Amazon satellites add to astronomers' worries about night sky
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On the bright side: each new satellite launch should lower the barrier to entry for the next satellite launch. This combined with growing competition in the space industry could lead the way to commercially viable spaceflight. There's so much opportunity for off-planet industry, it'll be pretty exciting to see where all of this leads.
At least, that's the way I see it. They've added new competition in so many areas. They've saved the consumer so much money that the federal reserve literally blamed them for lowering inflation, but instead, the federal government as painfully ironic as it is, views Amazon as the bloated overreaching organization.
... thousands of small businesses and millions of retail workers are so thankful for this "improvement". The day is nigh where you and I will also get "improved", hopefully!
Brave New World. Ideal for a certain social class: the alphas.
The main thing people get unhappy about is wealth disparity ie., how much MORE the rich have than the poor. That even today's poor have a rectangle that's effectively a magic portal to the entire world's knowledge and population is not satisfying to you when you read headlines about Bezos' mansions, right? Allow me to humbly suggest to you that if the dominant emotion of your worldview is envy, you would not have been any happier in decades past.
They are big and growing but just a bunch of talking heads and campaigns squawking "monopoly" doesn't make it so. Walmart is still bigger as a retail sector so calling #2 a monopoly is jumping the gun.
What if it takes them zero effort to do so?
Let me guess. Richer riches and poorer poors? I hope you'll enjoy the view from your off-planet 2 m^3 residential cubicle.
1: risk of collision. The main mitigation measure here is active collision detection. The second mitigation measure is that all of SpaceX's satellites will be in an incredibly low orbit that decays rapidly without active station keeping. If a satellite fails it will burn up in the atmosphere within a couple of years.
2: light pollution. The latest generation of SpaceX satellites with the visor are so dark that they are not visible to the naked eye. This is dark enough that blooming is not a concern. Of course they'll still be visible in telescopes but that doesn't ruin the shot the way blooming does.
I suppose it's possible that Amazon doesn't address concerns the way SpaceX does, but it seems unlikely now that SpaceX has proven it can be done.
We will have to build observatories on the far side of the moon and at lagrange points and in orbit.
Between now and then there is and will be a struggle to get out of the planets gravity well and into space. There will be some detrimental effects, but the benefit of planetary connectivity via sat internet will help so many its hard to put a value on it. If capitalist competition is not desired then there must be a state designated max cap on sat numbers forcing them to iterate on the ground and possibly cooperate.
As someone who has been on the waiting list for an astrophysics scope for some 9 years (!) I can feel the light pollution trauma, though for normal people observing from the ground the albedo of these things will not approach city light pollution.
Disbarring space launches for this reason is similar in the notion to not landing on mars until decades or millenia of sterile robot landers have confirmed or otherwise the presence of life. Reality, waste decades doing this and find you contaminated it anyway with your robot, but it had no effect on life which is robust.
Lets just get out there finally and get stuff done. Most scope viewing is done on cameras anyway now and not by eyeballs.
The world is still a big place. The day you can be connected anywhere and take a vtol to tunguska is still some time distant. The sky of such a world will be congested but there may still be sky slices present.
This is about spending a few dollars more to have them properly painted.
Think about this, Musk and Bezos are saving a few cents. In exchange of astronomy.
Other satellites are reflective, too. It's difficult to make a satellite completely dark, in part because dark = absorbs heat and it's hard to dump heat in space.
The problem with these internet constellations is that, to work, they have to have thousands of them in each constellation. SpaceX has permission for 12k and is seeking permission for 30k more (https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-mor...).
And since when has "It's difficult" been a free pass? Both of those companies beat their chests about how neat their tech is, but when it comes to a genuinely hard problem - as in, how to launch this fleet without fucking up humankind's ability to gaze into the cosmos as we have for our entire history - you're going to let them duck it?
And, to head off the obvious objection: I really, genuinely, truly don't care how difficult it is, why the physics make it difficult, what a vacuum does for heat, etc. I know. It's a hard problem. Maybe you don't get to launch fifty thousand satellites into orbit without solving it.
