> It's what, 15 aeroplane flights' worth?

Try a single aeroplane?

For just the fuel, yeah, but the expendable second stage adds a lot of impact.

How so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometeorite#Introduction

> An estimated 40,000 ± 20,000 tonnes per year (t/yr) of cosmic dust enters the upper atmosphere each year of which less than 10% (2700 ± 1400 t/yr) is estimated to reach the surface as particles.

The thread is about CO2 emissions.

The entire total carbon emissions of producing and flying the second stage is non-trivial.

> The thread is about CO2 emissions.

I agree, but the post I was responding wasn't talking about CO2 emissions.

You're citing the cost of 1% of the network against the entire network's function. It's more like 750 "flights worth." To provide internet service to ~250,000 people - about one quarter the population of a major east coast city.

Also, these are consumable - much more so than cable plants.

Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure. As witnessed by the very high cost of Starlink service, which is likely losing mountains of cash despite that.

> For the sake of bringing internet to hundreds of thousands of people? By letting people shop online or stream entertainment they've probably paid for themselves in reduced car journeys already.

That's not how that works.

> the very high cost of Starlink service

It's $99/mo for 100+ megabit service. Sure, it's moderately expensive if you're comparing to cable service in cities. It's downright cheap compared to the cost of connecting the extremely rural customers Starlink targets with physical cables. You don't think running a new set of physical cables to every rural residence in the world (or even cell towers to cover the same) would be expensive or have any environmental impact? Starlink wins on both and not by a small margin.

And then of course there's the prospect of bringing service to the remote mountains and jungles and deserts and polar regions and oceans where nobody lives and which will never (and should never) have ground-based infrastructure. And a bit of sorely needed competition to keep the ground-based monopoly service providers in check. And service for disaster areas or war zones where infrastructure is destroyed.

It's crazy how many options it opens. With combination of remote work, many areas that were effectively shielded off from digital nomads, now have a chance to attract those tourists. I remember as well rejecting lots of vacation places because of terrible internet. Poor local people stayed poor and I spent my money in popular tourist destinations that already had high internet speeds. Overall its one of the factors that can transform the society and possibly partially break down the big cities.

Isn't it $99/mo for service? Afaik there is no guaranteed bandwidth at all at the moment as all users are beta testers? All users are on a "best effort all you can get" plan. I'm sure there will be different tiers as the network matures.

I hate to break it to you, but you don't get guaranteed bandwidth on your wired consumer ISP either. Reported speeds have been more than reasonable for a consumer service. 100 Mbps isn't even the peak speed, that's more like 250 Mbps.

Plus $500 sign up fee ;)

This might all seem reasonable in rural America but it’s hugely expensive for internet in Europe.

That pays for the antenna. The antennas are expensive now because they are new technology, never manufactured on this scale before, but that is changing fast. The fee will get smaller soon enough. Ground-based infrastructure will not be experiencing any analogous rapid cost reduction. And in rural areas it costs a lot more than $500 per residence already. What infrastructure exists is heavily subsidized.

I think when I got my first cable broadband the modem cost ~$300, probably more than $500 now after inflation.

I know it pays for the antenna but the fact remains the cost of Starlink isn’t just $99/month like you’ve claimed.

> Plus $500 sign up fee ;)

That's going to average out to less than $10 a month pretty quickly.

Let's first see if you can even keep using the same make of antenna before replacing it with a new model for 5 years

The problem with that logic is that it’s not paid across 50 months. It’s a sign up lump sum to pay for the antenna rather than a fixed monthly cost added to your contract duration.

Also your post doesn’t take into account the life span of the antennae, that could be less than 5 years. It doesn’t take into account any competing services that you might want to switch to (eg some internet contracts in the U.K. typically run for 2 years and you’re encouraged to shop around at that point). Nor does it take into account any other personal circumstances that might lead one to cancel Starlink.

If we're using price as a proxy for environmental cost, it seems irrelevant whether it's paid up front or over time.

Lifespan certainly matters, but the financial structure doesn't.

You do realise not everyone has $500 to spare? For some people the distinction matters a lot.

It’s the same reason some people with high end phones pay a larger monthly phone bill. They want a phone they cannot afford to buy so they pay in instalments as part of their mobile contract.

So yes, it absolutely does matter to a lot of people.

This is a beta with no subsidies yet and no promotions because they have too many people interested.

So you're worrying about that way too early.

You'll be able to get starlink without a big upfront fee later, I assure you.

It's an issue but it's a separate issue from "high cost of service".

> This is a beta with no subsidies yet and no promotions because they have too many people interested

Not entirely true. The hardware is sold at a huge loss. If I recall correctly the dishes cost a grand to make. Musk expects those costs to come down but the fact remains he’s losing money with every sign up.

My point wasn’t about whether the cost is worth it though. It’s that the service costs 6 (!!!) times more than the GP claimed.

It’s really not a complicated point I’m making here either. I’m not judging the service, just correcting an error in someone’s post.

> So you're worrying about that way too early.

I’m not worried. Why would I be worried about how much an ISP I don’t need costs?

