This. I don’t understand why people give these companies credit for being able to solve problems when they straight up ignored industry experience.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

I guess Musk still wanted to find out anyways. His goal isn't merely building cars the simplest way possible. The guy is an educated physicist, he knows how stuff is usually done.

He has a BS in physics and never worked in the field a day in his life. No one would call someone with merely a BS a “well educated physicist.” This kind of thinking is cult-like attestations of faith.

To give them some benefit of doubt, all the industry experience is with geostationary sats. There is AFAIK little experience with tracking multiple quickly moving satellites using one antenna array.

Dial down throughput and reliability of the connection once enough people have bought into the original hype? Downgrading the performance seemed to be the popular solution for battery issues on phones not too long ago.

Things standing on pavement in direct sun can reach 50°C even without any added internal heat.

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.

I guess users would have to strap on heatsinks and fans?