Starlink satellites hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids, study finds
caltech.edu
caltech.edu
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument...
It includes this perspective:
> Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image.
> "There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF."
Reminds me of the SF housing madness where you can build housing, as long as it doesn't cast a shadow.
From Casey Handmer’s excellent post (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside...):
“Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT information and high speed data connections. It is practically begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing Arecibo and independent of Earth’s rotation. Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets.”
If starlink were used as an outward sensor array, with the correct software and enough compute you could generate a live 3D model of the entire sky and almost anything in it down to quite a small resolution.
Which is a huge baseline and getting anywhere near it with so much better resolution could be really impressive.
If it's a third to half the dish area of Arecibo, and Arecibo is half of SKA, then it qualifies as "anywhere near". And SKA goes up to 14GHz so this theoretical system is completely incomparable on resolution.
Even if the physics are fundamentally the same, all kinds of practical implementation details like orientation, bandwidth, frequency, and probably all kinds of stuff an actual expert in the field would know about may well differ.
That doesn't mean they'd be within orders of magnitude of optimal for measuring extremely weak signals.
He's literally richest person on earth and SpaceX is his playground.
So, he has to make SpaceX more clearly a success before he can dedicate any capital to a space-based radiotelescope. And even then, he can't use SpaceX's capital -- he has to use his own.
Musk is gone have enough opportunity to invest in things that are not commercially viable for Mars missions. Because it will take a long time before NASA gives them money for this.
All of his current business ventures make sense when viewed through the lens of setting up a highly autonomous Martian colony. Each self funds R&D.
Tesla: power generation, storage, management. Autonomous vehicles and droids to operate in hostile environments.
SpaceX: transportation and communications.
Boring Co.: protected subterranean environments.
NeuraLink: Humans are more expensive to send. Augment the ones there with AI
Hopefully someone from SpaceX will see it here.
It is so incredibly wasteful that the companies and governments keep coming up with unique designs for the satellites serving similar purposes. Imagine if we had a standard design template for an optical telescope that could be cheaply and easily mass produced and launched by the thousands.
Common satellite chassis has been a thing for decades. StarLink and other systems like it benefit from mass production and economies of scale. Each block of StarLink satellites is identical. They also have a singular task and everything about them is optimized for it.
Most satellites are not identical copies of one another even if they have "similar" roles. Mass production is less desirable as you'd end up with unoptimized designs which means wasted mass or reduced capabilities.
It's relatively inexpensive for SpaceX to do it, but their external prices are still quite high, even if cheaper than the competition.
The resulting arms race would be... interesting and would probably get us closer to Kessler Syndrome quickly.
The consequences for pollution from other industries is usually longer term and less dramatic/direct on the business itself, if it even effects the core business directly.
I think all the effort put into monitoring space debris and the amount of attention things like starlink is getting speaks to this.
They're at 550km up. From https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm puts it at likely a 10 year lifespan with some variation. The published lifespan of a satellite is 5 years.
Its the stuff in the 700km to 900km range that's a problem.
https://www.satview.org/spacejunk.php - and you'll see things like STARLINK-1204 already getting deorbtied ( https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=45203 - note its perigee is 204.0 km - its already well below the other orbits)
https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45203 for more on that satellite.
Starlink-61 appears to be one of the oldest ones still in orbit - https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44249 though its on its way down and you can see the type of impact and the duration of the "ok, this is going down".
Even with the maximum starlink, that's 1,700 satellites that will last about 10 years.
The 2007 China anti-satellite test created approximately 150,000 debris at 865km. Those are in an orbit that is on the order of 500 years.
Starlink isn't going to be the cause of Kessler Syndrome.
---
In hunting this up, I also found https://planet4589.org/astro/starsim/index.html which is relevant to the main topic - the impact on astronomy.
A more natural one is https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45229 which has the same initial orbit pattern.
The key thing with this is that without anything else, the satellite has a lifespan that is measured in months to years and up to a decade... not centuries. A Kessler syndrome at 550km would certainly be rather up there on the "suck" scale, but wouldn't keep humanity grounded for more than a decade.
One of the important things to remember about debris at a given altitude, without additional energy, an object cannot climb further out of the the gravity well into a higher orbit. It will always come back to the same spot in its orbit one orbital period later.
We just stop letting the broadband companies regulate themselves and nationalize the system.
Then we don’t have multiple layers of bandaids.
Though unfortunately advances in radio don't compensate losses in optical and survey quality due to strays. Different sources emit at different wavelengths differently and usually one needs the whole picture (spectral energy distribution) from radio, ir, visible light, uv, x-rays up to gamma-rays to explain the properties of a source.
