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| Many satellites per launch, into multiple orbital shells |
Starling satellite internet a constellation of thousands of ~570 lb (260kg) satellites with Ku-, Ka- & E-band phased array antennas providing global broadband access to anyone (currently 140,000 subscribers) with a $500 receiver willing to pay $99 a month, in areas unserved by Xfinity Comcast High Speed Internet or similar. Visit the official website & check out their new better faster Starlink Premium service for $500 per month via a $2500 antenna & router kit / https://www.starlink.com
With $900 million in grant funds from the FCC, Starlink by SpaceX off to a stellar accelerating pace
Depending on your cellular 4G LTE or 5G NR services, the SpaceX internet might be more or less affordable in terms of cost & your specific use case. Much of the Earth lacks access to internet broadband service such that many hundreds of millions of people are still "offline" without any practical way to get "online"
While the venerable Falcon 9 rocket can put 60 Starlink satellites into lower orbits, the StarShip will be able to lift 400 Starlink units into orbits around the Earth^^ Starship will also be moving people from any of its many ports around the world to other distant locals within ~30 minutes ^^ making supersonic passenger aircraft seem slow. Like strapping into an ICBM that can land itself autonomously :) The Reusable Starship platform amazing as an aerospace launching vehicle!
IT HERE! Elon Musk FINALLY Reveals Starlink 2.0 in January 2022! https://youtu.be/bRmXfLgXg3c
If playing with my Garmin 2589LMT GPS unit & having a hard time getting GPS signals any indication of that Satellite internet might be like with signal loss, signal noise, weak signals. I even demo-d a free trial of Satellite radio service in my 2013 leased Nissan LEAF S & even some hills & building blocked the signals & caused a loss of reception.
2021 Starlink Train Highlight Reel
https://youtu.be/ZFPK1whMQbg
IT HAPPENED! Elon Musk FINALLY Reveals Starlink 2.0 in January 2022!
https://youtu.be/rPN5aEwEaeQ
I am sure in stationary applications with the antenna transceiver pointed towards the sky, reception will improve vs mobile use cases where the antenna is moving. I would be curious to try the service in my car, a wifi network for my cell phone created therein, or in a boat on the ocean or RV roaming the USA // Hey @SpaceX #Starlink, can you hook me up with a demo-unit to borrow, make a YouTube video & then return? As this is likely to not create any return contacts, I will contact SpaceX directly about this with an official request & inquiry!
From IRL in person testimony from international visitors to the USA, I was told repeatedly that in my rural parts of developing countries, many products you can buy on Ebay or Amazon, are simply not available, nor is access to internet to shop online. The digital divide as it is known, not just the result of global chip shortages associated with economic changes due to COVID19 outbreak & increased uses of video conferencing services like Zoom for telecommute & online classroom operations & remote learning & similar non-in person interactions, requiring newer computer hardware for smooth video acceleration & web cam streaming simultaneously & requiring high speed internet to work.
Basic sanitation not even universally accessible to people worldwide, let alone broadband internet access. To give everyone internet access means that we need more electricity, enough to give 10 billion people at least a 2kw lifestyle potential & really somewhere between that & 6kw with peaks up to 20kw for people with home manufacturing, welding, laser cutting, intensive dual or triple oven operations, mining rigs, brewing operations or other energetic uses of lots of fridges or microwaves or similar.
Electric vehicles are the first platform with 100kw mobile energy levels, where the 200amp domestic household electrical service panel offers only 24kw continually. Peak acceleration energy in some higher performance dual motor Tesla cars can approach 800kw or more. Our BlendTec blender uses 1540watt through its brushed motor that spools up super ultra rapidly. An electric hot water heater like the one in our apartment can consume 15kw peak converting tap water into hot water for showers, laundry, dishwasher, rinsing dishes with hot water etc.
After WWII increasing affluence in America produced a consumer class of middle class people with good buying power in a world where individual family homes & cars made locally were relatively cheap compared with wages. The USD or fiat currency the United States Dollar was strong & much of the economy supplied all of its own products & services to itself, in a circular positive feedback loop of added value, taxes, government expansion, more infrastructure, growing the size of the economy & size of the middle class. That whole progress in the US economy for normal people, sorta peaked in the late 1960's & the same can be said for other countries like the UK.
