“What we’re seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation or a proliferated architecture can provide in terms of redundancy and capability,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said during a hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee.
U.S. general: Starlink in Ukraine showing what megaconstellations can doQuote“What we’re seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation or a proliferated architecture can provide in terms of redundancy and capability,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said during a hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Just out of curiosity, is the current Starlink terminal capable of randomly switching in timing to a different Starlink satcom in view?
Quote from: jpo234 on 03/08/2022 08:51 pmU.S. general: Starlink in Ukraine showing what megaconstellations can doQuote“What we’re seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation or a proliferated architecture can provide in terms of redundancy and capability,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said during a hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee.And Starship just became a national security priority. With how things are falling for SpaceX (not to mention Tesla), I'm starting to wonder if Musk somehow arranged the current conflict, lol.
Quote from: Zed_Noir on 03/09/2022 07:25 amJust out of curiosity, is the current Starlink terminal capable of randomly switching in timing to a different Starlink satcom in view?They had an update months ago that automatically switches to your best sat. Does a sat switch over in phases.
Quote from: Tomness on 03/09/2022 11:56 amQuote from: Zed_Noir on 03/09/2022 07:25 amJust out of curiosity, is the current Starlink terminal capable of randomly switching in timing to a different Starlink satcom in view?They had an update months ago that automatically switches to your best sat. Does a sat switch over in phases.Each satellite produces several beams that cover an area more or less below the satellite. Unless you are in a satellite's beam you cannot communicate with the satellite because it is not looking at you. In general only one or sometimes two satellites are looking at any given spot on the Earth's surface, so you cannot switch to some other satellite just because it's in the line of sight.All of the users currently in a beam share the beam using some multiple-access protocol built on some combination of TDMA and FDMA elements. This sharing requires the Starlink system to allocate a portion of the beam to each user. This is generally done by broadcasting the time/frequency plan from the satellite to all terminals. Each terminal then knows when to transmit. I am not familiar with the details of all this for Starlink, so I'm describing the principles used for other satellite communications, but they are fairly fundamental because of the nature of shared RF communications, including e.g. cell phones and cell towers. There are huge differences at the detail level to optimize bandwidth efficiency based on each specific system architecture.
With 2000 operational sats and 50 sats per plane. That is 40 planes full of sats. Since you can see a plane in ascending and descending it effectively doubles the density of the number of planes in view. Such that a Gateway or UT can see right now up to 9 sats and connect to them. The reason why the Gateways were setup to communicate to as many as 9 sats at once. The minimum numbers would be about 5 or 6 sats. The farther away from the gateway you are the less sats that are connected to a specific gateway that a UT can connect to. In specific with Ukraine at a mean latitude of 49 degrees. That means that there is a lot more than just 5 planes in view but around 10 planes or more in view and as many as 18 or more sats are in view for connection.
Quote from: Robotical on 03/08/2022 09:53 pmQuote from: jpo234 on 03/08/2022 08:51 pmU.S. general: Starlink in Ukraine showing what megaconstellations can doQuote“What we’re seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation or a proliferated architecture can provide in terms of redundancy and capability,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said during a hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee.And Starship just became a national security priority. With how things are falling for SpaceX (not to mention Tesla), I'm starting to wonder if Musk somehow arranged the current conflict, lol.Nonsense. F9 and Vulcan have it covered
Quote from: sauerkraut on 03/08/2022 04:21 pmI'm not interested in use while in motion . But it sounds like dishy can be used when stopped while traveling .I'm retired and on the waiting list . I hope this feature remains on after I receive one !! Not standard capability. A lot of people have lost connectivity when they moved the dish a few miles with a message telling them it's in the wrong place.
I'm not interested in use while in motion . But it sounds like dishy can be used when stopped while traveling .I'm retired and on the waiting list . I hope this feature remains on after I receive one !!
For your amusement. A not so favorable interview about Starlink and Musk.I believed this is the same Tim Farrar that is mention elsewhere on this forum bad mouthing Starlink and Musk.The man still hasn't realize that no one have launch capacity along with satellite development and manufacturing capacity in house like SpaceX.One of the comment from the video is that Tim Farrar on Starlink sounds a lot like former GM executive Bob Lutz on Tesla. Lutz keep on saying the competition is coming to drive Tesla out of business for years. Even with 2 Tesla Gigafactory coming online soon, Tesla can not produce enough cars to meet demand.
General idea I just had. I looked at the wikipedia article for the SDI "brilliant pebbles" program. The idea was to have a large number of cheap satellites in orbit, that could change their orbit to intersect an ICBM if one was launched.The estimated number of sacrificial satellite to stop a mass soviet nuclear strike against the US was 7000, but possibly up to ten times that if you wanted global coverage. Starlink is very close to this ballpark. Could Starlink itself, or a system based on it, be given a dual use as an ABM system? Between Starship and the capability of mass producing cheap spacecraft for Starlink, it looks to me like SpaceX basically could have the capability to launch an ABM system capable of eliminating the Russian land-based ICBM threat in fairly short order, though the SLBM threat vector is a lot harder to deal with.