My Son and I live in the very rural mountains of Virginia. He has friends who live quite a bit higher up and further from cable, fiber, etc and who got a Starlink package. My Son was visiting them last week and he saw 3 people using Starlink for internet at the same time with all 3 enjoying simultaneous bandwidth similar to really good cable connections. They love it and my Son, who is on cable, was quite impressed.

Delivered, for a tidy fee, and tied to a subscription. That is an impressively clever business move since the fallout from the storms will last far longer than 30 days, and the resale value of the hardware is probably nil, so the sunk cost fallacy will hit hard causing many to keep going even if they are among the few back up and running within 30 days.

A month of service is nothing to sneeze at, but the press releases could be more up front that this appears to be a marketing maneuver and not a donation. A donation would be something more than what you can generally get by negotiating over the phone with an ISPs sales dept. Satellite communications are an interesting idea but cannot scale as a general solution, one of the many obstacles is the ever increasing risk of collision by the large growing amount of space debris including both live and dead satellites. A Kessler Syndrome even would cut off the possibility of asteroid farming or zero-G manufacturing, not to mention colonization.

That said, where is the tie-in to GNU, Linux, or even Free and Open Source Software in this thread? Are the dish and attached hardware being distributed while running Linux? If so, where is the source republished?

WTF Turbocapitalist? With an avatar like yours you surely understand SpaceX is not a charity but a business, but a really goodhearted one in large. What businesses SHOULD be providing the kind of service you seem to seek should be fossil fuel industries, especially Big Oil, that caused so much of this disaster by lying for years... decades actually about human caused global climate change, just like the tobacco industry did about the cancer threat.

As for the thread, haven't you been here long enough to see the sub-section description for General - non-linux? Personally I salute LQN and the Linux Community for having a message board, almost totally unique on the 21st Century webz, that allows adult discussion of those 2 scary subjects of Politics and Religion. If I were religious I'd vote Jeremy for sainthood. Right along with him would be Elon despite his , understandable but single issue misguided support of Orange Jesus especially after that dumpster fire interview with Mr. Trump. I suspect Mr. Musk is just too much the head-in-the-clouds dreamer to grasp how the fundamentalist religious crowd hates would constrain any Science oriented business, especially since even most moderate Republicans in the 21st Century are against electric cars, deny climate change that compels them, and Space? "why waste so much money on stuff so far away and of so little value"?

In my view, mjolnir is a rare exception and should be applauded for promoting the pioneering spirit embodied in the exploration of space and the improvement to our environment that Elon is engaged in, influence ripples that will quite literally go on forever promoting important progress for all Humanity.

The origins of his money are a whole other saga that look to do with luck (which is fine) more than good decisions. But that is another discussion. Mostly.

What I see, and what I try to address, in the previous post are the bad optics of the current set of decisions regarding orbital space. Filling the orbits with a cascade of growing debris fragments is not a sound investment, and more like eating the seed corn so to speak for his own space ambitions by closing off the exosphere. Even from his perspective, because it closes off his own ambitions for Mars, or for that matter even the Moon, cutting off the ability to reach space doesn't look that smart. Sure he sells some antenna kits and a few subscriptions which are soon maxing out the satellite network, but that looks like it is coming at the cost of closing off escape from the planet for both him, his business ambitions, and all of Humanity.

Starlink is still a division of SpaceX and Musk owns ONLY about 40% of it(SpaceX). Do doubt his voice carries a lot of weight but he is constrained by a board of directors.

Thank you! We can disagree about a lot of things - politics, religon, windows vs. linux, etc but find common ground in a love of science and tech.

Exactly.

You're a Windozer? That tears it! Burn in Hades, Infidel! <sarcastic elbow to the ribs>

Ping Turbocapitalist - I've looked up in the sky and seen the "Night Train", or at least what is visible from my latitude, and it's called that because they are all in a line as if on train tracks. I don't see how that presents more problems than it solves and if a line is all there is, is by no means a barrier to space exploration and a few arc seconds at worst to ground observatories. Then again some people opposed actual trains and paved roads when they were first introduced.

I was listening to NPR somewhat recently and Earth's orbit is already a bit of a garbage dump. Any collision by accident or on purpose could make launching rockets very difficult. There are millions of objects of different sizes to small to track already in orbit.

I think the plan is something like 42,000 Starlink satellites plus other similar big constellations are planned as well so the number of LEO objects could be on the order of 100,000 by 2030.

I have read where Starlink satellites emit RF interference into radio astronomy bands. Telescope images have exposure times of 10s or minutes so it would be annoying to have trails ruin them.

I could be wrong but it looks like this thread is getting the "mountain out of a molehill" treatment. Plus I suspect it is largely because of ruthless, no holds barred corporate competition employing FUD. All of us must be aware of such things since this is a mostly Linux based message board and have an understanding and awareness of even just Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" battle plans.

