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Comment by seattledev | Hacker News Reader

So I guess we're just going to lay back and accept that Comcast and other awful ISPs are going to rule over our access forever? Just completely shit on anything that attempts to improve the situation?

Additionally, there's nothing stopping several people from connecting to the same satellite dish that connects to Starlink. Yes there are bandwidth limitations, but for grandmas checking Facebook and emails you could have hundreds of people on a single satellite dish. This is still a huge improvement for millions of people.

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Comcast and 'other awful ISPs' are regional issues.

Starlink is obscuring astronomy for the entire world.

Yes, the benefits to rural citizens are fantastic -- but Comcast never did anything to turn the lights out for the night-sky for the entire world.

Should I be okay with trading the stars from Earth for seamless connectivity for the people on the planet?

Maybe.

But am I ?

No one asked.

> should I be ok with trading the stars from earth

This level of hysteria doesn’t strengthen your argument. Are these satellites even visible to the human eye? Why are the thousands of satellites in orbit today not an issue for you but more are?

To be clear, there are about ~15,000 objects (active + debris) in orbit ranging from small debris chunks to active spacecraft.

Starlink alone is expected to add ~30,000 active satellites with relatively large solar panels/bodies, which by virtue of their area alone can be expected to be more visible from the Earth than most of the small objects that are currently tracked.

Ok, sure, so here's a valid argument from you - roughly, "why is Starlink allowed to double the number of objects in earth orbit?"

But, you follow it up with an unjustified comment - "with relatively large solar panels/bodies". Can you expand on this? Are these things an order of magnitude larger than the median tracked object? A factor of two?

Finally, you make a comment that doesn't follow for me:

> which by virtue of their area alone can be expected to be more visible

Is it not true that angling solar panels away from the earth to minimize the "area" relative to a ground observer is trivially accomplished?

And, also, already not really knowing the size of objects in space, I find it hard to accept that they are such significantly larger objects that they take up more of the sky. Please expand on why they are so much larger or perhaps fly so much closer to earth or perhaps have such limited maneuverability that I should be concerned.

>Starlink is obscuring astronomy for the entire world.

No it isn't.

> turn the lights out for the night-sky for the entire world.

This didn't happen

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