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A Falcon 9 stands ready for a Starlink mission at Cape Canaveral’s pad 40. File photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.

Update Oct. 21, 4:20 p.m.: SpaceX is pushing back its planned launch to no earlier than Tuesday, Oct. 22.

SpaceX is set to launch another batch of 23 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to low Earth orbit on Tuesday.

The Falcon 9 rocket launch comes on the heels of a week that saw the company launch a record six missions with four Falcon 9 rockets, one Falcon Heavy rocket and a Starship rocket, utilizing all four of its launch pads.

Liftoff of the Starlink 6-61 mission from pad 40 at CCSFS is set for no earlier than 6:14 p.m. EDT (2214 UTC), pending weather. This will be SpaceX’s 68th dedicated Starlink launch of the year.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.

Coming into the Monday launch opportunity, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast 70 percent chance of favorable weather during that window. Meteorologists said they are tracking the impacts of Hurricane Oscar, which may also impact the booster recovery zone.

“The breezy, onshore flow will continue into the upcoming week as the combination of a strong

high centered to the north and Hurricane Oscar to the southeast enhance the pressure gradient over the Florida peninsula,” launch weather officers wrote. “These conditions will persist tomorrow as an area of higher low-level moisture moves in, enhancing Atlantic shower activity along the Space Coast.”

A little more then eight minutes after liftoff, the first stage booster is set to touchdown on a SpaceX droneship, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean west of the Bahamas. If successful, this will be the 280th droneship landing and 357th overall booster landing.

Expanding Starlink

The mission is the first time that SpaceX has launched a batch of its Starlink satellites bound for the sixth shell of its constellation since May 31 with the Starlink 6-64 mission. Since then, it has been building out its eighth, ninth, tenth and 11th shells.

The company has been working to get approval from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy and operate nearly 30,000 Gen2 Starlink satellites.

Back in March, the FCC approved a request “to conduct communications in the 71.0-76.0 GHz (space-to-Earth) and 81.0-86.0 GHz (Earth-to-space) frequency bands (collectively, E-band), with the 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites that the Commission previously authorized in the first partial grant of this application.” That authorization caps the number Gen2 satellites at that number, for now.

“Grant of this portion of SpaceX’s request will serve the public interest by allowing SpaceX to utilize the full capacity of its more advanced Gen2 Starlink satellites, which will improve the broadband service that SpaceX is bringing to U.S. customers, including those in unserved and underserved areas of the country,” the FCC wrote on March 8.

“We continue to defer consideration of the remainder of SpaceX’s request, including SpaceX’s ongoing use of emergency beacons, which is the subject of a second amendment to SpaceX’s application, as well as the remaining 22,488 satellites SpaceX proposed in its application, as amended.”

On Aug. 16, the FCC’s Satellite Programs and Policy Division approved a license modification request from SpaceX regarding its Gen1 satellites, of which there are 4,408, according to the FCC.

“Specifically, SpaceX is authorised to modify its operations due to planned changes in satellite hardware, including modification of beam-forming and digital processing equipment to enable narrower beam capabilities,” the FCC wrote. “This modification also reflects updates to SpaceX’s orbital debris mitigation plan due to planned deployment of larger satellites.”

Essentially, this approval allows SpaceX to launch Gen2 Starlinks as replacements for the Gen1 versions under the Gen1 authorization.

According to astronomer and expert orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell, as of Oct. 20, 2024, there are 6,473 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit. Among those, 4,150 are Gen1 and 2,323 are the Gen2 Mini variety.

The next generation Starlink satellites, which are so big that only Starship can launch them, will allow for a 10X increase in bandwidth and, with the reduced altitude, faster latency https://t.co/HLYdjjia3o

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2024

The full-size Gen2 Starlink satellites will be launched using SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which just completed its fifth test flight on Oct. 13. The company was able to catch the first stage booster, called Super Heavy, using its launch tower for the first time. SpaceX points to this capability as key to being able to enable rapid reusability of the rocket in the future.

