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.
@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.
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.
@jonhendry @sundogplanets space is literally infinite. You know, black holes and such. Space does not care about our trash.
If we put all human creation and waste for all time up into space, nothing would even notice.
You're not pissing off any weird frog, or going through someones territorial land, or choking off the sun from the earth.
You're not filling space's oceans.
Better to have our trash in space than on earth, tbh. Space knows exactly how to handle matter.
Jesus christ. The problem is debris in orbit fucking up other satellites or, you know, manned craft.
"Oops, can't get to Mars because Elmo's space junk created an hazardous barrier around the planet."
@jonhendry @sundogplanets You're making up problems that aren't there. You know we have tech like lidar, sonar, radar...
It's a nonissue.
You can not like Elon, that's fine. But everything he touches is not the devil because he touched it, and starlink is awesome.
It doesn't matter, you can whine about it and cry the sky is falling all you want - but it's happened already and it's benefiting people.
There are tons of obstacles in space that we didn't put there.
@jonhendry @sundogplanets sonar to space, lidar in space. Yeah. Not really speaking out of turn.
And yes, I get it. People can write doomsday scifi articles all day.
The operative part being -fi
It's source is the 2013 movie "Gravity". I saw Independence Day too.
The starlink satellites are in low earth orbit. We're not even talking about the same thing.
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