It’s wild that a private company was able to take up this much orbital space / night sky and the people of the earth had no say in the matter.
I'm pretty sure if a global vote was held on the question of "Would you like to have 10,000 satellites launched so you have the option of paying a US company for broadband anywhere in the world?", the vote outcome would be a firm 'No'.
But yes, they're not big enough to cause a "space junk preventing space travel" kind of scenario.
And of course once all goes to hell and you have a chain reaction of destroyed satellites destroying other satellites - each next satellite moves the scenario towards a positive feedback loop.
There is no orbital solution in which this happens to any meaningful extent. Even worst-case scenarios of massive anti-satellite activity create localised messes that clear in a few months.
One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.
> However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites travelling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.
There's also a statement by SpaceX about why Starlink won't cause this but that's not worth the paper it's printed on given that SpaceX would of course say that.
It does sound like the Kessler syndrome risk is higher for heavier, higher orbit satellites so a more likely issue would be a higher orbit satellite starting a debris cascade that could take out Starlink (and cause Kessler syndrome) rather than Starlink satellites going haywire and causing the cascade themselves.
A Kessler scenario, not syndrome. Localised to a set of orbits within which you see a rise of collisions. The number of affected orbits doesn’t increase for more than a few months, at which point the problem is constrained within space.
Sure, if you overload a high orbit you could render it unusable for a long time. In its worst case, it’s still highly localised. Congestion in LEO has tradeoffs, but Kessler syndrome (much less a scenario) isn’t one of them.
People can be trusted a lot more in the second category, which is generally also their right. If they have valid concerns that are getting dismissed, they're not gonna like talking to you.
I know personally that when I chose from menus at restaurants I am hilariously bad at picking what I like, while my wife is consistently better at choosing what I like.
I’m British, so this question definitely applies to me, by the way.
7% of the world has a college degree.
The median full-time fast food worker in the US is in the top 6% income, globally.
There’s always going to be capex to bring the internet to far-flung places, but my point was that starlink means it’s no longer “dig a 100km trench and install a fibre” expensive.
It's surprising to me so many people are angry over the sky being polluted visually, and not over common air poisoning by burning fuel, river pollution by dumping waste, ocean and sea pollution by ship transportation, plastic pollution, and many other... Rain water is already above (arbitrary) safe toxicity level and so shouldn't be drunk... So what you're doing is you're in a house fire and complain on some noise. This doesn't mean of course you're wrong: the pollution is a problem to astronomers and to the safety of space ventures.
So... you're critizing having no elections by assuming the outcome of one based purely on personal intuition? I think you're making the same mistake you seem to criticize.
Also just think about the impracticality of doing something like that and at the same time the fact that of that 7.5B, 90% probably wouldn't care. How many complaints about starlink have you received from, idk, China or Zimbawe or rural Russia?
It's always funny to me when I see this "7.8 billion people didn't choose a private corporation", as if they chose the american government lol.
And it's absolutely not true that the US is the only country that has a say here. International regulatory bodies exist as well. Maybe the citizens of some countries don't have effective governments that express their will at the UN but that's not SpaceX's fault. There is a process to have everyone's voice heard. It's not the wild west.
And I think you underestimate how much people like and want truly global wireless internet service. The value to the world is enormous.
* 3 billion people don't care because they don't use the internet
* 7 billion people don't care because they wouldn't be able to afford it anyway
* 7 billion people don't care because the question doesn't make much sense to them nor do they really understand what it is about
* 4 billion people likely won't participate because voting is not an activity they are familiar with and/or is not something they desire to participate in.
Direct democracy also has a pretty bad track record in producing just, principled, and reasoned results.
But nearly all 7.8 billion live under the night sky and see 'moving stars'. And that's why I think a global vote would come out saying 'no'.
I think you're right that the vote would be no, but not for the same reason you do.
I think many people reading:
> Would you like to have 10,000 satellites launched
... would stop right there and say "I have no idea what that is, so no"
What still amazes me is that the orbit seems to not be owned by any country. Reading from another comment it looks like the FCC regulated this - but I'm still confused since it covers multiple countries, and I'm pretty sure not everyone had a saying in whether they agreed on this.
As a possible future user, it's still spectacular though.
And where does the atmosphere end? :) From Wikipedia[1]:
Exosphere: 700 to 10,000 km (440 to 6,200 miles)
The exosphere is the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere (though it is so tenuous that some scientists consider it to be part of interplanetary space rather than part of the atmosphere).
It's less than half, but not by that much.