In addition to expanding the number of Starlink satellites that it is allowed to launch and operate, SpaceX also wanted to modify the nominal orbits of some of its shells, as first reported by Ars Technica. In a filing to the FCC dated Oct. 11, 2024, Jameson Dempsey, SpaceX Director of Satellite Policy, wrote that SpaceX wants “to lower the nominal altitudes of its shells at 525 km, 530 km, and 535 km to 480 km, 485 km, and 475 km altitude, respectively.”

“For the lower-altitude shell at 475 km, SpaceX requests authority to reduce the nominal inclination from 33 degrees to 32 degrees,” Dempsey wrote. “With the exception of its shell at 475 km altitude, SpaceX requests to modify its authorization to more flexibly distribute satellites in up to 56 planes per shell and up to 120 satellites per plane.

“While this reconfiguration will result in a higher potential maximum number of orbital planes and satellites per plane for all but one shell at 475 km, the total number of satellites in the Gen2 system will not exceed 29,988 satellites, and the first tranche of satellites in the Gen2 system will remain 7,500 satellites until such time that the Commission permits deployments beyond that first tranche.”

Dempsey argues that the requested modifications will allow the Starlink Internet constellation to “deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally who still lack access to adequate broadband.”

The FCC has yet to respond to this latest request.

Special coverage concluding

While there aren’t any Starlink satellites that feature the Direct to Cell capabilities on the Starlink 6-61 mission, SpaceX is about to wrap up a unique learning opportunity with the technology.

On Oct. 7, the FCC’s Satellite Licensing Division granted SpaceX “special temporary authority” to operate its second-generation Starlink satellites that have the DTC capacity for 15 days “with supplemental coverage from space-capable Earth stations in the areas of Florida affected by Hurricane Milton.”

It was also granted the same authority on Oct. 4 for the territories impacted by Hurricane Helene.

In the United States, SpaceX is partnering with telecommunications company, T-Mobile, to provide the service, though it has expressed an interest in working with other providers in the future.

SpaceX also began testing the functionality down in New Zealand with telecommunications company, One New Zealand.

“When we announced our collaboration with SpaceX, we were dealing with the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, a stark reminder of the necessity of a resilient back up to our mobile network, which can be disrupted by climate-related, fibre and power outages,” said One New Zealand CEO Jason Paris in a statement.

“We’re unfortunately seeing this play out with Hurricane Milton in Florida right now, where Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capability are playing a vital role keeping people connected as the extreme weather has disrupted their ground based mobile networks. That’s why starting testing here is a giant step forward on our mission to bring coverage like never before to New Zealand.”

Starlink d2c now beginning testing in New Zealand with @onenzofficial! https://t.co/c810mpihRz

— Michael Nicolls (@michaelnicollsx) October 21, 2024

Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York from United States of America, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My last post was pretty dark and dire, so here’s something a little more cheerful and optimistic. One of the most important and positive trends that I’ve been trying to highlight over the past few years is the amazing progress in battery technology. Huge increases in energy density and even bigger declines in manufacturing costs have made batteries competitive with combustion engines for a large variety of applications. The most important of these is transportation.

At the beginning of this year, the big story about electric vehicles was that sales were slowing down. Detractors of EVs — and there are a lot of them out there — declared that EVs are a flash in the pan, that interest is already waning, that the problems of EVs would prevent them from ever displacing internal combustion cars, that EVs will never be viable without subsidies, and so on. Essentially, the story was that the EV revolution was over, or at least stalled indefinitely.

That narrative has now essentially collapsed. EV sales reaccelerated in the U.S. after just a couple of months, and their market share has hit a new record high:

And EVs continue to outsell combustion cars:

Nor is there any sign of a slowdown at the global level:

A number of developing countries are seeing truly spectacular growth in EV sales:

So EVs are still winning. But they haven’t won yet; only 4% of the global passenger car fleet, 23% of the bus fleet, and less than 1% of delivery trucks are electrified.

