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Comment by netram88 | Hacker News Reader

What I'm concerned about is how much the launching of tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of satellites will affect our ability to launch things out of orbit. Launch windows are already very precisely calculated, and the more junk we put in orbit the harder that will become.

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There is no issue with controlled and tracked satellites; we could have orders of magnitude more. The real issue is space junk, derelict satellites and collision debris. In high orbits space junk is essentially permanent pollution, which is very worrying. However, in low orbits space junk is guaranteed to fall out of the sky within a few years due to atmospheric drag. So there is no real space junk issue in low orbits, and SpaceX has modified their constellation plan to use lower orbits for this exact reason.

I'm not saying it isn't a problem, but aside for Covid there are usually 10,000 flights in the air at any given time on average, with several hundred thousand flights in 24hrs. A lot of those are concentrated during the day over the continental US, which is the most congested region in the world. So on that basis, an evenly distributed web of LEO satellites should be manageable, especially as they will also be much more vertically distributed than planes.

that's actually a fascinating idea. think about how humanity solves the environment problems and fusion works out, bringing global peace and prosperity for once. Now a smallish rock comes from space. We don't see it, because of "we go to mars, bro"-elon making ground based astronomoy infeasible and debris from crashes from his great internet satellites making 9/10 new launches fail. so, even if we saw it, we couldn't launch a nuke to deflect it. BOOM. There was the USA and Elons android son is just reduced to dust by his daddies hybris.

Space based observation of objects on potential collision course with Earth is far superior to earth observatio. For example you can't really observe anything coming from the direction of the sun. Look up NEOCam project that aims to have a near Earth asteroid telescope in solar orbit.

how many space-based telescopes are there? And how many will where be, once 9/10 launches fail?

> And how many will where be, once 9/10 launches fail?

This is not a real thing that will happen.

This was never meant to be a real thing, but I fantasized. Some people then told me that our some dozen space telescopes are sooo much better.

How do you know by the way that this will never happen?

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