This is mainly due to how they are targeting RDOF areas to appease the government from winning all that money. Heat is one thing, but freezing temperatures are also very difficult to deal with. A deicer is common on high-end antennas to melt ice off in subzero temperatures.
I would be surprised if SpaceX changes the design at this point. To manufacture it antennas in the quantities that they need, they would have had to order a lot of the parts 6 to 9 months ahead of time in large quantities, especially given that they lose money on the terminal cost currently.
I mean they practically used a water tower to test their starship engines. while in parallel they worked for rocket design just to test the first flight/landing and yet in parallel another deisgn for orbital flight tests etc. It seems a waste but this aproach has allowed them to be years ahead of ULA in rocket design. In this case I think they have demonstrated how they work and it's fair to assume that these problems are not engineering miscalculations but deliberate "go with the fastest thing you can test" decisions.
That works for building rockets one at a time. It works less so for mass producing consumer electronics. Lines cost a lot of money to set up, and economies of scale exist.
{
"dishGetStatus": {
"deviceInfo": {
"id": "ut01000000-00000000-0000e586",
"hardwareVersion": "rev1_pre_production",
"softwareVersion": "db6b5d22-a642-43d6-bbec-97a816e3dbd6.uterm.release",
I always back off from the maximum limits for the gear I design then after years in the field and proven reliability you can remotely update it and push things a bit. And that's in production. This is beta
It’s like.. hey guys, the rest of the world has been designing satellite dishes for 40 years that addressed these problems including very low cost stuff from the satellite TV era. Why didn’t SpaceX learn from the rest of the industry instead of having to rediscover it?
Elon Musk famously works by „first principles“, which can indeed be roughly translated to „discover everything yourself“. The advantage is that it gives a clean slate for approaches considered impractical when the books were written.
I'm not sure when that has ever worked out like that though. SpaceX built on a lot of existing aerospace knowledge. Tesla went through a lot of manufacturing hell trying to automate what turned out to be pretty unautomatable parts of manufacturing a car. As far as I know, whatever you think of the EV, the car manufacturing process Tesla has isn't uniquely good.
Phones aren't supposed to be used in such situations at all, so it's hard to carry over design lessons from there. Plus the radio frequencies used are new, unlike phones.
Means the antenna is not even outdoor rated
We have a thermometer with a black plastic sensor (why?!) in our balcony. When the sun hits it in mid-morning, it gets up to 120°F, even when the actual ambient temperature is more like 65°F.
They put the limit there in the first place, so why did they choose that temperature? Keep in mind these terminals need to last 5-10 years in these conditions. The motorized antenna is another part that is known to fail in extreme weather. Let's revisit this in a couple years when they have a decent amount of customers.
(It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available. You may have noticed that there's been a pandemic going on for the last year or so, and that's hurt the availability of many electronic components, among other things.)
> It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available
Fun fact: they don't make (commercially available) GPUs, NICs, pretty much any PC components rated below 0°F. If you need to design a system which needs to sit in an aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either pay out the nose for some serious engineering, or you just roll the dice. We rolled, and it turned out fine. That won't always be the case.
What Spacex is doing is smart, not sloppy.
Radiation doesn't help either, as sibling commented - it creates ions making the initial breakdown easier, though it shouldn't make a difference for a continuous flow that involves innumerable ions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIqK45nxcTo
He even explained it with balls and magnets!
edit: ahh, now I see it's because you're factually incorrect. It's only 1/3rd of humans that live within 100km of oceanic coasts.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-o...
Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device that utilized active cooling (as in would get colder than ambient not just fans or whatnot)?
Can't have the servers freezing when turned off.
Also your example is a poor one. Engineering a systems solution for 0F is far easier than engineering for outdoors in the sun. Heat removal is a primary consideration and a 0F environment makes that far easier. In 0F your issue isn’t the cold, it’s the lack of humidity - again, something everyone who has more than two years in HW knows.
Update: -40F is -40C, oops, my bad, I don’t understand Fahrenheit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Who is “we”?
It's made it 2 winters and dozens of missions so far.
The customer is NOAA and they really don't have oodles of cash to spend on this thing, so it's mostly commodity hardware. Initially we designed this whole crazy insulated case to keep it from getting too cold, but the aircraft engineers nixed it due to fire hazards. The airframe isn't airtight so it gets most of the brunt of the diurnal swing.
