Low orbit satellites are unnecessary for emergency/comm. Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper, but LEO constellations are now subsidized by the military industrial complex (there is other value to be low).
> Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper
GEO satellites are pretty pricey. Each Milstar satellite cost $800 million, others in the same category are also in the hundreds of millions, WGS-11 was over $600 million. Starlink V2 cost $800k per satellite.
And if you spent $800 million on a constellation of 1000 Starlinks, you'd have better coverage and bandwidth than the entire 6 satellite Milstar constellation put together for 1/6th the price.
Digging around for more recent prices, GEO is around $100-300 million. That's still orders of magnitude more per satellite than LEO. At the low end this means you could get 100-400 Starlink V2s up there for the price of one GEO. One GEO that only covers part of the globe, versus 100-400 satellites providing global coverage.
Satellites have to pass through the Van Allen belts in order to get into such higher orbits, which may expose them to a not insignificant amount of radiation, especially if the final orbit injection is not done in a single impulse. Then, once they are comfortably out in their higher orbit, they have to endure yet more radiation without the aid of the Earth's magnetic field, and require more cooling capacity due to spending much less time in Earth's shadow than an LEO satellite.
They're also overlooking the actual prices of GEO satellites versus LEO. LEO is much cheaper than GEO, there's a reason DOD and others are moving towards it and it's not that it's a fad. GEO has a few specific benefits but cost is not one of them.
I read the whole thing and I don't see any evidence of leaked information. It's synthesizing this argument from public information and reasonable inferences but not any privileged information.
It is hardly the first one to connect these dots. I and many others came to these same conclusions years ago when it became apparent that SpaceX had the ability to execute on the Starlink plan.
According to Mike Griffin (referring to the first decade of the company), "[SpaceX] will have received approximately $1.2 billion in government money from the collective programs. I’m rounding, but with this recent $400-plus million award under CCiCap [Commercial Crew integrated Capability], that brings the total SpaceX funding to something around $1.2 billion, maybe a little more.
That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive, especially since in testimony last year the SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, indicated that the private funding involved was not more than $200 million. $100 million of his own money that he had brought in from a prior enterprise, and then he alluded to the fact—I’m trying to recall the testimony on an ad hoc basis, but the point is that there’s less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion of government capital."
You are just connecting unrelated evidence. Nobody denies that SpaceX got government contracts. That still doesn't validate the overall story.
SpaceX got paid to provide services, and they did so. It had little to do with SDI or any long term demand for missile defense.
Most of the money is from experimental NASA program to find a cheap way too get money for ISS.
SpaceX got almost no money from DoD for quite a bit of its history.
> That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive
Its not 'excessive'. You can't just say 'excessive' without evidence. You actually have to show that they got overpaid for the services provided. In reality, they got underpaid and lost money on those contracts.
The thing is, most of that money was performance based. Go look up how COTS and Commercial Crew actually worked. You only get money once you reached specific milestone. Having such a contract requires you to raise private money (can be stocks or lending), and then you can try to execute, if you do, you get paid. If you don't, you wont get paid.
Look what happened with Kistler Aerospace for example. They failed to raise sufficient private capital and were kicked out of the COTS program.
So for this argument to make sense, show what contracts SpaceX got, and explain how the government could have achieved the same results cheaper.
Most experts agree, and pretty much everybody calls COTS the most successful NASA program in decades. And Commercial Crew as almost as good. NASA achieved a huge amount with little money.
> less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion
Again, you don't just get 1.2 billion. You have to raise private capital, and then execute on your development program. Some of those 1.2 billion $ took years until they arrived at SpaceX.
For example, Griffin included 400 million $ for CCiCap. Guess what, that money didn't fully arrive at SpaceX until way after 2013. Griffin only account for Musk private funding, not all the other money raised by SpaceX.
Griffin is a very opinion person that often goes against what most people believe. I would not his interpretation and evaluation as gospel. He is a politician and a bureaucrat.
His whole spiel during the last 15 years has been that government should own the intellectual property for things like capsules and such. The thing is, most of NASA simply doesn't agree with his opinions.
And most expert that look at NASA performance, seem to agree. He is very much outside of current thinking at NASA.
You're mixing things up. Elon Musk's statement was about the private funding that was initially used to _start_ SpaceX. That statement by Griffin was also made in 2013. SpaceX has had many many billions in private funding since then.
"In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs. The unsuccessful trip is credited as directly leading to the formation of SpaceX.[7] Musk offered Griffin the title of Chief Engineer at the company,[8] but Griffin instead became president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.[9]"
In 2005, he was appointed NASA Administrator where he pushed for commercial cargo and crew transportation services that saved the company from bankruptcy.
"In February 2018, Griffin was appointed as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering by Donald Trump. One of his first actions was to create the Space Development Agency.[13][14] The organization was tasked with procuring a proliferated constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to detect Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. Commercial contracts for the constellation were given to L3Harris and SpaceX."
Yes and every halving of that 1% error is more than twice as hard to do with neural net training. At some point more principled control algorithms are needed.
These types of comments are unhelpful. The expectations on the driver are getting vaguer and vaguer. Can't drive in damp weather? Yet it's Full Self Driving? Tesla wants to market it as powerful AI but leave all responsibility with the driver, don't encourage that narrative.
I'm not a fan of Elon's branding either, but if you've ever actually driven a Tesla, it's very obvious very quickly that "FSD" is not fully autonomous driving, and Tesla itself festoons "Beta" all over the place. So, yes, the driver deserves some responsibility for relying on it in manifestly unsuitable conditions.
100%. Whatever the actual limits, flaws, and failings of FSD, the outsize criticism of the branding is crazymaking. (as I've commented in many of these threads) no one who actually uses the product for even a short period of time is deluded into thinking it is fully autonomous by the labeling.
My pet theory for some of these dramatic fails: the driver is not risk-averse, and knowingly uses FSD at some limit "to see what happens" (I know I do it from time to time, though not in anything truly risky).
