Light pollution from satellite swarms is an economic externality. Any company can dump sewage in the river (and maybe the sewage is necessary for progress!) but the private sector profits by consuming a shared resource.
For the night sky and astronomy the externality is not so great in the grand scheme, but if unmitigated it does mean that there will be fewer discoveries per taxpayer dollar sent to the NSF/NASA. I'm a postdoc in astronomy and am all aboard Starlink-style networking. But it also seems fair to me that SpaceX should be the party that's responsible for treating that externality with light pollution, or else it's the same old "privatize the gains and socialize the cleanup." We've already effectively achieved this for radio astronomy by regulating protected bands in the spectrum for passive listening.
> if unmitigated it does mean that there will be fewer discoveries per taxpayer dollar sent to the NSF/NASA
Fewer discoveries _by ground based telescopes_.
I want to make this distinction because more access to space also decreases the price of space based telescopes. A swarm half the size facing outwards would also be an incredible tool.
(I do want to note to everyone that ground based telescopes will still likely be significantly cheaper for quite some time. But still decreasing the cost of space based telescopes is a huge advantage)
As far as I know, A lot of people will never have access to an analog space based telescope that they can look though with their own eyes. There will be a lot of people who wont like that.
These swarms aren't going to affect the average amateur astronomer very much. You'll still be able to look through a telescope no problem. These satellites are pretty small.
But, I should mention that Blue, SpaceX, Bigelow, and Virgin are trying to create access for space. Bigelow has an expandable module[0] with the explicit purpose of building larger space stations. Bigelow is specifically trying to create a private space station[1]. All these companies are also looking at lunar habitats. So yeah, there might be a period where people are not able to look through space based telescopes with their own _physical_ eye, but we shouldn't expect that period to last that long. If you are explicitly trying to colonize space, well you have to make it cheap enough for people to... go... Yes, it'll be super expensive at first, but that's true for almost every new technology (with typically ~20 years to reduce that price).
"These swarms aren't going to affect the average amateur astronomer very much."
Not true. Most of amateur astronomers are also astrophotographers that is affected by Starlink's light pollution. Just look up any astrophotography group, I see posts of ruined shots by satellites every day.
Right now Bigelow Aerospace isn't doing anything. They were forced to suspend operations in March 2020, when the State of Nevada determined they weren't an essential business.
There's currently no news when or if BA will resume operations. Even if they do, chances are most of their original talent has made other arrangements by now. From a staffing point of view, they'll be starting from scratch.
IANAA (I am not an astronomer), but I'm wondering - what are the implications for cheaper commercial spaceflights and satellite launches on research astronomy?
Isn't terrestrial astronomy sort of limited by the Earth's rotation, atmospheric distortion, cloud cover, dust, light pollution, electromagnetic storms, electromagnetic noise, and limited availability of real-estate to place telescopes?
Yes and no. Yes, if there are clouds, optical telescopes can't see through them. That's why the really big scopes are built high up in the mountains above clouds. They are also being built in the dry desert air to prevent issues from humidity. With AO (adaptive optics), any atmospheric distortion can be compensated and removed from the images. So in some cases, we get better images from ground based scopes than space based. The size of the primary mirror is a huge factor. This image is a favorite of mine that shows the size of various famous telescopes[0]
It's also possible to build larger telescopes on the ground. It just makes more sense and cents to build on the ground than into oribit. However, something like James Webb needs to be in space due to the type of research it is doing. Also why it is getting sent so far away rather than a closer orbit like Hubble.
While I agree with this, I do think easy access to space also enables much larger telescopes in space. It would greatly decrease the cost of JWST. Though not enough to still compete with size/$ (GMT is planned at $1bn and JWST is $10bn, and GMT is like 7 JWSTs in size).
What I would sci-fi utlimately love is the combination of both. Putting permanent bases on the moon, and then building whatever the sciencey word for lunar telescopes. They get the benefits of no atmosphere, and the benefits of being on the "ground" so things can be updated/fixed compared to just floating in space.
Makes no sense to me. Given you'd have the capabilities to have bases there, you'd also have the capabilities to fix stuff floating in space effortlessly. Btw. ground can shake or vibrate, which is no benefit at all.
edit: also electrostatically charged, abrasive dust particles.
Thanks for the reply, that image is pretty compelling,
It seems that space based telescopes could be substantially larger than Earth based telescopes, based on not having to build a structure to support their weight then?
Sounds like a good idea, except we have a hard time getting really large things off the ground. If you notice the size of the James Webb with its unfolding primary is still really small compared to other terrestrial based mirrors. It's mind boggling to look at the size of those mirrors, and then easily missed is the comparison to the former dish at Arecibo. Arecibo doesn't even fit in the image and is just an arc that looks like the background.
I don't know that the externality comparison and compensation is self evident.
it is possible that the positive externalities of satellite swarms outweigh that of ground based astronomy, and they should be prioritized for the visual spectrum.
