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Comment by proee | Hacker News Reader

We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionable value. In 100 years will the sky at night just be a massive grid of dots moving across the sky?

Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.

Edit: Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials. Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms (Making the case for wood satellites).

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Hank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help fund orbital cleanup and internalize the externality of polluting orbital shells. It's an idea that deserves more discourse IMO.

Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos

And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?

The video discusses this directly.

Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.

What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.

US can enforce US satellites, no?

Provided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely

Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles

Maybe but if so, it would mean that US spontaneously would go against one of their main strategic interests for the planet ? Doesn't makes too much sense.

It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels.

It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US.

Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about.

Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes.

CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend.

But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence.

I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.

CFCs were solved because we found new chemicals that were more profitable than CFCs. Global warming may eventually be solved because renewable electricity is (already) more profitable than fossil electricity (but only when it's working, which is the major sticking point). In neither case did thinking about the bad things that would happen if we continued along a path actually stop us continuing along that path. It was always about profit.

US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.

Could the US effectively sanction BRICS these days?

Hmm, probably not

Not at all, it can be handled via international treaty. Frequency allocations for civilian satellites are already handled this way, a UN body (the ITU Radiocommunication bureau in Geneva) acts as a neutral party that handles satellite spectrum coordination between UN member states.

The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons.

Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund.

Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.

Also, the number of countries with practical space launch capability is very small. US / China agreement isn't trivial, but if you can get them agreeing to ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India, NZ etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)

In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years

Eh... no, not really. At low altitudes (<500 km), sure, but much above 600 km you are starting to look at decades for a passive deorbit depending on solar cycle and ballistic coefficient.

Decades is a few years in a trash conversation. Things stay longer in a regular dump.

But that's the problem. The debris disperse whatever heavy metals and compounds into the atmosphere. Removing the debris and taking it somewhere, even just landing them protected in a heat shield, could reduce those vaporizing particles, if those are going to be a problem.

My new startup, SPECTRE.

It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me.

Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.

Extortion is my business

-- Ernst Blofeld

The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine.

I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself.

Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.

And how did the Dutch collect the toll and who received the tax benefits for it?

I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.

You wish to take up a specific space, and with the right to use it come obligations.

There was no tax or toll to consider.

People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor.

My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent.

All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align. One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation.

Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.

Ok but that's not what I asked... You're just saying "we should have some system that benefits everyone". Ok sure that sounds nice, but you compared it to a specific framework with an off-hand "we've solved this so long ago" type of comment. Surely if it's so simple and straightforward and the Dutch "already figured it out" you'd have at least some idea of a proposal or implementation details.

How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?

Those parts aren't the hard ones?

You collect waterworks taxes the same way regular taxes are collected in NL. You get a letter with an amount to pay and you pay it. The waterworks is the entity that sends you the letter and manages the application of those taxes. The system that comment described is still in place today and operates in parallel to "regular" government.

> Those parts aren't the hard ones?

For an international resource it absolutely is. Everyone would lobby their government to ditch to make a sprint. (Well, China and America and possibly rising powers like India or the UAE would.)

You're not really good at asking anything. I did not say a system that benefits everyone.

I did not say the dutch solved this exact problem, and my previous response was a best effort after you prompting me because i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.

I brought up the comparison because nba456_ 19 was already complaining about a required mythical global government - as if that's relevant for the 50y time frame we're planning for.

I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls. I'll try to answer that again in the other comment.

> I did not say a system that benefits everyone.

Ok then the US can just ignore all this stuff and do what we want.

> I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls.

I can tell - I think you’re having a hard time here defending an idea you now want to walk back. That’s fine. At the end of the day “collective maintenance” is typically achieved by either a tax or toll. I don’t have to keep bringing it up, but then you need to explain how your proposed system works instead of leaving one to guess. You suggested it was simple because the Dutch “figured it out an millennium ago”.

Without global governance to address what is a global space - you know, space itself, how would your proposal work? American and European companies pay for some maintenance scheme but then China, Russia, and others ignore it? So it’s not global? Who will they pay anyway? Why would they agree to this scheme?

> You're not really good at asking anything.

This is incorrect.

