It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.
I can see it "Trump: China puts 10000 eyes on the sky, they pretend they want to give Internet to the poor but they have cameras and spy on the traffic, and some reliable sources told me they can release viruses from this satellites in a targets back yard, this needs to stop , I will build a space wall and China will pay for it...
Well, that isn't really a useful distinction in any sense of the word. The American companies are doing it, because they are allowed to do so by their country. Most countries which have any kind of space capability have their own space agencies which say what is or isn't ok to launch. If the American space agencies approve things like Starlink, then the pollution of the Earth's view into space isn't purely on Elon Musk.
Point of order: intercontinental missiles, rockets, and radio telecommunications are highly regulated industries. The US regulators have approved (and not stopped) Starlink on both fronts. I do not know if there’s any international / UN body that performs the same roles?
This should start a golden age of space astronomy, even if Elon doesn't give away some telescope launches as PR.
You destroy my house and I should be happy you offer me a discount when I buy new blueprints from you.
I have a view over the ocean, 50 miles up the coast in another country a marina opens, and dozens of sailing ships start arriving over the hour.
I have a view, and an airport opens down the road, I'm now under a flight path, not only is my view obscured, I'm getting noise too.
So you have a home and someone makes noise so you can't sleep, you have a home and your neighbor has pig shit in his backyard and the smell enters in your yard.
Also I amargueing from a public(international) point of view. As an individual with terrible eyes sight I already can't see the stars anymore.
Falcon 9 is a heavy launch system that can lift up to 50,000 lbs of payload to orbit, similar to the Shuttle.
Falcon Heavy is a super heavy launch system that can put 140,000 lbs of payload in orbit.
Starship is designed to be significantly cheaper than both of the Falcons, and to put over 200,000 lbs of payload in orbit with a far larger fairing size (though Falcon Heavy is getting a larger fairing shortly).
These are all game changers the scientific and commercial space customers haven’t yet taken advantage of.
Having to use lightweight materials is the least of your worries (and not even that expensive - and sometimes done for ground-based instruments as well).
That's the vicious cycle of space mission costs put in reverse. The missions are expensive today, because launches are expensive, meaning you have one shot at doing your decade-long project, so you need to max out on risk mitigation - increasing your project length, labor costs, and launch mass. Significant drops in launch costs and increases in cadence translate to ability to launch much less robust mission (and launch a replacement if/when it fails), which drops the costs all across the board.
> Big thermal swings, no easy air cooling, no AC outlet to get your power from, no convenient anchoring point for your telescope to push against to point a certain direction, no just bolting several racks full of off-the-shelve electronics to the telescope
While by no means easy, that's still table stakes for space missions, and something there's decades of experience in around the world.
> none of them work in vacuum
Nobody is, nor was, sending the equivalent of a ground telescope installation upwell. You only send the looking part, with a downlink bolted on them. You do control and data processing planetside.
> no possibility to repair or upgrade anything
Cheap launches = you can replace. Even cheaper launches = you can try to repair. We'll need to develop that capability anyway, if we want a cislunar space economy.
I do not believe that. The hardware and software is expensive because regular stuff will fail in space and you can't call some guy to just go and replace parts. I know it was done but it was expensive and risky.
There are many existing communication and navigation satellites but not that many space telescopes so I think this proves that launching shit is not prohibitive expensive but I will read any claim that proves you right.
Radhard stuff is expensive, but not that expensive. Also space missions don't need all that much compute - they carry only as much as is needed to operate the hardware and maintain a radio link with Earth. You don't use more than you absolutely need to, because more compute = more power demands = more waste heat => need more thermal management => heavier satellite => need to cut down mass (or power demands) somewhere else => ballooning R&D costs => ...
Look, I'm not making this up. It's widely known in the industry. See e.g. [0] and [1] for the first two references I could find. I actually learned about this concept from some NASA report that featured a beautiful flowchart, but I can't find it now for the life of me. But the phenomenon is real, and that's why SpaceX has been a big deal in space circles for years now. More and cheaper launches translate to a qualitative difference in how we approach space systems.
> There are many existing communication and navigation satellites but not that many space telescopes so I think this proves that launching shit is not prohibitive expensive
Communication satellites pay back for themselves in rent the owners can extract from the users. Navigation satellites are first and foremost military projects with huge implications for national security of the states that own them - which gives them almost infinite budgets. Space telescopes are research platforms funded by taxpayers, most of whom don't understand the importance and don't care to. Astronomy can't afford space telescopes at current prices.
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What I am saying if Elon or Jeff makes a telescope work harder or impossible they should pay for fixing the issue not the public and it should be fixed today not in 50 years. Also a tax on opoluttion would make the management at SpaceX considering using different paints(or doing more with less) in before the satellite is designed and not after bad PR.
