https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomers...
The ability for people to take pictures being diminished is unfortunate, but if I had to choose between the two options I'll choose the one that significantly increases a lot on people's standard of living
Maybe in the future when we aren't ruled by capitalist overlords that make expanding traditional internet infeasible we can stop launching and replacing these satellites and can take pretty pictures again
Huge portions of the world are simply so sparsely populated that running wires is cost prohibitive.
And it's not a theoretical problem - there's plenty of people who have already had their work impacted
Software to remove the satellites would be great, given that the satellites are already interfering with astrophotography, can someone point me to the software to remove the starlink satellites from my images?
http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/userguide.htm
https://www.astronomie.be/registax/index.html
There are a few use cases/reasons to put telescope observatories on earth.
One reason is because it's cheap enough for hobbyists. An ordinary enthusiast can go out in their backyard and point a couple hundred dollars worth of gear at the sky and get shockingly gorgeous images with little more than a webcam and a cheap scope. Software like what I linked above can help remove satellites from those images. Post-processing of images is a (nearly) cost-free but complexity-expensive way to remove noise, distortion, and other artifacts from the images produced by cheap gear, might as well remove satellites while you're at it!
The second reason is because it's cheap enough for scientists and students. A few universities have their own observatories. They're abundantly aware that not only satellites but also air and light pollution get in the way of good seeing. There are all kinds of effort devoted to fixing the problems that air and light pollution cause, but the easiest fix is just to move the telescope. A university can contract time for its students with an observatory in a favorable location (low light pollution, clear skies, right latitude/hemisphere, high altitude, good seeing) and do science through that remote interface. These are, I think, the most important users to take care of with space-based telescopes. Maybe their Chilean observatory doesn't have the server hardware or network connection to do stacking and post-processing to remove satellites, and images taken by the old method of long exposure astrophotography are getting ruined by satellites. Time on a space-based telescope would, for many use-cases, be as good or better than time on a terrestrial observatory. And there are zero air or weather issues!
The third is because it's the only place where we can put telescopes of the required size for a particular imaging task. Maybe they're in an interferometric array, maybe they're 3+ meters in diameter, who knows. There are only a couple dozen telescopes in this category in the world, the few astronomers using these telescopes don't need HN commenters to point them to software to remove satellites!
I do acknowledge that processing for a hobbyist does increase the learning curve and reduce the raw awesomeness of the hobby a bit - "why not just go to nasa.gov and download someone else's preprocessed images" isn't the same as seeing something from your own backyard through nothing but a mirror and a piece of glass. I also acknowledge that there's a ton of money invested in terrestrial observatories, but everyone needs to keep up with the times.