Maybe don't look up, and wear a crash helmet

[Andrew]

Geostorm hits 40 SpaceX low erath orbit satellites almost as soon as they are launched.

Or is there another reason ?.

Andrew

[Nick Odell]

Lasers in spaaaaaaaaaaace!

Financed by some pretty pissed-off astronomers.

Nick

[Chris Hogg]

YouTube video here

[Sysadmin]

Move over Carbon you are being sidelined,'This storm warmed up the atmosphere and made it much more dense than expected'.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

It was space weather which hastened the end of Skylab before they were ready to boost it higher for safety. Unfortunately our atmosphere is very good at protecting us from thes coronal mass ejections, and it obviously dissipates the energy by absorbing it, expanding when it does so, and creating views of the two effects, from the north and south magnetic poles. The ISS is equipped with engines on the Russian section to give the station a boost to counteract this problem, however in the case of the story on the bbc, the parking orbit was far too low under such conditions as existed. One might have thought that with the current active period known about globally, that they might have delayed the launch. I personally feel Starlink is folly in the extreme. You only need a craft to malfunction and be out of control when its in the correct orbit for a collision to occur with one of the others, and this will escalate until that orbit height all around the world is full of colliding debris, making any launch far more dangerous and leaving loads of junk to obscure the view of the stars. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

No they don't want debris, there would be no point in actually creating it. The reason is as I was taught at school the Sun has several cycles, one of these is every 11 years or so and affects the number of over time on average. The sunspots are places where the temp of the sun is vastly different to the rest of it, caused by turbulence in the plasma deep inside the star. This tends to also result in some very powerful perturbations of the magnetic fields near the surface, tht i s what w e see, and some of these get so wound up that suddenly they lose their grip on the surface and fling huge quantities of energetic charged particles straight out and if the Earth is in the firing line, some hours later on the results are often unpredictable. Back when the old Telegraph system was king with huge runs of cable across the planet some people got electrocuted and systems burned out by the energy transferred to anything conductive on the Earth. Nothing new, and is why a well designed spacecraft, or ground based transmission line takes precautions to not allow the problem to occur, it seems everyone except a certain Mr Musk who obviously is making cheap as chips spacecraft for this system and reaps the results of so doing. Sods law at work. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Is it a silent video then? I can hear nothing. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

One of the problems with Mars is the thin atmosphere and of course when a CME hits that, it also can grow, which is one of the reasons why its so hard to land on that planet. You either need to fly in, use rockets to break the fall or dissipate your kinetic energy in the atmosphere, but since it can vary by space weather and dust storms it hard to work out the correct strategy till you are almost there. Brian

[newshound]

Interesting that this guy in Puerto Rico manages to catch so much. I guess he must be picking up first and second stage boosters from Cape Kennedy. Obviously, they launch eastwards to benefit from earth's rotation, and from the east coast so that failures end in the sea. Do they normally launch somewhat south of east?

[Chris Hogg]

Yes. It just shows a burst of very bright trails against a black night sky, much like comet trails, as the Space-X satellites and/or rocket remains burn up as they re-enter the atmosphere.

[Chris Hogg]

Bearing in mind the Starlink project will put 648 satellites into orbit, of which these were just a few, I imagine they get squirted off in all directions.

[Andy Burns]

A few more than that! They have already launched over 2,000 of which about

1,850 are still in orbit, they're planning another 37,000

Once their delivery rocket reaches orbit, they release a batch of about 60 satellites from a sort of 'skewer' letting them drift free in a 'train' for a while, then they use ion thrusters to lift themselves into their proper orbits, you can see graphs of this happening per batch here, they tend to lose a few every now and then.

Note how batch 38 didn't make it, only 3 seem to be going upwards, I think the green items are the skewer rods falling back down.

[Chris Hogg]

Crikey! No wonder the astronomers are concerned! But at least they'll block out some sunlight, so those worrying about global warming should be pleased ;-)