OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#2between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#3between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
Ideally with space based telescopes. Hopefully launching things up into orbit becomes dirty cheap and it's not so unreasonable.
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#4between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
Most astronomy is done with computers. It should be easy for a computer to ignore or subtract all known satellites. If you only get 900 exposures of some new comet instead of 1000, that's still plenty. And we'd need many orders of magnitude more satellites to make 10% of astronomical photos unusable.
I hear the astronomy argument all the time, but I just don't believe it. If satellites are ever cheap and plentiful enough to make that kind of difference, the astronomers can launch a thousand Hubble-style space telescopes and timeshare on those.
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#5between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
Most astronomy is done with computers. It should be easy for a computer to ignore or subtract all known satellites. If you only get 900 exposures of some new comet instead of 1000, that's still plenty. And we'd need many orders of magnitude more satellites to make 10% of astronomical photos unusable. I hear the astronomy argument all the time, but I just don't believe it. If satellites are ever cheap and plentiful en…
I believe GP was talking about the ever growing space debris.
https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Space_debri...
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most astronomy is done with computers. It should be easy for a computer to ignore or subtract all known satellites. If you only get 900 exposures of some new comet instead of 1000, that's still plenty. And we'd need many orders of magnitude more satellites to make 10% of astronomical photos unusable. I hear the astronomy argument all the time, but I just don't believe it. If satellites are ever cheap and plentiful en…
I believe GP was talking about the ever growing space debris. https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Space_debri...
These satellites should be in low enough orbits that any junk from them burns up in the atmosphere as their orbits decay. Maybe there could be an issue from collisions in low orbit pushing objects into higher orbits but those likely would be erratic orbits with low points that still subject it to decay.
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#7between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
Most astronomy is done with computers. It should be easy for a computer to ignore or subtract all known satellites. If you only get 900 exposures of some new comet instead of 1000, that's still plenty. And we'd need many orders of magnitude more satellites to make 10% of astronomical photos unusable. I hear the astronomy argument all the time, but I just don't believe it. If satellites are ever cheap and plentiful en…
All astronomy can’t be done from space. Space has many issues such as maintainability, heat, reflector sizes and the list goes on. I have friends and former colleagues who do astronomy.
I’ll trust the experts who’s profession are actually impacted.
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#8between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
They are mostly a problem at sunrise and sunset when they catch the sun and reflect it. Astronomy isn't much good then anyway.
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#9between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
Ideally with space based telescopes. Hopefully launching things up into orbit becomes dirty cheap and it's not so unreasonable.
These satellites are going to damage real science that is already costing us billions (and what's more perverse, do it for a profit). Professional astronomers already warned us about the issue, and IMHO there's no reason to think we know better. Of course we're launching telescopes into space (like the James Webb, planned for 2021 [1]), but those won't be able to replace science done by the larger terrestrial telescopes.
For reference, the ELT, which is currently being built in Chile, will be 74 meters high, 86 meters wide (with a Ø 39.3 meters primary mirror), and weighing 5,000 tonnes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Teles...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
Re: OneWeb successfully launches 34 more satellites into orbit
#10between this and Elon's stuff, how long till it is impossible to do astronomy or safely launch anything into space?
If you spread 50,000 cars over the surface of the planet, how much of the Earth's surface do you think would be blocked from view by the ISS? Because we have millions of cars scattered all across the Earth and from space, you can't even tell they're there.
>how long
I'd say at least until there are more satellites than cars. In other words, not gonna happen.