1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interfero...
3. https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/black-hole-files...
You need long baselines if you want high resolution. However if you want high sensitivity there is no way around having a large collecting area. And since we are not looking to detect the sun in super high resolution, but very far away objects that will be extremely faint we need very high sensitivity. There is a reason the VLA (and other arrays such as ALMA) move their antennas into different configurations. A more compact configuration achieves better sensitivity at the cost of lower resolution and a more spread out configuration gives the inverse.
Your hypothetical Starlink telescope would always have extremely high resolution but virtually no sensitivity to detect anything at all (maybe the sun). Certainly not any NEO objects - those were the prime targets for large single-dish radio telescope like Arecibo.
The closest radio telescope to the concept you have in mind is LOFAR, but even for that one each station has many times the collecting area of many dozens of Starlink satellites (total collecting area of all stations together is up to ~1km^2).
In this, they take the VLA and add a few more big ones.
> By adding the GBT, phased VLA, and/or Effelsberg to a VLBA experiment the sensitivity can be increased by an order of magnitude. This capability opens up new avenues for scientific discovery. The aim of the High Sensitivity Array initiative is to facilitate the planning, scheduling, and calibration of observations making use of this array.
There's also The Impact of Arecibo's Sensitivity on VLBA Observations https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AAS...207.2907D/abstra...
> A growing number of observers are using large single-dish telescopes as elements in VLBI arrays for increased sensitivity. Recently, the High Sensitivity Array (HSA) has been formed by adding the phased Very Large Array, the Green Bank Telescope, the Effelsberg Telescope, and the 305m Arecibo Radio Telescope, to the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), to deliver very sensitive VLBI observations. Arecibo is the element that contributes most to the sensitivity of the HSA, but it has limited sky coverage. The study reported here has used the 305m Arecibo Radio Telescope with the VLBA to observe the compact radio source J0837+2454, and carry out a systematic analysis of the impact of including Arecibo. In these observations, Arecibo participated for about 25% of the total observing time. ...
One of the advantages of a LEO based surveillance system is that the optics could be smaller at the cost of requiring more satellites with shorter life span.
Some NRO satellites are sent to geostationary orbit, presumably for other missions. So, it really depends on the goals as not all satellites are designed for ground imaging.
I haven't done much research on them though.
If the satellites can swing between sky and ground scanning several times in a single orbital period, they could use off-peak hours in the early morning to scan the skies.
I don't know if that practically will work out, as Starlink has lower speed of light delays than undersea cables. Accessing content on the other side of the world will become more attractive with lower latency. For instance a lot more people using VPNs to watch BBC.co.uk at 4 am GMT.
There are lots of potential customers for this (especially if used for terrestrial imagery or similar sensing), and piggybacking on their existing telecom fleet to handle the uplink/downlink side could be a phenomenal bit of cost savings for them. And they get the benefit of improving the inter-satellite network with the additional relays.
If Starlink offered inter-satellite comms as a product/service, it could potentially reduce the cost of many satellites both in low orbit or any higher orbit since it would reduce both mass and energy requirements (up/downlink takes a lot of mass and energy). Reducing the weight of systems targeting higher orbits making them cheaper to launch, or allowing them to incorporate more capabilities thanks to the reduced mass.
It also reduces the terrestrial-to-satellite comms requirements, you'd connect to your satellite like any other Internet enabled device. Just with higher latency than most and maybe (for a few times a day) lower than optimal latency.
Of course, there's a downside. What if Starlink goes bust in 5-10 years? Even 20. Whatever the comms system is, you'd want it to be reprogrammable (at least) if not part of some more open specification that others could connect to. Which suggests the possibility of licensing the technology. That opens Starlink up to competitors, but makes the service more appealing to customers. Which brings it back to probably having the most near-term utility for other LEO satellites since longevity isn't an issue for them in general, but reduces the utility for the next JWT.
I was curious about that claim, so I did a bit of research and made a "back of the envelope" calculation. According to Wikipedia [1], the angular resolution of a telescope is proportional to <wavelength of light>/<diameter>. Starlink seems to operate from 10 to 40GHz, so assume the hardware has a 50% design margin so is capable of reaching 60GHz. Visible light has a frequency of 400 to 800THz, so take the middle of 600THz. Using those figures, it come out that the Starlink satellites, used as a telescope, would have the same angular resolution as a 1.3m visible light telescope. Is it enough to resolve exoplanets ? I'm not sure but I think not. Hubble is 6m and can apparently resolve some exoplanets so it's not too far off. Some launches to GEO would boost the resolution to the equivalent of 8.4m in visible. (IANAA)
60GHz has a wavelength of 5mm. Effective diameter would be ~13000km. Someone check my math but I end up with 5e-3/13e6 radians or ~.0001 arcseconds. Hubble is ~.05 arcseconds.
