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Comment by timbre1234 | Hacker News Reader

Astronomy is nice to have, but it absolutely pales in comparison to the things satellite swarms can bring us on earth. The cost is well worth it, and if astronomy is affected the solution will have to be more reliance on space-based observation.

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> The cost is well worth it.

That's speculative and subjective, hence the debate.

I actually disagree to some degree as well, as there are more costs associated with these constellations than just missed photo opportunities for people's hobbies. Knowing the effect a single cheap kitchen microwave can have, I worry about what these constellations may mess up with regard to physics research. Important discoveries can be delayed to the detriment of everyone, and in exchange we just get cheaper faster internet out in the boonies for a small portion of the population.

Astronomy may or may not be humanities savior on a larger timescale. I think it's worth debating if we shouldn't just accept poor connectivity in the middle of nowhere as a feature as opposed to a bug.

Nearly half of humanity doesn't have Internet access, not a few rednecks in the boonies. That's billions of people, the world is much larger then the US.

And it's not even just some rednecks in the boonies in the US either. My dad's house in Maine is just 10 minutes from a fairly sizable city (by Maine standards). He can get maybe 1Mbps down and the houses further down the road can't get wired Internet at all. Cell phone reception is also almost non-existent.

Being ten minutes from a city, it seems a single cell tower would solve the issue much better than a satellite no? In that instance, satellites feel like a work around for poor development practices (whether that be city or state regulation, or provider investment) than a reasonable solution.

Maybe there is not enough houses in that area to spread the cost of that one wireless tech hosting tower?

A single satellite from a swarm will cover much bigger area at any one time, not to mention the coverage area moves as it orbits.

Much better argument for paying infrastructure costs if coverage area is effectively "humankind".

Maybe, there aren't enough houses to justify the cost, sure. I figured that probably wasn't the case given the proximity to a city.

I'm not arguing that a satellite solves the problem of remote data access generally, they definitely do. My original question was whether or not that specific use case is worth the cost to science.

They don't solve access generally, so the other threads which reference large swaths of the planet not having internet yet feel beside the point to me. The vast majority of humanity lives in densely populated areas, and therefore these satellite based systems still won't solve that problem.

Yes, but these constellations aren't designed to serve 'everyone without internet', they are designed to serve areas with low population density where physical connections are financially infeasible, hence my usage of 'boonies'.

It's perhaps worth noting that Starlink is about much more than network access in remote areas. The laser links between satalites should enable a considerable improvement in intercontinental transmission, both bandwidth and latency.

If you're using the satellites purely as continental links, then the overall number needed would be much much lower, as you could plan service areas as opposed to trying to services the entire surface of the planet.

That's simply not true. The throughput provided by starlink absolutely pales in comparison to an optical fibre link. AFAIK current plans might look at 100 Gbps transponders for the interlinks (I think it might even just be 10 Gbps). Even if they go to future 800 G or 1T transponders (which is questionable if it's possible, especially because most of the constellation needs this, so a whole exchange of satellites would be required), that's still much less than 70 Tbps that can be transmitted through a single fibre over submarine distances, and a submarine cable typically contains tens to hundreds of fibres.

So in short starlink will have no influence on available crosscontinental bandwidth.

Source: I research on optical fibre and space communication

Which is much more expensive and risky, just look at the Hubble($4.7B) failure recently, or the Kepler ($600M) failures before that. How many years (decades?) has James Webb($8.8B) telescope been in development? Ground based can't be easily replaced by space based and will leave lots of people and nations out of astronomy, which will truly be a terrible loss.

I'll just point out that not all ground-based astronomy is affected. Satellites are only visible when the sky is dark but the satellite is not in Earth's shadow, so only observations at dusk and dawn are affected.

Are you sure this is true? You can frequently see satellites in the dead of night. Further, they show up quite plainly in non-visible wavelengths like radio or infrared even during the day.

This of course only applies to visible light, they will be visible in infrared no matter what.

When can you see satellites in the Earth shadow with visible light?

The parent post said that only observations at dusk and dawn are affected. I'm pointing out that, even at astronomical midnight, large fractions of the sky aren't in earth's shadow. For other wavelengths the shadow is irrelevant, since satellites contaminate data even without the sun's direct illumination.

