Starlink Now Constitutes Roughly Two Thirds of All Active Satellites (the-independent.com) 64
"SpaceX deployed its 7,000th Starlink satellite this week, making the vast majority of active satellites around earth part of a single megaconstellation," writes Slashdot reader DogFoodBuss. "The Starlink communications system is now orders of magnitude larger than its nearest competitor, offering unprecedented access to low-latency broadband from anywhere on the planet." According to the latest data from satellite tracker CelesTrak, SpaceX now controls over 62% of all operational satellites. The Independent reports: The latest data from non-profit satellite tracker CelesTrak shows that SpaceX has 6,370 active Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, with several hundred more inactive or deorbited. The figure, which has risen more than six-fold in just three years, represents just over 62 per cent of all operational satellites, and is roughly 10-times the number of Starlink's closest rival, UK-based startup OneWeb.
SpaceX plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites to complete the Starlink constellation, capable of delivering high-speed internet and phone connectivity to any corner of the globe. Starlink currently operates in 102 countries and has more than three million customers paying a monthly fee to access the network through a $300 ground-based dish. The company expects to launch its service in dozens more countries, with only Afghanistan, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Syria not on the current waitlist due to internet restrictions or trade embargos. "Starlink now constitutes roughly 2/3 of all active Earth satellites," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X following the latest SpaceX launch.
SpaceX plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites to complete the Starlink constellation, capable of delivering high-speed internet and phone connectivity to any corner of the globe. Starlink currently operates in 102 countries and has more than three million customers paying a monthly fee to access the network through a $300 ground-based dish. The company expects to launch its service in dozens more countries, with only Afghanistan, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Syria not on the current waitlist due to internet restrictions or trade embargos. "Starlink now constitutes roughly 2/3 of all active Earth satellites," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X following the latest SpaceX launch.
ill be glad when (Score:2)
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Communist Brazil
Brazil is a democracy with a presidential and federal system of government. Its current constitution provides strong protections for civil liberties.
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Its current constitution provides strong protections for civil liberties.
Obviously not strong enough.
It is a crime in Brazil to read X/Twitter. [yahoo.com]
Brazil treats criticism of the government the way America treats CSAM. It is a crime to publish it. It is a crime to read it.
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Enlighten me, Bill!
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I'm really curious what's the difference between baldy Elon censoring opinions of accounts he doesn't like and a judge ordering the platform to block accounts to keep a fascist like Bolsonaro in power? Enlighten me, Bill!
Elon has a way more fanbois fawning over and worshiping him than the judge -- 'cause the former does what they like and they wish they were him and the latter not so much?
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1. Elon is a private citizen. Comparing his actions to a government is silly.
2. If you don't like X/Twitter, you are free to use a different platform. Elon has no power to arrest you.
3. If you don't like your government, you can't switch to a different one. Your government does have the power to arrest you, and in this case, it has threatened millions of Brazilians.
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1. Elon is a private citizen. Comparing his actions to a government is silly.
Why? Not an answer. It's an apples to apples comparison. Baldy Elon likes to censor opinions he doesn't agree with. The judge is trying to censor people in an attempt to overthrow their democratic government. Censorship is equal on both sides.
2. If you don't like X/Twitter, you are free to use a different platform. Elon has no power to arrest you.
Except when you commit treason on that platform. Bolsonaro's supporters are storming Twitter and committing treason.
3. If you don't like your government, you can't switch to a different one. Your government does have the power to arrest you, and in this case, it has threatened millions of Brazilians.
No matter what you right wing trolls say Brazil is a democracy. They most certainly can change governments and did by booting the fascist Bolsonar
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That is more due to Musk than anyone else.
A judge ordered X to close 5 accounts. Musk refused, despite doing so quite readily in Turkiye and other countries.
He could've appealed the court order - it was ordered by *ONE* supreme court judge. He could've appealed it to the entire bench. He chose not to, instead choosing the FAFO method.
The judge
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You have addressed the government's actions against X/Twitter for not cooperating with censorship orders.
You failed to address the government's threats against its citizens for reading X/Twitter.
Re:is this how free markets work? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nobody is forcing you to use it.
Actually they are. When I look at the night sky and see a white streak through my photos I can't just un-see a Starlink satellite. The detriment of the free market isn't just about "not using" a product.
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see a white streak through my photos I can't just un-see a Starlink satellite.