So there I am, hacking like mad in a terminal in the back of this airplane over sea ice, trying to squash various bugs. I blame my love of travel and reading while flying for my resilience to motion sickness.
Stressful AF. So worth it.
Umm, yes?
I see people here hate the idea of startups or engineers being responsible for any kind of reliable service even though lives depend on it, and as this "SV spirit" infiltrates more of our life even coffee machines don't work without an internet connection, a subscribtion and software update.
Completely prosperous
I think that's the idea...
The automotive screens didn’t exist in the size they needed and they weren’t at a stage in their company where they could design their own.
They took a risk to achieve the product vision that they were determined to bring into the world given the technical constraints of the age. I’d say overall it paid off.
IMO it wasn’t arrogance.
I don't like their handling of it from a warranty perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial decision was actually the wrong one.
No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or a smaller LCD that wouldn’t.
This is just one of many decisions traced directly to Elon that fly in the face of established best practices. Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional misnaming of “autopilot”, and the resulting body count of the wide consumer release of its “beta” software.
So yes, it is arrogance.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...
> Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts
I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together, Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous regardless of tape and beeping.
Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.
An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it was a significant and potentially catastrophic engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over potential consumer safety risks as well as over the expertise of the component manufacturers.
The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly.
There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering).
In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.
I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We definitely didn’t use to ship software we knew would break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and delivering updates was hard.
The internet has been good for many many things. Software reliability hasn’t been one of them.
Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems.
Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too.
People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.
Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous.
The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal cycling with that particular part model as well. These things happen.
But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen reboots, I can't place the car into park or reverse. With the shifter, I can push and hold the parking button to engage the emergency brakes on the car. Can't do that if the screen is rebooting. The blinkers are now capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel. While I imagine they'll stay low level and decoupled from the MCU, I sure hope that's the case.
The yoke is possibly the stupidest thing Tesla has done, ever. So many people are going to end up with completely shattered arms as they get into accidents and have the airbags deployed while they're turning and have their arms crossed. All for what? To look cool to a 13-year-old? Idiotic. And I say this as someone with a MS on order for September which I'm desperately hoping I'll be able to get with the regular wheel. Still bitter about the stalks, though.
the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.
A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...
Not being aware that objects placed outdoors and exposed directly to sunlight easily reach temperatures above 80C is either a collosal design error or sheer incompetence.
Let's put it this way: for anyone to draw the line at 50C they needed to do at least a review of environmental constraints and operational ceilings, and the most rudimentary of cursory reviews (i.e., googling and looking at the first search hits) is enough to show that white objects placed outdoors at direct sunlight easily get to 80C.
But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.
1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and regulations
2) Give business advice on (1)
SpaceX, paradoxically, has easier time experimenting and partially failing, because they mostly haul machines. Every Tesla car, OTOH, has a human pilot.
[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-how-hot-t...
> Another complaint said the failure disabled safety monitors associated with Tesla’s driver-assistance system Autopilot. [1]
It looks like losing access to the touchscreen does actually effect safety components, and driver's abilities to use them. (Though I'm not clear on to what extent - driver's might just need to crack out the manual to see how else to defog, for example.)
[0] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/06/tesla-investigated...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-safety/u-s-probes-t...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...
> Officially, SpaceX has said that "Dishy McFlatface" is certified to operate from 22° below zero up to 104° Fahrenheit. Temperatures reached about 120° yesterday in Martin's town of Topock,
> the Starlink app provided an error message saying, "Offline: Thermal shutdown." The dish "overheated" and "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error message said.
Maybe not the greatest behavior, but clearly they already accounted for this.
This often leads to some of the most spectacular failures, and unforseen issues.
Or someone fucked up
They're beta, so it could be that the thermistor was placed poorly in a redesign, that they intended 122°C instead of °F, that they shipped with a dummy value used in an older fw during testing, etc.
All in all, a little embarrassing but not that significant, assuming this is certifiably not a scam.
If they planned to shut it down at 122C (which is indeed close to melting the solder) but by mistake made it shut down at 122F (not that much for most electronics), it would be a completely understandable blooper. It doesn't mean that the hardware isn't capable of operating at 122F.
> the Bombardier CRJ aircraft used on some shorter routes have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533662790...
