Once again, I'm reminded of how much the billionaire space race has absolutely destroyed my love of rockets.
10 years ago, I definitely would have been paying close attention to the current giant SpaceX launch. But because I know it's going to be used to launch hundreds of unregulated, unsafe, polluting, for-profit Starlink satellites at once, I just can't look.
Instead of being excited and awestruck by a new gigantic rocket launch, it just makes me want to puke.
I was looking at photographs from Apollo 11 the other day, remembering how wonderful and exciting those times were and how today all I feel I dread.
Yes, and, I think my contempt for Musk and anyone who tolerates him, is a separate good reason.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
@joostvb @sundogplanets
That page is harrowing 😱
I read that as:
Starlink: "We can reserve you a time slot when we allow you to look at the sky" (now sing our praise)
WTAF ?!?
I just today had the same thought: if somebody had told me 20 years ago that in 2023 I'm going to see news about a rocket launch and will think "meh, I hope this fails in a spectacular and expensive but non-lethal fashion" I would be flabbergasted.
@cosmiclibrarian @sundogplanets
I mean, it was in the hands of an actual Nazi in the 60s...
@pvonhellermannn @sundogplanets
Fortunately his are mostly doing dialup, so, at least so far, there isn't much of the global economy that is dependent on that 52%
@pvonhellermannn @sundogplanets
As far as I know the many, many satellites he owns up there are all new ones for his own company's satellite internet product. He's been spewing them into orbit, dozens at a time, for the last few years.
@sundogplanets How did someone wiser than I once phrase it?
"Life gives you lessons. If you don't learn from them, it keeps giving you the same lessons."
As I've experienced: even if you do learn from them, it keeps giving them to make sure you're still paying attention.
Gil Scott-Heron (Of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") fame, wrote "Whitey on the Moon" in 1970:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwkXZ0SmTs
We still haven't learned from our poets.
If we continue ignoring them it will keep getting worse.
@sundogplanets I can read this message in the most remote part of rural Utah because of those satellites.
Instead of not caring about rocket launches at all, now they effect my life in a positive way.
You may not like for profit companies... but not-for-profit companies don't have a super great record of building the best rockets ever created.
Federally funded NASA doesn't even try anymore and hasn't produced anything meaningful in like 60 years.
@realwaaagh @sundogplanets of course a cable is better, for tons of reasons - but there are a lot of places you can't run a cable. You can't run a cable into a national monument, or an indian reservation.
I live in an RV fulltime, often times hundreds of miles away from utilities.
You can't run a cable to a boat.
Also, copper is expensive. I don't think anyone's running cable to rural Ethiopia.
You can knock capitalism all you want, but you can do that wirelessly from flying airplanes.
@realwaaagh @sundogplanets if you’re going somewhere dark enough to actually see the night sky - there is almost certainly no wired internet - or any other buried utilities or phone poles. Those areas are federally protected.
Where there are phone poles there is light pollution. In Alaska, Utah, Maine… there’s dark skies.
You can have dark skies or electricity.
With starlink I can live offgrid on solar power AND have dark skies - which is primarily why I do it.
With all due respect I'm not sure you getting internet in remote rural Utah is good value for what the world is losing.
But then, you probably didn't move to remote Utah because you want to participate in society.
@jonhendry @sundogplanets with all due respect, what exactly have you lost?
You see a streak of lights in the sky when you're out at 2am taking your stacks of milky way photos in whatever populated light polluted area you're in?
We can send people and equipment to the ISS after the federal government abandoned it?
Tell me. What did you lose?
Just because I gained something, and most underdeveloped nations gained something - that doesn't me we took it from you.
And when there are thousands more of them up there? And some are nonfunctional and start breaking up?
What exactly do you think is going to happen? They're gonna fall out of orbit and crash down to earth in fiery balls that destroy cities? They're not.
They burn on reentry.
We're talking about the coldest, deadest place imaginable, where nobody lives or travels.
We don't care, Russia doesn't care, China doesn't care, scientists and ecologists wildlife experts don't care, and space itself does not care.
It's about the best possible place for our temporary tech.
And the fragments that just keep orbiting?
@jonhendry @sundogplanets if they stop working and stay in orbit, yeah, they keep orbiting waiting for repair.
If they stop working and fall out of orbit for some mysterious reason, then the velocity burns them to the point of negligence.
SpaceX might be a private company, but they still have to answer to pretty much every regulatory authority imaginable.
They're not throwing ACME grand pianos up there just to fall down on your head like roadrunner.
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