61–70 of 395 posts
How long are digital exposures? It seems like most of the interference could be removed with a bit of signal processing.
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Why do astronomers own the skies? I don't remember when they got title to that property.
Conversely, why do the the satellite owners own the sky? Space is a shared resource. One use shouldn't infringe on another.
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Will those american billionaires pay say for more European satellites to compensate? What if this were Chinese satellites would you have the same opinion? It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.
I'm sure astronomers would pay for access to a global distributed space-based telescope. So, if there is demand... We are about to have a huge supply.
I also do remember the story how NASA got a couple decommissioned telescopes from some intelligence agency, which turned out to be an order of magnitude better than Hubble is, and the agency was getting rid of them because they were already outdated. I do remember reading that if those were put into astronomy use they would be a lot better than anything we have currently, but of course those are being used for taking pictures of military sites and tanks, rather than stars.
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Why do astronomers own the skies? I don't remember when they got title to that property.
Astronomers don't "own" the skies, the rest of humanity simply considers the benefits of astronomy to be higher than some satellite internet vanity project.
What will the impact be when there are 500k+ satellites in LEO, who decides who can launch more?
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It's not as big a deal as you think. The satellites are only visible to the naked eye for a few weeks after launch as they travel to their final orbits; after that they are too dim to see. The sky will not appear different than it does now to the naked eye; you will never see thousands of satellites. Most of the bright satellites you see now have been there for many years already; Starlink will not be visible like th…
How do you know what the final orbits are? Why would they not be visible on the final orbits? Sure, only a fraction of the satellites will be above you and illuminated by the sun, but at 30000 that's still bound to be a huge number. See for example this guy who tried to model this for the lower number of 12000: https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1132335640605945856
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I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong. The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern…
> I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hing…
The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite.
It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
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Astronomers don't "own" the skies, the rest of humanity simply considers the benefits of astronomy to be higher than some satellite internet vanity project.
We can judge the value humanity places on astronomy by looking at how much money is allocated for it. I suspect it will come out less valuable, to humanity, than the service Starlink will provide.
That is a very naive viewpoint.