The temperature limit for takeoff performance has nothing to do with the maximum temperature for electronics or other components. It's about air density decreasing which reduces the engine thrust as well as the maximum lift from the wings. So the warmer it gets the lower the maximum weight you can take off with and the higher the speed required before lift-off. At some point that's not safe anymore so the manufacturers only publish verified performance data up to a maximum temperature. You can't legally fly above that.
About a year or so after the article I linked above was published, Bombardier obtained ISA+40C certification for the CRJ700 and CRJ900 from both the FAA and TC. For the flights in and out of Phoenix, AZ, this meant that those aircraft have since been able to legally fly in temps of up to 123.8F. I don’t know the details of the certification upgrade, but my understanding is that there were no changes to either the aircraft or weight restrictions.
I don’t personally know anyone at Bombardier to know exactly why they didn’t certify the aircraft for ISA+40C to begin with, but given that there were apparently no changes to either the aircraft or the weight restrictions, this seemed very much a case of “your engineering team had to wait ... to realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get hot”.
We use ISA differences (the +40 you wrote) in flight performance calculations specifically. Not in any "aircraft too warm / cold" kind of limits, since those would be absolute numbers not relative to ISA.
In the case of Starlink's dish, it's not clear which temperature they mean.
A simple search will net you heating and cooling devices for satellite dishes. If you face more extreme temperatures, you need only go buy a heating and cooling unit.
You're definitely right that people are hating on it. Most of the people I know in real life that knocked it have access to land based internet. Once you get out into rural areas where 4g is the basis for your internet, it's amazing.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/how-cows-caused-s...
My Starlink arrives next week :) I’m so exited to be able to finally download some photos I put on google drive a couple of years ago.
Thermodynamics FTW
For one you need a sophisticated reverse heat engine, for the other a piece of wire with high enough resistance.
This is a very obtuse way of saying “refrigerator”, which is a type of heat pump.. a technology over a hundred years old. The simplest refrigerators/heat pumps are pretty simple — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
Cooling for active outdoor technology has extremely variable outside temperatures (basically anything from -20 to 60 °C, or more if you take direct sunshine into account) and a constant generation of heat to be taken away.
Like mobile base stations of course have AC units and some amateur astronomers use peltier cooled sensors, but I would hardly call these mass produced consumer items.
-30ºC - +55ºC
The previous link was only for heating dishes. I wonder if there are any products out there for cooling dishes. There are products out there for Dish TV receivers but Starlink has circuits in the dish itself. Seems more like the dw7000 above.
OK, maritime outfitters will sell you a climatized radome, which will set you back a few grand. Proper engineering costs money (can't have radar fail in the middle of the Strait of Malacca), and that's why Elon relies on his army of fanboys, Elon's outrageous conduct is part of marketing.
To be fair, isn't the maritime market a bit like the aviation market, where a pack of 6 disposable AA batteries potted in a pack will cost you $43? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1YjGLwfYSQ&t=37)
On land with a good supply of fresh water (so, not in drought regions) I think you could probably cool a dish for a few dollars of parts with an open-loop cooling system. I'm not sure how much water you would actually need though, it might be an unconscionable waste in the regions that are prone to these sort of temperatures in the first place.
Fair point, a portable AC sets you back 150 dollars or so, so with outdoor proofing and all, you can build a passable cooling system for 250 dollars. That would be the proper engineering solution, but it wouldn't look cool, like the steering yoke in the recent Tesla.
Oh, and apparently there are heatsinks you can buy for satellite dishes.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Tokyosat-Radiator-Alu...
You can't have a lot of positive attention without a corresponding amount of negative attention when something goes wrong.
Starlink provides an excellent example of a deeper problem I see with new technology vs. traditional infrastructure. We know how to do broadband in rural places. We do it all over the planet. We simply tax income and spend it on infrastructure.
Elon Musk (and the likes) see an opportunity to disrupt this simple answer and make money selling a different unproven solution that has the potential to be at best as good. For me this is bad news. If politicians get sold by the likes of Elon Musk, it will stand in the way of traditional proven infrastructure and—in the case of starlink—fast and affordable broadband connection for rural communities.
Starlink seems to be a very cheap option in comparison, even if it has LoS and overheating problems.
When (if) those customers ever get broadband access by additional infrastructure investment, SpaceX will need to find a way to provide better value. I’m not sure I understand how this is a bad thing.