But that means you mixed up meters and kilometers when you did your division.
1.3km visible light telescope
Synergy not fight then.
Edit, found an interesting link: https://www.spacelegalissues.com/orbital-slots-and-space-con...
> The geostationary orbit is part of outer space and, as such, the customary principle of non-appropriation and the 1967 Space Treaty apply to it. The equatorial countries have claimed sovereignty, then preferential rights over this space. These claims are contrary to the 1967 Treaty and customary law. However, they testify to the concern of the equatorial countries, shared by developing countries, in the face of saturation and seizure of geostationary positions by developed countries. The regime of res communis of outer space in Space Law (free access and non-appropriation) does not meet the demand of the developing countries that their possibilities of future access to the geostationary orbit and associated radio frequencies are guaranteed. New rules appear necessary and have been envisaged to ensure the access of all States to these positions and frequencies.
It's not trivial, but it's still easier then a space program
GEO is 35,786km.
Every nation ever to field ASAT missiles demonstrated orbital launch first.
If you're suggesting a space based laser... we don't have any of those either, and it would be just as difficult (or easy) to launch a satellite that goes out to the orbit, latches on, and then dorbits it as it would be to move a satellite out to that location that would shine a laser on it.
That would also still have the satellite in that position which is the issue.
The issue is the size of the slot for geosynchronous orbit. They're 73km apart.
https://www.spacelegalissues.com/orbital-slots-and-space-con...
> Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) has long been recognised as prime, and scarce, real estate. Starting as a measure for spectrum management, the international community agreed in the 1960s to regulate the assignment of slots in the GEO belt through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Today, any company or nation planning to launch a satellite to GEO must apply to the ITU for an orbital slot, and popular regions over North America, Europe, and eastern Asia have become so congested that few or no slots are left for new entrants to the market
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/dec/28/china-compla...
Its not clear whether this was during deployment, or operating configuration.
It looks like the main problem is not the amount of data lost but amount of extra manual work this situation causes. I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who might be affected by their satellites? That way researchers could automatically classify these trails.
I'm not sure if this is in any way official and/or the right way of doing it, this area is all outside of my normal competence. But, stumbled upon a python library (https://github.com/python-astrodynamics/spacetrack) that supposedly connects to space-track (space-track.org) and you should be able to get the position there. How the data comes into space-track I'm not sure.
But there are bunch of small services for seeing the live location, so I'm sure someone is tracking the location somewhere, like this one: https://findstarlink.com/
The information on where Starlink is is already publicly available through the US government. Anyone who wants to know where the satellites are can view the live positions at any time.
"the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image."
Of course an expanding space economy is just what we need to be able to survive an asteroid on a collision course.
I’m assuming it’s totally fine to delay asteroid detection by one search with regards to whatever we can do about asteroids.
It’s like if there were just a few thousand cars and boats on the entirety of planet earth, evenly spaced out across the land and sea. And then someone pipes up to complain about the heavy traffic, or the constant sound of horn honking.
Its the same reason telescopes can't just "filter out" stuff like city lights and human radio sources.
Do you have any facts to show that the streaks raise the noise floor significantly (say more than 10%)?
I would guess from your lack of hard information that you are just suggesting it could potentially be a problem.
Edit: for a quick and dirty calculation, I estimated the pixels on a horizontal line in the image in the article, ignoring the galaxy, and the streak is not significant compared with the light from the stars. I presume because the satellites move fast across a slow time-lapse image capture, your hypothetical problem is not actually significant.
Orbital period is ~90 minutes, and the surface area of the planet is ~510 million km2, so they would only occasionally pass you closely. The Doppler effect would prevent you hearing the horn, but the sonic booms would be rather noticeable (the speed of sound is 1080 km/h).
But are they actually random? I thought satellite orbits (even LEO constellations like Starlink) were well know and tracked?
To a human observer, the orbits may be 'seemingly random', but a computer should know if a Starlink satellite crossed its field of view.
Go to https://droid.cafe/starlink (disclaimer: my site), click the gear icon in the top right, and drag the speed slidebar all the way to the right to see...
So it requires processing for mitigation, but isn't as dire as the title suggests.
>approximately 4 × 10−4 of all pixels would be lost over the course of a year.
I don't believe this is a significant enough impact
It's probably seen more as an opportunity to acknowledge a problem early to try and prevent issue before the problem grows too large and to consider mitigation strategies now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope
EDIT: Oops, I was actually thinking of WISE but found the wrong thing Googling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Exp... but apparently that isn't nearly as important as land based surveying.