China created really hard competition with low priced factories, cheap coal electricity & cheap labor without any of the human rights or workers protections & safe workplaces laws or L&I or anything else like a union to protect workers from exploitation. Now China so expensive that they are outsourcing manufacturing jobs to other "cheaper" nearby countries in Asia, like Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, where government easy to bribe & where factories are cheaper to build & where energy cheaper & water cheaper & labor cheaper, all usually exploiting degradation of nature ^ creating toxic emissions with dirty industrial processes, coal power, dirty biomass combustion, low quality electricity & deforestation, land degradation, soil & dirt runoff, lack of composting or recycling operations, trash creation galore & worse.
In a world with thousands of billionaires & millions of starving poor people, how can such inequality exist such that $10 billion can be raised by SpaceX to put many thousands of motorcycle sized satellites into orbit around Earth. Space trash already a major issue worldwide & all of those satellites have a finite life. They do have HAL thrusters that use Krypton gas with high voltage DC to create ionization acceleration of noble gas molecules thrust for de-orbiting at the EOL or end of life of each Satellite. These de-orbited satellites then re-enter Earth's atmosphere where the burn up from aerodynamic drag heating that melts & then burns all the materials so that only a mist of dust & ash results as the final products.
Of three components, the user terminal is a transceiver antenna that plugs into a wifi router for the use to use with phones or laptops or desktop. The satellites are relatively small, and mass-produced telecommunications units in different orbital shells at different altitudes. There are multiple version too. The first 60 units 0.9v were all deorbited & burned up, except a few they lost contact with & were unable to control. Newer version 1 satellites comprise the first bulk delivery set & further future delivered constellations will be version 2 & so on. As of early 2022 the Starlink system is currently in public beta testing mode. Lastly there are ground station gateways featuring 8 antennas plugged into fiber optical internet backbone connections to major telecom service providers.
Both the satellites in Starlink system constellation & the user terminal antenna transceiver feature phased array technology operating in the KU-band from 12 to 18 gigahertz (GHz)(25–16.7 mm wavelength), the KA-band from 26.5 to 40 gigahertz (GHz)(11.1–7.5 mm wavelength) & E-band from 60 to 90 gigahertz (GHz) (5 mm-3.333 mm wavelength). Phased array antenna are capable of controlling & aiming the RF beam profile digitally without physical motorized gimbals or precisely oriented dish antenna tuning mechanically. Though in practice, the actual receiver kit with it waterproof wireless router, does actually tilt the main array to line up with the smaller early constellation. Right now, wait times for preordering a receive kit about 6 months.
These small wavelengths enable a lot of antenna to fit into a small rectangular array, thus no round oval shaped parabola needed like other ground based satellite telecom systems. Similar to synthetic aperture radar used on military drones & other aircraft, the phased array also kind of like MIMO or multiple input multiple output antenna arrays on wifi routers with better RF spectral performance & faster data speeds :)
Each Starlink satellite an "L" shaped block about 8 feet long & 4 feet wide, with a 30 foot solar photovoltaic power generation array to energize the electronics, charge the batteries & power the HAL thruster for station keeping, orbital shell insertion, raising or lowering the orbit or changing the shape of the orbit or other maneuvers. Orbiting the Earth at about 17,000 mile per hour, there are always a few of them in view of your end user antenna setup. The satellites communicate with laser transceivers in space, since light can travel 2X faster in space than it can through glass fibers in fiber optic internet. This gives the network great data bandwidth to shuttle bits around faster in space.
Made in Redmon, Wa, USA, each satellite constructed with a team of electronics, RF, ASIC & system design engineers & technicians in serial high volume production like an automaker, with the goal of making many tens of thousands of them & launching them on SpaceX rockets.
The longer term goal through the late 2020's to put more than 42,000 Starlink com satellites beaming up high speed broadband internet around the globe to anyone around the world with an active subscription & the needed hardware, according to ITU filings by SpaceX.
Right now nearly 2000 Starlink satellites are orbiting Earth, though not all of them are part of the broadband internet network function. The military in the USA for example via a $100+ million grant, got super premium features unavailable to other commercial user or customers. Around 1400 of these are currently serving up broadband internet service to end users, many of which work for SpaceX or are partners of SpaceX. Currently more than 100,000 subscribers are fueling SpaceX with $99 per month, generating a big revenue stream to pay for more Satellite manufacturing & the other operations.
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