> i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.

Based on your inability to describe or walk through your solution I think it’s likely you think you’ve thought through this and you haven’t and now as your comment is being scrutinized you are turning to discussion points that don’t make a lot of sense.

I suspect the mindset that makes you write these nonconstructive questions trying to be right instead of making sure we're on the same page, is the same one that is preventing you from entertaining the idea that people are able to collaborate, understand, and write out a set of rules they can agree on are in their own interests.

> I did not say a system that benefits everyone.

I meant the difference between "everyone" as in Bob living on the street everyone, and "everyone" that is using it.

I thought maybe that was the thing that you were not understanding, so i keep having to go to your position and guess at what you mean. But sure take it as a moment to gloat with your superior intellect.

If you think 5 comments in and bringing up "But what if China ignores it" is scrutiny then I'm sorry to tell you you're just oblivious, not critical. You keep bringing up taxes and tolls. I've already addressed them 2.5 times in this thread.

> is typically achieved

well at least i know you couldn't be bothered to comprehend any of my comments before wasting my time.

Sorry but i'm good on trying to explain things again - this isn't going to work. Clearly i made the mistake of taking to much for granted and we set off on the wrong foot. Its not you its me. I'm sure you understand.

Maybe try again in a week.

You should comment less on my mindset and comment more on your proposal.

"It'll just work" isn't convincing (if not taxes and tolls then what?), and withdrawing from the conversation because your idea was challenged is not very mature and shows you haven't really thought this through.

If it's easy and the Dutch figured it out a millennium ago, then you should be able to explain how it will work going forward. If you're unable to do that, that's fine, but be honest about it instead of wasting time trying to critique my great questions that happen to expose the various flaws in your own comment.

What happened if you didn't pay?

Pay what? Its a 'pure' system where nothing has to be denominated in money but instead we care about effects:

taking-up-orbits, applying-force, and danger-pollution.

The system requires the biggest player calculates the cost of non-compliance being too high either by:

- the scheme triggering a clause where other members start to apply force to their non-sanctioned orbits and trashing their satellites, add in the additional threat of earthly economic sanctions like we do with so many companies.

- the scheme breaking apart and becoming a wild west with _extreme_ danger-pollution.

Clearly, at the moment, the biggest users do not care because the danger is low enough, and they'll try to delay a bit so they get more 'grandfathered' in.

I'm not saying its going to be perfect or fair. I'm arguing its dumb to fear a mythical global government, because that's not required to create stable solutions for these kinds of issues.

So basically in order to prevent Kessler syndrome, everyone follows the regulations or the other participants punish them by destroying their satellites, causing Kessler syndrome?

The EU is collecting CO2 taxes (indirectly by giving permits out). That's a good comparison. There're tolls in the making for imports.

That works because every member country agrees to it

How many individual people were involved in collective dike maintenance, so we know the model scales? 100 million? 200 million?

Do you anticipate 100 million space companies vying for orbit?

I certainly anticipate a billion or more stakeholders on space companies.

Or are you doing the corporations are people thing, so if five people can agree on something in a handshake, ethos-centric deal, then surely five space companies with billions of dollars invested from millions of people should surely be able to act like those original five people?

Not to mention that this bias is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thanks to all the ideologues that get elected to government by insiting that government can't work, surprise, surprise, government doesn't work.

European statecraft has led to a massive bureaucratic blob whose best and brightest just go to America.

Yes, that would totally work while countries like China, Russia, North Korea exist. They could all have a group hug and sing Kumbaya straight afterwards.

The US and Russia have been sharing the ISS for decades. If you can't get past your xenophobia enough to see that there's massive cooperation between the US and Russia in space and has been for probably longer than you've been alive.

Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?

Seize a few shadow fleet tankers to pay for it.

(This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)

I'm not opposed to seizing shadow fleet vessels operated by Russia (or any vessel sailing without a valid flag registration). But as a practical matter Russia is now legally registering much of the shadow fleet under their own flag, and even giving them armed escorts in some cases. So this is going to make additional seizures more difficult.

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it.

Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.