Key word being "ground based." SpaceX's work will likely lead to much wider access to space-based telescopes. That may turn out to be a more-than-fair tradeoff.
The other thing about LEO constellations is that they're not permanent. A polluted river may not clean itself up automatically after a couple of years, but LEO will. We can change our minds about the utility of LEO Internet constellations at any time. There seems no real downside to deploying them and seeing if all stakeholders can find reasonable grounds for compromise.
starlink is low enough that it will clean itself /relatively/ quickly, but even doubling the elevation get's into some very long lived debris[0].
If you wanted to tax these mega constellations to mitigate the externality they're causing, directing 2 to 3% towards orbital telescope production/launch costs arguably would be the most immediate remedy.
No, it's not. These are relatively new problems posed by specific companies. If we say part of their taxes go to solving this problem they caused, then what about all the other things their taxes were going to before?
It's roughly similar to suggesting a tiered membership service should upgrade all customers to the highest tier without charging any more than they did last month.
The taxes don't exist prior to satellite network, so there is no before. Growing the economy grows tax revenues and adds new revenue to the federal budget.
It is like adding a new customer to your license membership service. Marginal costs are zero but they add to revenue. You can then use the extra revenue to develop new features.
That's not a workable position. By that measure a new industry that blows up significant fractions of major population centers for pennies - but pays taxes on those pennies - is a net producer of new tax revenue and should be considered a net benefit.
Yes, obviously, in this highly contrived example there are many other non-tax laws and reasons this company could never exist. But I think it still demonstrates the point that a new industry that produces new taxes is not inherently a good thing even if you limit the scope to simply government revenue.
I don't believe there is a perfect view of these things, but at least taking the tack I originally expressed is more workable than this.
>new industry that produces new taxes is not inherently a good thing.
I think you are making different point than in the last post. I never suggested this. I agree that new companies can theoretically cause externalities that cost the government more than their taxes.
My point is that in this case SpaceX taxes are not pre-allocated to cover government costs incurred by SpaceX. SpaceX isn't increasing the number of people on welfare, teachers, defense budget, ect. In fact, SpaceX existing saves the government huge amounts of money on launch costs.
Maybe I worded my original post poorly then, as that was the idea I was trying to convey.
And you're right. As I said, I don't think there is a perfect way to view these things. However I do think that viewing those taxes as pre-allocated is a reasonable easy heuristic. Otherwise every single externality has to be rather thoroughly investigated. Is it already known and accounted for? If it is not accounted for, is it intentionally not accounted for or is the externality actually entirely unforeseen? How much does the externality actually cost? How much additional revenue does the company/industry causing this externality bring in and how does it compare, etc etc etc.
Not viewing those taxes as pre-allocated to existing programs essentially leads to immediately discounting any new externality because of the sheer complexity of trying to figure out the exact dollar amounts involved. Many externalities do not even have an objective dollar cost from which to start the accounting.
Even if you wish to continue with SpaceX, how do we account for them properly? They may be saving the government money on launch costs, but they are also deriving an unusually high benefit from our public education system. I'd assume they are also putting more wear on our road system than many companies. And that's not even scratching the surface. And SpaceX isn't even the whole industry.
Much, much easier to view taxes as essentially pre-allocated first and then figure out how you want to deal with things more specifically later. At least it gives us a tractable starting point.
that's assuming there are no deductions. I'm willing to bet every rocket explosion we see, is written off as r&d expenses and reducing their taxable revenue.
in a company as fast paced as SpaceX, I doubt they pay much in taxes yet.
> the private sector profits by consuming a shared resource.
The public benefits from this privately maintained system. Irrespective of who profits, this is a service that I very much want, and I'm perfectly happy if Random Corporation XYZ makes a few bucks as long as I get the service at a reasonable price.
"The public" usually refers to the whole community and implies payment through a government or similar scheme. You cannot call your benefit from a private transaction a public good or yourself the public in that scenario. Otherwise literally all commerce is for public benefit. The comment was making a point about externalities.
It's a false and misleading point. It makes no difference whether SpaceX or NASA is selling satellite internet service.
This isn't a tragedy of the commons scenario, or a "privatize the gains" scenario. It's simply a competing use. For millennia astronomers have had near-exclusive use of the sky. I don't see why they should continue to be able to hog it all to themselves.
Wow, those dastardly astronomers, hogging something that somehow isn't part of the commons. They should learn how to share! How about letting astronomers use the night sky every Tuesday?
I like to describe this position as NIMOP: Not In My Orbital Plane.
The idea that you own a view to infinity to me us more absurd than taxing me for breathing air, which is also a negative externality taken to extreme.
Let's put a quadrillion more times the mass in space. Let's build huge orbital rings, and take to the Galaxy. Let's get a trillion people living in space.
Where was the global debate on universal optic fiber?