Yes, you can. There's free software that can remove satellite trails from astronomical photos.
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Does it add the blocked and ruined starts and objects back in perfectly?
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Does it add the blocked and ruined starts and objects back in perfectly?
If it's a single image, obviously, there is no way to reconstruct what is behind the streak.
But astronomers almost always do longer exposures, with a sequence of many images. The software can interpolate between the images.
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It's imperfect. ShanghaiBill correctly notes that astronomy images are made up of a sequence of multiple stacks. You can configure it such that high deviation of pixels are rejected from the final frame, but the trail remains present in the noise floor - the reduction of which is the point of shooting multiple frames. It's not so relevant for just making images, but it does become relevant when people use ground based observatories to do statistical analysis on the night sky, doing things such as supernova
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Yes! Negative externalities can always be worked around with more tech!
For example, we can cancel climate change by just running our air conditioners, and even pollution can be solved by wearing an NBC suit outdoors. Alarmist liberals don't understand this!
Re:is this how free markets work? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't use free software. I use expensive industry tools and yet the result of those star trails create very real problems even after they are removed. Sure I'm just taking some photos, but other people are doing actual science and the resulting deviation in noise response from where a trail was discarded means that they often are forced to discard the entire subframe so it doesn't screw up their data. That is fine when a single iridium flare ruins one frame. Not so fine when you throw out 25% of your data because the damn sky is full of Starlink satellites. And it is getting to the point where a significant portion of images are affected.
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/snob
I know it comes as a shock to people on Slashdot but the reality is that free tools are often not as capable as ones carefully developed by experts for a specific purpose.
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Nobody is forcing you to use it.
Actually they are. When I look at the night sky...
1. Who is forcing you to look at the night sky?
2. How is "seeing" it the same as "using" it?
I do get your point though (you're still affected by it, even though you don't use the service), I just don't get the "actually they are" [forcing you to use it] statement.
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1. Who is forcing you to look at the night sky?
The same person who is forcing you to be a gaslighting cunt. We should go hunt this person down before become even more of a piece of shit for gatekeeping what other people do.
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There's always externalities (that's a free market failure caused by an exchange affecting third parties). For example, Starlink completely wrecks Earth-based long-exposure astronomy, allows internet access to millions who have never seen a cat video before, drastically decreases incentive to lay physical wire in rural areas. Overall I'd guess a huge net positive, as long as they don't start acting like a monopoly.
As for breaking up monopolies, this is Slashdot, let's start with Microsoft, and the resurrect
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Starlink completely wrecks Earth-based long-exposure astronomy
This is only a problem for the small minority of astronomers who don't know how to use Google to search for the dozens of software packages that remove satellite tracks from photos.
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There's no such thing. Your photo is still degraded, the absolute best possible scenario is you can excise parts of it.
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Starlink isn't giving internet access to people who have never experienced it before. It's way too expensive, both to buy and subscribe to, and in terms of energy usage.
Worse still people are advocating for it to be a solution for rural areas, instead of fibre. One "choice" of ISP, hope Musk doesn't start censoring it like he does with Twitter, and zero price competition. People really are forced to use it.
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It's not a monopoly. It's an entirely novel form of bullshit.
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Now shou
Lots of the little things (Score:3)
I was stargazing a few nights ago looking near Sagitta trying to find "the coat hanger". I saw several satellites go by one after the other in the same orbit. They weren't visible by naked eye, but showed clearly in the 7 X 50 binoculars.
There were other satellites in other orbits too, but that many in the same track, same brightness was different. I'm surprised we haven't Kesslered yet.
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Space is big, (accidental) collisions of satellites are only something we worry about because our ability to track and maneuver them is not precise enough to provide our desired confidence level that a freak impact won't occur.
Still, even with relatively small sats, in low orbits, there's enough up there now to be a threat of you put your mind to it. And not just by becoming the defacto master of global space-based communications. There has to be some way to weaponize them in a more traditional sense. La
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This won't be a popular post and I'll likely be modded down for being anti-space, but hear me out. What's happening beyond Earth really doesn't matter. Earth is the only place we can really survive and that's not changing.
If we stopped staring at the stars yesterday, so fucking what. There is shit all we can really do about what's going on out there, including dealing with a civilization ending asteroid, ie dinosaur killers.
I'm not saying we haven't benefited from some of the research we've put into our spa
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There are a bunch of factually incorrect statements in your post, and a few philosophical dead ends.
