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falcolas

Snark:

Boy, it's a great thing those satellites will only ever orbit above the US!

Or:

Boy, those astronomers are going to be so grateful for the extra bandwidth in their remote observatories!

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I am curious what the comments would be like when China or other country will put thousands of satellites around the world. I expect one of the first comments to be "why not give money to X US company instead of reinventing the wheel" and other comment about spying.

You're not kidding. I can only imagine the anger and outrage if North Korea, China, Russia etc. all launched 20,000+ satellites into space.

I'd guess we'd have a few people trying to shoot them down from their back yard, actually.

I'd imagine China doing this soon, even if it's just because they can.

I will be happy when anyone in any country does it, because they will likely be paying SpaceX to perform the launches, and SpaceX, regardless of national origin, seems to be making the most progress toward a future where there is regular passenger service to the moon.

I would very much like to live off of the Earth.

I think you forget other countries have rockets too, satellites and rovers that were not launched by SpaceX.

There is no more a theoretical situation that US can have a country locked our of software or hardware so larger countries would not want to have this dependency or have NSA/CIA intercept your satellites before launch and backdoor them(that is their job will be the excuse).

Nobody else has reusable rockets (yet), which means that regardless of capability, it is much, much more expensive for anyone else to do an orbital launch.

LEO constellations require lots of launches.

This is not to say it’s impossible, just that for it to be within an order of magnitude of the cost on SpaceX, someone else needs to come up with reusability as well.

I have no doubt that someone will, I just wonder about when, and if it will be in time to benefit anyone else’s presently announced LEO internet access constellations. It’s also possible that Amazon will just eat the cost of disposable rocket launches; it’s not like they couldn’t afford it if they wished.

Yes is more expensive but governments burn this kind of money all the time on military and other shit. I do not see China or India giving money to US to launch satellites from them. Private small companies will probably rent such SpaceX satelites.

Are there any planned government LEO internet access constellations that will be consumer-facing products? The only ones I’ve heard about are Starlink (first party by launching entity), OneWeb (which had to be bailed out), and Kepler (Amazon, so theoretically unlimited funding available).

I am not aware of any, it is a very niche thing though since the majority of people can be connected with cables(I know in US there are issues but in other countries if you have electricity in a remote place you can just add a internet cable on the same polls and bring cheap and fast internet to everyone).

Do you honestly see China,Russia or India governments giving money to a foreign company when they have their own space programs? The governments to not min-max for short term financials and you also have on top of that the security issue to trust US.

I think there will be tons of global customers for Starlink. Any cable or signal that leaves the premises has to be encrypted anyway, addressing the privacy security issue for civilians, and the military, which also has availability as a security concern already has a local/nationally-run satcom system for their use today.

Satcom isn’t an issue for governments right now. It is, however, for billions of normal people who live far from population/commerce centers.

Boy, those astronomers are going to be so grateful for the extra bandwidth in their remote observatories!

They will when economical access to LEO pays off in the form of cheap orbital telescopes.

millions of people own telescopes (most with internet access already) and for 99.999% of them there is no upside.

They'll live.

Shouldn't the companies that launch these satellites be responsible for their externalities?

Why is whoever is first has the moral high ground? That's why cities in California have a water shortage while people are growing alfalfa and exporting it for less than what others would pay for the water alone.

you can choose not to live in CA. you cannot choose not to live under the common sky, or breath the common air. unless you're suggesting to just avoid looking up at night?

this is a whole 'nother level of NIMBY.

NIMS ("not in my sky")? Yes that would be an escalation in this already tedious boomer tendency.

I'm not sure that being able to see the stars is an unreasonable thing to ask. There is probably some middle ground between allowing NIMBYs to hold society hostage and not giving homeowners any rights over their broader environment.

They could launch billions of micro-cubesats into LEO, and it wouldn't block anyone's view of the stars. They're too small and they're moving too fast.

Besides, at some point there will be a valid reason to have a visible device in orbit. I don't want any precedent set that some small number of narcissists can repeat e.g. the opposition to offshore wind power we've seen on Martha's Vineyard.

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