NASA picks SpaceX to deliver cargo to the Lunar Gateway | Hacker News Reader

NASA picks SpaceX to deliver cargo to the Lunar Gateway

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51 pointsjonbaer43 comments

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That's great news for space in general.

SpaceX has proven to be far more efficient than the usual suspects for making stuff happen in space.

Finger crossed, let's hope the Gateway program don't get downsized to oblivious by the impending crisis.

Saw the Starlink train go through Orion last night, a tiny sliver of the trashing of the night sky that is to come.

SpaceX is no longer cool. I plan to tell this to everyone who will listen.

Not to take away from your post (because I agree), but satellites already clutter a lot of the space surrounding earth even without SpaceX.

Are you aware of how many of them there are? And where they will be in the sky? And how low they are? And how shinny? And that they perform their own station keeping so you can't plan your observations around them? And how much money is being spent on Really Big Telescopes that are due to come online over the next few years? I think the single term 'clutter' needs to stretched a LOT to cover both before and after these are up.

And their 'low reflection' ones only drop mag by 0.8. It's a looming disaster (refreshingly unrelated to the other more important one happening right now): https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21190273/spacex-starlink-...

I wasn't, thanks for the verge post and tl;dr. That looks much worse indeed

And they are only visible briefly after sunset and before sunrise because they spend the rest of the night in earth's shadow?

"People in rural Africa should not have internet because I want an unobstructed view of the stars" ...is not a good argument.

The only good place for a telescope is the far side of the moon.

The people in rural Africa argument is BS.

Here is a 2016 report (see link in this CNN story)

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/19/africa/africa-afrobaromet...

that found:

"In Africa, less than one in three people have a proper drainage system, half of the population live in areas without paved roads, and only 63% have access to piped water. Yet, 93% of Africans have cell phone service."

Over the course of the next five years, 4G and 5G coverage in Africa will likely cover 95% of the population.

The really strange thing about Starlink is that there really seems to be no business case. It seems almost like it's based on taking the half-assed broadband coverage in the US, and extrapolating to the rest of the world by assuming it must be worse.

Musk is from South Africa. I would expect him to have a better grasp of the distribution of needs of the worlds population than many american innovators.

He got out and never looked back is my impression, for instance it's certainly not where he first spends his charity money [1]. At most he's given some money to his former high school, but there are rumours that was done in exchange to them not contacting him any more [2].

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/23/how-elon-... [2]: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/why-did-elon-musk-...

70+ years of of "aid" have destroyed Africa. Good thing not to participate in that scam.

BS! StarLink's goal is not to go bankrupt. Full stop.

Musk said so himself. Delivering Internet to the 3rd world or even emerging countries is not part of the agenda.

Stop fooling yourself.

Weird, because of was since the early days of Starlink.

"Not to go bankrupt" was only the response to a question about taking Starlink public. Please don't spread lies by taking quotes out of context.

How the heck can "the focus is not to go bankrupt" be taken out of context? Please elaborate!

It's neither a lie nor out of context, especially given the fact that every single other satellite internet [edit]startup[/edit] went bankrupt.

So please, enlighten me as to how this is a lie or taken out of context.

Ships? Airlines?

A substantial portion of worlds population lives in rural areas with very poor internet connectively. Starlink isn't for urban areas, whether in the US or Africa. It's for ships, planes, islands, mountainous rural terrain, etc.

I refuse to tilt at straw telescopes, to mangle an idiom.

If you saw the train then you saw it in transit (which takes 3 months), not in its final position.

Good point. It seems they'll be much more spread out but with many more tracks so you'll see them ... everywhere, more or less?

They'll be quite visible near the horizon the 30 minutes around sunrise and sunset. They're in very low earth orbit so they are in earth shadow and not visible to the naked eye the rest of the night.

They will also be at higher altitudes, reducing their brightness.

I hope this group of astronomers is entirely defunded - zero them out.

Start fresh with a group based on satellite observations. The increased access to space that SpaceX represents will be a boon to this new group. If you look at the costs / time to get the TMT up for example it is absolutely ridiculous. For $1B you could launch amazing missions on SpaceX - but there are so many invested interests in these big porkbarrel projects that there is little chance of that.

Are you seriously suggesting that _all_ Earth-based astronomy should be stopped? Do you know about the issue involved in making telescopes? In making space telescopes? Look at the James Webb telescope; do you think the cost and difficulty lies in the launch?

Yes - there is a great opportunity for a new type / class of astronomy based in space. That should be the focus going forward. If all these astronomers can do is (usually incorrectly) say that land based astronomy can no longer happen - zero out their funding.

Seriously - look into some of the port barrel type endless projects going on - TMT for example. It's ridiculous.

Look at ultraviolet, infrared, X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy - the idea that you are going to be doing high quality work on these on land is also silly - huge opportunities are in space for this.

For all the talk of satellites obscuring the view - you ALREADY need tons of processing / active adaptions to handle a much much bigger impact - atmospheric distortion! Seriously - the stars "twinkle" because of this. This an entire sky effect.

The reality is the land based interests are all the tenured folks at big universities and really depend on these long streams of funding - so I recognize almost no chance. But if there are young astronomers on HN - look to space positively to see what might be possible there! You'll find the forward thinkers may already be there!

