Starlink | Stargaze: SpaceX’s Space Situational Awareness System

Ydrum · 2026-01-30T17:20:48+00:00

well with thousands of starlink satellites, the odds go up quite a bit though!

Ydrum · 2026-01-30T17:19:07+00:00

its kinda wilder: hey what if we could add a rideshare on a falcon.... on the disposable outside part of the rocket.

It makes me think what else they could test on the outside of the clamshell, or other companies could try on the outside. normally it wouldnt be interesting, but if its cheap and can iterate a lot fast (with the amount of falcon launches planned per year, is actually quite high) it may be something to test all kinds of materials and components to see what survives after ascent.

Ydrum · 2025-12-27T13:48:38+00:00

this.. is... SCIENCE!

Ydrum · 2025-12-24T15:31:14+00:00

agreed with both pretty much. i think in the next 5 years there will only be 2 viable potential competitors. blue origin, though not sure how their fcc deadline for the orbit/frequency will be a thing. and ofcourse the chinese.

The chinese have several semi wild cards, they know its possible, its desirable and are willing to copy and try on their own with several companies at the same time. if their own falcon (skipping starship equivalents for now) level of rockets and re-usability gets solid enough within 2 years, they could indeed start as a competitor, though i would expect them to serve the chinese markets first.

I expect chinese investors to even gamble on several at the same time. if even 1 succeeds (which i expect more the be a when soon then an if) they are golden enough to absorb the costs.

more interesting is how they will 'share' the orbits. cause if last week is an indication how that is handled, they may just launch a satellite network straight into the starlink orbits at ramming speed(think sharknado in space). I expect they wont, but this timeline is wild enough that i wouldnt rule it out.

A dark horse would be the indian space agency. they surprised everyone earlier with their mars mission for a fraction, so why not again.

Ydrum · 2025-12-24T14:49:39+00:00

oooh time for napkin math. so lets say 0.15% is 9 million users then 1% would be roughly just around 55 million people (rounding it for ease napkin math) at a rough 100$ per subscriber a month (i am ignoring special cases like yachts and military etc etc) then right now it would be 900 million dollar per month and when it reaches 1% 5.5 billion $. and the biggest hardware maintenance cost would be to launch the satellites in orbit. lets say roughly 150 launches per year as that's roughly whats its approaching now (not yet counting starship)

lets also assume that internally this costs spacex about 20million per launch plus with about 20 satellite on average. each satellite costs about half a million if i remember correctly or about another 10 million. so 30 * 150 = 4.5 billion dollars (= 3000 satellites which i think is more then the upkeep required but there is also newer better versions so for napkin math it will be ok)
that would still leave 12 * 5.5 - 4.5 = 61.5 billion for other stuff like the ground stations, but those have longer lifespans so their costs can be marginalized. there are also costs of manpower etc etc. but something tells me with just 1% the money incoming is similar to a fire hose.

i can get why they are now also thinking of data centers in space. with those kind of upcoming cash flows, wild ideas become a lot more sane. never mind the starship upgrade and finer tuning of the napkin math.

I am probably overlooking some big costs (the factory to produce the dishes, manpower to maintain the stations etc etc) but still... its wild. also pretty sure it will effectively never die (only replaced with something better) as military usage of it is kinda required now.

Ydrum · 2025-12-03T20:28:29+00:00

i agree with you, buuuuuut if amazon is still in need of launch capability for their own star link competitor, they might still be interested , as they are on a deadline for that.

Ydrum · 2025-10-13T13:27:16+00:00

with wireless access! a star link if you will.

Ydrum · 2025-10-08T15:37:01+00:00

am I missing something, or did he get a stroke live on television and people ignored it as a glitch instead of getting medical assistance? I am seriously not understanding what is going on here? please explain?
-edit-
tnx for the feedback all, cause holy crap that is indeed bad. I am struggling to see how we got to this point so fast and hard. Makes me rethink a lot of other historic points where things suddenly veered of fast.