People in rural communities were looking for allies and groups like astronomers weren't there even though it was obviously in their interest to show up. (e.g. wireless communications period is an enemy of astronomy)
Yeah, I was kinda thinking, the last thing the astronomers want is a "global debate". Keep it inside their community and they might get action. Truly open it up to global debate and they're going to get completely and utterly routed on this matter. For everybody else, benefits clearly outweigh costs. Most of the people in the world already live in such light-polluted areas that they'll hardly notice the difference.
I do wish that was how policy was developed -- people see a risk to their interests and then they advocate to address the root cause in a way that helps all of society.
While we're wishing for things, it would have been nice for climate change if oil companies had actually transitioned to being energy companies a few decades ago in the interest of all current and future generations.
On topic: Musk behaves like Vanderbilt and Stanford in this way--he exploits vulnerabilities in the current system prior to regulators being able to address the concerns, leading to a de facto monopoly once market entry is prohibited.
Just ten years ago, most people could arguably kinda/sorta get by without home access to good broadband Internet. OK, you couldn't stream Netflix or You Tube but those weren't really necessities. And a telephone landline was fine for real-time communications with people. You maybe had cellular data and some laggy expensive satellite, but you could make do if you cared enough about living somewhere rural.
Increasingly that's not the case. I really couldn't have worked for any extended period from my dad's house in Maine with marginal (at best) cell service and flaky 1Mbps ADSL down.
So getting broadband to rural locations is really not up for debate even if the method of doing so is.
Well, to be fair, the technology and broadband speed promote out each other. If broadband would not have been available to some people, Netflix would've never started streaming. Similarly, once we get low-latency 10 GBit networking, new services will pop up that require these bandwidths.
Which is to say that we should really start and get them _good_ speeds now, not something that is somewhat acceptable now.
We had the netflix prototypes even in the dialup area, with things like RealVideo. Nobody had failed to anticipate it before broadband access increased.
There really isn't ANYTHING I do with my current connection that wasn't predicted or prototyped in the 90s or earlier. So I'm skeptical of the claim that new uses will appear once we're all at 10GBit.
> Similarly, once we get low-latency 10 GBit networking, new services will pop up that require these bandwidths.
like what? this is brought up, but i'm not aware of anything waiting in the wings.
is there anything in use these days on large campuses (corporate, or academic) where the bandwidth does exist, that doesn't make sense on the broader internet?
with most folks using wifi for everything at home, how are they even going to deliver 10Gbps to a device?
First thing to pop into mind: High detailed maps for games. Also, the devs won't have to think about compressing things or leaving things our because of size concerns.
From an infrastructure standpoint the difference between fiber and everything else is that fiber is permanent.
That is, if you run fiber optic along the power lines that will be good to support crazy high-speeds for the next 50+ years -- with relatively small investments in the future to improve the transceivers at the ends.
If you build fixed wireless the one thing that's certain is that the hardware will be obsolete in 5-10 years and have to be "ripped and replaced".
Not seeing a huge difference. The hardware lighting up the fiber will go through the same obsolescence curve, and the airwaves are even more permanent than that fiber will be.
It's a big difference because electrical signals have to work so much harder to deal with the low bandwidth and signal/noise ratios available to them.
This is why the schedule for PCIe and similar electrical buses has lurched back and forth, as at times progress seemed impossible and then somebody got patents that made the next breakthrough possible (at high price.)
Note for instance that optical PHYs run at 400 GBit/sec but 10 GBit/sec is aspirational for the home. Thus any optic fiber service you might get is two orders of magnitude away from the best possible. Contrast that to LTE, 5G, etc. which are right at the limit.
I have gigabit now, and barely need it. It’s nice to have for the occasional large download, but otherwise it’s unnecessary. Even the latest ultra hd Blu-ray spec tops out at 128mb/s, and Netflix won’t give you more than 25. Can’t imagine what 10 gig would give you.
Hasty Googling gives a bitrate of 85 Mbps for 8k video streaming with HEVC. Presumably if a physical media comes out, it would be closer to 400 Mbps if it was a similar compression ratio as 4k. I'm not sure what the bitrate of volumetric data would be, but I would guess less than or equal to the video stream.
So your gigabit connection would be getting close to saturation if you can find someone to stream you 8k volumetric video at the same bitrate as physical-disk media. At streaming rates, you'd be nowhere near saturating a gigabit link.
Human touch is extremely sensitive. I imagine that for sufficiently complex objects, bandwidth requirements may be onerous if aiming for the touch equivalent of 8k Dell Ultrasharp visual fidelity.
I don't think most astronomers knew that there would need to be 50K more satellites for remote internet to work. Maybe if someone had told them it's not just a few extra satellites?
Astronomers were told how big Starlink would be. In fact, the FCC had a public comment period for Starlink before it was launched. Just no one in the astronomy community took Starlink seriously enough to say anything. (Granted, SpaceX also didn’t know it would be a big impact to astronomy either, but at least SpaceX quickly altered the design of Starlink to mitigate brightness once the problem was apparent.)