One of the arguments Hank makes in the video is that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of useful LEO shells, which crowds out future competitors or users of that orbit (i.e. you can't put more satellites into the orbit without risking collisions, especially satellites that aren't part of the existing constellation), and that the natural consequence of not regulating orbital space in some way would be to lock in the first movers in an orbital shell as the only organizations that have access to that orbit.

I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX.

The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.

We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.

So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.

> The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.

The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.

Yes, and you're 100% right, but context is needed here for others even if you know this next bit.

The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.

Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.

I remeber being sad as a kid.

Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.

Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.

I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.

Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!

There used to be a space science mags for kids.

Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.

I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).

I only recently got rid of my entire collection of Omni. No room to keep stuff like that any more. But I kept v1i1.

The natural consequence then seems like the competitor might as well launch into that orbit anyway and destroy Starlink?

I mean, presumably, the tax would apply per-spacecraft with a price adjustment for orbit lifetime and how busy a particular orbit is, so a small constellation of 5-10 short lived microsatellites wouldn't have a huge entry barrier.

> People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights.

Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.

It may be finite, but satellites are tiny and the earth is huge. We barely cover the Earth's surface where we don't even have to deal with launching it into space.

Things on earth don't move at 8 km/s so understandably less worries about collisions there.

How else are the entrenched interests who control most of what happens on Earth to guarantee their continued dominance off world? And yes, it’s exactly like the creep of taxation, copyright police[1], and censorship into the Internet when they realized people were going there in part to avoid those.

[1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.

I really don’t see how making people pay for their externalities is “gatekeeping”.

If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative.

The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.

The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities".

They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.

CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.

Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.

Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.

All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.

Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.

Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time?

It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.

How would starting earlier have stopped industries from outsourcing CO2 emissions to other/exempt countries? If you look at graphs of global emissions it's like they didn't skip a beat once legislation and treaties in the west kicked in.

If we hadn’t designed our economy around carbon emitting processes from the beginning there would be no incentive to continue to do this by exporting industrial capacity to authoritarian states.

But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Seems like a reach. Not that economies were particularly ever designed, at that level, but they were also "designed" around sailing ships, horses, rail locomotives, steam power, hand harvesting wheat, weaving fabric by hand, mail for communication. Lots of things that rapidly melted away and changed entire economies and even structures of society in much shorter time than governments have been pretending to fail to address carbon pollution.

> CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes

All the?

We barely regulate CO2 at all.

If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

> All the?

All the.

> We barely regulate CO2 at all.

Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.

> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!

> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.

Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.

Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government.

If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?

> Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights.

This reads like a parody of libertarians.

If you don't leave junk it won't cost you much. I really don't see this as gatekeeping.

> one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.

That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.

If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep radio by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap communication. I'm sure RCA and the others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it.

(RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)

Radio was kind of the original internet. They had to restrict the crap out of it so that some jackoff couldn't just get on the airwaves and interview some random conspiracy theorist who says the government is gearing up to kick the bonus army out of DC.

Lots of cynical replies here unfortunately, but that proposal is similar to other ones that seek protection for various other natural commons. John Michael Greer discusses a bunch of this in Wealth of Nature [1], basically arguing that merely taxing "externalities" like pollution is insufficient, you need to see the true primary economies that generate the fundamental value of nature as being those that operate without human involvement at all, and also incorporate awareness of the different cycle lengths: a pollinator garden can establish in just a season or two, a forest takes decades, replenishing an aquifer takes centuries to millenia, and putting minerals and oil in the ground, millions of years.

Any human activity which degrades, disrupts, one of these cycles, or consumes an output from it needs to compensate the rest of us accordingly.

Now obviously governance is the tricky piece. The two obvious ones are to give the money back to the taxpayers or put it in a sovereign wealth fund to be invested on their behalf, since at the end of the day, the commons should be the equal entitlement of all citizens.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-o...

Difficult to tax something you don’t have jurisdiction over.

LEO satellites are the size of a car and are spaced apart by the size of a state. They also all are in slowly decaying orbits and will fall out of the sky on their own accord in 10 years or less (they are designed with intentional structural weak points to break apart and burn up on entry). The concerns you have are valid and very real, and shared by the people designing these things.

> Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials.

