Don’t get mad. Think of the shareholders.
Don’t fall for the clickbait reporting here. Musk has a history of making comically exaggerated claims. There won’t be a million satellites just like there wasn’t a 4000 km/h train, self-driving tunnel network, intercontinental rocket transport or Mars colony.
But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.
There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.
And I’m not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I’m jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).
If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn’t really matter).
The problem is that we offloaded “world leadership” to a bunch of ultra-rich sociopaths who only care about their own profit maximization. And they then made actual profit obsolete, since the only product they produce now is hype in the service of inflationary speculative assets. From a planetary perspective it looks like the human species is committing suicide.
Of all the permanent and irreparable things big corporations are doing to our world, I struggle to really put this high up. Yeah it sucks, but it provides a useful service and they naturally degrade. If anything Im more worried about all the pollution from them burning up in the atmosphere. If they stop launching them, the sky will be clear within the deccade.
It’s still infuriating that he could theoretically make the WALL-E earth a reality
Now I’m curious. Can a satellite fly over a country without permission? I know that an aircraft can’t. How far up from the Earth’s surface does sovereignity end?
However high they can shoot
There are international rules though i’m not sure either, if 50 Km or less or more.
List of Starlink and Starshield Launches - Wikipedia
~10,000 Satellites currently orbiting right now, and that’s just Starlink.
Check out the list of launches under “Falcon 9 Launches > Starlink Launches.” It’s every other day now (sometimes consecutive days) that they launch another rocket, and each payload is carrying 20 to 60 satellites.
Starlink is 2/3rds of all satellites. They add 5-6 per day, lose one per day.
Monty Burns approves.
i cannot describe how angry i would be at this shit.
Every day, these guys make our life worse and destroy what we love.
Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?
i am angry at the idea. want to share angers?
meet me at the launch site with some molotovs, we got some anger to share.
you know those water balloon slingshots?
Just need the Kessler syndrome to put a stop to it all.
Doesn’t make visibility better!
Does that apply to LEO? Seems to be self clearing in the medium term
I was like wtf does this have to do with law enforcement 🤦🤦🤦
It has always applied to LEO. Scifi media transformed it into the idea of “nothing will ever be able to leave the planet ever again” but the original studies that the phrase originated from included LEO. Despite the fact that there is enough atmosphere that a lot of the debris would experience sufficient drag for the orbit to decay within several years, not decdes or millenia, it would still have huge impacts.
Yes it does because parts of LEO have such low air resistance that the junk will stay up there for a very long time. However, I think part of how the Starlink satellites work is being so low that they do deorbit pretty quickly.
I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can’t believe I’m saying this: Maybe we’ve gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
This isn’t really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they’re passionate about, IMO they’ll be more motivated to research their field of choice
we should let scientists work on what they’re passionate about
*fund them
Why is it always 100x more on useless destruction and military? And yeah i know the sad answer already.
True, that is how we got unit 731.
SpaceX has developed laundry list of new technology to enable Starlink and other endeavors. It’s silly to discount that as worthless.
lol just so you know a “laundry list” is a list of bad things.
And no, rockets that can put stuff into orbit where around even before Mama Musk shat out lil Mech-Hitler.
If your scientific discovery disproportionately benefits a few billionaires then it’s worse than worthless.
AND makes life far worse for literally the entire planet.
Imagine unilaterally deciding that increasing your already obscene fortune is more important than every living creature that will ever exist in the future having a sky to enjoy, ever again. To these people, human joy is not something worth preserving.
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
I was thinking more like Climate Change and Infrastructure and suchlike.
That’s great, but that comes from funding those things, not shutting down a different industry. It’d be better to shut down non-productive industries like bombing brown kids in the Middle East.
Not gonna happen. Not with the effective altruist cult running things.
I don’t think you are using altruist right, or I am missing some sarcasm here.
A lot of the ultra wealthy espouse a nonsense philosophy called “Effective Altruism”, which asserts a kind of utilitarian “most good for the most people” ethic, but in such a way that one can basically justify any action as being, eventually, for the most good ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Including being good to hypothetical, unlikely trillions that may live someday if we colonize Mars.
I’ve been really passionate about space. My bday is on the anniversary of the moon landing, and my one aunt has always reminded me of the fact. My great grandfather worked for NASA and my aunt gave me his stargazing binoculars that his brother gave him when he got hired at NASA. That part of my family instilled a huge love of science in me, esp space stuff. I wanna go to space more than anything, but I don’t have the brains or constitution to be an astronaut. So I just daydream, stargaze, and write poems about the cosmos.
maybe just for this one guy you know
Believe it or not, you can do two things at once. Some people are interested in space, some in geology. That’s fine.
i just tried to chew gum and walk and my personal injury attorney would like to know your address (they think you’re cute)
Kinda missing the point there.
