One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

Better than gates' effort to eradicate malaria?

Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have, because it's slightly easier than paying OpenReach to connect them to proper network. And it's hard to imagine anyone else being their clients, at the prices that they charge.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory – Impact of Satellite Constellations

https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa...

The Vera Rubin Observatory came online only this June, but they were complaining about Starlink already last year, and provided preliminary observation how they affected their observations, and how they plan on mitigating it.

Both the 2023 paper and the Vera Rubin Observatory statement call for a set of policies to mitigate the effect of these satellites. However policymakers have not enacted any of these other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution (I don‘t know whether or not they were defunded by DOGE; although if they were, that would seem like a criminal conflict of interest). And I have my reservations about the willingness of governments in the world to come together and set the universal regulatory framework required to enforce these proposed mitigations.

Note that increased exposure time required because of these satellites will affect the number of available operations, which in turn will decrease the amount of astronomy done with this telescope. I want to note especially the conclusion:

> Overall, large numbers of bright satellites — and the necessary steps to avoid, identify, and otherwise mitigate them — will impact the ability of LSST to discover the unexpected.

When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy. You better have a good reason for that (other then protecting the wealth of billionaires).

I think we are simply talking about two different things here.

I mentioned 802.11r not due to the key exchange implementation details, but to point to the general point: Seamless handover requires shared state between cells.

This is not about static vs dynamic routing, you are thinking on the wrong layer here. We are in L1+L2 land.

On Starlink, the last time I tested a handover between two Sats in 2025 still involves a downtime of at least 5 seconds, and both L2 info and NAT state being lost.

In regards of axes: I am not much into emotions. Of course the data says that Elon Musk is the cancel cell that will play a huge part in destroying the western civilization. But as I do not like the western civilization and humans in general much, this does not trigger much emotions.

And even if I hated Elon Musk: We are talking about technology, R&D and implementation details here (which I enjoy!). I do not have emotions on IP protocols and such :)

No, in reality it's really very simple: My data says that Starlink just is not worth it. It is not commercially feasible. It pollutes the space with tons of trash that will harm productive future space missions and projects. It's highly overrated and overhyped. It's very hard to find positive reviews that haven't been paid for.

Or, executive summary: Starlink is a dead end, and without the Elon cult nobody after looking at a hypothetical business plan would invest.

And finally: Anecdotical evidence collected from my own tests and those of friends all says: It's just shitty. However: That of course depends on your use case. For some an 8 seconds drop-out might mean "patient dead". For others it might be "I will retry loading this after grabbing a cup of coffee". My peer group might have higher standards than others.

Of course Sat internet has its place as a niche business. But as you surely are aware in the US it was and is tried to steal tax money meant to build fiber by claiming Starlink would be equivalent. And you might also remember that if someone would not have pulled the emergency break, you know would have air traffic controllers seeing planes with 100ms+ of latency AND every now and then losing contact to all airplanes for 8 seconds.

And all of this has been tried before. Over in Europe, we 10 years ago had those fights where Viasat & co claimed to be an alternative when we got the "basic human right to broadband".

There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.