Mastodawn

Prof. Sam Lawler

Trying to edit a stupid FCC comment on Yet Another Fucking Stupid Orbital Data Center (fuck you, Blue Origin) and I need to go outside and rage-scream for a while. And I have an easily accessible hayfield to rage-scream in!! (Also maybe baby goats, I'll check for those too #BabyGoatCountdown)

Prof. Sam Lawler 17h ago

Comments are due to the FCC on Mon for Blue Origin's copycat of SpaceX's fucking stupid orbital data center idea. Comments were due yesterday for the first SpaceX copycat: Starcloud (I hate everything about it, including the name). I was in chaotic travel mode for most of that and so had to rely on colleagues.

Now I have to read these fucking docs to see what bullshit Blue Origin is serving up, so time to rant about it.

Prof. Sam Lawler 17h ago

Blue Origin wants 51,600 satellites, all in sun-synchronous orbits. That means they'll follow the terminator line around the Earth and be sunlit ALWAYS. They want to distribute them between 500-1,800 km altitude, which means some of them will be sunlit and visible all the time. Fanfuckingtastic.

This is also the exact same set of orbits that both SpaceX and Starcloud want. Sun-synchronous orbits are about to get ridiculously crowded.

Prof. Sam Lawler 17h ago

"BLUE ORIGIN BACKGROUND" a.k.a. the grandiose greenwashing section. Oh they named this Project Sunrise?! Project Sunrise sounds like a billion times worse than Reflect Orbital...

Whatever it is, at least they didn't name it Project Sunshine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SUNSHINE

You just never fucking know with these techbro companies...

Project SUNSHINE - Wikipedia

Prof. Sam Lawler 17h ago

Oh my god the "PUBLIC INTEREST" section is a giant love fest over all the things that AI isn't actually doing. Don't worry guys, if you launch data centers into orbit, they are way greener! There's always solar power in space! Please just ignore all the rocket exhaust, ablation products, and shit hitting the ground... Also the fact that data centers in space are almost certainly physically impossible...

Prof. Sam Lawler 17h ago

The shitweasels are also asking for waivers! Because the few rules that are left are just too much.

Please don't ask Jeff Bezos to pay a measly million dollar bond in case they don't launch 50% of their sats within 6 years. That would be unfair! Also please don't worry about what radio spectrum we'll use, because we totally promise not to have any interference at all, even though we provide absolutely zero information about how our satellites work!

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

Oh another one too: Please don't ask us about our debris mitigation plan because the "satellite design is currently being matured" (in other words, they have no fucking clue what the satellites will actually look like or how they will work).

Oh yet another: we totally can't upload our orbital parameter date because the FCC's web form is too crappy! (This part I actually believe. The FCC's website blows.) But come on guys, no orbits?

Oh yeah, didn't submit to the ITU yet either. Of course.

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

That was the Narrative, now on to the Technical Annex. Whoopee.

Ok, so they want 300-1,000 satellites per plane, separated by 5-10km, ranging from 500-1,800km altitude. All in sun-synchronous. Like I said, super crowded.

There's a bunch of info about spectrum use, I will leave this to my radio colleagues to interpret. (dBW/m^2/MHz units... flux, I guess? Eeek.) It's probably bad.

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

ORBITAL DEBRIS MITIGATION this part will be the most "fun"

But a reminder that they asked for a waiver for their debris plan, so I guess that this is just... for funsies?

Here's the first and only information I've seen about the satellite sizes. They will be bigger than 10cm, so they will be easily tracked! No shit!! A fucking data center needs to be bigger than 10cm! What useful information!!

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

To nobody's surprise, they will burn all their satellites up in the atmosphere, because that's what all the cool kids do. They don't actually say their operating lifetimes anywhere. But if they're 5 years like Starlink, then that's a bit more than one satellite burned up per hour.

And will they burn up completely? Well, they say they'll use the same NASA debris model to assess that said that the SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk would burn up. So I'm not worried at all!!

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!

They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

No mention of atmospheric pollution, of course, because the FCC doesn't give a shit about that. With SpaceX's 5 Starlinks a day a few months ago, we were well above natural infall rates of most metals, so 1 (presumably) gigantic satellite per hour will be a lot worse than that.

My colleagues and I wrote a bit about using the atmosphere as a satellite crematorium here, and it's bad: https://theconversation.com/a-new-space-race-could-turn-our-atmosphere-into-a-crematorium-for-satellites-276366

A new space race could turn our atmosphere into a ‘crematorium for satellites’

Planned ‘megaconstellations’ of satellites could cause unforeseen harm to the ozone layer and climate systems. Global regulation is needed before it’s too late.

