21–30 of 231 posts
So now they'll also have to deal with "preserve the ionosphere" activists who have no clue.
The term "punching a hole" is absurd, IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars don’t constantly move thousands miles an hour uncontrollably
Cars also don’t move in easily predicted patterns for decades without turning from their predetermined path.
Cars, for the most part, follow the road and the direction they're already going. They (usually) signal if they're about to make changes. And to be safe, we've built an arrangement that they only travel on these specific paths at specific speeds, modifying their speed to match the other cars they might hit.
The challenge with satellites is that steering is hard and very limited. And they don't have brakes they can slam to come to a stop if they need to suddenly avoid a collision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will excess radiation leak through to Earth during re-ionization?
If the holes are quickly healed by sunlight, and only local to where a satellite is launched, the answer would seem to be no.
Doesn't sound too local to me.
When we fly drones especially BVLOS operations we sometimes encounter some GNSS anomalies, that in some cases we just cancel the mission that day and the next day it’s with no issues. Could it be that’s the reason? Who knows, but it might be an issue later with crewed drones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only insignificantly. Most of the radiation is filtered/diverted by the magnetosphere. The only really practical effect of the disturbance is making the already hard to predict sky-wave propagation of HF even more harder to predict and characterize. Which is today realistically of an interest to HAMs and mostly as an fallback for intelligence agencies and diplomatic services. Edit: It also somewhat changes the scatte…
What about high frequency trading shops?
Starlink plans to deploy 12,000 - 42,000 satellites. What if two competitors want to do the same? Can the low earth orbit handle 150,000 satellites that turn into space debris at some point?
That’s fun! Of course, we do already have something analogous to FAA altitude separations. But that requires everyone everywhere to cooperate in real-time, and mandates some degree of maneuverability. I guess orbital decay is only a concern for aircraft when they aren’t trying to land.
What you have to watch out for is the eventual rise of the Kessler Cult, who (according to me) will seek to block all access to space intentionally ;)
> Sudden GPS errors can also result from the anomalies. When we fly drones especially BVLOS operations we sometimes encounter some GNSS anomalies, that in some cases we just cancel the mission that day and the next day it’s with no issues. Could it be that’s the reason? Who knows, but it might be an issue later with crewed drones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The waste, waste majority of sats never turn into space debris. Every single sat that launches today in the West has a deorbit planned. The only sat that turn into space debris will be those that brake unexpectitly and totally unrecoverable. And the Starlink sats are so low that they dont really turn very meaningful debris ever. And in general, yes LEO can handle millions of sats. We have like 150k cars in a single t…
Cars don’t constantly move thousands miles an hour uncontrollably
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The waste, waste majority of sats never turn into space debris. Every single sat that launches today in the West has a deorbit planned. The only sat that turn into space debris will be those that brake unexpectitly and totally unrecoverable. And the Starlink sats are so low that they dont really turn very meaningful debris ever. And in general, yes LEO can handle millions of sats. We have like 150k cars in a single t…
> the Starlink sats are so low that they dont really turn very meaningful debris ever. Is that right? Scientific American seemed to think it could be a problem in 2019[1]. Space.com says Starlink satellites orbit at an altitude of about 342 miles (550 kilometers)[2]. And the Wikipedia article on Kessler Syndrome[3] (which is a chain reaction of satellite debris) mentions an incident at 555km that was problematic: "In…
The real danger is space junk that's at much higher altitudes. OneWeb and Telesat Lightspeed (in planning) operate at 1000+ km, where space junk will take 1000+ years to deorbit on its own. And OneWeb has already had a satellite failure where it can't deorbit the satellite.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The waste, waste majority of sats never turn into space debris. Every single sat that launches today in the West has a deorbit planned. The only sat that turn into space debris will be those that brake unexpectitly and totally unrecoverable. And the Starlink sats are so low that they dont really turn very meaningful debris ever. And in general, yes LEO can handle millions of sats. We have like 150k cars in a single t…
> the Starlink sats are so low that they dont really turn very meaningful debris ever. Is that right? Scientific American seemed to think it could be a problem in 2019[1]. Space.com says Starlink satellites orbit at an altitude of about 342 miles (550 kilometers)[2]. And the Wikipedia article on Kessler Syndrome[3] (which is a chain reaction of satellite debris) mentions an incident at 555km that was problematic: "In…