IMO you did not convince me that the reason we don't have tons of space telescopes is the launch price.
IMO we will probably need to have a few bases on the Moon and build telescopes there to get around the light pollution.
SpaceX is doing what it can to "fix it". There's not much more that can be done beyond just not launching satellites. At this point, you have to choose whether you want clean skies or humanity spacefaring; you can't have both. I'm strongly in the "humanity spacefaring" camp, especially that once some sort of permanent industrial presence is established in the cislunar space, we will be able to build large telescopes in orbit or on the Moon.
> IMO you did not convince me that the reason we don't have tons of space telescopes is the launch price.
I'm trying my best :). Consider also economies of scale: expensive launches means your payload is pretty much unique, which makes it expensive. Cheap launches means you can make more, which drives architecture & hardware standardization, which lets manufacturing scale up, reducing its costs significantly.
The tax would also insensitivese to launch better/smaller satellites and not abuse the fact that launch is cheap so let's put as many stuff in orbit because we can (maybe US can get their shit together and use cables for internet like rest of the world) so Internet satellites would be used only by remote communities. IMO if you managed to somehow have electricity and old fashion telephone cables then what the hell is expensive to drag a new cable for internet to this places ?
That hinges on the quantifying and pricing of the solution. A smart accountant could probably figure out a fair calculation (something along the lines of % of wasted observation time, against operating costs of telescope facility in that time + depreciation). I'd love to see it.
> SpaceX tried to "fix" things only when bad PR hit them, before that some leaders there decided that this is not an issue.
I'll concede on this since I haven't been following the story until it hit media, and only then I've heard about SpaceX painting the satellites. I'm guessing they just didn't consider it at all, or were betting on astronomers not being that upset.
> IMO if you managed to somehow have electricity and old fashion telephone cables then what the hell is expensive to drag a new cable for internet to this places ?
That was before telcom monopolies, and also before people figured out they can hold infrastructure projects ransom, or block them out of spite, just because they own a piece of land that needs to be dug up or paved over.
That rack full of electronics is the looking part (temperature controllers, power supplies, CCD controllers, motor controllers, ...). The data processing happens in a server rack on the other side of the planet in either case (ground-based or space-based).
And you somehow are under the impression that telescopes and instruments are so cheap that it doesn't matter if we loose one every year and then just launch another one. If that were the case we would be building dozens of 3m+ telescopes all over the planet every year - but we are not, because we don't have the money to do that.
Telescopes are multi-decade investments by the institutes, so even with free (free!) launches exactly as much testing will be done as before, because we can still only afford one shot.
Are you sure SpaceX is allowed to do business with China? As I understand it NASA is forbidden by Congress from collaborating with China. Since NASA and SpaceX work together, might that limitation extent to SpaceX as well?
Doesn’t mean new sanctions can’t be levied and certainty China seems a likely target for future increased sanctions.
There is already history here where a failed Chinese rocket crashed with a classified American payload and caused the whole satellite anything is now ITAR
If NASA is forbidden from working with organizations affiliated with China, it seems to me that SpaceX working with China might imperil their collaboration with NASA. Then again maybe not, I don't know the answer.
Edit: It seems the situation is not nearly as clear as you believe: https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2020/08/2...
Considering a less direct relationship with China already has some congressmen evidently perturbed, I think there is a decent chance SpaceX would refuse any contracts with China if for no other reason than to avoid provoking Congress further.
But they also aren’t likely to pass any specific legislation or change what Elon does.
They don't owe you anything.
I also do remember the story how NASA got a couple decommissioned telescopes from some intelligence agency, which turned out to be an order of magnitude better than Hubble is, and the agency was getting rid of them because they were already outdated. I do remember reading that if those were put into astronomy use they would be a lot better than anything we have currently, but of course those are being used for taking pictures of military sites and tanks, rather than stars.
And the main limitation is quite simply money.. and since a lot of the things that were only possible with HST in the past are possible from the ground now people started focusing on building space observatories for the parts of the optical spectrum that simply cannot be done from the ground (x-ray, far-infrared, gamma-ray).
Be warned: it isn't a pretty picture.
Separately, I was surprised to learn how many observatories there are in space. Here’s just a selection:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_telescopes.j...
Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit, then there is an intensive to make the satellites less bright and we make the people that pollute pay and not the public.
Well, couple small problems with this idea
1) who collects the taxes? I can imagine some international agency in charge of it which then proceeds to spend the money on other international projects, but how could you guarantee compliance?
2) Countries which are only now starting to launch things into orbit would(rightfully) say - hey, how is that fair? Others have been able to launch thousands of satellites for free, but now that we finally got the capability to do so, we have to pay? Why?
2) this always happens, look at intellectual rights. The country with the bigger army forces the rest to play by their rules.