Is this a huge concern? According to NASA [1], about 44 metric tons of meteors and meteorites enter the atmosphere daily, or about 16,000 tons annually, or about 35 million pounds. Of which 5000 tons is estimated to reach the ground. [2]

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ [2] https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial...

In practice the lower cost of access to space had made it viable to star requiring people to at least deorbit their upper stages, something that was long a no-go, with the excuse being that the extra fuel and redundancy would eat too much into the payload mass.

Nowadays it is generally frowned upon if you leave upper stages in orbit or if your satellite fragment spontaneously. There are of course exceptions (like some chinese launches leaving massive core stages in orbit that ten randomly fall back a couple months later) but AFAIK the situations seems to be actually improving due to the added robustness, that was only made possible by cheaper access to space.

There is a legitimate concern with space junk hitting useful stuff or even manned spacecraft but I think space is big and the sky won't appear bright soon. Not all satellites are that reflective and they need to reflect the sun, they don't just glow visibly.

At present, I don't believe there are industry standards / codes mandating minimization of reflectivity. My understanding is that SpaceX has engineered for this from their own internal requirements and "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback). As we anticipate a major scale-up of LEO in the future, it follows that "cost pressures" may (mal)incentivize players to skip this concern.

> "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback)

I hate this cynicism in everything. People didnt work there 10 years ago to be millionaires in a far away IPO, they worked there because they are Team Space.

Nonetheless, the company didn't start the whole non-reflective paint thing until well after the complaints started streaming in, significantly less than 10 years ago (DarkSat launched in 2020)

I think the cynicism is warranted when the CEO was instrumental in the downfall of democracy in the US.

Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.

I'm not quite understanding, sorry if what I said was misconstrued. You don't think the engineering team considered reflectivity from a moral perspective? I am saying there needs to be some standards set out so that future engineers at unscrupulous companies have something to point at as a requirement.

Isn't that kinda how we got the plastic pollution problem in the ocean?

At first, the ocean seems immense. So much so that dumping plastic and toxic chemicals makes no difference.

But then we humans are great at scaling things it seems, such that at some point ocean plastic pollution became a real problem.

I know that space is much much bigger than our oceans, but I wouldn't underestimate the ability of mankind to scale launches to the point where debris becomes a problem.

This is on a similar scale to complaining about there being too many tennis balls on the surface of the earth.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.

I feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves".

Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.

Except everything in orbit is also moving at those same speeds, so the relative speed difference between any two objects is orders of magnitude smaller than that. (Of course, yes, there's outlier cases where that's not as true, but those are the rare exceptions to the rule; the constellations being discussed don't fall into the outlier cases).

Well yeah, the relative velocity is what matters, but not everything is moving in perfectly circular concentric shells either. You've got many different inclinations and eccentricities (and drag profiles) within what's broadly construed as "LEO". The relative velocity of the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision involving two satellites in LEO was over 11km/s.

Low earth orbit is actually not very big. And that’s what we’re talking about here.

LEO is about 2000km to 300km - at 50m shells, that’s about 34,000 times the surface of the Earth.

It is very, very, very big.

50m shells seems pretty optimistic. I thought some alarms would fire when things are within 1 km.

A major plot point in the Red Dwarf books is about Coca-Cola sending a fleet of space ships out to blow up stars so they can spell "Enjoy Coca-Cola" in the sky.

One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.

Oh great the NIMBYs are coming for space now.

Not Above My Back Yard - NAMBY?

Space is big and still very hard to get to. A kilogram of payload in orbit costs several times as much as a kilogram of silver on earth, even after SpaceX's aggressive scaling of capacity. No one's going to be spending that kind of money and effort carelessly. I was more worried about SpaceX becoming monopolistic, so I'm encouraged to see this deal.

Don't project your worries about pollution on Earth-- which is a much bigger problem!-- onto space industry which is at a much much earlier stage. The "burning-up" thing sounds extremely speculative, like you're looking around for reasons to dislike this. Space is exciting and inspiring-- and yes, that includes commercial uses, since realistically we couldn't afford to expand science or exploration in space much otherwise!

