Why Channel 37 Doesn’t Exist

Thanks for that summary.

> Somehow the news got around that here was this new way of listening to little green men on Mars. This is what radio astronomy seemed to the ordinary public. And the FCC was preventing it from being developed in the United States. We got rumors, George particularly from friends he knew, that gradually a huge accumulation of letters arrived at the FCC, protesting against this nonsupport of this new science, whatever it was. And that this finally persuaded the FCC that they’d better give in. Nobody knows. [emphasis added]

That's the part about aliens. McVittie's perception that the popular understanding of radio astronomy (listening to Martians) influenced the FCC decision (which, at least officially as described in the next quote, was not the case).

Well, there is this thing that some humans do called "humor" where one party will perform some action that serves as a benign violation, usually of another party's expectations. When this benign violation is revealed to be in jest, both parties receive a rush of endorphins; which many find pleasurable.

> Why the need to bring aliens into it?

If the cynic in me wants to assume the copy-editor who was tasked with coming up with the title skimmed the article, saw the phrase "and found it had an extraterrestrial source", and interpreted the wrong definition for "extraterrestrial".

I assume that you are wholly unfamiliar with Vice to be able to say this.

Ok, since I constantly get downvotes for no reason. Vice, runs tons of stuff about aliens. They're a meme news outfit that runs shows such as "Fuck, that's delicious" and shows with Action Bronson and friends who get really high and do commentary on episodes of "Ancient Aliens." So again, you have to be totally unfamiliar with Vice, to say "Why aliens?"

It's never aliens.

LEO satellites in earths shadow are effectively invisible to ground based telescopes. Which is why StarLink and other LEO satellites have zero effect on ~98% of current observations, but do impact a few very specific types of observations.

That is the bargain...

IIRC, StarShip will result in something like 1 Million tons of annual launch capacity -- 3 orders of magnitude greater than today. Commercial applications are required, and satellites such as StarLink are a natural start.

Meanwhile, some of that launch capacity can be used to build space-based instruments for much cheaper.

Overall, I'd call it a win.

Starlink's effect on astrophotography is overstated. Starlink is in a fairly low orbit, so past twilight, the satellites are in Earth's shadow and aren't visible. The Iridium constellation orbits at 780km, for instance, while Starlink is 550km. During the darkest parts of the night, peak time for observation, the satellites aren't visible.

My guess is that there won't be an appreciable difference in the number of space telescopes. Hubble cost $4.7 before it was launched, and it was just a derivative of keyhole, so even though launch prices are cheap these days (compared to the $550 million it cost per Space Shuttle launch) the cost of a space telescope is still pretty steep.

And the funding for comparable spaceborne telescopes will come from where? You can't even take a ride on black budget, because there is nothing to spy on in direction opposite from earth, and and space telescopes with parameters comparable to ground based ones are bigger than what's possible to launch with any of the perspective super-heavy launchers - and critically, would be too big for spy agencies to use against earth targets.

The first sentence of the article links to that.

Vice has always been hit and miss for me. On one hand you have some really well produced documentaries, such as Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, the great reports on Ukrainian Protests or Xinjiang camps.

On the other hand you have stuff like this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy8pxm/gluten-free-people-ar...

In the US you usually had a choice between channel 3 or 4. Both channels were in use across the country but no market had both in use so you could always switch to the other if there was a broadcast on one.

Is a "strong government enough"? To quote the article:

> The FCC’s attempt to balance science and commerce was not well-accepted by said scientists, who took their story to the media.

This suggests to me that the government had enough strength to make an enforceable ruling, but very nearly made a ruling that would have not prioritized science in the way that the radio astronomers would have wanted.

It took something else (public attention, persistent outreach by scientists, etc) for the FCC to come to the ruling that it ultimately came to.

>it will consume every available resource in service of privatizing and charging for resources that used to be available to all

Minor nit-pick: I don't think the story is a good example of your concept here. The radio telescope, regardless of what it did for scientists, served fewer people than what commercial use of channel 37 would have.

You could think of it that way. You could also think of it as denying hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking New Jersey residents programming in their native language in exchange for the discovery of one new type of Active Galactic Nucleus and two supernova remnants, from a telescope that only operated for ten years and which the scientific community cared so little about they didn't even bother fixing it when it eroded away in 1970.

Australia and New Zealand both had channels 0 and 1 for analog television broadcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_and_New_Zealand_tel...

During the peak of Solar cycle 22 in 1989-1991, amateur radio operators (including me) on the US west coast used to listen for New Zealand channel 0 audio on 50.75 MHz (also 50.74 and 50.76 MHz). If you could hear the wideband FM audio, it was almost guaranteed you could make SSB or CW contacts with New Zealand hams around 50.11 MHz.

The US, too, had no channel 1. (Source: I'm old enough that my family owned a TV in the 1960s.) And my current cable TV service, from Comcast, also has no channel 1.

There was a channel 1 briefly in a few places, but it turns out that it wasn't a good spectrum for TV so it looked awful, so no one wanted it. They didn't bother to renumber all the channels though, so channel 1 just didn't get used (although it's available as a virtual channel now).

Overlapping broadcast areas. It's one less channel to use for deconflicting the need for broadcast spectrum and the desire to have a broadcast channel while avoiding interference from neighbors.

They get at this with the New Jersey case, where in order for the station to get a channel it had to be 37. Presumably this was because of there being too many other broadcasters in the area. It's been a long time since I studied radio so I can't recall the specifics, but if there are 70 channels available (total) in a specific area perhaps only half or a quarter of them might be usable without producing interference with others.

EDIT: You also see this play out with conventional AM/FM broadcasting. You typically won't find adjacent stations, like 91.3 and 91.5, in the same area and when it happens (perhaps you're on the edge between the two broadcast areas) you'll hear one station bleeding into the other.

Both of those are cable channels. Cable channels (normally) use different frequencies than broadcast tv. I don't see a similar frequency reservation for cable TV (would be around channel 89), probably because cable TV signals are not intended to radiate.