For those interested in the challenges and opportunities - large fleet observations unobstructed by atmo. For large diameters (also still valuable) cracking some robotic build out (or even astronout build out options) would be great because a ton of complexity is in the unfolding mechanisms for planned large space telescopes. Anything that let you get a high volume of segments up and then assemble those in space would open up the door to HUGE telescopes. The future is going to be much more SpaceX style than SLS style (the next telescopes are planned for SLS - literally pork on pork - should be amazing results but the costs are eye watering).

Excuse me, but isn't this a whole lot of hypotheticals and assumptions (we could do this, this and that) while disregarding the concerns of professionals in the field?

I still don't see your working: why do you think space telescopes will not have the same problems in management and development as Earth-based?

To be specific, a project like the TMT started in 2003 or so (17 years ago) and was a follow-up to 3 other projects that had been going on for a while. So we are talking 20 - 25 years of funding to get to one telescope.

Very cool, but this telescope is going to be followed by the same "you can't do that" issues that spacex has always faced - but on land (ie, hawaii will fight it, canary islands will fight it etc).

Now the opportunity if you talk to astronomers for space based observation is incredible. I think folks in canada have tried to get canada off the TMT pork barrel train (anyone have the details of these efforts?)

The "trashing of the night sky" was already committed by all the light pollution being emitted from cities since decades ago. It's a shame. Cities are no longer cool. I plan to tell this to everyone who will listen.

Cities haven't been cool for astronomy for a very long time, so the telescopes go elsewhere to look up. These new satellites are in the sky where the telescopes are trying to look. It seems strange to need to point this out.

They've been working on mitigating the problem https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/darksat-is-di...

> so the telescopes go elsewhere to look up

Lift the telescopes to orbit, to the moon, and to Lagrange points. Lift is cheap now.

We're trying to get off this rock, not fight over it's shortcomings.

I assume you've been keeping track of how much JWST has cost before launch. Launch is not even close to the dominating cost for a serious telescope.

> I assume you've been keeping track of how much JWST has cost before launch.

Yes.

> Launch is not even close to the dominating cost for a serious telescope.

Even more reason to move observation off planet. Why are we not commoditizing observation platforms? Planet Labs, inexpensively images the entire earth daily, with satellites the size of shoeboxes [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2018/05/28/this-make...

The edge of observational science is the sensor and the satellite is built to support that. Radically different sensors have radically different engineering requirements. And to an extent, there is already a bunch of re-use between missions for the bus, power, control etc. But casually comparing a 10x10cm cube sat sensor to something literally over 3,000 the area feeding to a cryogenically cooled sensor to somehow argue in favour of SpaceX's current deployments is ... hard to reason with.

I am casually stating that it's time for observation science and engineering to evolve. StarLink isn't the only obstacle to earth based observation; siting requirements can constrain where observatories can be built, staff and equipment having to be colocated (sometimes in remote geographic locations), relations with local stakeholders can be fraught with peril [1], all avoided by lifting to space.

Will it be challenging to design observatories for space that were previously designed to be built on Earth? Certainly! Should we shy away from the challenge as an advancing civilization? Absolutely not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope#Approva...

JWST would have been a lot cheaper if they had known they could use heavier and cheaper materials when it was designed.

This seems akin to being against wind power generation because it "ruins" the view. Most space "views" are already ruined by light pollution, surely you don't propose we eliminate cities as well?

Yeah, but it isn't akin though, is it? Well, it is if you only consider the aesthetics of the sky, which is not the problem here. It's the science of astronomy being made more difficult and/or expensive. You might not think that is important, but some people do. For what it's worth, I thought the satellites looked amazing and my kids were thrilled, but I'd looked up for an ISS pass, which was until recently a rare sort of event. And so it goes.

You might not think connecting remainder of the world is important, but some people do.

Ground telescopes have reached their limit. We use giant radio telescopes that account for satellites and space based telescopes for all the recent discoveries.

Yes keeping the night sky clear is important, light pollution is the worst offender.

It just seems like feigned outrage tbh, especially when you're ignoring the fact that SpaceX has addressed your concerns and have proposed adjustments.

I could see your point more if they had not commented at all.

So SpaceX was ‘cool’ to you before, presumably because of their startup and disruptive nature, combined with advances like landing reusable rockets and genuine plans to colonise Mars... yet all of this is invalidated by the impact of Starlink on earth-based astronomy? Have I got that right?

Bingo! They are a commercial space launch company and there is money to be made (in internet access), so they're as cool as that is cool. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs! It doesn't even matter if they your eggs! Just go for it!

So, no. Not cool. And speaking directly to your question: it is everyone's prerogative to make these sort of character judgements, just as you're making one now.

I'm certainly not making any sort of character judgement - I'm just trying to clarify and understand another individual's (yours) weighting of factors in a particular situation. It's always an interesting exercise, as each one of us comes with different inbuilt biases and moral standards.

In this case, not being (remotely) an astronomer, I'll freely admit that my bias is to be less concerned about this issue - especially as I've read conflicting accounts of how damaging it will be for astronomy, and also because SpaceX are apparently still trying to improve their satellites in this regard, meaning the final impact isn't even yet known?

And besides this, landing rockets and planning to colonise Mars is still quite cool ;)

There are plans & ongoing tests to make them much less reflective.

If when they are invisible, they can still occlude a bit of sky very briefly but that's solved by astronomy already AFAIK. Also happens with the existing satellites.

The first half of that first sentence is so darn Sci Fi.

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