Yea but it introduces a lot of issues for space travel and other satellites. The useful space in space we have is extremely limited. A single company shouldn't be able to just clutter space at will.
Does it really? Every time I heard the "we'll run out of space" FUD argument it was followed by a drastic increase of satellites in orbit with no issue...
We're also facing a climate and pollutant crisis as a species so we seem only capable of thinking in the short term. We're not doing that well right now after only a brief period of industrialisation.
Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs. And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.
Will sending bits to space and back really be faster than fiber? How?
It will definitely be faster when someone drops an anchor on the undersea cable.
So over 100K starlink sats and then another 50K mirror sats (see that other HN post). Leaving aside the very tragic destruction of the night sky for observers, I’m afraid for the day we have a cascade of satellite debris events that send us backwards an and pretty much destroy our spacefaring ability.
until the kessler effect traps is on this ever-heating rock
LEO is not the place to worry about Kessler syndrome. Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.
Not to be alarmist, but suppose a galactic federation judges that
humans in their current state of development will pose a danger to
other civilizations when they imminently attain warp capability, so as
a safety precaution they need to be confined to their planet for at
least a millennium. An agent of the federation posing as human
manipulates the population into allowing 100,000 satellites to be
deployed. With that done, federation scientists solve the many-body
problem for the exact necessary speed and trajectory of a small meteor
to shatter one of the satellites such that some of its fragments
precisely target its neighboring satellites, and so on, while the rest
get kicked up into higher orbits. Life goes on but any enterprise that
depends on penetrating the debris field becomes infeasible.
Hope for what? For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change? I look up at the night sky and i want to see stars and the endlessness of the universe and don't want to be reminded that Elon Musk will poisen our atmosphere.
> For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change? Yes. The only way to truly solve these issues is technological progress.
Not really, all three of them are sociological problems. And, at least for the first and last, we could already have mostly solved them but for the intransigent insanity of various political cults.
It's not technological progress we need; it's cultural progress.
Yea but it introduces a lot of issues for space travel and other satellites. The useful space in space we have is extremely limited. A single company shouldn't be able to just clutter space at will.
1. That's not true. 2. It's not "at will" if you actually read the article you're commenting under you'd see it is about them _applying for a license_ to do something.
Taken literally you are technically correct, but...
1. Space is big, but LEO is not that big and if a single company clutters it enough, other organisations might start bumping into issues like 'if i don't get sign off from starlink corp, i might hit one of their satelites on the way up and my insurance wont cover that so I cant afford to launch given the risks of being sued by elon'.
2. Applying for a licence in this context, mostly means greasing the right palms (preferably the pudgy bruised ones).
Wut? This has to be some sort of a scam. There's no way you're going to be reflecting enough light from hundreds of kilometers away.
It's not. USSR and Russia experimented with space mirrors and was able to light significant territory. It was a successful program, but in 1993 Russia had no money to continue the project, so it was wrapped up.
I wonder if it would be possible for Starlink to use less reflective materials for their satellites so that the sky is less polluted for the astronomers.
Sounds like a job for Vantablack
"University of Surrey is developing Vantablack as a coating for satellites in earth orbit, to reduce encroachment upon ground-based optical astronomy."
I have started to see what I think are star link satellites at night on walks with my kids. It actually makes me sad to see that on person owns the night sky and is changing the literal stars my kids will grow up with. It feels different when it’s the government that theoretically represents people but when it’s one person that feels truly depressing.
Think that the sky is one nuke away from being 100% clean at any given time.