Lets consider scale. Recently discussing scale, Neil DeGrasse Tyson noted that if the Earth was actually the size of a 20 inch globe, how do you suppose the atmosphere would be represented? The answer is the thickness of a dime, 10 cent piece. So for the purposes of the following examination please allow me to use metric system numbers since they are easier to grasp in our minds being base 10.

The Earth is a wee bit more than 40,000 km in circumference. I suppose almost everyone has driven a car at 100km/hr so imagine for a moment that you could drive non stop around the Earth at that velocity. Obviously that trip would take 400 hours and divided by 8 hours/day that trip around the equator would take 50 days, just roughly 10 days less than 2 whole months.

So now imagine a forest of 100,000 trees (I know. Imagining even 1000 of anything is beyond basic intuition but we try) . Now imagine each tree is 40km apart from each next tree. Do you really imagine you'd have difficulty driving at 100km/hr through such an immense forest?

For another perspective consider that it is estimated that roughly 10,000 meteors qualify as meteorites each year since they actually manage to strike the surface of Earth. In over 100 years (records say in 1888) ONE man was struck by a meteorite and killed and that considers well over 1,000,000 objects striking Earth since 1890. So what do you suppose the odds are that even 10 times that many (most never make it to Earth's surface) would strike a satellite, even ones as large as a school bus... shoot! lets get crazy and call it football field size!

The point is that had Gary Kindall (creator of CP/M operating system, the first for PCs) been a ruthless businessman concerned about his market survival and if he was also an astute market visionary actually imagining how that tiny office Microsoft rented in an industrial park in Albuquerque, New Mexico housing 12 employees would grow to thousands of times, globally, larger and unimaginably wealthy (each of the original 12 became millionaires, even the ones who left Microsoft in the 1980s) and if he had Gates' and Ballmer's avarice, he too might have spread copious amounts of FUD about Gates and Ballmer and crew to stay in the game instead of being nearly forgotten.

In fairness, Mr Kildall and his wife did eventually become fairly wealthy once he sold a later system (DRI) to Novell. However he remained bitter over Microsoft's vast success, succumbed to depression and alcoholism and died from injuries sustained in a biker bar in the 1990s in his early 50s.

Even though the average PC user hasn't a clue who Gary Kildall was, if you don't think his and others like him (far more "also ran amateurs" than famous top quarterbacks and pro teams) are studied by business students, you're not paying attention. It is VASTLY easier to destroy than create. So destroy away haters. What have you created lately? What's more to the point, how many billionaires do you think exist in the world in 2024 and how does their track record compare to Mr Musk's? I submit that for all his quirks and dreamy shortcomings, he's one of the better ones.

Elon Musk
"@elonmusk
You can watch live sports in 8k in Antarctica with @Starlink"
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1874997897571561472


Adam Ghetti
"@AdamGhetti
173mbs and 92ms latency in Antarctica thanks to @Starlink all from the laptop compartment of a backpack... We live in the future!"
https://x.com/AdamGhetti/status/1874984932579430629
Pics at the above link.

I have Starlink in Tucson, AZ USA

I am in love with it. Of course where I live there are really no other options. But typically get around 150-300mbit download speeds with a gaming ping averaging 30-50ms. It’s a game changer where I am. Before I was limited to fixed wireless, basically wifi on very sad steroids. Its very stable and I can count the number of times its been down longer than 5 minutes on one hand over the last 2 or 3 years ive had it.

I know that Starlink moved very quickly to provide internet access in the hurricane-affected regions of North Carolina. In today's society, this has become a very basic form of communication that is essential to many relief efforts. You can "make money from it" later.

And I gather it's proving handy in Ukraine.

Re Kessler Syndrome worries :

1 They're designed to be deliberately de-orbited every 5 years anyway, so they can be replaced by newer/better versions

2 They're deliberately in a very low orbit, which makes eg mobile phone contact possible, BUT also means that without regular rocket boosts upwards, they'll de-orbit naturally due to atmospheric drag.

"As Los Angeles is scorched by the intense flames of several wildfires, destroying thousands of homes and having already claimed five lives, cell service has reportedly dropped out across much of the city.

As a result, TV crews are using SpaceX's Starlink to broadcast their coverage of the fire, according a live news report from FOX11, with Elon Musk having now announced that Starlink terminals will be provided to areas of LA with no service.
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-s...ngeles-2012226

"SpaceX will provide free Starlink terminals to affected areas in LA tomorrow morning," Musk posted on X last night."
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1877219652050313671




"SpaceX
@SpaceX
For those in the Los Angeles area, the @Starlink team and @TMobile have enabled basic texting (SMS) through our Direct to Cell satellites. You can now text loved ones, text 911 and receive emergency alerts." https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1877547777858687231
Edit: Available only to T-Mobile users.