Hannes Lerchl
★ Amy Star ★the easiest way to become radicalized about astronomy is to open a stargazing app and to make it highlight Starlink satellites
i hate elon musk
"but what about rural internet access?!"
1. SpaceX/Starlink has no path to profitability
2. it will cost over $20-30b to maintain the network - mostly from government subsidies that go directly into Elon's pocket
3. that money could have been used to put down actual fibre lines for WiMAX installations which would be actually-reliable and not pollute the night sky
4. do you really want a far-right transphobe controlling internet access for everywhere that isn't a major city?
Kassil@AmyZenunim Rural internet accessibility is literally laying fiber and setting up sufficient wireless towers to cover until the fiber is fully laid.
It's being done in rural fucking Nevada, it can be done elsewhere.
vibhor 🍑 🏳️🌈@AmyZenunim good that in india the govt is putting actual lines for rural internet , instead of depending on a billionaire !
Eric LawtonHow do rural people get power for their modems and computers?
We have power lines right to the house.
The same, or other, providers could put in fibre, too.
I was going to mention phone lines, which we used to have, but they let them rot. Mine stopped working years ago.
notsoloud@AmyZenunim
Your figure got me curious about starlink maintenance costs. Do you have a link? Some people's estimates are way lower.
craignicol@AmyZenunim and also, he's known to withdraw service on a whim, in Crimea, in Africa. Doesn't seem like a good idea to give him more power on top of whatever he's doing with Twitter/X
Cykonot@AmyZenunim there's no way for it to be more profitable than maintaining existing infrastructure and laying down some new fiber. Or deploying terrestrial assets. Maybe even aerial (ie: not orbital) deployment lol.
It's just incredibly inefficient, materially speaking.
Simply being profitable isn't enough. You must promise higher rates of return on investment than other parts of the market to justify investing there, and that's difficult to imagine for starlink. People aren't that mobile lol
@AmyZenunim huh, maybe if they could increase the residency time for satellites beyond 100 years? But with that level of capital outlay, you could already have much much more resilient fiber, so it still doesn't work out
Maybe if they were also providing an satellite maintenance & refueling service? But that's a different company
https://spacenews.com/orbit-fab-and-clearspace-to-develop-in-space-refueling-service/
And still doesn't justify the Internet service part.
Space mining to feed into those other services would be cool, but isn't starlink
@AmyZenunim I guess you don't have to actually be efficient to be a billionaire.
That dude who keeps "inventing" trains-but-worse seems to be deeply irrational.
God, I hate people who think they're above it all and have a perfectly universal/rational perspective. Just like the dunning-kruger of context lol
Thorwegian (old account)@AmyZenunim why even care
living edge case
Mo Ⓐ☭🇵🇸@thor @AmyZenunim One guy owning half of all active communication satellites is probably a little suspect, no?
Weird Fish 🐠@thor @AmyZenunim makes space observation / astrophotography worse
imagine you finally could find a place away from light pollution, you are still having a lot of these satellites
imagine you finally could find a place away from light pollution, you are still having a lot of these satellites
Varyag
Flauschdompteur@Varyag @AmyZenunim No matter what, even in the event of a collision or China blowing up a bunch of them with anti satellite rockets, Starlink satellites are far too low orbit to cause a Kessler syndrome spiral, particularly one sustaining itself over a longer timeframe. Gravity will take any debris down in a matter of years.
The Steel Rat@diebarschlampe @Varyag @AmyZenunim
"years" is not as dismissive as you think it is. There is no way to track the hundreds of thousands of debris from a collision.
it is already a problem and we have not had a significant kessler issue since Nov of 2021
https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability
GunChleoc@diebarschlampe @Varyag @AmyZenunim A matter of years will be a long time for the people stuck on the ISS that cannot get back down safely.
toolbear#🌶️@AmyZenunim Peak white colonizer energy like Ma and Pa Musk. I regret my period of ignorance when I thought I was a fan of his.
Grodaeu@AmyZenunim shouldn't the anger be directed at the US government that hired him to do it
LambdaDuck@grodaeu they did? they hired him to do a bunch of other space related stuff, but afaik starlink is entirely spacex’s initiative? the main issue is that they allowed it
@grodaeu but yes, getting government funding for his private projects is probably one of his main areas of expertise
@LambdaDuck ok I was exaggerating but the US government is paying part of it and like you said approved it. Satellite communications is very closely entwined with government
karlggest@AmyZenunim
Who doesn't?
Who doesn't?
atlrvrse@AmyZenunim I'd imagine those starlink satellites are very unstable and break often, which makes the problem even worse because now we have debris orbiting the planet which could make it harder for anything to leave the planet
Officially Tara 🕷️ 
🌹@AmyZenunim what app lets you see this? i want to get more angry than i already am (and more importantly, have a visual aid to show people)
@tarajdactyl Night Sky for iOS
@AmyZenunim thanks! I'll have to find one for Android. i already had stellarium installed but they don't have a setting for satellites afaict
glasspshr@tarajdactyl @AmyZenunim SkySafari can show them on iOS. Probably their android version does as well
merlin / alex glow@tarajdactyl @AmyZenunim They do – at least in iOS! For us it's under the diamond-shaped / bottom left menu: long press on "labels", slide the "satellites" bar to the right, and cry... I saw them passing over the other night and checked it out for morbid curiosity :/
@alexglow @AmyZenunim ahhhh nice!! i totally missed that diamond menu 😅 thank you!