Don't think it's doing a lot of monitoring honestly.
There's the Vera C. Rubin observatory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory https://www.lsst.org/
> NASA has been tasked by the US Congress with detecting and cataloging 90% of the NEO population of size 140 meters or greater.[68] LSST, by itself, is estimated to detect 62% of such objects,[69] and according to the National Academy of Sciences, extending its survey from ten years to twelve would be the most cost-effective way of finishing the task.[70]
https://www.universetoday.com/153620/nasas-new-asteroid-impa...
> The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be a powerful tool for detecting NEAs. It’ll image each area of the sky about 1000 times in its ten-year survey. And it’ll do so with a powerful 3,200-megapixel camera. The Rubin will image the entire visible sky every two nights, and Asteroids will have nowhere to hide.
And there's NEO Surveyor which is a satelite which does exactly that as well from orbit to get full coverage.
https://www.universetoday.com/151539/nasa-has-approved-a-spa...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-approves-asteroid-hunting-...
Finding an Internet connection on the market in the U.S. isn't equitable at all. Market consolidation and disparate regulations across the country are creating artificial scarcity which has little to do with the geography. That's just the U.S.
Then there's outside of the U.S. which is a wholly different ballgame. This is a U.S. enterprise providing access to the Internet to millions in other sovereign countries. Which doesn't sit well strategically with local stakeholders. India already has already refused giving a commercial license to Starlink.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/1/5/elon-musks-starli...
When we're talking "rural" areas outside of the Western countries, we're discussing areas which just don't have same level of development or wealth. Starlink costs 499 USD for equipment + 99 USD per month for a subscription. The average monthly salary in India was about 430 USD; add to that the urban-rural wage gap and you'll quickly conclude that Internet access via satellite is prohibitively expensive in India for millions.
And that's discounting the fact that hundreds of millions of people in these rural areas don't have proper access to the electricity grid to begin with.
It's not just India, is many other regions in the world where - unlike the U.S. or Europe - the economics, the lack of infrastructure or the politics just aren't favorable to ventures like this.
Sure, all of this might and likely will change and the next decade or two. But that's a big gamble to make. In the mean time, Starlink's profitability remains a large question mark.
You have to question whether Starlink is ultimately just playing a home match on Western markets where Internet access has become a commodity that fits in larger strategic interests of large capital investments. Starlink is a commercial venture after all, it only keeps winning if it gets to dot the roofs of millions with dishes. It's business model isn't fundamentally different from ground-based ISP's in that regard.
Perception matters, and regardless of how you spin this: outside of this online bubble, a large portion of humanity simply doesn't take kindly to the appropriation of a common good such as the night sky for profiteering.
Are you suggesting that most people don't think that businesses that use public assets like the sky shouldn't be able to make a profit?
Airlines, Airports, Cell Phone companies that use public radio waves, Farms that take water from public water ways, factories that cause noise and light pollution.
Most people don't want those companies to exist?
But ultimately prices will have to drop far more than that to be cheaper to build an orbiting telescope rather than one on the ground for most requirements.
There was some discussion (Ars Technica maybe?) about why the Webb telescope took so long and was so expensive -- basically because heavy launch is (was?) so expensive, they needed to contort to fit everything in one payload (telescoping heat shield etc). But if you could do 10 launches for the same cost, you could iterate on the satellite much more easily, and the total cost to build it would be much less. (Waterfall vs. agile, to analogize with software development.)
Planet have shown that for earth observation constellations are not only possible but cost affective.
Now imagin if SpaceX stuck a camera/telescope facing outwards on even 10% of their constellation. With modern ML image proccing pipelines I could see that providing us with very valuable additional astroid detection.
I really hope to see SpaceX “renting” space on some of their constellation for uses such at this.
In fact, it would seem obvious that a LEO power station would make a lot of sense for the same reason. Earth-bound stations have the disadvantage of ~50% duty cycle due to a periodic eclipse phenomenon known as 'night'.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it's worth reading:
Starlink will ultimately be a network of tens of thousands of satellites connecting to hundreds of millions of user terminals located all over the Earth. Its radio encoding scheme adapts the signal rate to measured atmospheric opacity along the signal line of sight across 10 different frequency bands in real time. Collectively, the system measures trillions of baselines of Earth’s entire atmosphere every day. This data, fed into standard tomography algorithms such as those used by medical CT imagers, can resolve essentially all weather structure in the atmosphere. No more careful scrutiny of remote weather station pressure gauge measurements. No more reliance on single mission oxygen emission line broadening. Instead, complete real time resolution of the present state of the entire atmosphere, a gift for weather prediction and climate study.
