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Very excited about this. What's interesting is the deployment mechanism, where they almost use the momentum of the rocket to "fling" the 60 tightly packed satellites away from the booster, and then after about 3 hours they fire up the Krypton ion thrusters and start the course correction phase. IIRC the only other times this deployment mechanism is used is on tiny CubeSats where they opt for this more conglomerating type of deployment due to the durability of the CubeSats.

Will definitely be getting service for some family members in Northern Africa where incredibly slow speeds are charged high prices if Starlink can compete on price.




Last night at the sat. launch there was almost no fling effect. They slowly floated away in a group, hardly separated. I thought they could have had some mechanical problem.


>where they almost use the momentum of the rocket to "fling"

this is compulsory anyway due to physics.


Not really, the rocket and the payload would have the same momentum unless an additional force is applied between them.


Why? You could also just use a spring to push it out.


And what happens to the rocket from the reaction force from the spring?


Nothing, because you used a spring to launch the other satellite on the other side of the payload at the same time.

Or, you just use thrusters, like the ones that launched from the Shuttle did.




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