I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can’t believe I’m saying this: Maybe we’ve gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
Billionaires don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we’ve all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they’re certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn’t mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren’t environmental disasters anymore.
It’s either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.
Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn’t listen
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everything the tech bros touch, dies
Literally the plot of Horizon
While this very well might fuck up land-based stuff looking at space, people are often overlooking what this would mean to stellar photography from space.
If they can truly launch these million data center sats profitably, that means starship works. That means payload to space is relatively cheap.
That means we could also send large quantities of large telescopes into space on the cheap, and avoid the crazy expensive cant fail telescopes because the cost to get them up there isnt prohibitive and a technical failure in the telescope isnt a disaster.
Things very well might change, but it will also open up possibilities in the same area.
Elon will not make it cheap. Falcon 9 prices keep rising. He’s an exploiter and will enshitify his service once enough people are hooked on it.
Theoretically, even if we assume SpaceX is overshooting, that’s an interesting thought:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
In practice? I’m more concerned about interest in funding astronomy in the first place.
That, and big fat telescopes are fundamentally expensive. And (at least for the optical variety) “swarming” them with a bunch of cheaper units isn’t as effective as building a big one.
I’d love to be wrong though. There are some interesting papers on swarms of optical telescopes for a larger effective aperture, but I’m not qualified to assess them.
Oh, I wasn’t thinking swarms the same way these million sats will be, I was thinking just using the whole payload diameter of around 9m for the lens/mirror (minus any housing) but they could potentially just buy the whole starship and be cheaper than past options and that is the housing.
James Webb cost billions because of it’s complexity and launch costs, none of which is needed when there’s 9meters to work with without any complexity at all.
If you wanted, you could make a super crazy expensive satellite that worked just like James Webb and have a massive mirror as well, but that’s a bit different than my large quantity of cheaper telecopes in space. I wonder how big you could get the mirror if you did it James Webb style in starship.
I wonder how big you could get the mirror if you did it James Webb style in starship.
Presumably 7x ~8m hexagons folded up?
That is a good point though. And if one were to design a “budget” 9m space telescope, they could amortize the R&D dramatically by launching the same design many times, perhaps with different sensors for different purposes? Amortization is why the Falcon Heavy and such are so cheap, and why the Space Shuttle and JWST are obscenely expensive.
Okay, you’ve sold me. I hope this does happen.
He never respected his fellow man, why start now?
There are roughly 15,000 total at the moment ? I wonder what that will do to animals and insects lives.
is already so bad. i do astro timelapses and it’s all you see anymore. they stand out so much now, if the quantity gets 100x’d it’ll be a nightmare.
it will blot out the stars…
exactly nothing as most animals and insects can’t even see the stars; their sense of vision isn’t good enough for that.
There aren’t many animals or insects in low-earth orbit though, thankfully.
Yeah but they use the light to navigate too. They use this planet too.
I think local illumination is probably going to be more of a problem than reflected light of a satellite.
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
I thought they couldn’t take the sky from me!
We haven’t even finished burning the sky and boiling the sea!
And serenity is nowhere to be found.
Down with the space clankers
LEO 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.
Don’t count on it. These things don’t just zip along in their orbits. LEO is crowded. They have to maneuver to avoid collisions… a lot.
Over the past six months, Starlink satellites have been increasingly performing collision avoidance maneuvers. According to a report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX broadband satellites were forced to avoid more than 25 thousand times from December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023. And since their launch in 2019, the total number of maneuvers has reached 50 thousand.
If Starlink or any other mega-constellation company loses control of their satellites for any reason, there could be collisions. A recent study (Note: PDF) suggests that a sufficiently powerful CME could cause a runaway Kessler Syndrome in as little as 2.8 days if the loss of control lasts that long.
Eh, i’m not so sure. I just did a quick doodle.
My opinion is that when a collision happens, it’s probably very unlikely for each fragment to actually stay on a stable orbit around Earth. Chances are high that it gains a lot of energy and the orbit is significantly distorted. Now, if an orbit is already very close to Earth, that means that any distortion will make it not fit tightly around Earth anymore, instead will make it go elliptic and therefore on trajectory of collision with Earth. The only way a fragment would not do that is if it’s accelerated perfectly sideways, in which case it would continue to circle around Earth for 10 years before deorbiting due to atmospheric friction. So, the cascading is a bit limited.
I don’t think you are familiar with orbital mechanics. A collision would barely disturb an orbit.
then are the fragments dangerous?
Definitely.
I mean with proper regulation or would be slightly better. If they can maneuver to avoid collisions they can likes deorbit themselves at a quicker pace.
The main issue is if ever they went under someone would buy it, or try to buy it, at a discount. So they likely wouldn’t go away even if Star link went under.
Polluting atmosphere doing so.
That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them
Which is also nothing compared to a slew of other pollution sources
Which is also nothing compared to the general entropy of the universe.
Any way to help them do that?
No way that’s cheaper or easier than waiting
At least not legally
I’m wondering from a pure academic standpoint here honest. Like What about a laser?
Lmao 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.
Destroying these satellites with lasers poses a similar problem to what happens when you light zombies on fire: the satellites are held in space by their momentum and the reduced atmosphere vs Earth’s gravity. If you break the satellites into pieces via laser, then now you have uncontrolled and unpredictable space junk to deal with. Some of the pieces might return sooner, but what was once a concern is now a problem. Just like how a zombie at your door is very concerning, a zombie on fire at your door is an immediate problem.
Now, what could be interesting would be sending up another satellite that sprays black paint on the sun-facing side of other satellites. The energy absorbed and then exhausted could propel it towards Earth sooner. Maybe? I dunno, I’m just a simple country Fartographer, your honor.
No, it would run out of black paint. Give it a robot arm with scissors or something to cut the power lines on the Starlinks. (And also push them out of orbit? Maybe exchange energy with some sort of maneuver to stay in orbit longer?)
Good ole brute force is the best method, though, as you said, targeting is a huge problem. Basically you need a low Earth orbit shotgun.
Do they have those at Walmart?
i remember some startup tried to build a slingshot to shoot satellites into orbit with something like a bit catapult. that was 5 years ago, haven’t heard of them since.
Probably. I imagine you could probably get one at a gun show in Texas
Kessler syndrome though.
Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I suppose I need to study it a little more to make it stick.
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.
I mean I was trying to Broach a theoretical, completely academic, discussion about what could or could not take these satellites out.
sooo then this isn’t a problem if they all burn out eventually? hehe i’m just being pedantic of course
There’s reasonable hope at least that this is a problem that will solve itself, and unfortunately we have bigger problems to worry about.
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.
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.
How so lol?
For the uneducated, what do these look like and can you see them in areas with light pollution?
To me, they look exactly like all the other stars in the sky, except they move, a bit slower than a plane, and they don’t blink.
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.
If you look towards the horizon with the sun, a little before sunrise or after sunset, you’ll probably be able to see flashes of them as they catch the light.
LEO 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.
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.
Edit: they also serve air traffic where ground service isnt available.
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.
It 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.