This is one of those things where I don't buy any of it. The first time I heard a number connected to a Starlink constellation, the first thing I thought about was how many more dirty images are going to be in my footage.
So, yes, I happen to be an amateur amateur astrophotographer, but it was litterally the first thing I thought about. Never did I think there's some web form to fill out with this complaint. So I'm sitting here thinking that if I thought about it, surely others have as well. It's not like I'm some amazing genius that sees things others don't so let me reach out to some esoteric gov't agency that I don't even know is a thing to do.
We've also known about these issues with the much smaller number of Iridium statellites to the point there are apps/websites dedicated to tell you when you can catch an Iridium flare. We also know what the effects of GeoSync sats, Hubble, ISS, etc look like in images. This is not something new.
Cheap space launch is the cause of, and the solution to, our light pollution issues.
50,000 satellites would be impossible to launch without the recent step change in the wholesale price of launch. And even 5% of that number of space based telescopes will decrease the contention for valuable instrument time enormously.
Particularly if the next generation space based telescopes used tethers or precision formation flying for extremely large simulated aperture size, we'll start getting phenomenally amazing data. (Even some of the largest ground based telescopes will be possible to compete with in space using large formations of connected satellites.)
So all of the hue and cry around Starlink is really just growing pains. It will hurt some of the science temporarily (particularly around sunrise and sunset), but in the long run, cheap launch is really what the field of astronomy needs to continue to have better and better instrumentation.
That may be true for NASA and maybe the wealthiest and most connected universities and research centers. But that doesn't really help smaller universities or amateur astronomers.
Not to mention that getting a telescope the size of the Keck telescopes into space probably won't be feasible for a long time (although without air pollution you would get similar quality with a slightly smaller telescope). And even ignoring the cost of launch space telescopes are likely more expensive due to needing to deal with the extremities of space like temperature regulation and dealing with cosmic rays (which besides interfering with the computers, also cause noise in the CCD cameras).
> That may be true for NASA and maybe the wealthiest and most connected universities and research centers.
I work at a well funded university, and it's not true for us, either. In fact I haven't met a single astronomer who is optimistic that somehow we'll magically get enough money to replace even a small fraction of the great telescopes we currently have on the ground.
In this case, comments they DIDN’T make. The FCC had a public comment period before Starlink was approved for launch and no one pointed out the problem for ground optical astronomy.
They were too busy looking the basement for the permits that were "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'".
So that means they are disqualified from commenting on the problem now? It was not clear how bright these things were going to be on orbit with the publicly available information at the time, and SpaceX obviously did not consider the impact.
Also the number went way up, and the orbits changed.
And the FCC has no rules about light pollution. Which is the reason we should have a global debate about it.
Radio astronomers did complain right away and got a sensitive part of the Ka band left unused -- it wasn't included in the reserved bands but has become important since. Very nice of Starlink to grant that request.
I'm pretty sure I saw concerns from the astronomical community before launch. Maybe they just weren't aware of the process to complain, or didn't know about the threat until after the comment period had closed.
We have to take in consideration that we are weighting space exploration against the comfort of a minority of hobiists. Do you want a thousand people to take pretty pics of the sky, or millions to have rural internet ? I agree we should make sure we don't destroy the night sky view for the naked eyes, but I'm ok with having to see a satellite through my telescope when I look at venus. Not a big deal, and not important to humanity.
Also I'd expect having an amateur community will feed people into a stronger professional community. While not on the same scale, consider taking the same its just hobbyists approach to software dev vs just leave it to the big guys like FB/Google.
As an independent company it wouldn't, but as part of SpaceX, Starlink is meant to provide funding for Starship, which has a lot to do with space exploration. Not only Mars trips but anything anyone else wants to do at $50/kg to LEO.
What is the goal of SpaceX to be the ones actually doing the exploring, or just hiring themselves to be the means to which others can do the exploring? If the latter, then the hiring of SpaceX should be the source of funding. If the former, then they are going to be needing a helluva lot more cash than monthly subscription fees for internet service will ever provide.
As a sidebar/tangent, I see SpaceX/Starlink being the first company to actually get close to putting their Adams-esque customer service department on a different heavenly body than earth. "For all Starlink service requests, please visit our offices in person. Our offices are conveniently located in the Sea of Tranquility, practically visible to everyone one most nights."
> getting a telescope the size of the Keck telescopes into space probably won't be feasible for a long time
SpaceX is said to be discussing making a telescope out of a dedicated Starship. To simplify the telescope, and periodically return for maintenance. Like the telescopes of NASA's Scientific Balloon Program.
Except... Starship User Guide gives a payload envelope of 8 m diameter, and "100+" metric tons to LEO. Launch cost is TBD, but $30M would be failure (similar to Falcon 9 internal cost), and $2M is said to be an aspirational goal. Which is what a balloon flight costs, for a day or so, a few tons, and couple of meters of mirror.
So 8 m to Keck's 10 m. Half the area. But with balloon speed-tape (aerospace gaffers tape) pragmatics, not Webb insanity. Although... how about a "simple" pivot-out-to-hex of 20+ m diameter?