Well sure, at high latitudes and during certain seasons that may be true for higher altitude LEO satellites (Starlink is fairly low), but if we’re talking corner cases, sometimes the surface of the Earth isn’t in Earth’s shadow at astronomical midnight (land of the midnight sun).

Corner cases don’t really count as “frequent,” however.

James Webb is doing observation literally impossible to do from ground

My point is that not every use case is viable for space telescopes due to cost, next to impossible repairs, required technology, etc. They can't replace ground based observations completely.

Starship (which will get its bread and butter from Starlink) actually WOULD enable much cheaper space telescopes, cheaper repairs and maintain by astronauts. Starlink satellites themselves are very inexpensive and show there’s no fundamental reason why space hardware MUST be extremely expensive compared to ground hardware.

Space telescopes could actually be cheaper than ground telescopes if SpaceX succeeds in reducing cost of human spaceflight to their goals. Space telescopes don’t need massive structures to keep the mirror from deforming under gravity, they don’t need advanced adaptive optics to adjust for seeing, they can point almost anywhere in the sky and can observe objects day and night without weather or seasonal concerns.

That traditional space telescope cost is heavily driven by how expensive space launch used to be, which is already changing now.

Also with the upcoming RLVs in space repair or retrieval and redeployment might also become an option, this time much more affordable than with the Shuttle.

I find the naivity inherent in believing the claims of starlink being almost humanitarian by bringing cheap Internet to the unconnected masses fascinating. Satellite constellation are still extremely expensive way of deploying Internet even if (and that's a big if) spacex brings costs down by an order of magnitude.

The users of these constellations will not be the unconnected masses, it will be users with big pockets, military, intelligence, and large enterprise who operate in remote areas (i.e. mining and oil). Also who are the early adopters who bring down launch costs of constellations for everyone by paying a premium? I doubt starlink has the deep pockets needed. No it will be intelligence services who'd love satelitte constellations capable of near real time surveillance from LEO orbit.

Somehow nobody talks about this in their fawning over Musks latest tweets. And let's not even talk about the environmental impact of largely increases rocket launches.

Strongly disagree with this. If Earth based infrastructure was better there wouldn't be as much need for satellite based services at this scale. Depriving people of the opportunity to look at the natural sky, without it being besmirched by human objects, is a terrible downside.

It's bad enough that many people in light polluted cities can barely see major stars, never mind Andromeda or subtler constellations.

This just isn’t accurate. Starlink is only barely visible under certain conditions near sunrise and sunset and most of the time cannot be seen by the naked eye, due to SpaceX inventing and deploying sunshade technology to reduce satellite visibility to the visible limit.

I think there is a lot of miss information out there about star link. Yes it does affect large survey telescopes but for the most part it isn’t a huge impact on the actual naked eye visible night sky. ISS & other space stations are FAR easier to see, outshining out even the brightest stars vs Starlink which can only be seen a small portion of the time with the naked eye (once in operational orbit). It has absolutely no impact on reducing visibility of Andromeda or subtle constellations.

This isn't just Starlink. Of course, hopefully Starlink's satellites will adhere more closely to the agreed threshold in the future, but that isn't set in stone, and once this becomes a profitable industry it seems unlikely corners won't be cut and lawmakers lobbied like in any other sector.

Of course, even meeting the agreed threshold currently still renders them visible in telescopes, and that applies to amateurs as well.

I think it be good idea to have international rules and regulations with common sense limits to continue and improve upon what SpaceX has done voluntarily.

I don’t think it should be surprising or considered bad that you can see objects in space with telescopes. I don’t think we should stop sending stuff into space just because it’s detectable with sensitive instruments (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find ways to make scientific observations coexist). But I can definitely see an argument for limiting naked eye visibility.

Afaik, Starlink hasn't shown itself to be profitable yet, so there may not be any need

This is another case where something freely available to all (the night sky) is being affected by the externalities of a for-profit business (satellite internet). In that sense, comparing these things directly is a bit "apples and oranges". And it's important to note that the profits of said business will accrue to a small number of US companies, while the costs will be borne (in a small way) by basically every human on earth. Did Musk ask them all if they're ok with the tradeoff? Are they all going to be compensated? Probably not, right?

> he cost is well worth it

to you. Not everyone shares your values and has your priorities and preferences.

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