I asked Claude to visualize 1M proposed SpaceX satellites in the night sky: https://static.tomaskafka.com/prototypes/1m-starlinks/

Looks awesome!

> Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time.

That's not clear. There's no empirical evidence of it, and the computer models we have don't have definitive results.

Those alarms are not really proper.

Ignoring problems until they become too big to pooh-pooh away is how we got into the climate crisis. And some countries are still pooh-poohing it away.

evidence based alarmism.

Oh now even facts are alarmism. Right.. :X

There's no facts here.

I've actually read the paper everyone mentions

Ask a rocket scientist how many up-front tons of CO2 a rocket launch puts into the atmosphere, per pound of will-eventually-reenter satellite mass.

This is kinda like how it's "rational" to pooh-pooh away the possible radon emissions from your rock-hoarding obsession, when your house's floor beams are starting to make loud cracking sounds.

Not a grid of dots, a ring! https://earthsky.org/human-world/kessler-syndrome-colliding-...

It's a tragedy of the commons situation. And given how well we are able to regulate those kind of situations globally, I'm rooting for the ring.

Satellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome

Gravity was not a documentary.

Junk yes, but think of the new science and industry it will enable as well. Microgravity experiments, new space stations, space tourism, new types of manufacturing in space, asteroid mining. Any technology is a double edged sword, but the benefits surely outweigh the drawbacks here.

On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

Thanks for reminding me, I started watching this and forgot about it!

I wish clearing out all the CO2 from the atmosphere became a meaningful contributor to global GNP.

You are the equivalent person talking about apartment, app store, or website junk 10-20 years ago. and so, you going to invest or complain?

Dark night skies will probably be one of the main selling points for the off world colonies. I can see the Bladerunner-esque ads now.

for what it's worth it would take the equivalent of launching 60 trillion cars into low earth orbit to blot out the sky

and that's assuming they are all in the same concentric plane as each other. you could stack them at different distances from the earth

Isn't iridium already in orbit? So there would be no need for new launches due to this aquisition.

https://satellitemap.space

That map makes it look extremely crowded. Actual relative satellite size is many magnitudes smaller than each of those 1-pixel representations.

Wild that we already see “Kessler syndrome is a hoax” takes. I guess that should have been expected.

It's already a massive grid of moving dots. You can see it from the ground in certain dark-enough areas, but in order to see it in space you have to get outside LEO, like Artemis did. They don't have lights but they are shiny and they catch the sun, making them easily visible from certain angles, which the Artemis photos illustrated.

A gigantic amount of stuff from space hits the atmosphere. Most not made by humans.

Cosmic dust influx estimates can range from 5 to 100 tonnes daily.

SpaceX is launching say ~10 tonnes of satellites per day

As long as we can launch a big trash ball to knock the other trash ball away...

Aliens made first contact this week and told us to “knock it off.”

It’s already starting to be like that. If you get far enough out into the bush away from light pollution and watch the stars for a bit, you can see the grid of satellites orbiting. It’s kind of cool but also kind of depressing.

"Unobstructed view of the stars" will soon be how space tourism companies upsell their customers to higher orbits.

Seems pretty negative and pessimistic.

>Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.

Normal satellites can already be hacked, they provide zero to no security at all.

We are already full of ADs, this will be just another hobby for people into hacking. Imagine it displaying a gigantic pe** haha

On a serious note, as everything standards, they are already interfering with observations. Wait until we can no longer tell if it is an atificial sattelite or some massive asteroid coming from the direction of the son.

Humans are dooming their own existence lmao

>but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms

The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"?

I find it extremely disheartening how much anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-progress sentiment I read about lately.

People are not worried about the mass increase in the entire atmosphere, but very selective layers of the atmosphere (mesosphere and stratosphere). These are delicate layers that are highly affected by nano particles created from satellite burn-up.

>These are delicate layers that are highly affected by nano particles

s/are/may be/

Incredible how the first instinct is just to complain about progress these days. The degrowth mindset is really taking hold.

There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.

There's a reason most of the western world isn't capable of building anything these days.

Yeah. And on the other hand, Chinese culture tends to embrace and optimize progress. I blame the French for infecting western universities with the de-growth mindset.

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