Which is?
Right. Elon hires people on the basis they’ll be making Mars travel possible, but that Starship is really for dumping metal all over the night sky.
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
If we get that we’ll also definitely get a Moon Banksy.
… ‘Bansky goes to Space’ …
That would make for quite a story.
That’s where you draw the line?
(Also, say hi to your chickens for me)
Well, at least we’ll always have Sinatra.
theoretically
Billionaires don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we’ve all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
We’re just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There’s not that many of them.
I don’t see the beginning of anything to rein in the power they get from just being overrich assholes.
Ironically, the only countries on Earth that control tightly (some of) their billionaires are Russia and China. I rememer Vietnam also executed one for tax fraud. Something for which they are barely slapped on their hand in western countries.
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they’re certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn’t mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren’t environmental disasters anymore.
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware in a single satellite.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That’s all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Edit: so his power argument is mostly fine. Different components do dissipate different amounts of heat at the same power. Antennae will not run as hot as GPUs, the fact they radiate power by design helps here. However, even if you could use all a v2 satellite’s power generation for compute, you need 35 sattelites per MW of compute. So at the lowest estimate 35000 for a GW data centre. For 2024 data centre capacity (47 GW computed from 415 TWh used) you need around 1.6 million sattelites. Now you need to network a vast cloud to get reasonable inter GPU performance.
The required orbit would probably mean a whole strip of earth gets insane light pollution, due to the reflectivity of so many sattelites jammed into the narrow orbit. Note that each satellite is about as bright as a star visible to the naked eye.
Edit edit: The lifetime of a data centre GPU is around 1-2 years for serious uptime. The sattelites are meant to have a 5 year lifetime.
It’s either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.
Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn’t listen
To cool the iss they’re exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
For real. Thermal regulation of spacecraft is a problem that current, non-data center, satellites are struggling with and increasing the load by orders of magnitude isn’t going to make things easier. You can easily calculate the area needed for radiative heat transfer for a perfect radiator and you quickly end up with some gargantuan panels. Perfect radiators are also perfect absorbers, so the whole system goes to shit if the panel isn’t facing deep space.
Night as a Service
Welcome to SpaceX where we provide a garenteed night sky view that is simply to die for. Subscribe now to enjoy your favorite night sky. Subscribe now for a lower price than normal. Remember, Subscription to SpaceX’s night sky is mandated by USA law. Those who don’t subscribe will be executed as Traitors and Terrorists. SpaceX’s Night Sky experience normally costs $399 per day but if you subscribe in the next 30 seconds using the following code (insert code here) you can enjoy SpaceX’s Night Sky for just $99.99 a day. subscribe now. Terms and conditions apply. SpaceX is not responsible for any propery damage, injuries, and/or deaths related to SpaceX satellites falling from orbit. Prices scale based on your race and gender with White men receiving a 100% discount.
It’s so infuriating… I occasionally do astrophotography and it’s getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere… Fuck Musk.
I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.
Now I can’t look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.
You can actually see some in broad daylight. I was shocked one day looking up and seeing one (white dot in the picture, verified with sat tracking app).
This photo is AI!
Yikes. This was not a serious comment. I thought that’d be obvious because… it’s literally blue sky with a white dot.
Poe’s Law strikes again:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe’s_lawAdding a
/swould help convey that intent a little more. And if you’re going for the “Got ya!” satire effect, you could always hide it in a spoiler.How so lol?
For the uneducated, what do these look like and can you see them in areas with light pollution?
Yes. They are technically reflected sunlight, so they are as bright as the sun, just very small. It makes sense you can see them during sunlight, since they are reflections of sunlight. You will typically only see them on the side of the sky opposite the sun, but the exact angle depends on the location and orientation of the satellite and the surface that is actually doing the reflection.
Generally speaking, they are dots that fade in somewhat gradually, moving at a consistent pace (typically slower than a shooting star, but faster than an airplane at cruising altitude) in a straight line direction for awhile at full brightness, then fading away.
To me, they look exactly like all the other stars in the sky, except they move, a bit slower than a plane, and they don’t blink.
If you look towards the horizon with the sun, a little before sunrise or after sunset, you’ll probably be able to see flashes of them as they catch the light.
LEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.
Don’t count on it. These things don’t just zip along in their orbits. LEO is crowded. They have to maneuver to avoid collisions… a lot.