But at this point I think the writing is on the wall. The phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an older, inferior technology is not uncommon, and it generally looks like the EV transition is looking now. When a new technology passes a 5% adoption rate, it almost never turns out to be inferior to what came before; with EVs, that threshold has now been reached in dozens of countries.

In fact, we don’t have to rely on trend-based forecasting to understand why EVs are just going to win. There are a number of fundamental factors that make EVs simply better than combustion vehicles. The longer time goes on, the more these inherent advantages will make themselves felt in the market.

The first of these is price. Currently, EVs often require government subsidies in order to be price-competitive with combustion cars. But batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper as we get better and better at building them. The cheaper batteries get, the smaller the subsidies required to get people to switch to EVs. Goldman Sachs reports that this crucial tipping point will be reached in about two years:

Technological advances designed to increase battery energy density, combined with a drop in green metal prices, are expected to push battery prices lower than previously expected, according to a new briefing from Goldman Sachs Research…
Goldman Sachs’ researchers further predict that average battery prices could fall as far as $80/kWh by 2026, which would equate to a drop of almost 50 per cent from 2023 levels.
It is at this point that the investment giant expects battery electric vehicles could potentially achieve cost parity with ICE vehicles in the United States on an unsubsidised basis.

Once batteries cross that tipping point, the EV revolution will take on its own momentum. It will simply be cheaper to buy an EV than a combustion car. People will gravitate toward the cheaper option, especially if it comes with other advantages. And in this case it does.

EVs’ second advantage is convenience. Most EV owners will almost never have to fill their cars up at a station. This is because they will charge their cars at night, in their own home garages or driveway.

The BYD Atto 3 has a range of 260 miles. Suppose you only charge your Atto 3 halfway every night, to preserve the battery life (just as you would for your phone). That’s 130 miles. And let’s say that just to be on the safe side, you’d stop driving at 100 miles a day.

Very few Americans drive their cars for more than 100 miles a day! The number is less than 1%. In fact, the average miles driven per day is around 40. Which means that as an EV owner, on all those days when you don’t drive over 100 miles, you will never have to visit a charging station at all, any more than you now visit charging stations for your phone.

I suspect that many Americans still don’t understand this basic fact about EVs. They’ve spent their entire adult lives periodically visiting gas stations to fill up, so they naturally imagine that they’ll be doing something similar with an EV — visiting a charging station whenever their batteries get low. But that’s not how EVs work at all! They’re more like a phone than a car — you plug them in at home, so you almost never have to charge them when you’re out and about.

Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone, because not everyone has a place to charge their car at home. If you use street parking instead of a driveway or garage, it’ll be a lot harder for you to own an EV. But fewer than 10% of Americans park on the street when they’re at home. If you live in an apartment complex, that complex will eventually have EV chargers in most or all of the spaces in its parking lot, especially as EV adoption increases.

This means that simply comparing how long it takes to charge an EV vs. how long it takes to fill up a combustion car’s gas tank makes absolutely no sense. With a combustion car, you’ll be going to the gas station about once a week, spending about 8 minutes there each time. With an EV, it’ll take 30-40 minutes at a station to charge your car fully, but you’ll almost never go to a station. You’ll only go when you’re on a road trip or on those very rare days when you need to drive more than 100 miles in a day. So the proper comparison of filling times is “eight minutes every week, or 30-40 minutes on very rare occasions”. The latter is just much more convenient.

EVs’ third big advantage is that they require much less maintenance than combustion cars. A combustion car has a complicated engine with a lot of moving parts, all of which can break down. An EV is much more simple, getting its energy directly from the battery with far less machinery in between. A simpler car means fewer parts to break down. That’s why EV maintenance costs are 50% lower than combustion cars.

EVs’ fourth advantage is faster acceleration. Acceleration is one of the things people enjoy the most about driving cars, and EVs just completely destroy combustion cars here. A battery-powered electric motor can start accelerating your car with maximum force pretty much instantaneously, as soon as you hit the pedal. A combustion car has to burn gasoline and turn a bunch of gears before the acceleration can begin. Thus, EVs will always be able to go from 0 to 60 faster than combustion cars.