Starlink satellites are equipped with perhaps the most versatile software defined radios ever put into mass production. Each antenna allows the formation of multiple beams at multiple frequencies in both send and receive. With sufficiently accurate position, navigation and timing (PNT) data from GPS satellites, Starlink satellites could perform fully 3D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) of the Earth’s surface, with enough bandwidth to downlink this treasure trove of data. Precise ocean height measurements. Precise land height measurements. Surface reflectivity. Crop health and hydration. Seismology and accumulation of strain across faults. City surveying. Traffic measurements in real time. Aircraft tracking for air traffic control. Wildlife study. Ocean surface wind measurements. Search and rescue. Capella has produced extraordinary radar images with a single satellite. Now imagine the resolving power with birds from horizon to horizon.
Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT information and high speed data connections. It is practically begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing Arecibo and independent of Earth’s rotation. Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets.
There’s no reason to do only passive radio astronomy. Starlink can exploit its exceptional resolving power and onboard amplifiers to perform active planetary radar, for examination of close-flying asteroids and transmission of radio signals to distant missions in support of the Deep Space Network. As of November 2021, all Starlink satellites are flying with lasercoms so in principle the DSN application could also support laser, as well as radio, communication with distant probes. No need to build even larger dishes than the 70 m monsters. The potential to greatly increase our data rates from distant probes.
And while Starlink can derive PNT from the GPS constellation, it need not depend on it forever. High capacity radio encoding schemes such as QAM4092 and the 5G standard contain zero-epoch synchronization data, meaning that any radio capable of receiving Starlink handshake signals is able to obtain approximate pseudorange information. What Starlink’s onboard clocks may lack in atomic clock-enabled nanosecond stability, they make up in sheer quantity of connections and publicly available information about their orbital ephemerides. Already a group from OSU has demonstrated <10 m accuracy, while a group based at UT Austin is developing a related method for robust PNT estimation using Starlink hardware. It seems likely to me that Starlink could support global navigation with few to no software changes and no hardware changes, improving the resilience of satellite navigation especially in a case where the relatively small GPS constellation is disabled. I won’t go into vast detail, but GNSS signals are not only used for pizza delivery, but also support a vast array of Earth science objectives, including the monitoring of tectonic drift.
Starlink has received its fair share of criticism, drawn perhaps by its overwhelming scale and potential impacts to ground-based astronomy. But Starlink can also be the single greatest scientific instrument ever built, a hyperspectral radio eye the size of the Earth, capable of decoding information about the Earth and the universe that is right up against the limits of physics.
And that's now, when we're not close to the planned tens of thousands of satellites by Starlink above, and other vendors like Amazon only starting to plan their similar programs. That's why early feedback is important - otherwise the sky will be ruined in the best case for decades to come.
The tech works, its just completely non feasible. Geosync satelites can give you global access with handful of satelites.
Trans-sea cables give you cheap and quick connection speeds.
Starlink is middle of the road solution that solves both problems are immense costs.
I can only imagine high frequency traders being able to afford it vs utilise the advantage of the latencies.
They've already optimized the hell out of their latency, to a ridiculous level.
You just described all of CommonSenseSkeptic's 'debunking' content (along with his predecessor Thunderfoot, who should've stuck with creationists and Kickscammers).
Lately I find the word "debunking"/"debunked" in a title is a high-reliability signal of low-quality content.
Rebunk? Anyway, Musk-hate seems to be becoming its own religion.
Right now the words are mainly used as a cheap way to sound like Carl Sagan or Mythbusters without any of the deep knowledge and research.
"De-debunked" IMO gets the message across, but also highlights the absurdity.
I stopped here in reading your post but you're in a reality distortion field if you actually think this. Tesla and SpaceX have turned two industries on their head. And Tesla was actually in practice formed by him as the two founders were running it into the ground (Musk was there from day one as well, as chairman of the board). If you think Tesla would have succeeded without Musk, why did none of the other electrical vehicle startups then or since succeed?
Now how will other business compete? Will they need to go full bullshit to survive? Because in the end if lots of people buy, it’s a success, right? It’s just about money, who cares about truth and facts?
I think he is a terrible role model, and his "success" only proves that there’s a growing amount of people participating in a collective delusion. I’m sincerely worried.
Also, Tesla is not alone: Volvo, Waymo, Daimler, GM, Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and chinese makers have all promised Level 4 self-driving around 2021-2022.
And really, who cares that the CEO who was fired from Tesla didn’t get priority delivery, other than people looking for a match to light? It’s an inane discussion.
https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-deb...
This is my question regarding the morality of that.
> outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;
Any state can use space as they like.
Also:
> States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities;
The US government says it's okay so it's okay.
.. dishes on every one of the 12,000 satellites for the same total area [as Arecibo] each have to be over 9 feet. That's about the same size as the chassis of the satellite itself..
.. the receivers need to have very precisely synchronized clocks, and their relative positions need to be known to within a small fraction of the wavelengths you're interested .. you might need to add atomic clocks to every satellite as well..
.. you have to think about how to aim the antennas..
.. fairly sensitive, low-noise, specialized signal processing equipment .. power .. weight..
.. satellites have a roughly 5-year design lifetime..
then, can it be done ?
Fuck spacex and its apologists
Their claim about bringing Internet to poor countries is bullshit. Countries like Kenya, Nigeria and India have already shown that terrestrial long-distance networking (4G and soon 5G) is the way to reach mass connectivity in developing countries.
Why should we let one American ISP pollute our global nigh skies with 42,000 planned satellites? What happens when an European or Chinese competitor launches another 42,000 satellites? We need to stop this madness.
It's the same thing with the Boring Company and public transports: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
Because SpaceX is of course hardly the only one with plans like this. Like it or not, there will likely be tens or hundreds of thousands satellites in orbit in a few decades. Millions even long term. They are too cheap and useful for that to not happen. It's more a question of when than if other rocket companies get their act together. Lots of them have been inspired by the success SpaceX has had in recent years.
The downsides are extremely minor. Nobody ever complains about jets polluting our night skies (as opposed to our atmosphere, which they do of course do bad things to). There are thousands flying at any moment. And they are much bigger than the puny SpaceX satellites. And much closer too. And they are very easy to see because they actually have blinking lights on them that are designed to make the planes more visible. It's a complete non issue.
That being said I don't know what the probability of such an event is, I assume it's fairly small. I could look it up but I've got to fix an omelette.
Oneweb is 1000x more dangerous compared to Starlink but that not by Musk so nobody cares.
Musk just destroyed America's moral high-ground on the issue as well so 10 years from now when we look up we'll see corporations battling it out.
Interesting point. They'd also be harder to remove from your data because they'd be less predictable. Presumably someone could track/monitor all the satelite's so you could adjust for them (as best you can) in your data.
I except the discussions would be very different, and there would be many more calls to stop SpaceX/Starlink.
Starlink's constellation will have 12000 satellites when fully deployed. There are between 8000 and 20000 jets in the air at any given time, so you might expect jets and satellites to be roughly equally present in any given person's sky.
But wait...satellites generally are higher up than jets, so a given satellite will be visible to a larger area than a jet will.
If the Starlink satellites were in orbits that covered all of the Earth equally then when the full constellation is deployed there would be about 360 visible from any give point on the surface at any given time. I believe they aren't using any orbits that cover the far north and south, so the actual number visible for most places should be a bit higher, but lets stick with 360 as a lower bound.
That's way more than the number of jets visible at any one place.
If this is true then you’ve nothing to worry about. Starlink will quickly fail, they’ll close up shop, and the satellites will de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
We need not worry about one American ISP or a European or Chinese competitor. As you’ve said, this only serves a dwindling population of rural people in high income countries. No one else would be so stupid to try and enter this market. There is clearly no need, terrestrial cellular will win.
If something is slightly bad for a great many people we're allowed to just prevent it. We don't have to wait for the market to decide, there's no virtue in doing so it doesn't sanctify our decision.
Military and political backing are also not guaranteed. SpaceX’s origins are a good example of that.
Meanwhile, GP is saying the military is a huge early investor for Starlink, and they are doing it primarily because they want to consume it.
The US military funded the first two launches of the Falcon 1. Far from "not being a major factor", without that money, Musk and Space X (and likely Tesla) would have gone bankrupt in 200X.
For example, how is Starlink going to provide local Ministry of Defense access to the network in time of emergency, which was at least in 2008 a requirement for any ISP in Poland spanning more than one commune (smallest administrative region)? Requirements like that mean that ISPs need to seek waivers or just avoid having customers in specific countries (or break the law - we're talking Elon here after all, just look at latest FSD brouhaha). And they greatly dimnish the value proposal of building a constellation.
OTOH, DoD had been shopping around for global satellite provider for last 15-20 years, as bandwidth and availability were often issues just in running bases, but also making it harder to drone strike an usually innocent group.
Should a child struggle to access online learning simply because their parents have chosen to live in a rural location? Should a family in a town struggle when several children need to attend classes online, because some inept bureaucrat agreed to a telco monopoly decades ago?
The fact starlink is an inconvenience to amateur stargazers doesn't seem very important in comparison.
