BeepA million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
CompactFlaxLEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
CorrectAliasIt would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.
I know not all remote areas can be reached by fiber
Did you miss this part? You’re arguing over something I didn’t claim, and didn’t say.
But since you brought it up, SpaceX received nearly $1 billion in subsidies from the FCC in 2020 to support rural customers. That money is what I’m talking about. It wasn’t for ships. It was to connect rural customers because it would otherwise not be profitable for large ISPs to serve them. This billion should have gone to supporting county PUDs, not a rich nazi fuck’s company. It should have stayed with the public.
Unless you’re saying that the billion from taxpayers should have been given to him to support ships in international waters?
As a bonus, fiber doesn’t lose capacity just because it gets cloudy. Try using Starlink when a cumulonimbus cloud is overhead.
coleI don’t think you’ve ever used Starlink if you think clouds make it fail.
…you do realize it started in Seattle, right?
Seattle typically doesn’t get hail core cumulonimbus (supercells). It’s not the same. Plus, I simply am bringing up an edge case since the person who originally replied brought up ships when talking about rural fiber (an edge case).
Yeah, fair. Where fiber can be run fiber should be run.
Just scarred from all the times where we spend x billion to expand fiber, it doesn’t happen, somehow nobody gets held accountable.
I mean damn, at least Starlink is providing a service
Just scarred from all the times where we spend x billion to expand fiber, it doesn’t happen, somehow nobody gets held accountable.
That’s because historically, major ISPs have been given the grants (including Starlink) instead of PUDs. Public fiber is entirely different, it’s managed and installed like a public utility, not a service to be capitalized on. This is why I’ve been so focused on saying that SpaceX should never have been given $1 billion dollars. It shouldn’t have been given to any non public organization.
I don’t know what a fcc is but if it helps us having good internet I’m all for it. I work on ships and I’ve used starlink on ships in storms and all kinds of bad weather including finding the antenna covered in ice and snow. It’s fantastic. Our old geostationary communication system fails as soon as a passing bird looks at it.
The FCC is the Federal Communication Commission for the US. They’re a US federal agency meant to do domestic policy.
The intent of the subsidies was not for ships or international communication. It was meant for rural US properties. That’s why it should have been allocated to PUDs (public utility district). It would have been more useful for the people paying the taxes to give broadband subsidies.
Shipping companies can pay their own way - they’re corporations and can afford it. The subsides should not have gone to SpaceX.
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you’ll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
I mean I don’t specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 up/down with plus latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren’t reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some, so it’s not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn’t matter for download.
Now we just need to invent the Wall-E bot… We’re getting so close!
It’s so infuriating… I occasionally do astrophotography and it’s getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere… Fuck Musk.
I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.
Now I can’t look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.
You can actually see some in broad daylight. I was shocked one day looking up and seeing one (white dot in the picture, verified with sat tracking app).
This photo is AI!
Yikes. This was not a serious comment. I thought that’d be obvious because… it’s literally blue sky with a white dot.
confuserPoe’s Law strikes again:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Adding a /s would help convey that intent a little more. And if you’re going for the “Got ya!” satire effect, you could always hide it in a spoiler.
For the uneducated, what do these look like and can you see them in areas with light pollution?
Yes. They are technically reflected sunlight, so they are as bright as the sun, just very small. It makes sense you can see them during sunlight, since they are reflections of sunlight. You will typically only see them on the side of the sky opposite the sun, but the exact angle depends on the location and orientation of the satellite and the surface that is actually doing the reflection.
Generally speaking, they are dots that fade in somewhat gradually, moving at a consistent pace (typically slower than a shooting star, but faster than an airplane at cruising altitude) in a straight line direction for awhile at full brightness, then fading away.
They did a previous study on what 65,000 satellites would look like and that was pretty bleak. Also this bit:
Latitudes near 50° Will Experience the Worst Light Pollution.
Thats a large chunk of Europe.
I think it’s a waste of time to fight it.
Elon just has to ask daddy Trump and he will get anything necessary to get the autorisation.
I don’t think the Astrophysicists will convince Trump obviously.
I remember Europe saying the same thing around the 1930s lol
This conversation is a waste of time no matter how much of a nazi Elon is.