Starship changes the constraint envelope by multiple orders of magnitude. And that's starting to be reflected in strawman project sketches. Which seem low visibility for now. But unless something goes seriously wrong, very won't be in not a long time. (Edit: removed a misleading sentence).
Or even just a few. :) A constraint is that optical-frequency interferometry arrays need to directly combine the input light, rather than being able to sample and simply combine data, as with radio frequencies. So optical telescopes would need to be docked. But yes, if both launch and instrument costs dramatically decline, "can I have two? four? eight? more?" becomes a fun question. At a minimum, as launch and recovery becomes inexpensive, there's less point in leaving a backup instrument warehoused on the ground.
Sorry, I don't. It's not something I follow, and with access to campuses still restricted, I've only the occasional stumbled-on gossip to go on. That last "Monster submarine surfacing" sentence was excessive. And calling $30M failure, given the difference in payload mass, was just silly. I was tired, and should have punted or pruned the comment.
I understand the aesthetic argument against this the most.
The weakest argument seems to be the one saying that having satellites in space will help even the smallest universities. It will probably be cheaper for ones with no/old telescopes to split time on one in space than build one from ground that can't find anything new anyway.
First of all, small ground telescopes, ones that are cheaper than a single sattelite launch, can still do plenty of meaningful research.
And timesharing a telescope doesn't work well for certain kinds of research. For example if you want to observe a set of object every night to watch for variability, having a ground telescope you have complete control over is probably better than trying to get the timeslot you need on a space telescope every night for however long you need.
Many space telescope discoveries are followed up on with ground telescopes. Kepler and TESS planets are not confirmed until a second telescope sees the dip, and that's cheapest to do with ground telescopes.
time slot could be "every moment for 200 days" or it could be "two hours every day for a year"
I'm not going to try to BS my way into pretending like I'm an expert but I do find it to be a safe bet to think that in 20 years it will not be cheaper to have the world's best telescope makers come to whatever random city you are in around the world to help you set up - instead of one amazing telescope maker making 1000 on an assembly line and firing them all off
> But that doesn't really help smaller universities or amateur astronomers
And the harm is... some long-exposure photos will have a small aberration if they don't compensate digitally. In exchange, fast Internet access continues to be limited to select areas or the extremely wealthy.
Just too faint for the naked eye to see is actually really, really bright compared to a lot of astronomical objects of interest. Enough that it could easily saturate a long exposure, and depending on how close it gets to the target, completely ruin the frame.
Fortunetely, that's less of a problem in the middle of the night, bu there is something else that worries me. What if far from sunrise or sunset the sattelite occludes an object you are observing, without leaving a trail? Hopefully, statistics would level that out, but with enough of these sattelites, the chances of that happening go up, and it may lead to incorrect results.
Agree, I think the smart move for SpaceX is to stay ahead of it by offering/working out/subsidizing assembly line style space telescope production and launch w/ benefits to impacted astronomy programs.
I mean imagine if you just enabled a high quality ~cell phone camera in each direction on the existing starlink array etc. Or what if starlink specified a parasite satellite slot that they sold e.g. you can put up x mini sats embedded and facing space with network and power port. It lasts as long as the node lasts, put up a lot and don't complain.
I'd love to see more emphasis on smaller, more numerous space telescopes. JWST will be great when it launches, and it's impossible to overstate how awesome Hubble has been, but space is big and time on these largest scopes will be very valuable.
There's a ton of work being done on ordinary 1m and smaller telescopes. As you say, space has big advantages in atmospheric, temperature, sun, and weather factors that may allow a smaller orbiting telescope to do work that would require a larger terrestrial scope. I'd love to see enough scopes in space that (1) ordinary Astro 102 students could do a lab assignment to point a satellite-based telescope at an object and take an image and (2) researchers could have more frequent surveys of the sky to find transient objects.
The decreasing wholesale price of launch should also make cleanup relatively easy compared to other areospace marvels.
There are solutions from lasers (photon momentum), to nets that capture debris and then add a sail to it to increase friction from the atmosphere that is still in play in low earth orbit:
That might be a possible future, but why is starlink required in that process? I can definitely see a future where we have space telescopes without giant satellite swarms obstructing the view from Earth.
Reminds me of another interesting thread on the topic, from January: "What do we lose when we lose the stars?"[0] Sadly, it seems many on HN don't seem to feel anything towards the dark sky at night. I wonder if it's because most people grew up in an urban area? I'm from a rural area and always had a stunning view of the night sky and would truly miss it, and feel like something of inconceivable value is lost if it just becomes a flickering mass of satellites moving around. It's something I'd love future generations to be able to have, especially as we're already going to be depriving them of so much given our current tendencies.
I live in the Netherlands, which I think is the second worst place on the planet as it comes to light pollution.
I've never seen a truly dark sky full of stars until the age of 35. Not just never seeing one, not even being aware that it exists at all.