> You'll be able to get starlink without a big upfront fee later, I assure you.

I could afford it now if I wanted it. But I’m also socially aware enough to see that most people aren’t as privileged as we are.

> It's an issue but it's a separate issue from "high cost of service".

I’m skeptical this will ever become economical for low income families or lesser developed counties. The latter being a group that could really benefit from this.

Regarding cost of service, we moved on from the environmental impact a while ago and now just discussing the financial cost of service.

> I could afford it now if I wanted it. But I’m also socially aware enough to see that most people aren’t as privileged as we are.

You and everyone else.

Is that implication not obvious?

You're so locked on to the privilege issue and misreading the word "you" that you're completely ignoring my point, which is that the privilege of paying a big upfront fee will not be necessary.

Just like dozens of other services, you'll be able to sign up for a contract and the equipment fee will become either a small monthly amount or get waived entirely.

Eventually you might be right. But you’re now talking about theoretical future rather than what the literal monetary cost of the service is right now.

I say that because my point wasn’t to say that Starlink is uneconomical for the poor and always will be. My point was just that the GPs post was factually incorrect because he left off a hugely significant sum (relative to the first month) for the cost of Starlink right now.

The point about privilege only came about after others handwaved that $500 as loose change and I only really made that point to illustrate how ridiculous it was to say “it’s fine to get a payment wrong by half a grand because we’re wealthy”. It just smacks of being out of touch with reality (or perhaps they were just Starlink/Musk fanboys and defending factually incorrect posts if it looks favourably on Starlink?).

My personal opinions of Starlink is that it looks really promising. In fact I nearly signed up 9 months ago myself when I moved house. The kicker was I needed it a available within a week and didn’t really want to run two service providers. I’m guess given that Starlink is still beta I was asking a little much there. The problem is my current ISP locks me into a 2 year service and as much as I can afford Starlink there’s other things I’d rather spend my money on than paying for two ISPs just for curiosities sake. I’ll probably review that decision when the contract for the current ISP has > 12 months remaining.

I’m sure I’m 5 years time the cost of Starlink will become a lot more attractive to lower income families in the west. Or at least those that might need to depend on it might find it easier to gain access to the service. But I’m skeptical we’ll see the service affordable for most rural communities in Africa, India or South America, to name but a few large regions that could really benefit from such a service. Maybe Musk does have a plan here. He certainly doesn’t owe these people any charity; however it does feel a missed opportunity if some arrangement couldn’t eventually be found.

Anyway, that’s my 2c worth of opinions :)

It makes a huge difference to whether people buy it. It does not make a difference as a measure of "how much carbon does it release when they buy it", which is the question being debated in this thread.

> which is the question being debated in this thread.

That was discussed elsewhere in this thread. This discussion in this fork is very specifically about monitory costs.

Hence all the dollar signs. ;)

I had to pay hundreds for my first cable modem, so the early stage costs are comparable.

My point wasn’t whether the cost is reasonable. My point was just that the first month is a $600 bill rather than $100 like the GP suggested.

For some that cost is still reasonable for what they’re getting. And that’s fine. But from a purely mathematical standpoint the GP was significantly off in terms of the price they quoted.

You can all argue about whether that matters or not but that’s really just a subjective matter. Some folk cannot afford a $500 sign up cost. Whereas for others it will be an absolute bargain for what they need. It really depends on their income/savings, what other internet providers are available to them and how dependent they are on the internet. So the answer to the point you’re discussing is going to vary depending on the individual.

Thanks for clarifying, it's a fair point. Especially since lots of folks who don't have the upfront costs will finance it on a credit card and end up paying even more in the long run. (Hoping they wouldn't also do that for the monthly charge too, but lots of people finance normal living expenses every month, beyond their monthly income, until their credit breaks under the load)

Individual consumers aren't the only customers of Starlink. It also will bring high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity to the entire globe once enough laser-linked satellites are up. Industry and militaries will be using it. Whether this is a net positive for the environment or otherwise remains to be seen.

Also, the point of Starlink is to fund SpaceX's goal of a methane rocket. Methane was chosen because it can be generated from atmospheric gases and solar power. The logistics around scaling it up remain to be solved, but once it is solved, rocket launches will be basically zero carbon.

If you can extract methane from the atmosphere at scale you don't need rockets to solve the carbon problem.

The idea would be to synthesize methane from the CO2 in the atmosphere of Mars, which isn't quite as hard as on Earth: CO2 falls as snow near the poles there.

I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog.

It does however possess two chief advantages - the appearance of being novel and speed of construction. To build a cellular network to cover the areas that starlink does would take a decade - where it can be done at all. The aforementioned novel appearance also gets it largely free spectrum, which I believe starlink didn't have to go thru auction for.

To be clear - it's not novel, it's more or less a cellular network where the cell sites move about instead of the subscriber - which is something iridium did. I'm still not sure it can make money however.

> To be clear - it's not novel

Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites.

Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof)

Except no-one can provide you with low latency, high speed satellite internet. If you have alternatives (I do where I live) - Starlink is probably not for me.

