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How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

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Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#51

Post by FredPret »

bmitc wrote: post #30
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard enough that some people are putting up satellites instead. EDIT: Say there's some way to put in fiber at $10k per km. Even then, ten million users at 1km per user makes $100 billion.

To me, these are capitalistic solutions looking for problems. It's the whole startup mentality. Let's just throw a bunch of shit in space and see if it ends up being useful for anything. This idea of connecting the world is as false as the other hundred millions times that's been sold.

If you paid attention, "this time" and also the "other hundred million times" are true, not false.

We're massively more connected than ever before.

Homeless people in the third world have phones now. They should be able to get on the internet too.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#53

Post by pfdietz »

stouset wrote: post #18
hehdhdjehehegwv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Megaconstellations are not a problem for kids looking through telescopes. If anything it’s additional things to wonder at in amazement.

Indeed. The big obstacle for kids is when the entire sky is washed out with sodium vapor light and maybe you can see Vega.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#54

Post by shadowgovt »

tetris11 wrote: post #2

I know it's a blessing for people who live out in the sticks to have internet.... but is that really such a large use-case to justify entire fleets of these things? How hard is it to run km of wire from the nearest town? To me, these were built for the sole purpose of surveillance, and internet is an afterthought. Edit: yes yes it's expensive, but the easiest solution the world came up with was for some guy to invest…

In many cases, the issue isn't cost to run but cost to maintain.

Consider South Africa, where the largest threat to installation deployment is inability to police the entire deployment coupled with massive wealth inequality... People just dig the cables out of the ground for the copper. Cellular radio has ameliorated the issue some (harder to steal the repeater antenna out of the back yard of a shotgun-owning resident), but Internet can still be a challenge.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#55

Post by pfdietz »

stevage wrote: post #50
lumost wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back of the envelope math would suggest that 8-10 JWTs could be launched in a single starship flight making for an impressive telescope array.

Did you factor in the fuel to get to where it needs to be?

Propellant is very cheap.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#56

Post by FredPret »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #6
tetris11 wrote: post #2

I know it's a blessing for people who live out in the sticks to have internet.... but is that really such a large use-case to justify entire fleets of these things? How hard is it to run km of wire from the nearest town? To me, these were built for the sole purpose of surveillance, and internet is an afterthought. Edit: yes yes it's expensive, but the easiest solution the world came up with was for some guy to invest…

> How hard is it to run km of wire from the nearest town? If it's not hard, why hasn't it happened already?

Super hard.

You have to dig a trench or span the wire. Either way you need to clear it with numerous property owners over a vast distance, get approval from dozens of authorities along the way, coordinate work crews, and then do maintenance on the whole thing for decades.

And then you discover that the wire used 50 years ago contained lead and we don't like that anymore, so now you have to pay for massive lawsuits (look up AT&T & Verizon) and rip up all that wire. More coordinating work crews and property owners!

And then they invent a new kind of wire and you have to do it all again.

Launching 1000's of satellites isn't easy but I can see wanting to do that rather than wire up the whole planet.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#57

Post by ajford »

jonplackett wrote: post #35
runeofdoom wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just "any individual with a telescope" though. It's stuff like the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a set to map the southern sky down to below 27th magnitude that's in trouble.

How would a telescope like that compare to Webb or Hubble in its capability? Eg, if we had to trade the loss of that for many Webb scale telescopes, or presumably something much much bigger once starship can start launching - is that worth the trade?

Ok, who funds it? National Science Foundation doesn't allocate nearly enough money as it is, let alone enough to replace the tens to hundreds of active telescopes producing scientific data every night. And those telescopes are already oversubscribed with people waiting in line for available time. So unless we're slowing astronomy to a halt, we'd need similar numbers of telescopes.

And none of that takes into account that many of these telescopes are used specifically as experimenter telescopes where a given scientist can use their own equipment to perform unique observations that cannot be easily done with space-based telescopes.

It took over a decade to produce the Webb telescope and get it into space, and still is a massive feat of engineering not easily reproduced. We're not nearly to a point where we can just write off ground-based observatories in place of space-based ones.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#58

Post by pfdietz »

tetris11 wrote: post #2

I know it's a blessing for people who live out in the sticks to have internet.... but is that really such a large use-case to justify entire fleets of these things? How hard is it to run km of wire from the nearest town? To me, these were built for the sole purpose of surveillance, and internet is an afterthought. Edit: yes yes it's expensive, but the easiest solution the world came up with was for some guy to invest…

It's getting to the point it's not even worthwhile to run power lines to remote locations.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#59

Post by harimau777 »

delichon wrote: post #3

On the one hand the constellations are doing considerable damage to surface based astronomy. On the other hand they are funding an enormously lower cost of access to orbit and beyond for astronomy up in the sky.

It seems to me that one problem is that regular people who are interested in astronomy don't have access to space based telescopes. I'm not sure I'd want to live in a world where there's that degree of class divide between astronomers who do and do not have access to that kind of funding.

Re: How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?

#60

Post by runeofdoom »

jonplackett wrote: post #35
runeofdoom wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just "any individual with a telescope" though. It's stuff like the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a set to map the southern sky down to below 27th magnitude that's in trouble.

How would a telescope like that compare to Webb or Hubble in its capability? Eg, if we had to trade the loss of that for many Webb scale telescopes, or presumably something much much bigger once starship can start launching - is that worth the trade?

My understanding (as a very amateur astrononer) is that it's an entirely different sort of scope - very wide field, with the ability to track extermely faint objects, rather than magnification of a much smaller field. I.e. we'd need to build and launch another immense scope to get the same sky-mapping ability.
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