The Conversation

Prof. Sam Lawler 16h ago

Oh hey, there's an ASTRONOMY MITIGATIONS section!! All of the collective astronomy yelling and screaming is working!!!

...oh wait it's all total bullshit, because they don't actually have anything close to a satellite design or even a size. Three whole sentences at the very end of the document!! They care so much about saving the night sky and all of astronomy research!

And with that, I desperately need to go take a walk in the woods.

Prof. Sam Lawler 15h ago

Better. (But I'm still angry.)

@sundogplanets Your guardians against wolves are ready and primed!

John Maxwell 15h ago

@sundogplanets Good. To both, but especially the "better" part.

Sandor Spruit 🇪🇺🇳🇱🇺🇦🇨🇦14h ago

@sundogplanets I think you need to cuddle some goats now 😅

@sundogplanets
Looks like another grift to keep their investors wallets open while a few psychos continue the race to be the first trillionaire. The others in that race won't mind being 2nd, 3rd, 4th.....
And or the long plan is to build a gigantic space station for billionaires and slaves piece by piece while disguised as doing something good for everyone.

Holger Dittmann 9h ago

@sundogplanets Since a lot of Techbros are obsessed with naming their crap after concepts and items from High Fantasy or Sci-Fi I‘m actually amazed that no one has yet come up with the datacenter constellation „Hactar“. The giant computer from The Hitchhiker’s Guide which disintegrated into a dust cloud that enshrouded the planet Krikkit to isolate the inhabitants from the rest of the universe and make them paranoid. But maybe that’s just too obvious even for Techbros.

@sundogplanets I work in collision avoidance and space debris and cataloguing and this shit is just getting worse and worse... I can't believe how much they want to launch. It's just not feasible!! Fucking millionaires...

Red_Shirt_no2 14h ago

@sundogplanets
I see a data center and I want to paint it black

Red_Shirt_no2 11h ago

@sundogplanets
… idea for a cubesat mission …

Cat West 13h ago

@sundogplanets They would, if they could have their way, pollute the skies, day and night to the point where they could project ads across the sky. To them, everything is for sale. Nothing is collectively ours. Starlink remains a private profit endeavor using and abusing the sky above as their personal playground and the earth below as their garbage dump. Guess where we are?

lachlan slowly taming rust 13h ago

@sundogplanets Other than seperating investors from money, and - let's face it - a proxy for a dick measuring contest - what's even the point? Underwater data centres was odd, but made some sense to me. Being in space just makes everything about a computer work worse - I mean, let's start with cooling, powering, radiation hardening and cosmic rays for a basic 4.

@sundogplanets
I wonder how many satellites at what size it would take, for private PV systems to be affected. I.e. how much would they have to pollute the sky to re-centralize energy production?

Resistor McResistanceFace 16h ago

"have I got a bubble buster for you" - that shy campish syndrome they call Kessler

Please people, learn how to make fire without AI

Kyle Memoir 🍉🐧10h ago

What Bezos, Musk and even the nice folk at NASA have done is they've managed to abstract humanity. To them, humanity is merely an object in a great masterly program, called upon when needed (for funds extraction), otherwise null, a hindrance even, when it appears unbidden.

Our priorities need revision.

Until we can buy time by mitigating climate change, all this stuff is fireworks at the close of a long weekend—except come Monday, we won't be going back to work.

staringatclouds 10h ago

@sundogplanets I have a question

The FCC is an American agency, so why do they get to decide what's in LEO over my country ?

Snuffleupadon 4h ago

@sundogplanets it's like, all these righty billionaires go out and read great fiction and continually take away the wrong lessons. Did Elon and Jeff read "Illium" and "Olympos" and think, "let's build an orbital thingy, it doesn't matter what it actually does!" (RIP Dan Simmons).

🔻 aetios 🇪🇺16h ago

@sundogplanets 51 collisions! Let's go!

@sundogplanets I don't study orbital risk, but I do study cybersecurity risk, and a probability without a timeframe is a sure sign of sloppy thinking.

Henryk Plötz 16h ago

@adamshostack @sundogplanets Yeah, I stumbled there too. "0.00001" what? Eggnogs? Square rabbits per furlong? Is it common in orbital mechanics to give no frame of reference? I would have expected something like "per satellite per hour" or somesuch.

@sundogplanets What's more, is the 1e-5 the starting point, after which probability will be reduced by "at least 1.5 orders of magnitude" or the result of that reduction?

@sundogplanets As I'm sure we both tell our students, if you can't explain it clearly, that's probably evidence that you're not thinking about it clearly.