This is what the sky would be like in the majority of science fiction. If you want space exploration, there will be space infrastructure, and as time goes on that infrastructure will increase both in amount and size, not to mention the traffic to and from.
It is like complaining about the clutter of the marina while wanting to explore the ocean.
Boomer Humor DoomergodIf all we pick up out of the ocean is flotsam from the marina we’ll get the wrong idea about what’s in the ocean.
I’d almost understand where you’re coming from but most of us can’t afford a ship to explore, a slip in the marina, or even a property/room on the shore. For some of us, staring out at the ocean & capturing images from land is all we have.
Well said.
Nothing is being transported via constellation satellites that wasn’t already paid for by the American people (and then not delivered on).
Why would we want our infrastructure to be the most polluting expensive version (with shit latency BTW so you can’t selfhost), in control of basically one asshole billionaire who will gleefully censor whatever he feels like, after a critical mass of dependency has been reached?
Are you glad we put our communication into such a restrictive model under a monopoly that’s cozy with a fascist government?
Stop lying to yourself and others that this was “the most efficient outcome”.
gandalf_der_12teWhy would we want our infrastructure to be the most polluting expensive version (with shit latency BTW so you can’t selfhost), in control of basically one asshole billionaire who will gleefully censor whatever he feels like, after a critical mass of dependency has been reached?
Stop lying to yourself and others that this was “the most efficient outcome”.
NASA has tried to build their own rockets for i think 30(?) years. Like the space shuttle. The ship was expensive. Reusability never delivered on its promise to make things cheaper, instead it made them more complicated and more expensive when NASA tried. that was the public sector, it was attempted. Then SpaceX came and somehow managed to build rockets that were both reusable and cheaper than non-reusable rockets.
So yes, that’s not an ideological adherence to capitalism or anything, just plain data, that SpaceX is simply more efficient than NASA was able to be. With building rockets i mean.
People want houses, that doesn’t mean they want forests clear cut.
Similarly people want space exploration, that doesn’t mean they want to speedrun Kessler syndrome.
The infrastructure isn’t the only issue here. Its the fact that this is being done by a corporation owned by a nazi, with many other companies looking to compete. So instead of having one set of LEO satellites, we’ll have several.
If this was actually used to benefit humanity the light pollution caused by this would be understandable. But this isn’t being done in a sustainable way, or owned by the people.
And that’s all before considering the detrement to the environment from these satellites constantly burning up in the upper atmosphere.
driving_croonerCan we even get spaceships put if they are a million of those satellites on spaces?
Space is very big. A million is nothing in the grand scheme of things like launching at a specific point.
DaleLEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.
I expect that we will get in orbit refueling to extend their life once you get a good nuclear and solar panel power tug with an electric thruster that can deliver fuel, they’re in a similar orbit if you just do that.
Especially with the number of them it’s probably cheaper to just put up new satellites. LEO sats are designed to be temporary.
Cheaper and easier to upgrade the constellation to newer and faster tech. If you have backwards compatibility, you just start launching v2 and v1 will eventually just burn up, and hopefully finish just in time for v3 to start launching so you only have to be compatible with n-1 versions.
At least not legally
artyomLmao I wish. Satellites and their components have to be “hardened” to survive extreme temperatures and radiation in space. There’s probably nothing on it you could disable with any laser you could buy. Plus there’s the matter of targeting them.
Now with lasers you buy perhaps, what about with the lasers you build?
In the future where Federal Authority is concentrated on robbing and stealing elsewhere, I cannot imagine a high energy beam could not take these motherfuckers out.
If you have the capability to build a laser that can focus enough energy, from the ground through the atmosphere, with enough precision to lock on to an LEO constellation member long enough to disable it, you’d probably already either be captured, or working for DoD.
Also: great, you exploded it before reentry. Now we have a hundred thousand smaller, lighter fragments skipping off the atmosphere, disbursing randomly, and spinning around like hypersonic chaff bullets for actual worthwhile spacecraft and satellites to fly through, twinkling in infrared like a billion new streaky sparkles on those telescopes. It takes a lot longer for all that bullshit to rain down, and it pollutes just the same. Tell me, who were you fighting for again and why?
This is like when the humans blacken the sky in the Matrix to defeat the machines. Yeah it wrecked the earth, but is also didn’t defeat them and they just found something else to exploit.