Over the past six months, Starlink satellites have been increasingly performing collision avoidance maneuvers. According to a report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX broadband satellites were forced to avoid more than 25 thousand times from December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023. And since their launch in 2019, the total number of maneuvers has reached 50 thousand.
If Starlink or any other mega-constellation company loses control of their satellites for any reason, there could be collisions. A recent study (Note: PDF) suggests that a sufficiently powerful CME could cause a runaway Kessler Syndrome in as little as 2.8 days if the loss of control lasts that long.
And the orbits of that debris would still decay within a decade in LEO.
even less for Starlink
What’s your point? We would have a LEO like a minefield for 10 years.
I mean with proper regulation or would be slightly better. If they can maneuver to avoid collisions they can likes deorbit themselves at a quicker pace.
The main issue is if ever they went under someone would buy it, or try to buy it, at a discount. So they likely wouldn’t go away even if Star link went under.
Eh, i’m not so sure. I just did a quick doodle.
My opinion is that when a collision happens, it’s probably very unlikely for each fragment to actually stay on a stable orbit around Earth. Chances are high that it gains a lot of energy and the orbit is significantly distorted. Now, if an orbit is already very close to Earth, that means that any distortion will make it not fit tightly around Earth anymore, instead will make it go elliptic and therefore on trajectory of collision with Earth. The only way a fragment would not do that is if it’s accelerated perfectly sideways, in which case it would continue to circle around Earth for 10 years before deorbiting due to atmospheric friction. So, the cascading is a bit limited.
I don’t think you are familiar with orbital mechanics. A collision would barely disturb an orbit.
then are the fragments dangerous?
Definitely.
Any way to help them do that?
No way that’s cheaper or easier than waiting
At least not legally
Who enforces space law?
My mind was on the more practical idea of intervening on the ground.
But basically no-one, since it’s largely based on international law which is toothless.
Exactly
I’m wondering from a pure academic standpoint here honest. Like What about a laser?
Lmao I wish. Satellites and their components have to be “hardened” to survive extreme temperatures and radiation in space. There’s probably nothing on it you could disable with any laser you could buy. Plus there’s the matter of targeting them.
How rare are these materials that are sending to space? Literally sending rare metals out of our planet. Even if they fall back down to earth. Is it even possible or viable money wise to recover them?
Nope, not viable at all. A lot of it is straight up atomized on reentry especially for the smaller devices. Some of it is rare and some is not. The wet dream of these billionaires is they will be the first to figure out space mining and then manufacture. That’s why Elon musk has spacex and the boring company. Then raw resources like precious metals become infinite over night. Hopefully capitalism dies before that happens so we can all enjoy that.
Destroying these satellites with lasers poses a similar problem to what happens when you light zombies on fire: the satellites are held in space by their momentum and the reduced atmosphere vs Earth’s gravity. If you break the satellites into pieces via laser, then now you have uncontrolled and unpredictable space junk to deal with. Some of the pieces might return sooner, but what was once a concern is now a problem. Just like how a zombie at your door is very concerning, a zombie on fire at your door is an immediate problem.
Now, what could be interesting would be sending up another satellite that sprays black paint on the sun-facing side of other satellites. The energy absorbed and then exhausted could propel it towards Earth sooner. Maybe? I dunno, I’m just a simple country Fartographer, your honor.
No, it would run out of black paint. Give it a robot arm with scissors or something to cut the power lines on the Starlinks. (And also push them out of orbit? Maybe exchange energy with some sort of maneuver to stay in orbit longer?)
Why would we cut the power before deorbiting them? But if you wanna be more aggressive like that, then how about a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the satellite like a bully to ants?
Maybe exchange energy with some sort of maneuver to stay in orbit longer?
“No officer, I did not ‘run into their car…’ I improved their gas mileage by exchanging energy.”
Now with lasers you buy perhaps, what about with the lasers you build?
In the future where Federal Authority is concentrated on robbing and stealing elsewhere, I cannot imagine a high energy beam could not take these motherfuckers out.
If you have the capability to build a laser that can focus enough energy, from the ground through the atmosphere, with enough precision to lock on to an LEO constellation member long enough to disable it, you’d probably already either be captured, or working for DoD.
Also: great, you exploded it before reentry. Now we have a hundred thousand smaller, lighter fragments skipping off the atmosphere, disbursing randomly, and spinning around like hypersonic chaff bullets for actual worthwhile spacecraft and satellites to fly through, twinkling in infrared like a billion new streaky sparkles on those telescopes. It takes a lot longer for all that bullshit to rain down, and it pollutes just the same. Tell me, who were you fighting for again and why?