The eye-opening experience was in the Serengeti, Tanzania. Cruising the plains in a jeep some hours after sunset, to look for nocturnal animals.
Until the driver made a stop. We were told to get out, as he prepared hot chocolate, it was really freezing. Once we all had our drink, he then proceeded to turn off the engine and the jeep's lights (it had massive search lights)
Our group of 5 just stood there in complete awe, for minutes. A full 360 view with not a single light or object blocking a direct view at the darkest of skies, illuminated by millions and millions of stars. Endless.
Never before in my life have I experienced being part of the universe, I have only known it. Seeing it this directly, uncompromising, unpolluted was an absolute thrill. Further enriched with the howls of hyenas and nightly grunts of distant male lions.
The directness of the experience, feeling so close to it all, makes everything fall into place. How ancient people used it for navigation, or to count time. It is satisfactory at a very primal level.
A few years later in Colombia, we experienced it again. This time it was so clear that we could see the milky way with the naked eye.
Surely lots of people do live in rural areas, and cannot imagine this revelation. But for those living in extreme light pollution, it's like taking off a veil after decades, if ever.
Do I believe light pollution will be reduced so that we all can return to an "original" sky? No, quite the opposite. We'll have even more light pollution.
I'm really glad you got to experience that. I've only ever see it dark enough to see the Milky Way once, when I was out in rural Ireland. It was a stunning experience. But even the difference from where I grew up to where I am now is saddening, and I'm not currently living in a big city by any means. Thankfully, just a 45 minutes drive in the right direction makes it a bit better, but I can't help but feel a bit is lost every time.
This could also be interpreted as resistance to change. Would the world be better if screens had not robbed people of the sensations of holding a physical book/magazine/newspaper? If electric or gas lighting had not filled the cities with light contamination? If planes and trains weren't making so much noise? If instant messaging hadn't replaced phone conversations?
A sky with thousands of satellites is something the next generations will admire as much as we admire the actual one with less satellites and more planes.
The difference is, all your examples aren't unavoidable. I still own and can buy physical books. There are plenty of places without urban light pollution, as well as places without planes and trains. I can still make phone calls, and do so every day.
There is only one night sky, and when you put satellites in it they go everywhere. The remotest-living luddite bookworm will still have to see the satellites overhead.
The better analogy you should be making is (Assuming American here) do you really miss the old growth forests and wild areas that were leveled to make room for your cities and agriculture?" And the answer is, yes obviously! That's why we have national parks. But unlike with wildlife, the sky cannot be partially conserved. It's all or nothing unless all the satellites are geosynchronous. And I guarantee they won't be.
Planes are more intrusive. Bigger, brighter, and there are more of them. But they still don't ruin the night sky. At least for me, for naked-eye stargazing, satellites are a non-issue.
> This could also be interpreted as resistance to change. Would the world be better if screens had not robbed people of the sensations of holding a physical book/magazine/newspaper? If electric or gas lighting had not filled the cities with light contamination? If planes and trains weren't making so much noise? If instant messaging hadn't replaced phone conversations?
I think these are all questions that could, and perhaps should, be asked and pondered. For screens, it's not so much the sensation but what they have enabled (i.e. the dopamine hitting notifications), though there is evidence that our brain interprets text differently, less deeply, on a screen.
Likewise, I do think light pollution is bad, and perhaps we would be better if we took steps to minimize light pollution.
Same with noise pollution. I know I read that even low levels of noise pollution can heighten things like anxiety and drive a flight or fight response constantly. I for one look forward to electric vehicles in hopes that some of the noise pollution does die down, and think it will be better for many even if they don't realize it now.
Likewise, there's also evidence that interacting via messaging is robbing us of empathy, because we never hear other people's voices and learn to interpret body language cues and cue in on how others are feeling.
They're all questions that could, and should, be discussed and not just dismissed out of hand. In some respects, I truly think the Amish and the Luddites (who weren't necessarily against technology, but how it would be used and its long term cost-benefit ratio) took the correct approach to it.
It's not resistance to change, though. It's interpreting whether the benefits of that change are worth the downsides that come with it.
Doing cost-benefit analysis of new technologies is a good idea. More often than not for the majority of people the answer is "obviously worth it", and that can give an impression of out-of-hand dismissal. I for one would take all the downsides you mentioned and then some over the Amish lifestyle and it's not even close.
I don't think the majority of people actually do a full cost-benefit analysis, in particularly with the way advertising works. And doubly so with screens and the way things have slowly changed to become more addicting. That also assumes that all the costs and benefits are well known.
That said, I'm not sure I would take the Amish lifestyle as well, but it's definitely a close choice and I think they live more intentionally and that's something to be preserved. There are quite a few tradeoffs I would take though -- dropping text messaging for phone calls, for one; changing the way our cities are lighted to decrease light pollution; and definitely decreasing noise pollution.
it's all subjective I suppose but your analogy is describing trading one human invention for another. but in this case we lose yet another connection to the natural world outside our own making -- and increase the inward facing, solipsistic bent of humanity.