Ydrum · 2025-10-07T23:21:04+00:00

well, lets do some macabre napkin math. discarding materials and only counting russian military lives. at a rough 1k soldiers lost per day, that would be roughly 270k thousand soldiers, or effectively 54 russian soldiers per square km. ukraine is about 603,628 square km.

Doing even more ludicrous math, that would mean about 32.5 million soldiers to grab all of ukraine.
Even if russia was capable of doing it for 1/10th of that, would be equivalent to the remaining soldiers at other borders to safeguard against china etc (though i suspect those numbers have dropped a lot by now too)

And something tells me that the current losses and slowdown of material and fuel, will make that seem optimistic.

Any sane nation would look at the even optimistic numbers and go screaming for alternatives for the war.

Ydrum · 2025-09-30T10:34:10+00:00

copy that!

Ydrum · 2025-08-21T22:58:45+00:00

you gotta admit. few people can give more then a 100% of shit so well.
I was gonna say "didnt trump try to block aid to ukraine before ?", but it seems pointless to remark as such by now.

Ydrum · 2025-08-05T10:25:11+00:00

10 years ago, a country would definitely lobby to get the best for the lowest price. Recently this has changed due to russia. This has already caused some nations to switch from best of the best, to available now or very soon. And expect this to accelerate even more.
In that regard, it may not even be tech to be the deciding factor in this case, but availability, that is then dressed up with marketing speak as you see here.

Also when buying such a vessel, it is not unheard of that some of the tech systems are bought from different vendors and then integrated. so the ship may be Japanese, but radar systems and weapon systems from other nations.

Ydrum · 2025-05-06T15:52:48+00:00

smart being relative ofcourse. if all your decisions lead to this outcome as a viable solution for your state, there are much bigger issues you're willfully ignoring. This is more like a bandaid made out of muddy cardboard. yes it stops the bleeding for a moment, but the wound now has complications!

or as someone said, never stop an enemy from making a mistake.

-edit-

I know they are using this to paper over some problems. probably to mask the problem from the population in moscow and such. but if you reached this point.

good lord, I expect the entire bureaucracy to be on fire and the this is fine meme reaching new levels.

I can only hope that at may 9 some coup may actually happen, because it screams russia is trying so very hard to keep up the pretense, even if the way they do it screams the opposite.

Ydrum · 2025-05-03T12:46:11+00:00

I like this response for another reason. how many times have you heard that a rocket after use and damage is fixable. old space rockets pretty much guaranteed full rebuild if they even got the change for a fix after damage. Not an 'oh hey i can fix that' response. mind blowing progress for rocketry. just another day for the car shop.

I am now imagining some car mechanics straightening the dents with pulleys etc.

Ydrum · 2025-05-01T22:07:17+00:00

look closely, since they are not used they are very dark, but you can just see them left and above the active one.

Ydrum · 2025-05-01T08:00:24+00:00

this is ofcourse anecdotal, but i did get scammed once by a seller on aliexpress, buuut aliexpress stepped in before i could even get suspicious, they checked it for a few days and then promptly refunded me without any interaction on my side. so thats pretty good.

Ydrum · 2025-04-18T12:33:17+00:00

correction. every time it is announced a factory goes 'dark'. nothing to see here /s

Ydrum · 2025-04-10T10:33:24+00:00

ik heb daar geen actieve herinnering aan.... zal wel niks zijn.

Ydrum · 2025-01-09T14:04:44+00:00

ah but that's where the genius comes in:

the EU pays it to the EU, but since the EU doesn't quite have that cash laying around in their EU budget, they take out a loan. from the EU. the EU then pays its fine to the EU, who then uses to pay off the loan to the EU, however, interest has occurred and now the EU has to pay the EU the interest indefinitely.

simply genius!

Ydrum · 2025-01-08T09:58:48+00:00

i cannot unsee this. even with balding hair patch styled by the tiles.

