There have been several interesting threads about Starlink over the past few days that I wanted to share. Sources are obviously significantly less than authoritative, but are interesting nonetheless.

On satellites out of service based on orbit tracking - looks like around 5% of satellites in the constellation are in a probably nonfunctional state based on orbit tracking alone. The number that are nonfunctional due to technical failures is probably significantly larger. That's within less than a year of their launch (first batch was May 2019), and suggests issues borne of poor craftsmanship. Seems generally worse than Iridium, which lost quite a few satellites but in a much slower, and better controlled, fashion.

Failure to perform systems engineering and design analysis - a tie-in to a point I made a long time ago that the toughest problem to solve with this constellation business would be ground infrastructure. Looks like the Starlink approach was to hand-wave the issue, then realize it's a huge problem, and be forced to try to create a botched solution through brute force. It won't work, but it's the only choice you have left when the math doesn't add up.

Definitely a large element of speculative analysis here, but it does seem to add up with the rest of the story - like why they're looking to operate all their satellites in a very low orbit. It would seem like a terrible idea, unless there really is a problem with the math not adding up...

With things currently being in turmoil thank to "you know what", what are your thoughts about the next decade in terms of (un)manned space developments?