Yet, looking forward, if Mars and the Moon get colonized, a swarm of satellites would be the quickest way to wire a whole planet, a whole network of planets. That would be the most looking outward humanity has done so far.
"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!" – Emerson, Nature, 1836
I love the night sky, so much that I want to go there and SpaceX is closer to making that possible than anyone. Starlink is an essential part of that.
From what I've seen, the satellites are barely visible to the naked eye, and that mainly near the horizon. They're not going to turn the sky into a flickering mass of satellites.
As I said elsewhere, that might be true for Starlink. But the first corporation that discovers it's cheaper to pay the fine than making it so they're not visible to the naked eye will do it without a moment's hesitation, and nothing will happen to them and then the night sky will be ruined for everyone. And more will follow suit. It's a conversation that needs to be had now, before that happens.
This assumes satellite constellations will actually effect the night sky, which it does not appear to generally be the case. From what I understand, it's easier to remove satellites from images than airplanes
Go out on a clear night in any reasonably dark place and look up. The satellites are there, faint tiny moving stars. The human eye is not a camera. The human soul is not an SD card.
The post to which I was replying framed the problem as affecting imaging devices. I was introducing a new angle which is the human side, which was admittedly not part of the original article but nevertheless felt important to the conversation.
Starlink might not but I'm less optimistic about future ones. Who's to say that some company realizes they'll just get a (relatively) small fine if they skip the step that lowers visibility and decide it's worth the cost from a profit standpoint? It already happens now with pollution and I don't see companies changing.
Not to mention that many satellites are already visible to the naked eye in dark areas.
Living in "rural" Canada, 7 miles from a municipality of 160,000 people, getting Starlink a few months ago has been an absolute quantum leap in terms of our connectivity.
In the 7 years living here our LTE internet plans have literally gotten twice as expensive: with plans going from 100GB total bandwidth up/down for ~$165CAD (after tax) to 50GB total bandwidth up/down for the same price.
During that time I've seen nothing but empty promises and talk by political parties and telecoms. Apparently they're spending millions and doing something, but I haven't seen any results other than taxes going up, and data plans shrinking.
In that same time period Space-X and Starlink have literally redesigned space flight and created an entirely new telecom paradigm.
I only hope Starlink starts to offer home phone service in addition to internet to further erode the market of incumbents here in Canada.
As much as I wish everyone in the globe a beautiful unblemished view of the night sky, a couple of thoughts:
(IANAA - I am not an astronomer)
* Light pollution in cities already affects the majority of the global population.
* There are already satellites in the night sky. It seems like a slippery slope of drawing a line when it becomes a problem.
* Astronomy for cutting edge R&D/exploration already seem to be limited by terrestrial astronomy - islands in the pacific are denying access to culturally important mountain tops for new telescopes, atmospheric distortion, cloud cover, light pollution from cities
* Isn't the prospect of cheaper commercial spaceflight potentially better for research astronomy? Let's get these telescope platforms into space!
Anyway, as with everything, I suspect military control/government security considerations will end up being the overriding decision making factor governing these sorts of global mega-constellations rather than such noble and pure pursuits as preserving the nights sky.
If your government is bad at installing fiber/high-speed internet connectivity to a not-so-rural town of 160,000, you have to fix your government, don't just throw money at global unregulated corporations. This is a common thread in the US/Canada where governments are so bad at their job that people just came to hate the idea of public infrastructure as a result.
Sure I believe that. It's happening more and more around the world.
The problem is that the alternative isn't democratically elected, can't be held accountable for what it's doing and doesn't have any incentives to consider a long-term view that considers the well-being of all citizens.
This is really required. I do some amateur astrophotography in India where Starlink is not even operational yet and have already seen their satellites in my long exposures a couple times.
Light pollution from the ground already ruins this wonderful hobby (and stargazing) for so many around the world, adding sky based pollution on top of that would be truly terrible.
I recognise all the benefits these satellite constellations provide us, but at what cost?
Starship is going to launch the equivalent of 1000 Hubble’s with 10 years.
You’re thinking too small, this constellation is part of what enables you to someday go to space yourself and have your own observatory on the dark side of the moon etc.
Not everyone wants to go space, there is something nice about enjoying the stars from your own backyard or on a camping trip. I think this comes close to space pollution if they aren’t able to provide a tangible benefit to people on earth.
Surely inexpensive global high speed internet access is a tangible benefit. Even seems to offer a tangible benefit on that camping trip by increasing likelihood that you could contact someone in an emergency. Cell towers for hiker safety could be put in current dead zones. Not to mention as pointed out elsewhere, these aren't visible all the time so you could still enjoy the stars.
I fully agree with respect to global high speed internet. However, I'd point out that if being able to contact someone in an emergency even in remote locations is someone's concern, that technology already exists in the form of personal locator beacons (which can also send and receive texts) using existing satellites.