Hm, I recall reading recently that Starlink satellites are hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids though. Can't remember where. It's probably not important.
* get rid of starlink and any like minded projects
* create work around so you can have Starlink type projects and still detect asteroids.
It seems like the second option should be viable - if you know exactly where all the satellites are couldn't you create a filter?
And I'm sure Starlink will be ponying the money for that.
Or wait to deploy their satellites until that process is completed.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/08/in-much-...
https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/blog/the-state-of-...
> Mobile broadband coverage has also increased substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is still the region with the largest coverage gap; one in five people live in an area without mobile broadband coverage – an estimated 210 million people.
If 80% of Africa can manage mobile broadband, it seems likely the USA can.
Children who struggle to learn in rural areas and have parents who can afford a hundred dollars a month, plus equipment costs? Assuming that the cost to use Starlink doesn't rise (how many 35k Teslas actually shipped)? Seems like a vanishingly small population right there.
And the percentage of that population that is middle class (the part that cannot help themselves) seems even smaller. I'm not concerned about children hanging out at their parent's 70,000 acre vacation ranch.
Meanwhile, this article seems to be about professional astronomers
If DSL is available in rural Wisconsin, it costs $50/month.
Pull up https://broadbandnow.com/national-broadband-map and look the max speed and go a bit outside of a city. The area my parents live in is (for that $50/month) shows "1 to 30Mbps".
This isn't children hanging out in their parents vacation ranch. This is the children of rural framers and families that have a house in the country rather than a small apartment in the city.
The cost difference for DSL at 1-30Mbps (my parents single DSL network topped out at about 6Mbps) and Starlink at $100/month at 70Mbps is night and day different.
For additional fun, unselect DSL and look at the provider counters for much of the nation. With Starlink, that number is one higher.
Paying $100/month instead for 100Mbps satellite link is $50/month increase in cost and a 12x increase in performance.
The anecdote that I'm addressing isn't the children on a 70,000 acre vacation ranch (that likely can afford $100/month) but rather rural America.
Yes, ISPs and telecommunications needs to improve the network resources when you get more than 20 miles away from a city and suburbia. It will likely cost in the range of $100/month to get that when it is available.
Starlink meets that need now.
Starlink drastically improved the network performance. Quite frankly, without Starlink, I would have had most of my family spending their daylight hours in my house (while I did remote work too)... which again, isn't an option for most people.
As much as I'll grumble about Starlink for my night time long exposures getting less impressive and its CEO, using the 550km orbit to provide fairly reliable network connections at an acceptable speed to my family is probably worth it.
If he was really doing it "for the lulz" then there would be many more such launches. Cars, a painting of some artist that offended him, etc. We haven't seen that though.
That was the Falcon Heavy test launch and he wasn’t able to even give away the flight for free to anyone when he offered.
Just because I don't care for Elon (nor think he should have that much money), doesn't mean I don't care what he does with his money. If he buys and shreds the Mona Lisa, I care. If he pollutes LEO because a math error keeps the satellites from deorbiting and causes Kessler Syndrome, I care. If his Boring Company in Vegas has a disaster and a hundred people die in his tunnel, I care.
I care about a lot of other things he could do too, but I'm not going to list them.
Meanwhile, while I don't care for him, that doesn't mean I want him to become poor. I don't care if he has a megayacht or something.
Plus there've been some discussions, and even a signed contact regarding Starlink usage as a backhaul on cell towers. Link: https://telecoms.com/511313/kddi-to-use-starlink-for-mobile-...
And to counter your same example, in India around 41% of people have access to the internet. I think the internet is a basic right, at least in this century, so we shouldn't deprive people of the internet. I do acknowledge that Starlink might be costly but something is better than nothing.
* I often have to drive through rural roads with my family. Cell service is limited/spotty here. Starlink would allow me to work on the road (and have an emergency backup).
* My wife and I have been eyeing the possibility of purchasing a small plot of land to "get away to" occasionally. Starlink would enable me to work from that plot of land.
Maybe once a decade a few hours are spent pruning trees which encroach on the view or clearing brush for fire safety.
Hell, there are miners cabins built in the 1800s that are still habitable without any dedicated caretaking
By the FCC’s estimates[0], there are 26 million people in the US alone, mostly in rural areas, who lack access to adequate high speed internet. I believe that exceeds what most would consider a small dwindling population by quite a large margin.
This number could potentially increase too, with the recent advent of full remote work. A fair number of people who live in urban areas do so only because they have to for employment and if they had the option would move somewhere less densely populated.
[0]: https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr...
