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Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

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Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#111

Post by pc86 »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #94
pc86 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police and courts have legitimacy because they are created by the sovereign nation. There is no sovereign entity above the nation - you're comparing apples and hammers.

If nations have legitimacy then they can enter into supra-/international bodies and agreements with legitimacy much like two persons can agree on an arbiter to resolve differences in their mutual contracts. This is nothing new and we've been doing it for a long time—the Egyptian 18th dynasty entered into the first known peace treaty with a foreign nation 1500 years BCE; NATO and the United Nations are modern examples…

Those international bodies and agreements only have legitimacy because nations agree that they do.

To take a slightly different take, Mexico exists as an objective fact. The EU can decide not to recognize Mexico as a country but Mexico continues to exist and faces basically no adverse reaction from this. If the countries that make up the EU decided it was done and stopped acknowledging it, it would cease to exist. It has no population, no military, no land. No means of projecting force. Mexico retains these properties and abilities regardless of any agreements to the contrary, or lack thereof.

I'm not saying international agreements don't exist but that they have no inherent sovereignty because they are by definition but hand-shake agreements between independent sovereign members.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#113

Post by ggreer »

k4rli wrote: post #66
yapyap wrote: post #23

[flagged]

Madman seems better than a con-man. All those satellites for an unnecessary service that could never become profitable... Is this the node_modules/js ecosystem for space? 7k+ satellites for a service that Viasat and others can do with ~10. Supposedly Starlink has better ping, but as it's still unusable for gaming, it doesn't appear nearly as beneficial.

Leaked internal documents show that last year, Starlink made $72M net income on $2.7B in revenue.[1] Their revenue growth rate is ≈90% year over year. They're spending most of that on expansion (paying SpaceX for more launches, manufacturing more/better satellites, and manufacturing terminals). If they wanted to, they could scale back these expenditures and rake in the money. But long-term, they stand to gain more if they spend their revenues on ways to grow their business. Their customer base has increased by 30% since those financial statements came out, so their finances are most likely in even better shape now.

For comparison, last year Viasat had $4.3B in revenue and lost $1B. This year their revenue has been flat. They lost revenue in communication services (probably from Starlink) and gained revenue in military contracts.[2]

1. https://www.scribd.com/document/886692980/GI-2139325374

2. https://investors.viasat.com/static-files/c89c3424-4ad3-4fe2...

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#114

Post by bayindirh »

nilamo wrote: post #107
bayindirh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't expect this good behaviour to continue. I don't agree. Kessler syndrome is another M.A.D. scenario. Nobody would want it to poison the well for everyone incl. themselves.

Hi my name is SpaceY and I get paid to launch other companies payloads. What happens once they're deployed in orbit is the customer's responsibility, we specialize only in launching. Companies don't work for the public good, or even their own good, most of the time. Strange that you'd expect that to change.

> Strange that you'd expect that to change.

I don't expect companies to change. I expect government to regulate and oversee...

What's stranger is, people calling for deregulation of everything despite knowing how it's gonna end up.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#115

Post by southernplaces7 »

notahacker wrote: post #75
southernplaces7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across. To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units. This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,0…

The mental exercise is fine for realising that satellites don't look as big as pictures of satellites in graphics, it's just missing the point that if you don't want to hit a 20cm x 20cm x 20cm cube that moves at 17,500 mph and has slow and limited capability to adjust that movement you need to allow it quite a bit more space, and be able to predict its movement accurately relative to yours. Especially if any collisi…

All of these are useful things to keep in mind of course, and they're why I put forth my consideration as a thought experiment for perspective, not so much as an absolute assertion. Orbital space is complicated, and the the ramifications of accidents are extremely unique compared to those that apply in a terrestrial context, but I still stand by my point about it being absurdly big enough that a sense of proportion is needed in worrying about something like Kessler syndrome.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#116

Post by southernplaces7 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #28
carlsborg wrote: post #13

> "Earth has 4550 satellites in orbit" Rapidly obsoleted information. SpaceX alone has > 7500 satellites in orbit. It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.

This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that. Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topograph…

To those downvoting a completely innocuous comment like this and my other replies below, which simply put forth a thought experiment for the sake of debate, without asserting anything at all controversial: Grow an adult brain, no? idiotic as the downvote feature is in general, one would at least assume that the self-professed "intellectually above-average" readers of a site like this would use it better than 12-year-old rage-lords on a 4chan thread.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#117

Post by fifilura »

pwndByDeath wrote: post #92
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we aren't careful with space debris [1], deorbit protocols [2], and anti-satellite weapons [3], we risk triggering a Kessler syndrome [4] and permanently blocking our access to space. We currently have no international space agreements outside of not putting nuclear weapons in space, which is wholly inadequate for managing the dangers and safety of space development. The only reason space has been managed decently…

Meh, orbits and nuclei are vastly different scales, I've tried to simulate this by making everything in space-track a 10km radius sphere and it was just a few starlink nudging each other a couple times a week.

Isn't the theory that each nudge results in 100 new objects?

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#118

Post by radu_floricica »

Yokolos wrote: post #45
radu_floricica wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... good? In more ways than one. The most obvious is that any international body would be easily controlled by the big players, so you'd end up with more centralized control by the same national entities, but now they'd be controlling other countries launches as well. The other problem is that lately international organizations have a pretty bad track record. Two examples, which I've chosen because they are act…

Somebody has never heard of the tragedy of the commons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons > The tragedy of the commons is the concept that, if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely replace them,…

Oh, thanks for educating me! But seriously, that link on HN is a bit... you kinda expect people here to have basic education.

My comment had nothing to do with the theory of commons, only with the implementation. Yes, the better we coordonate the better the overall outcomes, but simply creating rules for the sake of creating rules will just create additional problems. You can't say "a better/new UN will fix Gaza" without understanding why the current one is failing: votes are based on population, there are very large Muslim populations, their political leaders have to play a certain tune or they'll have problems back home etc. It's all a bit more complicated than "let's all get along".

Same with space. Ok, basic rules are nice. At the very least, a norm of not having things go explody in stable orbits would definitely be welcome. Now, problem: how do you create an institution to enforce only the good rules, without scope creep and bureaucracy over 30 years?

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