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I can periodically see with the naked eye what appear to be "moving stars" (about the same approximate brightness as an average star), and appearing to orbit the earth (moving in a "straight" line across the sky). Can I assume that these are satellites?
What I'm concerned about is how much the launching of tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of satellites will affect our ability to launch things out of orbit. Launch windows are already very precisely calculated, and the more junk we put in orbit the harder that will become.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need to do something about millionaires. Urgently. Can you elaborate what premise this conclusion follows from? And what do you want to do about them? And going out on a limb, I would assume you have a problem with the satellites, but Amazon, SpaceX and OneWeb are companies, not a Millionaires. So maybe you meant to say we should do something about companies?
So you say this idea was born by the company and not some human ambition? How did Amazon the company, or SpaceX the company come up with this? Nothing to do with Bezos and Musk for sure?
Not a thing I said.
> How did Amazon the company, or SpaceX the company come up with this?
Companies have employees, employees are humans with brains, they come up with ideas.
> Nothing to do with Bezos and Musk for sure?
I'm sure the normal company structures were involved in approving strategy. I doubt the idea originated with either Bezos or Musk, and not sure why their net worth has much to do with it.
If you have a problem with ambition, ambition is something many people who are not millionaires have.
Seems like the perfect use case for Vantablack. Of course the satellites will still block ER as they pass across the sky, but at least if they aren't reflecting so much light it would surely be of some help?
> But the black paint made the satellite thermally ‘hot’, harming its internet operations, said Patricia Cooper, SpaceX’s vice-president of satellite government affairs, at a recent webinar.
The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. These satellites are low, bright (at dawn/dusk) and very soon to be incredibly numerous. Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three com…
This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet.
Weirdly, HN itself removed the "how" when I just copy pasted in the title and I had to edit it back in...
So instead of "How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images" it would be better with "Starlink satellites might interfere with space observations from Earth" or similar
In unrelated news the cost of launching a space telescope (that doesn't suffer from atmospheric perturbations or cloud cover) has decreased by several orders of magnitude.
The satellite itself is way more expensive then a ground based telescope. Maintenance of a space telescope is much more expensive then a ground based telescope. All in all launching a satellite is just a fraction of the total costs of a space telescope. On top of that SpaceX has also not proven to be real friendly towards space telescopes, so that just "moves" the problem. See for example: https://www.forbes.com/site…
It seems unfair to paint SpaceX as anti-space telescope on that basis.