The problem is that this view means you need politicians who care enough about the issue and many simply don't. I like there being a solution that eliminates a lot of the political factors that cause endless dither and delay over building traditional infrastructure for rural broadband, and for that matter my opinion of Elon Musk is still higher than most of my country's politicians when it comes to technological policy.
There's also another important use-case for things like Starlink which is people who can't be reached by traditional infrastructure. These are people who live in remote parts of the world where governments won't consider investing in infrastructure on grounds of cost, and people who live a nomadic lifestyle (liveaboard sailors for example, and van dwellers depending on where they go). I don't think they should be cut off from the internet because of an overly sceptical attitude towards new approaches.
Amazon and OneWeb are also looking to build constellations. It isn’t a StarLink question.
Examples: [1] The least stringent automotive standard I could find (AEC-Q100 grade 3) expects components to operate from -40°C (-40°F) - 85°C (185°F). [2] A pretty basic article on designing outdoor products suggests at least -20°C(-4°F) - 70°C (158°F).
This is a standard part of the design flow precisely so that you don't make a mistake as monumental as shipping an outdoor device that can't withstand the weather at the location you shipped it to.
[1] https://community.cypress.com/t5/Knowledge-Base-Articles/Mea... [2] https://suntsu.com/2017/09/15/the-great-outdoors-designing-p...
I am more interested in seeing the service achieve streaming latencies required for video games and trading. The day that happens, I have no need to live near a city anymore.
122F is only 50C. Most components can handle 85C so shutting down at 50C means the thermal rise is >35C. This is simply poor design.
0: https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-direct....
No, it really isn't.
The point of a test is to verify that the system works as designed, and in case it doesn't then there's planned room to iterate out unexpected issues.
If a system designed to be operated on the outdoors is not designed to operate with temperatures above 50C then this is a collosal screwups and gross oversight, as this sort of stuff is well-known for decades.
https://web.mit.edu/parmstr/Public/NRCan/CanBldgDigests/cbd0...
Like in the area where I life a satellite dish reaching 50°C would be the rear exception. And if the alternative is not having proper internet at all other days, Startlink would still be the better option, even if there are a very few days where it fails during the afternoon of the day.
(not saying things won't break at that heat, just that it's not unrealistically high)
Just something to keep in mind during installation I suppose, not insurmountable problems by any means.
Ideal conditions during development may not replicate real-world use.
Anyone with a six week internship worth of experience would have tested this in an environment chamber.
It’s bad enough when idiot “first principals” MEs and EEs toss this stuff over and I have to deal with it, but it doesn’t fucking reach customers with faults that bad.
I had a home router once that was cutting out in the summer. The operating environment section of the manual listed a temperature range that went up to something like 105 ℉. My apartment was below 80 ℉ so didn't think that was the problem.
It turns out that they meant 105 ℉ inside the router. Opening the router case and placing it so a fan I used to circulate room air was blowing over the router made the problem go away.
I think it is reasonable to assume when writing a manual that if you tell a consumer that the device can be operated in an environment with a temperature range of X-Y, the consumer will take it to mean that if the temperature in their room is in that range they can use the device. If that's not what the range means, you should tell the consumer.
Is the Starlink manual clear on this?
It’s not even the hottest part of the summer yet. I can’t imagine this problem getting better.
The rural communities most likely to use Starlink are also those most likely to be relying on satellite dishes right now, which seem to frequently suffer from similar problems.
My parents pay for internet from both HughesNet and AT&T because the former stops working whenever it snows more than an inch or two (even after clearing the dish manually) and the latter constantly drops any time there's thick rain, heavy winds, etc. There's dozens of days throughout each year where neither work and they're just SOL in terms of TV or internet.
They began providing service at higher latitude earlier because that is where the satellites "lump" due to their inclination, so that they needed fewer satellites in total.
They are also required to cover Alaska and have now started launching Starlink satellites into (near-)polar orbits. If these are test sats or actually operational I do not know but they seem to be working on these issues.
All in all they seem to be following a launch-early strategy.
This sounds reasonable, and you make excellent points. But the important fact we all have to remember in these discussions is not the details, but that SpaceX is run by Elon Musk.
But right right... I forgot. Musk.
English is terrible enough before we start butchering it by playing with intent.
(Said with love and encouragement; I've forgotten about not using sarcasm here too).
You're just seeing the system work.