@tarajdactyl @AmyZenunim it's easy to miss!
jesterchen42@alexglow @tarajdactyl @AmyZenunim Thanks. Crying right now. 😭
Oh boy, how I hate Elon Musk!
But the upside: I finally bought Stellarium Pro. Time to assemble my (quite cheap) telescope again. :)
(((_SjG_)))@tarajdactyl @AmyZenunim there’s also a free app called “Constellations” specifically designed to show megaconstellations of satellites.
Jim Parsons
叽里咕噜
Prof. Sam Lawler@AmyZenunim Thank you for phrasing that really well!
(I'm at a conference to talk about satellite pollution right now!!)
WiredForFlight@AmyZenunim what app are you using there?
Allan Chow@AmyZenunim we're a step away from Planetes
Kevin in Alaska@AmyZenunim fwiw this issue is more complicated for people living in remote communities without other high speed internet options
Mastodon Migration@feelnotes @AmyZenunim Sorry no. Remote internet does not justify filling low earth orbit with space junk and wrecking terrestrial astronomy. And once these things start smashing into each other we are going to have real problem. This is insanity.
@mastodonmigration @feelnotes @AmyZenunim Hopefully they launch more polar ones soon, I still only have about 75% uptime in central Alaska. Having lived with internet so slow that webpages would often time out and driving 40 miles round trip to hand someone a flash drive with 250mb of data was significantly faster than uploading it to the cloud, Starlink is an absolute godsend. I used to drive my DESKTOP computer into town to do windows & Steam updates because they would take days otherwise (if I was lucky enough that they didn’t fail), and now I can do them in 15 minutes.
@mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim i completely agree that there are terrible costs to starlink. but in rural communities that don’t have other internet options, starlink means you can meet with a doctor through telemedicine, attend online classes and earn a degree, start an online business, facetime with a loved one. what do we tell these people? “sorry the technology we used to connect the world wasn’t designed with you in mind.” my only point is this issue isn’t so simple as “starlink bad”
Mele@feelnotes Starlink provides a useful service for sure but at what cost? How is it, that a single company can litter the night sky that belongs to all humanity with their commercial junk for private profit? How profitable is it even? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely wondering if it actually is sustainable at all. Even with SpaceX's reusable rockets, sending stuff into orbit isn't cheap and the satellites have a very short lifespan. Do the subscription fees really cover all that or is the whole thing just running on investor money and government subsidies? As far as I know (might be wrong here,) Starlink's inter-satellite routing isn't up yet, so where-ever Starlink is used, there has to be fiber nearby anyway, so it feels to me that improving the local cellular infrastructure would be cheaper.
Just Jo@feelnotes @mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim how do you get power to rural communities?
Via power lines right? And you couldn't run fibre.. because..?
Rural communities could have had Gbps Internet today if you spent the last 10 years laying cable instead of launching junk. Junk that needs to be relaunched every 5 years.
There are other people on this rock that, in case you forgot, is already on fire from all the waste.
@JoTheBuzzyard i live in alaska, which has over 150 independent electric grids spread across the state. there is no statewide power grid here. there is no statewide road system. rural alaskan villages are like island communities in terms of utility infrastructure.
PulkoMandy@mastodonmigration @feelnotes @AmyZenunim
It would be possible to provide worldwide coverage with a dozen or so of GEO orbit satellites (with higher latency, but it's sufficient for a lot of uses)
Starlink is currently more than half of all satellites in orbit (4000 out of 8000), and plans to continue growing until they have 10x more than everyone else combined (40000 or so)
This is not at all a reasonable use of resources.
LisPi@feelnotes @AmyZenunim High-speed point-to-point radio links would be *much* cheaper than putting up a single one of these satellites (even rolling out fiber would be competitive) and would provide better bandwidth for such a community to the nearest internet exchange.
Peter Brown@lispi314 @feelnotes @AmyZenunim landlines already use radio and microwave links. Can’t see why the Internet can’t use them as well.
@AmyZenunim Just went outside to observe the Perseid meteor shower. Watched three starlink shit-boxes cross the sky and came back in.
Anthony Sorace@mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim @anne Today someone (weirdly, working an Xfinity booth at en event) tried to convince me to “swallow my pride” and sign up for Starlink because “your one more satellite isn’t going to make a difference”. It was a really weird conversation, not least of all because the idea of caring about the ethical implications of our choices just seemed entirely baffling to her.
@mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim @anne My plan for “what to do if I end up with billionaire money” remains to start my own space program specifically to forcibly de-orbit this crap.
Phil M0OFX@a @mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim @anne I've run into that opinion so many times that I'm not sure what to think about the average person. Do they also think that if you throw a Coke can out of the window on the highway that it'll magically disappear?
farnkraut@AmyZenunim I hate starlink(not just for this) and I despise Elon Musk. A lot of his projects really need to be shut down (at least loose funding)!