If the entire field of astronomy is so educated on the subject, why do most not know Starlink was never visible except at dawn or dusk, and it’s already implemented successful mitigations for those tones with visors?
Unless Musk has secretly invented Romulan cloaking technology, being invisible doesn't help when you are trying to look at the stuff behind
What percentage of the night sky will be obscured if Starlink goes to 30,000 satellites?
Let me guess, if the visual radius of a one meter satellite 550,000 meters away is (1/X)^2. Thirty thousand would be 1/one trillion, or far less?
The launch costs is just a small part of the total costs. You destroy my house and I should be happy you offer me a discount when I buy new blueprints from you.
Historically this has only been true because of the immense cost of building super lightweight payloads using super expensive super light materials to fit in very limited payload mass requirements. Falcon 9 is a heavy launch system that can lift up to 50,000 lbs of payload to orbit, similar to the Shuttle. Falcon Heavy is a super heavy launch system that can put 140,000 lbs of payload in orbit. Starship is designed t…
Your argument is incomplete, I said that transport in space is a small part of the costs. You can't just move the existing telescopes in space. You need special space telescopes, with special mechanical and electronic system with high reliability. You could say maybe Elon can send 6000 shit telescope that will work for 6 months and will be an equivalent to an average ground telescope.,
> It is this author’s opinion that any correlation between mass and space telescope cost is a coincidence. From "Survey of cost models for space telescopes" https://doi.org/10.1117/1.3430603
A decade old study, using only NASA telescopes, using only super expensive launch systems. Now the Falcon Heavy can lift over double the payload mass of the Space Shuttle to orbit, for less than 1/40th the cost per pound.
Launch costs are only a fraction of the cost. The cost of a space telescope itself is massive, regardless of launch cost. The James Webb telescope is massively over budget but even it’s original $1 billion cost and 10 year build time is much more than many ground based observatories would have costed at the time. Currently it’s cost is about x10 it’s original estimate and 14 years late, partially because it’ll be on its own once it’s launched.
On the ground, $1 billion or less buys you an extraordinarily large telescope such as a 40 metre mirror or a distributed array. These are needed to study very distant objects in detail and impossible to build in space.
The launch costs is just a small part of the total costs. You destroy my house and I should be happy you offer me a discount when I buy new blueprints from you.
More like "you build something ugly opposite my house"
Disagree, if I make a factory in China that generates some ugly clouds so you can't see your beautiful sky anymore, then if you complain I give you a discount on my airlines so you can fly above the clouds and see the sky for the first time. It could happen if we let companies pollute for free.
I love all of the comments about using software to filter out the images. This response is so obvious that it is from someone who has never worked with data from imaging the sky, and probably have never thought about it more than a drive-by comment. "Just filter it out" they say. And replace it with what? An average of near by pixels? An AI background replacement? That's just bollocks. Every single dot in the sky is…
To reinforce this, there is a fair bit of astronomy that is looking for single photon differences. The optics and engineering here is very cool (pun intended) and can take months of time on an instrument to detect, if there is anything at all. Sources of noise are pathologically chased down. Adding in noise would be like trying to chop off your arm, easy to do once, but hard to undo. As a reminder, astronomy is not a…
Exactly. Modern day comet/asteroid hunters are taking images from night after night and treating them like time lapses to see what dots are moving. Removing these dots to fill in the void left by the satellite streaks sets this method of detection back to unusable/unreliable. Even filling in the removed satellite streaks in an image with data from previous/next images totally invalidates the tracking of objects in motion.
> Your link describes a failure of SpaceX's internal ticketing system which resulted in ESA thinking that SpaceX were ignoring them. I'm not saying they are anti-space telescope. I'm saying I'm seeing little evidence they want to play nice with other people who have a stake in space. I have seen mostly evidence to the contrary. Regarding that particular incident; ESA's (way larger) satellite had that orbit / trajecto…
Satellites naturally cross paths over time, there is no “ESA” path. This is standards and expected, SpaceX is only guilty of a support failure, which has been corrected. And SpaceX has designed and is implementing shade visors on all new Starlink satellites at their own expense, for the sole reason of reducing their reflection and brightness for astronomers. No one made Elon do that, he chose to significantly increas…
As you say, there are standards and expectations that SpaceX failed to uphold. They shouldn’t be praised or thanked for doing what they should have done in the first place and only corrected after been called out.
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…
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…
Thats what everybody said in the 60s and we got scrambled pornography unscrambled for 19.99/month
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…
As a counterpoint, I'll die on the opposite hill with, I suspect, the large majority of the public. And I say that as someone who has been a lifelong space enthusiast. Ubiquitous access to cheap internet has done more for humanity in the last 20 years by far than any contribution from ground-based astronomy. If the choice is between Starlink and more difficult ground-based astronomy, I'll choose Starlink.
Yeah, this is a tradeoff, and the balance seems to favor adding more satellites. We're not going to the stars for centuries at least. It's unlikely that further knowledge we're able to glean from ground-based installations will ever have practical value for anyone on any appreciable timescale. As cool as the stars are, they're really far away and damn hard to see, especially through the atmosphere.
> will cost you some effort and money and time. This externality needs to be captured for it to be fair.
Sure. Governments regulate space pretty closely and they have the ability to account for that. I'm sure the commercial potential of global broadband internet is high enough that some funding for astronomers wouldn't be a huge obstacle to the constellation operators.
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…
So it's not exactly a good potential userbase for starlink. However, most of South America, Africa and Central Asia could benefit massively from Starlink and start participating in the global digital economy