SpaceX Tuesday...

[geeks]

eharding I was taking some space pics last night, I think I might have captured your ISP

[eharding]

geeks said:

eharding I was taking some space pics last night, I think I might have captured your ISP

Possibly! Interestingly, Dishy is currently tilted about 10 degrees to the North, although who knows where it's actually looking - could just be tilted to aid rain runoff. Service was a bit patchy on Wednesday, a lot less beta downtime yesterday and today, settled at around 160Mbps.

[geeks]

eharding said:

Possibly! Interestingly, Dishy is currently tilted about 10 degrees to the North, although who knows where it's actually looking - could just be tilted to aid rain runoff. Service was a bit patchy on Wednesday, a lot less beta downtime yesterday and today, settled at around 160Mbps.

Well that was in the plough so north. I also have a set near orion, which is south.

[MartG]

Musk has announced he's putting up a $100million prize for carbon capture tech competition

My idea - Compress it, load it aboard Starship, then release on Mars to increase the atmospheric pressure there

[Eric Mc]

Turn it into polystyrene and then turn it into models. It will then become PLASTIC MODEL KITS which locks up the carbon AND ends up providing excellent loft insulation.

[Beati Dogu]

What's wrong with carbon?


There's a hydrocarbon-fuelled Falcon 9 launch this Saturday - The Transporter-1 mission is carrying 143 smallsats, microsats and even 10 Starlinks. A record number to launch.

It'll be heading south out of Cape Canaveral for a sun synchronous orbit. The Starlinks will be the first to be launched like that.

The launch windows runs from 2.40pm - 3.22pm UK time (9:40 - 10:22 am EST) and the rocket is upright on the pad already.

EDIT: Scrubbed and delayed 24 hrs now.

Here’s what satellite stack looks like. Starlink satellites on the bottom.

Edited by Beati Dogu on Saturday 23 January 17:55

[annodomini2]

MartG said:

Musk has announced he's putting up a $100million prize for carbon capture tech competition

My idea - Compress it, load it aboard Starship, then release on Mars to increase the atmospheric pressure there

It's for fuel production, CO2 + H2O + energy = CH4 + O2

Gets him some good green brownie points too

[eharding]

Beati Dogu said:

What's wrong with carbon?


There's a hydrocarbon-fuelled Falcon 9 launch this Saturday - The Transporter-1 mission is carrying 143 smallsats, microsats and even 10 Starlinks. A record number to launch.

It'll be heading south out of Cape Canaveral for a sun synchronous orbit. The Starlinks will be the first to be launched like that.

The launch windows runs from 2.40pm - 3.22pm UK time (9:40 - 10:22 am EST) and the rocket is upright on the pad already.

EDIT: Scrubbed and delayed 24 hrs now.

Here’s what satellite stack looks like. Starlink satellites on the bottom.

Edited by Beati Dogu on Saturday 23 January 17:55

Nice picture - I love looking at more future bandwidth. Fly, my pretties, fly!

Purchased one of these today, to make a hole big enough to fit the Starlink cable through the wall, and responded to the Starlink Beta user questionnaire with feedback to a) move the 20mm ferrite core a couple of metres down the cable to aid getting it through the wall and b) some basic network configuration for the router/disc system.

Cold as witch's wotnot out there tonight, astronomy kit iced up after a couple of hours, lawn frozen and crispy but dishy ice and water free - either deep Musk voodoo or that 100W dissipation and the hydrophobic coating are doing the job. Rocking 130Mpbs tonight, a little slower than earlier in the day.

[Flooble]

Dog Star said:

That out-of limits landing was impressive, rough sea, waves crashing over the front of the drone ship, soaking, pitching deck, screen goes blank aaaaaand..... perfect landing. It never gets old.

The energy SpaceX has put back into things is great. I thought we would be left dicking around in low-earth orbit for the next five decades, and certainly didn’t expect to see another manned lunar landing in my own lifetime. In the space of a few years we’ve seen an incredible transformation in terms of cost, reusability etc and not only will we see manned lunar landings I reckon there’s bloody good odds on a Mars landing if not this decade then for sure the next (I think Musk is going a bit far with his timescale expectations- though I guess nothing should be surprising anymore(look at the doubts and nay-sayings on the first few pages of this thread)). I think we should be odds on that a living Apollo moonwalker will live to see at least one of the above, which will be nice.

Electrifying stuff!

Youngest Apollo astronaut is 84 so that gives about 6 years based on life expectancy age 84, however, if you work on the "percentage chance of death per year after the age of 80" (1 in 6) then I think it's only two years to get a ship landed. Someone check my maths?

[Beati Dogu]

eharding said:

Nice picture - I love looking at more future bandwidth. Fly, my pretties, fly!

Purchased one of these today, to make a hole big enough to fit the Starlink cable through the wall, and responded to the Starlink Beta user questionnaire with feedback to a) move the 20mm ferrite core a couple of metres down the cable to aid getting it through the wall and b) some basic network configuration for the router/disc system.

Cold as witch's wotnot out there tonight, astronomy kit iced up after a couple of hours, lawn frozen and crispy but dishy ice and water free - either deep Musk voodoo or that 100W dissipation and the hydrophobic coating are doing the job. Rocking 130Mpbs tonight, a little slower than earlier in the day.

