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Comment by martinclayton | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for Starlink. The one that was good for astronomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_Project

In contrast to your values work , I wonder what the benefit of all those satellites should be, besides profit ? It might be easy to say for someone living in a city , but I assume all relevant areas today have somehow internet coverage . So adding 10000s of satellites seems like just the next Netflix , shifting business from one company to another . In difference to GPS , and even ignoring all the impact of all those rocket launches , this is not adding a jot to humanity , and therefore a global light or radio pollution of astronomy is unacceptable

I’ve lived in a few areas in the US where internet was and still is horrible if available at all. Visiting my mother to help her out for longer than a few days was a pain since she had traditional satellite internet and terrible cell which were unusable for work video meetings. That’s in the US.

I doubt every small village in South America or Africa has good internet either. Hopefully they can get starlink and share. Hopefully it’ll give folks more opportunities and access to work or education. Even medical exams over a video call, etc.

Honestly it’s incredible that sending 12,000 satellites into space to provide internet coverage to multiple continents across the world is as cheaper than installing ground based infrastructure. The cost per satellite is reportedly $500k, so the star link constellation cost only $6 billion.

For comparison the Australian NBN (country wide internet infrastructure upgrade) cost over $50 billion, and it still relies on satellites to cover rural areas.

Do you think there are benefits to telecommunications such as telephone and video calls with a doctor?

> It might be easy to say for someone living in a city, but I assume all relevant areas today have somehow internet coverage.

I know people in rural areas who can't even get DSL. And even within a city, having Starlink available sometimes makes the difference between someone having one possible ISP (often something horrible like Comcast) and having two.

Also, see other comments here: this is already being addressed, folks are working with SpaceX on better EMI shielding.

I just got back from St. Croix - the largest, remotest, and poorest of the Virgin Islands. I had far better internet there than I do ~35 miles outside of Atlanta.

Infrastructure in this country is ridiculous sometimes. Comcast told us it would cost 75000 dollars for them to run a line to our street, so us and our neighbors just have to make due without. We have to use T-Mobile right now.

The potential scientific upsides are huge:

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside...

(there is a section about Starlink later in the article)

Do you have a link to any more detailed papers on those scientific upsides? What is listed there is high level and would seem to require the satellites to be equipped with equipment they don't necessarily have. If the science upsides are really that huge, I'd expect scientists to already be looking into it.

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