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Comment by seltzered_ | Hacker News Reader

Brightness reduction is nice but it's still important to also consider the energy required to keep starlink running: https://twitter.com/rdrimmel/status/1563158073694310401

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I wonder if that guy has worked out the energy required to build the ground infrastructure to bring communications to all of Earth.

Ah yes, because Musk is a philanthropist and is doing this for earth as a whole. That's why for poorer, thrid world countries, he'll... keep charging the usual rate, making Starlink a non-starter in those countries ?

Starlink is a rich idiot's toy, not a solution to bring communications to everyone.

It’s expensive because of capacity limits and this is why it is stated for use in remote areas.

They do price discriminate to a cheaper price for poorer countries (in Ukraine it went the opposite despite being a poor country, where they tried to jack the price up by thousands of percent, but we don't know the terms of the recent pentagon deal to say what price it finally went through at).

As I understand it, the cost of fiber repair has gone down and we should be able to wire everywhere that has grid electricity with high speed fiber very economically, but it doesn't happen for rent seeking and bureaucratic reasons. That would still leave the oceans and some more remote areas that don't have power.

A lot of places have no grid electricity worth calling that. And of those that do, there is no financially feasible way to wire them up with fiber.

A big portion of the population of those can be covered by cell towers and relays cheaper than launching cell towers into space that only last a few years.

In addition to rent seeking and bureaucracy, attempts to expand ground infrastructure are plagued by obstructionism by the giant telecom incumbents, not only in the form of legalized monopolies for some areas, but also by such underhanded methods as weaponization of environmental regulations with fake environment preservation groups and stoking NIMBYism in residents. It's nearly impossible to get anything done in some parts of the US especially.

Add most of Canada to the list too.

Also does't work when your infrastructure is destroyed faster than it can be repaired, like we can see in Ukraine currently.

In my small New Englandntown it would cost about $2,500 per household. We have about 2,000 homes.

Starlink isn't a good fit for towns that big, as it would overflow the rough limit of 300 dishes per cell (maybe changed with some of the recent fights with Dish?).

I don't want starlink. I'm old fashion I want fiber. I was just throwing out pricing for rural broadband installs in New England. I realize now my initial comment neglected that important detail.

That's a good point. One way to look at Starlink is as a proxy to the cost of government bureaucracy and oligopolies and monopolies that restrain trade. It's actually cheaper and more effective to build Starlink than it is to arbitrate all of that terrestrial mess.

No it isn't, the "energy costs" are negligible. That link is a joke, he's fear mongering about the effect of satellites falling back to earth but can't point to any specific harm; "Effect? WE HAVE NO IDEA." Classic Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt; aka FUD.

That thread claims the Starship launches for Starlink are "expected to have a significant effect on the atmosphere," but for support it links to an article about the black soot emitted by kerosene-fueled rockets like Falcon. Starship is fueled by methane, a much cleaner-burning fuel.

Talk about grasping at straws. Come on.

This comment is the most egregious case of whataboutism I've seen in a while.

Whataboutism refers to a Soviet-era habit of rhetorical distraction, i.e. "The USSR does something terrible," to which the reply was, "Whatabout the terrible things the US does?"

How does the comment you're referring to add up to that?

Light pollution is fixed ,but WHAT ABOUT co2 is what I meant.

That's... not whataboutism, it isn't an attempt to distract from an accusation or problem, it's the opposite of that in fact.

I honestly don't get your point, you probably misunderstand me, we might disagree, but this is not the opposite case of whataboutism.

This advancement is objectively good, it's one of the issues raised later in the twitter thread even, and (s)he chooses to change the focus to another subject.

This is called "moving the goalposts", not whataboutism.

Whataboutism would be "Yeah, well, who cares what Starlink does, NASA launches rockets all the time and no one complains about their emissions"

Why do you have to launch by rocket? Why not something like spinlaunch(1), perhaps powered in situ by stored renewable energy?

1. https://www.spinlaunch.com/

sadly spinlaunch is bogus and the whole concept doesn't really work out. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/9ziGI0i9VbE (Spinlaunch: BUSTED! by Thunderf00t)

Thunderf00t isn't science, it's a youtube channel who wants to get views.

He also busted Starlink because apparently technology costs never reduce, and single geostationary satellites have infinite bandwidth

YouTube channels are bogus, but he's not wrong. It's wildly unlikely. Any actual project would require not just a payload that can handle insane stresses, but also rockets for orbital insertion. Rockets that can handle those kinds of ludicrous launch stresses are hard to conceive.

I can't prove that it's impossible, but the gap between the requirements and even the most extreme conception of what's feasible is so immense as to basically dismiss out of hand. They're welcome to keep trying, but it absolutely will not happen soon and is not worth the level of attention it receives.

That video actually explicitly says that the concept _can_ work, he's just skeptical that the current company is likely to achieve it. I wasn't particularly impressed. Yeah, maybe spinlauch the entity _won't_ achieve it. Most people who try to do very hard things fail. But the only way we advance is because sometimes they don't.

Well, spinlaunch doesn't exist yet. It also imparts _much_ higher accelerations on its payloads than a rocket does, and a rocket is already appreciable.

Spinlaunch would destroy these satellites, and still requires some amount of rocket to get to orbit.

Spinlaunch is a joke. No payload is built to withstand those kinds of forces during a launch and the added weight to reinforce them to do so makes it uneconomical.

They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.

> They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.

It certainly can't help that Spinlaunch can't put anything into space.

I was gonna say. Wut? They have a demo that probably fooled all the investors lol.

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