So, i guess it is as legal as the interference themselves will cause on your 5g phone reception.
If the satellites tried to become more difficult to detect, perhaps with light absorbent coating they would also become more difficult to detect by other satellites in orbit.
https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_la...
With many more satellites on the way there will be more such stories.
Here is Iridium CEO: https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168582141128650753
BTW - Satellite operators (including governments) are currently the only customers of SpaceX. Their interests are SpaceX interests.
I think you are downplaying the problem. They are already reporting issues with Starlinks and there are "only" a few hundred of them right now, Amazon wants to deploy 3k low orbiting satellites.
Look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observato...
The very large majority of the world's observatories are doing wide-field astronomy.
This is not scientific progress, this is just two billionaires trying to one up each other and muscling their way around the world to rub their egos.
Starlink claims to have other objectives. Why do you think their stated objectives are dishonest?
This is a gimmick to sell the imaginary joy that you can go anywhere remotely and enjoy the pleasures of the modern connected world. There are already niche providers for Satellite services that users can use, if they are truly isolated and are able to afford internet.
There is no sense in having all of this infrastructure duplicated and done via RF transmission over a low-orbiting constellation (with all the losses and realibility issues around it), if it can easily be achieved through expanding the existing infrastructure.
The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (Which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).
Sure some architecture stays ugly - but preserving the aesthetics of a sky(line) ranks really low on my list of things that are worth stopping progress over.
It distracts from better objects like the Louvre and others.
I'm guessing amateurs with a telescope in their backyard are the ones suffering?
https://twitter.com/SuperASASSN
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/story?id=8221167
It's going to be a long time (if ever) before space gets cheap and accessible enough to replace these folks.
(The article, incidentally, shows photos from a four meter telescope. That's... probably not amateur astronomy.)
* Many experiments and a lot of science cannot be done from space, even if delivery costs were much cheaper. E.g. LSST (0.5 billion in US funding alone, + lots of other funding sources), or wide-field astronomy important for near earth object detection and monitoring (e.g. ASASSN). These things are too complex and too large to realistically do in space.
* Ground-based astronomy is inherently cheaper (no space costs, no extra engineering effort, and importantly, the ability to fix things and upgrade equipment), and therefore has a much lower barrier to entry. You can do truly meaningful research from the ground for ~$1 mill + a team of 4 or 5 core people, whereas space requires 10-100x this + an entire fleet of people with all of the associated bureaucratic nightmares + extra time required and engineering challenges. Space offers some benefits, but often times the tradeoff is either not worth the cost, or the experiment is not feasible to do in space.
* Regardless of whether or not you care about the impact on astronomy research (hey, astronomers care about humanitarian stuff too), the way SpaceX bowled through and just started launching their Starlink constellation was irresponsible, reckless, and actually quite ignorant (e.g. they were surprised by how bright their satellites were...this is basic stuff people). On the other hand, I'm not sure how much blame you can really place on a company being reckless when the law allows for such recklessness. There should absolutely be more regulation and oversight. It's in the governments' best interest because it's going to just destroy (needlessly) a lot of R&D already paid for.
Ninja edit: mentioned Space-X in here but this article is technically about Amazon's Kuiper constellation; however statement is the same (this isn't really a single company problem, this is a new-technology-without-appropriate-regulations-problem). Starlink is the largest constellation and the biggest problem (planned to have ~10x the satellites as the Kuiper constellation, they are lower orbit than anything else, and not sure how the albedo compares to Kuiper, but the brightness is > 99% of other satellites).
So: these constellations will multiply number of orbiting satellites by 10-100x, they are extremely bright (> 99% of all satellites), and they are very low orbit. So its a perfect storm of problems for astronomy.
final ninja edit: check out https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/satellites/ to see one astronomer's page about this stuff, some actual images that illustrate how big the problem is with the extremely limited amount of starlink satellites currently in orbit, and some other links. OK that's all
What does good behaviour look like?
