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Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

No. Starlink isn't 'filling the sky' — there's plenty of space left for everyone else, and they're not preventing anyone else from sending up satellites.

Also, the benefits of Starlink's satellites are immense.

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If there's "plenty of space left" then I dread to think what the sky is going to be like in the future! I never imagined I'd be part of the last generation to see a night sky that isn't full of satellites.

I'm starting to think more and more these problems with mental health we are seeing in young people are due to them being raised essentially in captivity. There's nowhere to go, no frontier left to conquer. Everything is full: the land is full, the sea is full and now even the sky is full.

As for the benefits, access to information and services is obviously a good thing, but we all know that it's really going to be access to social media and ads. I'm no longer convinced access to the internet is an absolute good.

When you are worrying about this, are you looking at visualisations or are you looking at the real sky?

I'd like to see the ratio of volume used up by satellites vs. volume of the earth's atmosphere between the highest and lowest flying satellite.

I wonder if it's something like the volume an ant would take up in an average American house, where nobody would care about it.

Apparently it's like colliding with one specific ant in a place much bigger than the Empire State Building. Or against one of thousands of pieces of an ant in such a building while being the size of a very tiny fraction of an ant.

The risk isn't the night sky becoming a blob of manmade tech, that probably won't ever happen; the real problem with these satellites (and other things we launch into the atmosphere like telescopes) is that when they get damaged, their debris effectively becomes dangerous, fast moving trash that has to be taken into account for every future space object launch. (Which has a compounding effect since if something goes wrong, you now have new and exciting debris to monitor and be careful with.)

Launch too many and you can essentially create an invisible blanket for the next 15 or so years (depending on re-entry time; without some technical innovations in this field, this used to be upwards of several centuries, but that's gotten better - Starlink's re-entry is 5 years for it's satellites if memory serves me right, but the industrial standard is 15-20 years - this has the extra downside that apparently their satellites don't burn up properly, having damaged properties and people in the past. Their fleet size also apparently risks halting the recovery of the gap in the ozone layer with the mass re-entry) that will prevent any kind of space exploration simply because there's no safe zone in which you can launch anything without crashing into a space object/space debris.

It's indeed like colliding with an ant, but that ant also moves at a speed comparable to a fired bullet. Even something as tiny as a screw that got loose and is now orbiting as debris can absolutely wreck other space objects at the speed those things move in the atmosphere.

The real sky. Go and look out tonight after dusk and you'll see satellite after satellite.

I grew up satellite watching, and I've never seen a sky not filled with satellites. The Iridian constelation has some of the brightest objects in the sky, and the company went bankrupt in 1999.

Many in our generation will never see the Milky Way, let alone Starlink.

> I never imagined I'd be part of the last generation to see a night sky that isn't full of satellites.

Are you also worried about the sky being full of aircraft? There is fewer than 10,000 satellites in orbit, but more than 30,000 civilian aircraft flying, and around 140,000 commercial flights per day. [1]

> There's nowhere to go, no frontier left to conquer.

Which is precisely what SpaceX is trying to fix.

> now even the sky is full

Nowhere near it.

1. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/statistics

> Are you also worried about the sky being full of aircraft?

Very much so. But with aircraft we at least have the ability to regulate where they can and can't fly and when etc. via local governments/democracy. The satellites can affect anyone in the world and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

> Which is precisely what SpaceX is trying to fix.

Haha, sure...

Ah ok, so if the benefits are immense looks like the rest doesn't matter then.

Hopefully that benefit/risk was decided democratically and publicly and not based on some assumption by a handful of people online.

The main downside outside of increased risk for space debris is that Starlink is messing with weather prediction/measurement. Apparently the satellite dishes they use register on weather reports as permanent rain spots[0].

[0]: https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks...

Its not just a matter of having enough room for more crap up there. The enormous and growing number of satellites have an impact on ground based astronomers and astrophotographers

Plenty of room for other satellites, maybe - but they are having a real impact on astronomy.

Which they have taken steps to mitigate. But in any case, the long-term benefits to astronomy of having cheap heavy launch capability (which SpaceX is funding through Starlink) will far outweigh the short-term costs of a few satellite streaks on images.

Not when any home/hobby based astronomy is off the cards.

Is it off the cards?

I’m sure even in the fictional worlds of Star Trek and Expanse there’s still someone in their back yard with a telescope, despite the skies being filled with not just satellites, but the constant traffic of space ships and the oppressive presence of megastructures.

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