This is like when the humans blacken the sky in the Matrix to defeat the machines. Yeah it wrecked the earth, but is also didn’t defeat them and they just found something else to exploit.
I mean I was trying to Broach a theoretical, completely academic, discussion about what could or could not take these satellites out.
Good ole brute force is the best method, though, as you said, targeting is a huge problem. Basically you need a low Earth orbit shotgun.
Kessler syndrome though.
Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I suppose I need to study it a little more to make it stick.
Do they have those at Walmart?
i remember some startup tried to build a slingshot to shoot satellites into orbit with something like a bit catapult. that was 5 years ago, haven’t heard of them since.
Probably. I imagine you could probably get one at a gun show in Texas
Polluting atmosphere doing so.
That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them
Which is also nothing compared to a slew of other pollution sources
Which is also nothing compared to the general entropy of the universe.
Definitely true. But not very relevant.
sooo then this isn’t a problem if they all burn out eventually? hehe i’m just being pedantic of course
There’s reasonable hope at least that this is a problem that will solve itself, and unfortunately we have bigger problems to worry about.
I expect that we will get in orbit refueling to extend their life once you get a good nuclear and solar panel power tug with an electric thruster that can deliver fuel, they’re in a similar orbit if you just do that.
Especially with the number of them it’s probably cheaper to just put up new satellites. LEO sats are designed to be temporary.
Cheaper and easier to upgrade the constellation to newer and faster tech. If you have backwards compatibility, you just start launching v2 and v1 will eventually just burn up, and hopefully finish just in time for v3 to start launching so you only have to be compatible with n-1 versions.
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
You know capitalism has reached peak efficiency when instead of laying some cables or even build a few more cell towers we decide to litter the atmosphere with satellites instead
Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn’t matter for download.
it’s such a game changer when you’re actually using it. night and day, completely different experience.
also, GEO is in many regards more at risk for Kessler syndrome because stuff up there doesn’t deorbit
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.
I know not all remote areas can be reached by fiber
Did you miss this part? You’re arguing over something I didn’t claim, and didn’t say.
But since you brought it up, SpaceX received nearly $1 billion in subsidies from the FCC in 2020 to support rural customers. That money is what I’m talking about. It wasn’t for ships. It was to connect rural customers because it would otherwise not be profitable for large ISPs to serve them. This billion should have gone to supporting county PUDs, not a rich nazi fuck’s company. It should have stayed with the public.
Unless you’re saying that the billion from taxpayers should have been given to him to support ships in international waters?
As a bonus, fiber doesn’t lose capacity just because it gets cloudy. Try using Starlink when a cumulonimbus cloud is overhead.
I don’t think you’ve ever used Starlink if you think clouds make it fail.
…you do realize it started in Seattle, right?
Seattle typically doesn’t get hail core cumulonimbus (supercells). Plus, I’m not saying that it completely fails with just cloudy weather alone. Note that I said capacity, which is absolutely affected by moderate to heavy cloud cover or not being able to see the sky. Diminished capacity doesn’t mean it fails, it means that it’s slower, higher latency, and less reliable. In extreme cases involving hail storms (like I mentioned), it can and does fail - you can see this in the storm chaser streaming circles. Their streams cut out completely at times, if the satellites are between the storm and their antenna.
I am simply bringing up an edge case since the person who originally replied brought up ships when I was talking about rural fiber.
My point is still that SpaceX shouldn’t have gotten FCC subsidies when a more reliable, cheaper (especially in the long run since we’re talking about LEO), higher bandwidth, lower latency option exists. PUDs should have gotten all of that cash, not a different, large ISP owned by a billionaire.
An added bonus to fiber: it doesn’t ruin ground based astronomy.
I don’t know what a fcc is but if it helps us having good internet I’m all for it. I work on ships and I’ve used starlink on ships in storms and all kinds of bad weather including finding the antenna covered in ice and snow. It’s fantastic. Our old geostationary communication system fails as soon as a passing bird looks at it.
The FCC is the Federal Communication Commission for the US. They’re a US federal agency meant to do domestic policy in anything telecom and radio.
The intent of the subsidies was not for ships or international communication. It was meant for rural US properties. That’s why it should have been allocated to PUDs (public utility district). It would have been more useful for the people paying the taxes to give broadband subsidies.
Shipping companies can pay their own way - they’re corporations and can afford it. The subsides should not have gone to SpaceX.
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you’ll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
Edit: they also serve air traffic where ground service isnt available.
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
I mean I don’t specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 down/up with latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren’t reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some (I vaguely recall something like 40-60% have met it?), so it’s not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
Edit: I think my 40-60 number is also about a year old, so its probably a little higher now.