You seem to paint as if starlink is something trivial, as some years ago people were thinking CRAZY - they can't possibly put that much satellites up there. Not to mention that people were really surprised they could put 60 satellites on a single rocket. That they established mass production of satellites. Etc.

This kind of comment reminds me of the Dropbox introductionary post [1]: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel.

Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths.

Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining.

Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper.

The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.

> Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof)

Iridium has been running sat-to-sat communication links since 1998?

It's not exactly equivalent, but I think the TDRS provides communication between different objects in space.

> I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog.

Starlink is a miracle for people with shitty or no cellular infrastructure. There are places in Australia that have exactly one cell tower for signal and they get 3G speeds at best. And if that tower has a fault, they'll be out of access for days or weeks.

$99 per month for Starlink is a no-brainer.

I don't think it can be profitable at that price is the point.

Current satellite broadband (in the US) is in that same pricing ballpark, I don't see why Starlink couldn't be profitable at that price-- or even lower-- once it scales up.

Different Opex and technical requirements -

The opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network (and Starlinks opex is certainly more than a convention geosynchronous satellite system). Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining.

Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper - this on top of the inherent launch costs, and the much much much larger fleet, implies that there may be a disconnect in pricing.

> You're citing the cost of 1% of the network against the entire network's function. It's more like 750 "flights worth."

Well you opened up by talking about "just one launch".

> To provide internet service to ~250,000 people - about one quarter the population of a major east coast city.

But people who are currently very hard to supply internet to and extremely car-dependent. Building housing in cities would probably be a better solution, and I'm all for efforts to make that legal, but realistically it's going to be extremely difficult to overcome upper-middle-class opposition to that and so other ways to mitigate the impact of those people's lifestyles are very much worthwhile.

> Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure. As witnessed by the very high cost of Starlink service, which is likely losing mountains of cash despite that.

On the contrary, running cable to many of these places would be overwhelmingly environmentally damaging (in many cases you'd have to build a road through a forest or blast through a mountain), and that's reflected in the high (sometimes infinite) cost of internet services. People are buying Starlink because it's cheaper (in the places they live) than ground-based alternatives, and as you've observed, the environmental cost is generally closely correlated to the monetary cost.

> That's not how that works.

That's exactly how it works. You've got to look at the net impact. For people who don't travel internationally, reducing car usage is the most effective single lifestyle change they can make to reduce carbon impact; if Starlink reduces trips to the extent that e.g. people shift from a two-car to a one-car household, that's huge. (And note that if it's reducing travel into towns or cities then that's benefitting the rest of us as well, by reducing congestion and parking usage, which in turn lets us turn more land over to productive uses).

>On the contrary, running cable to many of these places would be overwhelmingly environmentally damaging (in many cases you'd have to build a road through a forest or blast through a mountain)

How so? How do this people landed in this place without a road and electricity? Rural homes must have roads to reach the city to buy fuel and food. There are also wireless terrestrial ways to transmit internet too.

> How do this people landed in this place without a road and electricity? Rural homes must have roads to reach the city to buy fuel and food.

They might rely on generators for electricity, and access might involve a boat, or a quad bike trail that would need enlarging before you could bring construction equipment in and run a cable along it.

> There are also wireless terrestrial ways to transmit internet too.

I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding; if it were practical to run internet some other way they would already get it that way.

>They might rely on generators for electricity, and access might involve a boat, or a quad bike trail that would need enlarging before you could bring construction equipment in and run a cable along it.

Who are this people? ARe they poor farmers or rich dudes on islands?

>I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding; if it were practical to run internet some other way they would already get it that way.

It might be practical but not obscenely profitable. I double that Elon sells his stuff only to the above people, the people living in isolated environments with no roads and electricity are too few. In many places it is legal to put cables on the electricity polls and connect a village 25Km away in 1 single day, from what I read this is not allowed in US so you have no internet or a monopoly.

> Who are this people? ARe they poor farmers or rich dudes on islands?

You know, there are poor dudes that live on islands too.

Like one of my friends. It's a river island, it's only about five kilometers to the nearest cellular tower, and as you might guess running fiber across a major waterway is out of question.

So we built a 20-meter tower with a 1.5-meter parabolic dish on top just to get 3G-ish speeds on the site.

Quit the condescension, please.

There are a LOT of people living in such environments. Hell, when we were doing rural cellular in Africa, it was like three days over non-existing roads to get to the installation site. No electricity, only satcom, and that with 1-second rtt. Starlink is the best thing that could've ever happened for those applications.

Why I am not convinced that Elon and all HJN-ers here are thinking at poor people but instead find this extreme cases to shamelessly use them to promote the technology to work around the fact they don't like their mobile provider.

Because you're looking at your own prejudices rather than the facts? I'm no fan of Musk and Starlink will never be any use to me (I live in the biggest urban area in the world), but knee-jerk reactionism disguised as environmentalism is one of the biggest barriers to actually fixing environmental issues.

> Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure.

So what should people who dont have access to the ground-based infrastructure do?