good thing Xi Jinping himself is floating up in space with a giant butterfly net, cleaning up low orbit :xi-reactionary-spotted:
Yes! Fuck Starlink! Take that you light pollution assholes :sicko-yes:
SpaceX recently crossed the 2,000 satellite launch milestone, and has plans to launch 12,000 if not a great many more — so losing 40 of them might not be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Still, that’s the vast majority of an entire Falcon 9 rocket’s Starlink launch capacity burning up in the atmosphere.
Getting dangerously close to a cogent point there, The Verge, better copy-paste SpaceX's PR statement just to be safe.
If you have to rocket something up into space, you damn well better make sure that payload is ready for every eventuality, otherwise the whole endeavor quickly becomes a tremendous waste.
Couple this with that booster that failed to separate and is now gonna crash-land on the moon, andnobody should be taking SpaceX seriously.What would be a more environmentally sound way to bring internet access to people in remote regions? We need to show the muskmelon just how uncreative his Idea Guy ideas are.
Actually building the same networks that we've built everywhere else.
This requires developing countries that the west doesn't want developed because they are hyper-exploiting them though and undeveloped countries are easier to do that to.
I have a sinking feeling this would require a surface to air missile launcher to complete.
Probably fiber (mainly, with various forms of wireless and copper to fill in pockets where it isn't feasible). Glass is made of literally the most common compound on earth and doesn't require inordinate amounts of processing for the task or anything. And transmission is incredibly efficient over very long distances for tiny amounts of energy.
Boring answer but a normal wireless network can do the job, especially if 5G wireless can provide the speeds they advertise, cell towers and point-to-point antennas can do the same thing with less latency
You have to get signal and energy to the towers anyway. And then they actually use up a pretty large amount of energy. Might as well lay fiber. The thing that's usually so expensive about it is getting permits to put lines underground...something there's an obvious political answer for: decide to do it rather than to not do it. (We could actually put power lines underground and make those networks more durable and safe while we're at it, instead of crying the same "BuT WhErE's ThE PrOFiT?!" story.)
Various forms of wireless transmissions (cell, microwave, and even wifi for short distances like within a neighborhood) can, of course, fill in in places though.
It's unfortunate that the profit motive drives so much of the public infrastructure debate. As a gay south african internet access has allowed me access to spaces I never new existed and connections I could never make IRL. Wireless tech with all it's shortcomings is a great bridge for low investment areas. I can shitpost in this site because my township got 5g
SpaceX recently crossed the 2,000 satellite launch milestone, and has plans to launch 12,000 if not a great many more — so losing 40 of them might not be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.
But it is still funny.
Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink just got dealt an expensive blow — the company’s currently estimating that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched on February 3rd will be destroyed because of a geomagnetic storm.
The storm caused “up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches,” keeping the deployed satellites from reaching their proper orbit around the Earth. And while Starlink tried to fly them “edge-on (like a sheet of paper)” to reduce that drag, it now looks like as many as 40 of them will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere instead of reaching their destinations.
That’s hilarious that fucking magnets introduced extra drag, to the point that 6/7 satellites are gonna burn instead of reaching the correct steady state
Gotta be jokerfied obviously, but Elon’s gonna extrude the whole earth of he gets his way, amused to see another of the many L’s along his journey
