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Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.
And all those were launched on Falcon 9 rockets, with I think only two launch failures ever.
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Starlink satellites are in low enough orbit to decay on very short timescales. More worrisome are Russian satellites in high / very long lived orbits that tend to spontaneously explode.
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Absolutely. Common sense and critical thinking is less common than you may think.
That's in part because "common sense" is an illusion and fantasy.
In reality theyre so small that it makes this look 100x worse than it actually is
Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.
Actually the Kesler syndrome, a space debriss cascade is a very real threat and a real concern. I suggest an interview with the commander of the space control quadron in a radiolab episode "Little Big Questions"
We risk solving the wrong problem due to bad visualisations of the situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Proper scale makes the visualization impractical. So lie? You can see from the comments most Hacker News users can't handle the abstraction. Your blog post is great, but most people don't know the Earth is a perfect sphere or simple things like the sun is white, the real "Don't Look Up" Universities have become pop culture, they are Gravity (2013), not 'science', whatever that word means now. We cross mountains so…
> So lie? Any 'visualisation' is a 'lie'. If you look at google maps you'd think the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about 3 inch (depending on your zoom factor). If you manage to grasp that abstraction, you might think the roads are about 5 miles wide. etc etc. where to draw the line.
But not twice the distance between Sacremento and San Jose.
For those who don't know, Leo Labs operates a commercial version of NORAD radar sites that track satellites and debris. If you're a satellite operator looking to avoid conjunctions, then buying additional measurements helps reduce uncertainty (which is often needed in order to decide if you should conduct a maneuver).