SpaceX may be the first company in history to be affected by the fact that the number of satellites manufactured by the factory exceeds its launch capacity in a given time. From these perspectives, the spare satellite surplus is actually a “happy trouble”.
Editor’s note: This article comes from Tencent Technology , reviewing Golden Deer.
March 5th news, according to foreign media reports, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, a US space exploration technology company, recently confirmed that the company ’s Starlink satellite factory ’s production efficiency Significant improvements have been made, making satellites faster than launches.
Since SpaceX first disclosed its aggressive flat satellite design, stacking method and deployment mechanism in May 2019, the company has successfully launched 300 satellites at an incredible speed, of which about 290 were designed as expected run.
This means that StarChain has become the largest satellite Internet in history, crushing the second largest satellite network in terms of the number of satellites (150 satellites). Perhaps more importantly, although the StarChain Network has just been launched for 9 months, its satellite mass in orbit has now exceeded 75 tons.
Although the size of SpaceX ’s satellite internet is already awesome, the production efficiency of the company ’s satellite chain satellite factory is even more amazing, and it is now far beyond the launch speed.
Given that SpaceX has maintained an average of about 1.3 satellite chain satellite launch frequencies per month since November 2019, many of them have experienced significant delays due to weather or hardware issues, which may mean that SpaceX is building more satellites than its launch capabilities Dozens. As these satellites accumulate, it is likely to cause a backlog of launch lists within them.
Considering that in less than nine months, SpaceX changed the StarChain from only two prototype satellites to the largest satellite Internet in history. The company ’s StarChain factory has manufacturing capabilities that exceed launch capabilities. That’s a good sign. Although weather- and hardware-related issues in the past few StarChain satellite launch missions are likely to make it difficult to adhere to the target of launching on average twice a month, SpaceX has not deviated too far from the goal.
Today, SpaceX may be the first company in history to be affected by the number of satellites manufactured in a factory exceeding its launch capacity in a given time. From these perspectives, the spare satellite surplus is actually a “happy trouble”. After all, rival OneWeb was forced to postpone the launch of its first 34 satellites for two months, after several delays in production at its new plant in Florida.
On the other hand, SpaceX has to build almost twice as many satellites for each launch. In the past three months alone, 35% of the satellites required for the entire OneWeb Internet (about 650 satellites) were launched, and there is still a significant backlog Of satellites are ready to enter orbit.
As of March 3, SpaceX has completed five launches of 60 upgraded Starlink v1.0 satellites. The sixth launch is scheduled for March 14 and has been postponed three times before. The recent delay was due to a problem with the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Cargo Dragon CRS-20 mission, prompting SpaceX to replace it with a rocket originally intended to launch a satellite satellite.
After the sixth launch, SpaceX will have more batches of 60 StarChain satellites that may already be stacked and ready for launch. If the Cargo Dragon spacecraft is successfully launched this week, the average time interval for each launch of SpaceX will be reduced to 1.9 weeks. If this rhythm is maintained, the company will conduct at least 27 launches in 2020.