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Comment by borissk | Hacker News Reader

Starlink will no doubt turn into a money printing machine very soon. The war in Ukraine has proven it has a ton of value as a military communication system.

Too bad it ruined the sky for the 15K professional astronomers out there and a big part of the millions of amateurs as well.

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Not sure about this - seems like Elon's personal meddling has shown that Starlink is not reliable for military purposes. Military would have to have complete ownership/control

They are building a US-military controlled one called Starshield.

The US doesn't have any current plans for military version of Starlink. They have a pretty extensive satellite system. Starshield is SpaceX project to use Starlink technology for military.

The US Space Development Agency, focused on missile defense, is working with SpaceX on tracking and communications constellations. But the communications is using laser links for in-space communications. Military Starlink is possible but not proposed yet.

What "meddling" are you talking about?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/elon-musk-bi...

Walter Isaacson, the book's author, gave a long-form interview recently on The Lex Fridman podcast. In case you'd like to form your own opinion about the book's legitimacy, its writing/Musk-supported research is substantially discussed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOV5R7M1Js

Musk has since stated that the satellites were always disabled in the Crimea, as per requirements of US sanctions, and that SpaceX would have turned things on if requested by the American government, but no such request was made. Is he lying?

Articles claims have been retracted

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/08/elon-musk...

>A senior Ukrainian official has accused Elon Musk of “committing evil” after a new biography revealed details about how the business magnate ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships.

What you think Elon did with regards to Ukraine is almost certainly incorrect.

> Too bad it ruined the sky for the 15K professional astronomers out there and a big part of the millions of amateurs as well.

Checkout the latest updates on the new sats, the problem has been fixed.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-more-astronomy-photobombs-spac...

The article doesn't say that it's been fixed, merely there's a new attempt to lessen the issue that is being tested with the latest batch (which were still easily visible by eye via earth bound observers).

I think they meant to post a different link. The latest satellites are dimmer than 7 apparent magnitude (meeting the AAS recommendation) despite being 4x larger.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06657

Kessler syndrome is inevitable once low-cost access to space is unlocked. At least we'll get to browse cat memes from an airplane out of it.

This has nothing to do with kessler syndrome; these satellites will all necessarily deorbit a relatively short period after their fuel supplies are exhausted and they're no longer able to correct for the orbital degradation caused by the atmosphere.

Somewhat tangential: Can you imaging having to come up with a price point involving the planned destruction of millions, if not billions of dollars of assets every few years?

They cost about 250,000 each from what I read. If the constellation is 10K satellites that is 2.5 billion every 5 years. If revenue is $80 per month per subscriber, you need about half million subscribers to break even.

This doesn't include launch costs, but starship is supposed to minimize that further. Add in other overhead, then 1 million subscribers is well within spitting distance of break even.

Low cost access to space also implies low(er) cost cleanup of defunct satellites and other debris.

The war in Ukraine has proven that starlink or a private company shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to military operations.

It's proven that you get what you pay for

Did the dark paint have no effect?

They recently started launching highly reflective satellites, which counterintuitively reduces the amount of light scattered in earth's direction.

The dark paint was a stupid idea, that never realized.

>The company developed a highly reflective dielectric mirror film and a low-reflectivity black paint, which are applied to several parts of the spacecraft body. The mirror-like surface reflects sunlight into space instead of scattering it toward observers on the ground. In addition, the solar panels can be oriented so that observers do not see their sunlit sides.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-newest-and-la...

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