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Comment by usui | Hacker News Reader

You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies because people are replying about the launch volume. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?

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we cannot have private trillionaires milking "privatize the profits and social the costs"

no more, it has to end immediately

they aren't just silo-ing their wealth, they are leveraging against societies, funding far-right violent politics against society

even the evil Koch-brothers have cancer wings in hospitals around the country, Musk doesn't give a dime to charity, just his own foundation which he controls to only do what he wants to manipulate

pre-pay costs to society before damaging society

also, criminal murder charges for those who enable actions like, "poisoning a water supply," "creating an opiode epidemic," "giving millions of people cancer, knowingly"

I just don't understand why, killing one person is murder, but killing hundreds over many years is, "just the cost of doing business."

Would be nice for oil and gas companies to pay for all the emissions say, starting when they found out about it and decided to lie to the public. Maybe also bring charges against the PR firms they used since given those same PR firms worked for the tobacco industry clearly they won't stop until there are consequences.

Unrealistic, I know, but one can dream.

> How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

You are clearly not grasping the magnitude change in how many satellites we used to launch vs how many we are launching nowadays.

In 2026, we are putting 10x as many objects in space as we did just 8 years ago, with Starlink being the bulk of it: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-....

Starlink has 12.5k satellites in space and looking to ramp up massively, the biggest "multi-decade incumbent", oneweb, has 5% as many, about 600.

We want incumbent multi-decade culprits to also pay appropriately.

Yet you only talk about it when it’s big scary Elon. Cry me a river.

He's generating a lot more pollution. It's reasonable to want equity around externalities, which is a distinct problem under capitalism.

I talk about it all the time.

> How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

"Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years."

(And most of the other providers don't plan for theirs to burn up within a few years. Giant disposable LEO constellations are new.)

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