Earth is currently the only place we can survive. It used to be humans couldn't survive sub-zero temperatures or extended droughts, but we developed the technology to deal with those in most cases.
While there is little we could do about a near-term asteroid impact, part of that 'stargazing' is to find them all so we have enough time to bump them off course. And we've actually already tested kinetic impact t
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The fact is, we've pretty much reached the limits of space observation from the earth's surface. The earth's atmosphere distorts and dissipates most of what is viewed. What we need are more space-based telescopes. SpaceX is bringing the cost of launching things into space down. When Starship is operational, it will drop the cost of space travel by another two orders of magnitude. At that point, the cost of putting small telescopes into space will be within the reach of every college and several smaller
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We haven't reached the limit of space observation from the earth's surface to generate wonder in the people lucky enough to see it. Things don't have to have a practical application to be valuable and worth preserving.
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Realistically, it's going to be that way for the forseeable future, and then some.
However...
> The reason you have a modern society and the Internet is
> because people did things that "didn't matter" and diverted
> resources from base survival needs.
This is true, and is a good point. It's not possible to reliably predict what new technologies will eventually become possible due to pure scientific research bearing fruit down the line. We can pred
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Satellites allow us to measure pollution and climate change. They help us more efficiently grow food and predict the weather.
It would be a disaster if we lost access to space/LEO.
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I'm surprised we haven't Kesslered yet.
StarLink satellites orbit at 550 km, where atmospheric drag will deorbit debris.
Kessler is a problem from about 800 km to 2000 km. Below that, there is too much drag, and above that, space is pretty empty.
42,000 nodes? (Score:2)
So nobody is concerned with that baseline? That's a private internet in the making but I guess you have to have been around long enough or at least studied the topic to ask "what can't you do with 42,000 nodes...?"....?
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So nobody is concerned with that baseline?
Nope. There's far larger networks run by ISPs with a far larger customer base which could be conceivably turned into a "private internet". The thing is, customers are customers of an ISP because they want access to the actual internet, not some private network.
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Yes and no. If you put up a great firewall of America, most of us probably wouldn't even notice since the vast majority of things we use the Internet for is hosted in the USA in the first place.
I actually really don't care about what's happening in the rest of the world to the extent that I need to know RIGHT NOW. You could tell me next week or next month really and it would be equally useful information.
USA disappearing would have a greater affect on the world then the rest of the world not being there wou
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It would be a private internet if anything were actually hosted on those nodes. At best it's a private peer exchange in the making, with the caveat that the available bandwidth of ISL with Starlink v2-mini constitutes only about 5% the carrying capacity of an individual Starlink ground-sat-ground relay, meaning we're not at the point that other ISPs would see a performance benefit to routing traffic via Starlink as opposed to terrestrial undersea cable (that irresponsible/malicious countries can just drag a
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>"what can't you do with 42,000 nodes...?"
make a funny beowulf cluster joke? :)
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And me without mod points. *sigh*
The other day, something came up that made me say, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" Even though she's used to hearing things like this from me, my 19yo daughter still gave me her best "WTAF" face!
With a Madman at the Helm - What Could Go Wrong? (Score:2)
cash? (Score:2)
Can this ever result in a positive cash flow?
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Can this ever result in a positive cash flow?
Maybe. Probably. But irrelevant.
Starlink was created with the purpose of giving SpaceX something to do with all the rockets it needed to launch in order to develop better rockets. It allowed SpaceX to practice putting satellites in specific orbits. It allowed SpaceX to demonstrate that it can successfully launch and land rockets. SpaceX is now seen as "the reliable launch option". If Starlink makes enough money to offset it's operating costs, that is a bonus. If it never breaks even, it is still a suc
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Despite the inevitable hype, commercial space launch isn't that big of market which is why everyone else is floundering. SpaceX managing to create its own market gave them a head start to sustainability by being the last man standing.
Cuba (Score:2)
only Afghanistan, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Syria not on the current waitlist
Cuba is not on the list?
One order of magnitude (Score:2)
Perhaps a bit pedantic, but 10x more satellites is not "orders" of magnitude but rather a single order of magnitude. If the author wishes to emphasize the huge advantage that Starlink has, perhaps they should focus on the rate at which satellites are being added. Perhaps that first derivative approaches multiple orders of magnitude.
Satellite cellular? (Score:2)
When will we, consumers, get affordable satellite cellular services for our smartphones and other small portable devices?
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