosynchronous providers are allowed, but with a destination that's drastically closer.
Is Starlink immune to rain fa
Re: Rain? (Score:2)
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> or place a lower bandwidth auxiliary channel at a lower frequency
The design spec is three frequencies to avoid this problem.
AFAICT, only one is active but a blizzard only reduced my speed by about 10Mbps.
Tesla Partnership (Score:3)
They should partner with Tesla on this. Not for communicating with their cars, but for integrating the antenna into a Tesla solar roof. They could also do a free roof installation of the current system with any solar installation.
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> When this thing no longer needs 100+Watts
I don't know about 10W but power reduction as a top goal is now public information so stay tuned for firmware updates. Software can do very nice things with extracting signal from noise.
Without a doubt there will be improvements over the beta hardware.
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> for integrating the antenna into a Tesla solar roof.
It's an aimable phased antenna array with a router in a parabolic dish. Roofs are more difficult to steer.
I've installed eight of them so far and getting a clear view of the sky (mostly trees) is by far the most difficult part. Strong hardware and tall masts.
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Now I suddenly want a steerable roof.... ;)
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as for me, I'd rather the steer on my grill and in my freezer than on my roof, and I'd rather not pay for the extra structural support needed to not collapse under that steer . . .
and my preference for convertibles only magnifies this . . .
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Yes, but that's for the current hardware.
What if they could merge signals from multiple antennas facing different directions, such as from several different roof tiles facing different directions, possibly including the ridge at the top of the roof?
Show of hands please for Starlink Coverage in '21? (Score:3)
Just checking my home address here in rural New Zealand I get "Starlink is targeting coverage in your area in mid to late 2021."
So soon?!
I didn't think they were covering anywhere outside of N.America so quickly?
Is this a indication of an aggressive and ambitious launch timetable for 2021 by Starlink?
Anyone else outside of N.America that gets a "sometime this year" response to your home address?
NZ pricing is inline with the US setup and subscription costs.
Re: Show of hands please for Starlink Coverage in (Score:3)
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> "Starlink is targeting coverage in your area in mid to late 2021."
So soon?!
You must be in a favorable latitude. Good planning!
Internet everywhere on the planet by the end of next year. The despots won't be able to act quickly enough. Fingers crossed.
"Preservation of consciousness".
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I don't think SpaceX's goal is to enrage every foreign government by bypassing their internet laws. Not to mention the need for ground stations.
What I expect will happen is that they'll make region-coded dishes. Dishes coded for sale in China for example would route all traffic through the Great Firewall. Someone could bypass this by smuggling in a non-Chinese dish, but then the crime would be on them and not SpaceX.
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If there's some smarts in the satellite, region-locks could be enforced. Sort of a geo-fencing for satellites.
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It's all about (A) latitude, (B) ground stations, and (C) dish production.
The initial beta launch was at 44-53 degrees latitude, with a steady expansion toward the equator. New Zealand is 34-47 degrees latitude. So clearly they could already launch on the southern end if they had the ground stations and enough dishes.
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I didn't think they were covering anywhere outside of N.America so quickly?
They are satellites. They fly in tiny circles all over the globe.
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I just checked, and coverage is coming to Peru in late 2021. I may push my semi-retirement plans forward then, since I would be able to work part-time from there (while still being paid US wages, woo hoo!)
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"I just checked, and coverage is coming to Peru in late 2021. I may push my semi-retirement plans forward then, since I would be able to work part-time from there (while still being paid US wages, woo hoo!)"
The Peruvian IRS just woke up.
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I don't mind paying taxes. Taxes pay for civilization.
Factory (Score:5, Informative)
"The factory apparently won't make the dishes and routers on site but will instead design systems that improve the manufacturing process."
Then it would be a design centre, not a factory.
But declaring from a job ad for a single position that the site "won't make the dishes and routers on site" just because that job isn't responsible for it is uniquely incompetent reporting. The job ad literally states: "To keep up with global demand, SpaceX is breaking ground on a new, state of the art manufacturing facility in Austin, TX. The Automation & Controls Engineer will play a key role as we strive to manufacture millions of consumer facing devices that we ship directly to customers (Starlink dishes, Wi-Fi routers, mounting hardware, etc)."
MAC sublayer (Score:2)
Some off-topic, but: Does anyone know if there is any available information about the MAC sublayer used in Starlink?
It's just curiosity, speculating how the system would respond when its user-base grows.
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> any available information about the MAC sublayer used in Starlink?
A little bit. Head over to /r/starlink .
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Dishy the Dish (Score:2)
It's Dishy the Dish, not Dishy McFlatface.
The cult meets at /r/starlink . Punch and pie.
Dishy McFlatFace (Score:1)
Is mcflatface export controlled? (Score:2)
It's some amazing tech, but I can't imagine these dishes aren't export controlled.
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That said, SpaceX is welcome to talk to Commerce's BIS to get it reclassified or get open ended export licenses. BIS is a bit more friendly than DTCC.
Disclaimer: I no longer do aerospace export control and I make no claims to the accuracy of my cursory glance over EAR. See a qualified lawyer for specific legal advice on exporting.
Cultural appropriation (Score:2)