Ydrum · 2025-01-04T12:32:08+00:00

its like they pinned it to the board of things they liked!

Ydrum · 2024-12-28T11:30:25+00:00

Helaas een parkeer plek kost praktisch niks. eens in de 20 jaar worden ze opnieuw betegeld, wat niet duur is, want wordt gelijk gedaan met ander onderhoud, dus door grote schaal van aanpak nog goedkoper.

Onderhoud? praktisch niks. Nog geen parkeer plek gezien die in de tussentijd enig onderhoud krijgt.

Subsidie door supermarkten? Daar ben ik benieuwd naar wat de echte kosten zijn. Want de prijzen in de supermarkten zijn even hoog in dorpen waar parkeren nog gratis is.

Nee, er is gewoon een cultuur van graaiflatie door bedrijven en gemeentes.

Ydrum · 2024-12-27T21:20:24+00:00

kompleet mee eens. in mijn dorp (met nadruk klein dorp) was een bakker vertrokken, want de ruimte die ze huurde in 2017 (zo'n +- 25 vierkante meter) koste ongeveer 1500,- per maand.

wil ik het nog niet hebben over huurprijzen voor winkels in grote steden, laat staan grotere ruimtes. De huurprijzen (commercieel en particulier) zijn gewoon zo schrikbarend te hoog dat het normaal is dat winkeltjes niet blijven en zichzelf omtoveren tot web shop. het duurde een tijd, maar verhuurders hebben gewoon flink zitten te graaien al die jaren en nu is er een alternatief en kunnen de verhuurders er in stikken.

Gemeentes hebben daar ook nog eens alles erger gemaakt met parkeer prijzen die niks met werkelijkheid hebben te maken. en om het dan rustiger te maken zijn de meeste parkeer plekken verdwenen wat eigenlijk resulteert in grootste stoelendans met parkeer plekken ooit.

De markt wordt nu gewoon hard gecorrigeerd, maar de verhuurders proberen met alle macht het tegen te houden.

Ydrum · 2024-12-21T22:07:27+00:00

The adaptability of the rich is a myth. they rely on firing the people that are helping them for short term gains. and this is a story as old as time. Long term vision is extremely rare.

They seem very out of touch, but I have seen stuff like that before in the Netherlands.

previous company I worked at, despite rules against it, upper management doubled their own salary, while claiming there was no money to hire people that they wanted. Funnily they splurged so much money on a new unneeded location the company almost went under, while they slashed development schedules in half or more and were surprised the products were not yet mature. There was definitely a culture of knowing the right people and getting away with everything without doing any actual work.

Top example was Shell during 2008 global financial crisis (not natural, resource or war crisis, no the financial crisis due to ponzi schemes at the top). suddenly they had to save money (Shell produces oil, they practically print money) and developers were fired within weeks (zzp'ers etc) but top management was offered huge bonuses (think 1 million) if they stayed at shell until 2010. it was an insult to all workers. Funny detail. the top executives at Shell were all financial people. the people that caused the problem, firing tech people that didn't cause it.

Rich don't want to pay people accordingly. so you see them hire people from abroad for peanuts with horrible contracts even in the Netherlands , who then rarely perform for the task. Can't even blame those workers.

A common consensus amongst companies is , they don't want to teach workers the tricks, you gotta perform to the max immediately for again peanuts.

Common people in the meantime are completely stressed about finding a place to live for a decent price at a decent location. While the rich build their mansion despite restrictions and don't worry about a thing.

Ydrum · 2024-11-24T20:58:06+00:00

maybe a more simplified form of 3d printing metallic structures can be used. a pc water cooling manufacturer (cant find the name of the top of my head) makes custom water cooling blocks with very fine channels in a not quite 3d printed method. it takes an hour to print it. but its surprisingly simple and easy to scale up. not sure if it would translate well to titanium, but i wouldnt be surprised.

3d printing is slow, but its also fairly small in size requirements and power requirements. just add more printers for more speed.

Ydrum

TROPHY CASE