EVs’ fifth advantage is quiet. Combustion cars make a lot of noise, with that controlled explosion and all of those moving parts. EVs are incredibly quiet, since all they’re doing is pushing electrons through a wire. This is why EVs are far, far quieter than combustion cars.1 That’s helpful for when you’re driving and want to listen to music or a podcast. It’s also nice for the neighborhood around you — the fewer growling, roaring combustion cars there are on the streets, the more peace and quiet we all get.

That’s a huge suite of technological advantages for EVs. What advantages do ICE cars still have? Combustion cars’ range advantage has basically evaporated, with plenty of EVs having ranges of over 300 miles. Their slight remaining cost advantage is about to become a cost disadvantage in a couple of years, even without subsidies. Their quicker fill-up time almost never comes into play, since EV owners rarely have to fill up.

Other than the familiarity born of long use, I don’t see many significant, enduring advantages for combustion cars over EVs. And as EVs become more popular, combustion cars will become less and less convenient, because of a doom loop. In a post a year ago, I tried to explain why:

[T]he more gas stations there are, the more convenient it is to drive, and the more people drive, the more profitable it is to run a gas station. This is why we have a lot of cars and a lot of gas stations; they reinforce each other.
By taking internal combustion traffic off the road, EVs are going to make gas stations less profitable to run. Gas stations have fixed costs that they need to make up for by catering to large volumes of customers; when they can cater to fewer customers, their fixed costs are harder to pay, and some go out of business (or switch entirely to EV charging stations). When the number of gasoline-powered cars on the road goes down by double-digit percentages, it’s going to lead to a lot of closures or conversions.
When some gas stations vanish, it makes it harder to drive an internal combustion car as your primary mode of transport. This is because gas stations are fewer and farther between. This creates range anxiety if you’re on a long trip, but it also just forces you to drive farther and every time you fill up. That gives people an incentive to switch to an electric.

Note that this network effect is yet another subtle advantage of EVs over combustion cars. Combustion cars rely on a nationwide network of gas stations in order to be usable. But EVs almost always charge at home, so they rely much less on having a network of charging stations.

So EVs are just a superior technology to combustion cars. They’re soon to be cheaper, they’re more convenient, they’re much easier to maintain, they’re more powerful and far more silent. They will mostly replace combustion vehicles; it’s just a matter of when.

American industry needs to realize this fact. Right now, Chinese auto companies have been far more aggressive than their established rivals in terms of switching to EV technology. Bloomberg’s Gabrielle Coppola and Danny Lee have an excellent, sobering feature on the rise of China’s electric auto champion BYD:

Now executives from Detroit to Tokyo have to figure out how to compete with BYD, and they know tariffs alone won’t cut it. For years, they couldn’t or wouldn’t make the case for cannibalizing profitable business with an expensive, technologically novel experiment such as the electric vehicle, and now it’s unclear if they’ll ever catch up. The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), a lobbying group representing American companies and labor groups, has called China’s EV offensive “an extinction-level event” for the American auto industry. They realize BYD has built EVs that many Americans, starved for an affordable option, would probably be happy to buy.

Tesla was America’s answer to BYD — indeed, it did more than BYD to pioneer many of the key technologies in the EV revolution, and to drive down their costs in the 2010s. It’s still (just barely) the world’s top electric car seller. But in the last year or two, Tesla has stumbled, losing some EV market share to old-line auto companies in the U.S. domestic market, and facing an increasingly uphill battle against domestic champions in China. Hopefully Tesla will recover its footing, but even if so, the U.S. needs more than one EV champion.

But even though the U.S. has lagged, the EV revolution is a great thing for the world. In addition to benefitting consumers directly by giving them better cars to drive, the ascendance of EVs will also help the world mitigate climate change. It’s definitely a reason for optimism in these troubled times.

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They’re so quiet, in fact, that they have to add back in a little noise just so pedestrians know they’re coming

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