Dan Sugalski 16h ago

@adamshostack @sundogplanets Sadly in this case I suspect it's more "if you're not explaining it clearly it's because explaining it clearly looks *really* bad", since these are folks who absolutely know their stuff (at least legally and organizationally) and any weird lack of clarity is most likely intentional.

Paul_IPv6 15h ago

@adamshostack @sundogplanets

i specifically did technical talks and tutorials about things i wanted to be sure i well understood for exactly that reason. also, nothing like a public talk/tutorial to motivate you to refresh your knowledge on a subject.

Come On Giant Asteroid!15h ago

Feasible == costs us nothing.

Infeasible == costs us money.

DieKeh®seite am Endepunkt™16h ago

@sundogplanets 😭

Mike McCaffrey 16h ago

@sundogplanets I am disturbed by how the reentry of those satellite pieces have made them so furry.

M Berberich 15h ago

@mikemccaffrey @sundogplanets

Fiber enforced materials?

Mike McCaffrey 15h ago

@m_berberich I certainly hope so.

Prof. Sam Lawler 15h ago

@mikemccaffrey @m_berberich Carbon fibre

Mike McCaffrey 13h ago

@sundogplanets @m_berberich It looks like the fibers aren't burning with the rest of the material. I wonder about the quantity and size of the fibers are that are left over when the object does "burn up" on reentry.

Ms. Que Banh 15h ago

@sundogplanets Can you please repost the photo of your cat, hijacking the audio gear stuff, from that day? That was a hilarious, memorable moment.

Prof. Sam Lawler 14h ago

@PhoenixSerenity Hahah! Not my cat, the cat belonged to the Sawchuks.

That cat will make a fine journalist someday!

If you look carefully in the second picture, you can see her checking out the space debris and getting filmed, too.

Ms. Que Banh 14h ago

@sundogplanets I love that cat! Thanks for reposting this fabulous cat-don't-care-about-media-gear memory! This is one amazing cat!

Curioso 🍉 🇺🇦 (jgg)16h ago

Wouldn't it be fun if they were plain Raspberry Pis with little solar panels attached and a little parabolic?

So cute!

Michael Busch 16h ago

@jgg @sundogplanets

There is a group called Lonestar Data Holdings that claims to offer "orbital data centers", by which they mean that they once paid to have an extra drive bolted on the side of a spacecraft used for something else.

But that is not what the current flood of "data centers in space" scams is about.

Michael Busch 16h ago

Thank you for reading through this mess so that the rest of us do not have to.

rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua 17h ago

IMHO there are other better ways to create some thousands of jobs.

@sundogplanets If they really think they need to do this - which I'm no scientist, just a Sci-Fi fan, couldn't they maybe I don't know, collaborate and stick the tech on satellites combining different companies techs? Like instead of cell towers for each provider, combine the antennas on one per region...

Samuel Smith 20h ago

@sundogplanets I don't have experience with goats, personally. But I have heard if you scream, they will scream with you. Could be cathartic.

There's "goat yoga". Could there be "goat rage" sessions?

But, more seriously, I hope we come to our collective senses and quit the whole "pollute the skies" plans before we ruin it for everyone. You're doing a great work. We need more people like you, doing the right thing even when it's hard. Thank you.

@sundogplanets
Don't frighten the goats.

@sundogplanets Pictures of any found baby goats, please. They’ll help you, too. 🙂

Thelmadonna 19h ago

@sundogplanets Orbital data center? YHGTBFKM. Jeff should just repurpose his yacht and install a desalinator so the thing has enough water to run. And then some pirates should blow it up.

Jens Finkhäuser 5h ago

@thelmadonna @sundogplanets Oh no, the idea has been around for a while.

The sad part is that it's vaguely related to some decent ideas out there, like the notion of focusing on a "flying rack" kind of satellite design that can be better repurposed.

But no, flying DCs are not the best idea.

Roy -- the dull one 18h ago

Following your lead, I read "More Everything Forever", by Adam Becker. Thanks for that tip!

To others alarmed by the insane "constellation" stampede:

If you are thinking that this is merely billionaire greed, you might want that book. This is greed on a scale never unleashed before, infected with a malevolent pseudo-religion that is stunningly corrosive.

You're probably aware of this already. Becker fleshes it out.

Roy -- the dull one 18h ago

I apologize for increasing the need to rage-scream. I would have made an independent post, but @sundogplanets is such an important info stream, and so widely followed by intelligent people, that it seems excusable to intrude on this thread, sometimes. Sorry!

A key point that seems to be hidden from many of us is that these 'Titans of Greed" are not unaware of the harm they are doing. The role models among them want to do harm.

Prof. Sam Lawler 18h ago

@oldclumsy_nowmad Glad you read it and learned from it! It's an excellent book