I bought a long drill bit for a doorbell cable and it went though the brick mortar, cinder block & plaster behind it like a hot knife through butter. I was a little disappointed I had no other walls to drill.


Some of the Starlink engineers did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) a couple of months ago. They said that the dish does have a self-heating capability. Whether that's a specific heater wiring, or it just ramps up the power to warm up, they didn't say:

"The Starlink does have self-heating capabilities to deal with a variety of weather conditions. In fact, we'll be deploying a software update in a few weeks to upgrade our snow melting ability with continued improvements planned for the months ahead." - DishyMcFlatface - Official Starlink

While it seems to idle around 100w it can go up to around 150 w apparently. They're trying to get the power usage down with future improvements.

"We have a couple of items in progress to further reduce power consumption. We are working on software and network updates to allow your Starlink to go into a deeper power savings mode to drop power consumption while still remaining connected to the network. Power reductions are a key item we are focusing on for the future." - DishyMcFlatface - Official Starlink


More here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/...

[frisbee]

Good shot of the landing on the launch today, it pixelated a little but didn't cut out completely. They really have made them very routine now, right in the circle every time.

[Beati Dogu]

The landing accuracy does seem to be very consistent now. They basically just need a helipad these days,

[MartG]

Looks like they caught both fairing halves too

[saaby93]

Isnt this 143 pieces of space junk in another few years
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-557...

[Flooble]

saaby93 said:

Isnt this 143 pieces of space junk in another few years
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-557...

They are de-orbiting old starlinks, the orbit is so low they burn up in a few years anyway (one reason he needs Starship - replenishment of the constellation will be like painting the Forth bridge, with sats de-orbiting as fast as you can launch new ones)

[eharding]

Beati Dogu said:

I bought a long drill bit for a doorbell cable and it went though the brick mortar, cinder block & plaster behind it like a hot knife through butter. I was a little disappointed I had no other walls to drill.


Some of the Starlink engineers did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) a couple of months ago. They said that the dish does have a self-heating capability. Whether that's a specific heater wiring, or it just ramps up the power to warm up, they didn't say:

"The Starlink does have self-heating capabilities to deal with a variety of weather conditions. In fact, we'll be deploying a software update in a few weeks to upgrade our snow melting ability with continued improvements planned for the months ahead." - DishyMcFlatface - Official Starlink

While it seems to idle around 100w it can go up to around 150 w apparently. They're trying to get the power usage down with future improvements.

"We have a couple of items in progress to further reduce power consumption. We are working on software and network updates to allow your Starlink to go into a deeper power savings mode to drop power consumption while still remaining connected to the network. Power reductions are a key item we are focusing on for the future." - DishyMcFlatface - Official Starlink


More here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/...

Interesting - there didn't appear to be any heating elements in the dish teardown video I posted a few days ago, but they might have been hiding in plain sight.

Didn't manage to drill a hole for the Starlink cable, started tinkering with the iPhone app to see how it was downloading the data - got as far as finding the HTTP endpoints in the router and dish it was querying, stuck those into Google to find that predictably someone else has been all over it already.

Upshot - looks like you can dispense with the Starlink router if you want to integrate with an existing setup, and lose no functionality (the iPhone app will stop working, but the core functionality is available directly from the disc) , Starlink support the former (ish), but the documentation implies you would lose the functionality of the app - you do, but it is replicated elsewhere.

As it stands, the router is hardcoded to a 192.168.1.* subnet, but this routes through to the disc on 192.168.100.1 - the router and the disc expose gRPC services, and there are already packages to communicate with the Starlink services - https://github.com/sparky8512/starlink-grpc-tools - those seem to work OK, so if you want to download the diagnostics from the disc directly you don't need the router and the iPhone app, and finally it turns out the disc itself replicates the parts of the app which deal with the disc (rather than WiFi) anyway - via a web app at http://192.168.100.1/support.

Still no way to change the client subnet of the disc, but I'd guess that might come eventually. Also means that you might eventually be able to order the dish on its own and save the cost of the router (it's a very nicely put together bit of kit though, if rather limited).

Edited by eharding on Sunday 24th January 19:53

[Flooble]

gRPC is quite new by ISP standards, good to see they aren't stuck on some ancient stack. But then it is SpaceX.

[Krikkit]

eharding said:

Interesting - there didn't appear to be any heating elements in the dish teardown video I posted a few days ago, but they might have been hiding in plain sight.

You don't really need a heating element when you have other processing on board - set it doing some meaningless math on the various chips and let the TDP ramp up what comes out.

[Beati Dogu]

It would be funny if they had it doing SETI@home. I’m sure that would appeal to Elon.


Meanwhile the recent Starlink-16 booster is just back in port to conclude its 8th mission.

Not much rest for the drone ship and support crew though. They’ve got to be back out there for Starlink-17 on Friday. This would be the second booster to make 8 flights if all goes well.

[anonymous-user]

Looks like the SN9 test flight might be today. This stream goes live at 1pm GMT:

https://youtu.be/lPRfJxz-ECE

According to this channel, the launch could be any time from 12pm to 6pm central, which is 6pm to 12am GMT.

Edited by F20CN16 on Monday 25th January 11:41