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Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

Man, this really excites me! I hadn't even thought about this before, but it seems super obvious now. Especially the bit in the article about putting a telescope at one of the poles inside of a crater (to shield from sunlight).

I'm surprised this proposal hasn't been tried sooner. Is this because the cost per pound to send something into space has gotten cheaper? Why now?

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Also, Earth's sky will eventually get polluted by things like SpaceX satellites, so this would solve that issue as well.

>polluted by things like SpaceX satellites

I know the media likes to hyper-focus on SpaceX, but it should be noted that Starlink is one of the best large constellations in this regard. SpaceX goes far above and beyond the (inadequate IMO) legal requirements for radio/IR/visible emanations, at substantial engineering expense to themselves.

https://youtu.be/MNc5yCYth5E?t=1717

https://cps.iau.org/news/nsf-and-spacex-sign-agreement-to-mi...

If you really want to get mad about badly-designed satellites impacting astronomy, look up AST SpaceMobile.

If there were a million satellites(which there won't be), and they averaged 100 square meters each (which they don't), and they were all very close to earth in LEO(like starlink, which they aren't), they would take up 0.0000166% of the night sky.

I think we will be okay.

It's not their size that's an issue. But astronomers have already voiced their concerns in great detail. It might be worth exploring the specifics.

Some astronomers have voiced their concerns. Others have voiced their lack of concern. It's not an open and shut issue, but I do suspect a lot of hubbub is about who is launching the satellites, not the fact that they are there.

Once Starlink builds up the capacity around the moon to handle all the new telescopes' data, won't they have the same problem?

We can maintain continuous internet connection from anywhere on the surface of the moon to Earth using 2 lunar satellites. Using more won't provide any advantages until its using a lot of bandwidth.

How would you do that? Land based (or whatever the term is for "terrestrial" on the moon) relays?

Groundside.

Putting telescopes in higher orbits should handle most of that.

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