I live in downtown Chicago and I can't get wired Internet for less than $70,000 installation. I would have gone with Starlink except they had backorders on the receivers, so I went with T-Mobile 5G Home Internet instead. So, it's not just people in the boondocks that need wire-free Internet.
(I'm posting this message via Starlink. Admittedly I'm a rural person in a rich country. Still grateful for it.)
Then there are 84,000 satellites in orbit and room for literally millions more? Space is big. Each satellite is smaller than a car. What happens if a company produces 42,000 more cars? Will it blanket the Earth? Of course not! I think you might just be a bit confused when trying to conceptualize just how much room we're talking about here.
Everyday a billionaire wakes up and does nothing with those billions but make more of those and hold on to them. They are nothing like anybody else but other billionaires
Since they were "allowed" to launch (potentially) thousands of satellites. Does that mean that every other company and/or country can do the same?
It is not magic. You signal from the user terminal has to reach a ground station / gateway connected to the Internet. Either there are inter-satellite links and the signal can be routed to a gateway far away. Or there are not and the gateway need to be at most a few hundred kilometers away if you satellites are in orbit at 400km.
> Afghanistan not being able to do anything against their citizens using Starlink apart from “shaking their fists at the sky”.
Or sentence to death people caught with a Starlink dish on their roof.
Edit: Looks like Starlink doesn't have great coverage at this latitude anyway, currently: https://findstarlink.com/#4032402;3
Starlink is definitely available at that latitude (in the sense that there is signal, not in the sense that SpaceX is currently taking customers or has set up base stations), in the southern hemisphere the only significant landmass that doesn't have more or less constant coverage is Antarctica.
Back when coverage was more spotty, I made this map. I'd probably change some things if I revisited it now that there are lots of satellites up, but it's good enough for demonstrating the point: https://droid.cafe/starlink
Fiji is the nearest realistic location to downlink, Suva, where many cables land (including the cable from Tonga). It's 466 miles, way over the horizon.
> Musk, the world's richest man, has been sending an increasing amount of satellites into orbit since 2019 through his company SpaceX.
The personal tone in news about Tesla/SpaceX is funny. Sounds like SpaceX is the post office where Elon Musk goes to send his packages.
For context: plain old Falcon 9 could launch a Hubble-sized telescope to LEO (with a bit of room to spare) and return for reuse.
It feels like the right thing to do and could gain them a bit of goodwill.
.. Now you have to think about how to aim the antennas. Presumably you can't just reorient the entire satellite, because its main job is to keep its ground-facing antennas aimed at the ground and its solar panels aimed at the sun. So you need to add a separate antenna pointing mechanism, with a fairly wide range of very accurate movement along multiple axes, so that all of the radio antennas can observe the same region of the sky simultaneously..
Some very few scientific instruments will have slightly higher cost of operations.
99.99999% of people will never notice anything.
Can we stop being so dramatic?
No, there are many scientific instruments, basic optical telescopes, advanced observatories to NEO detection tools that will be affected (see article). The costs of placing telescopes in orbit is exceptionally high relative to constructing them on the ground, so again, no optical astronomy is going to experience a significantly higher cost of operations.
Yes, few people will notice. Few people noticed when we poisoned rivers with PCBs or approved the demolition of Penn Station. There is an aesthetic, social and practical value that is lost when we allow a select set of firms to dominate certain frequency bands and orbital locations.
No, we cannot stop being so dramatic, these are legitimate questions. Space is for everyone's benefit, not just SpaceX, despite their remarkable accomplishments.
It is reasonable to have a discussion about how we will mitigate the tragedy of the commons in advance, have a plan and ensure that again...broadband internet in space, a regulated business doing a thing for money in a common setting...benefits us from its use of our common domain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973626 (12 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995026 (11 comments)
Source (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Implications
We really haven't. We found Sedna in 2003. Makemake and Eris in 2005.
Weight == $$$
Plus starlinks have very short lifespawn
> I’m guessing if the signals were combined in an array and integrated you could gain quite a high resolution image.
that's just wishful thinking, ironic since starlink is also no more than wishful thinking of a business venture.
“The current count of large debris (defined as 10 cm across or larger) is 34,000.” - Wikipedia
Eventually someone was going to fill up orbit, and cheap global internet connectivity is a really good reason to do so.
The telescopes you need for NEO detection aren't very big, so we really should fund a full high orbit web of them for planetary defence.
For example, if Alice did X and got Y, then published a paper about it, and Bob did X and got Y, and Charlie did X and got Y, then X->Y is scientifically proven.
If well known and proven scientist Alice said that X may cause Y, then it is just Alice words, not a science.
Best line from that movie
I'm surprised about how many astronomers seem to...not want us to go do stuff in space.