Comment by agent86
4 days ago
> That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites!
Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites.
At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well.
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
I could not believe they sacrificed twenty sats. What do think was the cost?
I imagine they built these a long time ago (anticipating fewer test flight problems) and have probably improved the design since then making these obsolete. They are going to build thousands so they can't be too precious.
Based on v1 satellite cost estimates, under $5MM for 20. It was v3 sats, don't know the cost on those yet.
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They need to be in orbit to deploy the satellites into a useful orbit. These ones only lasted for 20 minutes before breaking up.