Hacker News Reader

> that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now

A lot of astronomers disagree.

And a lot of starlink customers agree.

How can this be resolved?

Easy: Starlink should internalize its negative externalities. As a first pass, we can estimate how much astronomy infrastructure ($$$) is negatively impacted ($$$) by Starlink and pass those costs to them.

And new astronomy infra should obviously pay Starlink for the mitigations they put in place, right?

Maybe water rights really are the best model for this, but it’s a terrible model as demonstrated everywhere there are water rights. I’d like to think there’s a more sensible approach.

Why would new astronomy infra pay for the Starlink's negative externalities?

Yeah it turns out that "divvy up finite resource" is actually just an intrinsically nightmarish problem when it's something no one intrinsically owns, didn't create, but needs nonetheless, like water and land.

Well if you build a new telescope where there are already satellites doing their business with no objections, shouldn’t you be required to pay for changes in their business, if the principle is first claimant?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com