The problem is really that there needs to be better oversight and more regulation. The laws as they stand do not address the problems that these constellations produce, because they were written in a time when starlink-like operations were scarcely imaginable. SpaceX and amazon, etc., should definitely be allowed to do cool and serious projects like this, but the oversight agencies basically saying "hey do whatever you want" is a recipe for serious accidents like collisions, as well as a needlessly enormous impact on astronomy research. If there were, say, albedo requirements or something, everyone would have to plan for that, but that is not in place today.
One part that irks me even in the absence of regulation is that SpaceX provided no forewarning of how bright their Starlink satellites would be, which astronomers were shocked by. Space-X claimed they were "surprised" by their brightness which is either a lie or belies serious incompetence.
Assuming that within 20 years we can have sufficiently cheap space launch systems that there are sufficient geosynchronous telescopes for amateur use would that solve this problem?
Genuine questions, not Socratic method.
I think it's a bit of both; right now SpaceX is trying to get the brightness of their starlink sats down to ~7th mag (they're at 5th mag now, they have an experimental coating that should bring this down to ~6th mag), and it sounds like if they can do this the problems will be far more manageable (for LSST specifically this amounts to a few extra months of observing time, however the impact even with these mitigations is strongly dependent on the specific science case).
However, this work should be done before approval. What happens when SpaceX realizes that getting things down to 7th mag is too difficult and costly and time-intensive? Without regulations in place, I would expect they shrug their shoulders, do some PR to frame the problem as "us vs those pesky astronomers" and launch what they want to launch. We have virtually no leverage. But from the standpoint of people that operate in space pretty regularly, what we're asking is pretty basic. Astronomy of course isn't going to be thrilled with the amount of satellites growing by a factor of 10-100x, but we live in the real world. But something that monumental needs to be done thoughtfully and carefully and with respect to the billions of dollars of R&D already paid for that will be impacted.
> Assuming that within 20 years we can have sufficiently cheap space launch systems that there are sufficient geosynchronous telescopes for amateur use would that solve this problem?
Again, space delivery costs are only one factor. Not to say this wouldn't enable new kinds of instruments or make some new things possible, but it would not solve the problem, no. There are too many things that can't realistically be done from space.
* NEO's (asteroids) are really only detectable at twilight so this would severely hamper efforts here, and I hope most people would understand how important NEO detection is from a practical, human-survival standpoint.
* Depending on your latitude/day of the year, "twilight" can constitute the majority of the observable time...
* e.g. for LSST 30% of all images will have a StarLink trail. If Space-X can somehow manage to get their satellites down to 7th mag (15% of their current brightness, 50% of the brightness of their "DarkSat" version), then LSST can mitigate a lot of impact; it will come down to extra cost + observation time for many science cases, however a lot of science cases are still SOL even with these mitigations (precision cosmology, NEO detection, etc.).
The point I'm trying to make isn't that astronomy is "doomed" (though some subfields will be) it's that we should not be in a situation where we are scrambling to fix problems like this (i.e. Space X is now helping mitigate things voluntarily, thank god, and only after a huge outcry). There should be regulations that ensure everyone is on the same page and that prevent issues like this and ensure at least a bare minimum set of requirements are met.
Those regulations are not there only because when these laws were written, nobody even dreamed of a situation like StarLink or Kuiper. I don't think Space X or amazon are "evil" or anything, they're doing great work, but they have zero incentive (except maybe PR) not to trash billions of dollars in astronomy research, and that is neither good nor necessary.
Eventually? Can you estimate how much it costs to move all existing and planed satellites in space? After that can you tell us if the billionaires would pay or the public? Also please estimate when it will be done.
If the society needs this satellites then we need something that the entire world would benefit not some billionaires(reminds me as regular pollution where billionaires get rich and poor guys pay the consequences )
Also we need to minimize the number of this objects, you will not like it when China puts 1 million of satellites - at least Trump for sure will not like it and propose some space wall.
Obvious with what the rest of the thread says and the timeline you gave it won't be 100x easier to observe space itself from Earth but instead it'll be easier to observe space from off Earth.
Thanks for the obvious point though \s