Sure. Absolutely existing geosync satellites exist, the iridium network exists. They are not very accessible tech, and neither would be used to stand up an emergency tower. And maybe it's just my impression, but it seems when I read stories of someone lost in the wilderness, it's often people who don't take precautions, are casual hikers. And for them, having a cellphone that functions, with maps, text and calls, could be lifesaving.
As a personal note, a relative was doing coastal sailing (US east coast, bahamas), and while he wanted access to the iridium network for maps and emergency contact, he couldn't afford the data rates and device costs. He settled for downloaded maps and checking in by cellphone when possible. So, if he was lost out in the crossing to the bahamas, there would have been no contact. (yes, I realise that at present, Starlink is not yet offering ability to move around with your dish, so RV and boats are out of luck for now, apart from the possibility that more towers may spring up)
Something like the Garmin inReach is pretty accessible these days. A few hundred dollars for the device and as low as about $12/month for the subscription. If I did a lot of solo stuff in out of the way areas, I'd probably have one.
That said, I agree that casual hikers doing dumb things and getting lost definitely happens. But cell phone reception is hardly a panacea. Just because you can call 911 doesn't mean that someone is going to come get you if the conditions are bad. I actually have very mixed feeling with the newish assumption a lot of people have that their cell phone will always work and that, worst case, they can just call for help.
Their costs are moderately higher than existing broadband right now (if you aren't rural), but in news articles I read in past as they upgrade the satellites for more simultaneous connections the goal is to have a lot more subscribers at much lower costs.
Also, for remote areas of the world it would be a choice between this and nothing else.
Even if you were sharing the starlink dish with a few thousand other households to bring the cost down to affordable for your area, you'd still have an improvement over nothing.
>I think this comes close to space pollution if they aren’t able to provide a tangible benefit to people on earth.
But they are providing a tangible benefit to people on Earth. Maybe it doesn't benefit you personally or you think the costs outweigh those benefits so it is a net negative, but let's not pretend that there is zero benefit.
> But they are providing a tangible benefit to people on Earth. Maybe it doesn't benefit you personally or you think the costs outweigh those benefits so it is a net negative, but let's not pretend that there is zero benefit.
I don't know the answer and yet think the way we have normally answered such cost/benefit decisions is through government. Currently, we don't have a government where people make decisions based on what's best for the planet or at even just for all of humanity. Perhaps one could argue the UN or other global agreements, but I don't think, in their current forms, they have the ultimate say.
> 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) [0]
Blocking usability of LEO is not ideal, but blocking launches is really not the risk.
Not really...Either Starlink and the rest fail, and the skies clear up again shortly as failed projects get de-orbited. Or they succeed and there will be many established bases in space for research and telescopes.
It's not like the funds from Starlink are going to be used to build casinos in the desert or something. Every $ earned is going back into building better space tech. So if it fails no problem for space views from Earth, and if it succeeds the result is cheap access to space views from space.
AFAIK SpaceX and Elon have said Starlink profits will fund their Mars exploration plans. That effectively hands-on astronomy! ;-)
On a more serious note, if you get the infrastructure going to get a lot of hardware and people to Mars, then getting some more modern space observatories should be quite easy.
First, I never said that. Please read my comment again. Second, Starlink exists to fund the start of a permanent self-sustaining colony of millions of people on Mars. I'm not sure how they would get to that without also doing and supporting a lot of astronomy research along the way.
Your assumptions continue but to be unsupported by sources, but rather, blind fanboyism.
Do you have proof that Starlink profits will go towards funding a Mars colony? Or that research into astronomical observations will be required for building a space colony? Or even if so, the overlap somehow helps astronomers on earth?
> Do you have proof that Starlink profits will go towards funding a Mars colony?
Funding transportation to Mars to enable establishing the colony, and the question should be, do you have evidence this is not the case? Because this was what Musk/SpaceX have been saying since Starlink was barely an idea, and I haven't seen anyone prove they're lying.
> Every $ earned is going back into building better space tech.
And to the shareholders. Who may choose to build casinos in the desert with that money.
> ... and if it succeeds the result is cheap access to space views from space.
It's more accurate to say it will give us access to space views from space at the highest cost that the market will bear. I assure you this cost will be well above what 95% of the world will be able to afford for quite some time. After all, much of the world can't even afford regular flight.
> And to the shareholders. Who may choose to build casinos in the desert with that money.
There's a reason SpaceX isn't public, and it's precisely that. Starlink was, since its conception, and still is, a way to fund the R&D for opening access to Mars.
Rural internet access for a minority. Granted, it's awesome for those that now get high speed internet for the first time, but if rather we didn't pretend this was globally relevant.
Pricing eliminates starlink for poorer regions where it'd be needed most (by a factor of at least 10). Personally, id really rather avoid it because who in their right mind would trade eu privacy for us rules by switching to a us based isp.
That's a subjective question. Different people value different things and have differing preferences and priorities. At best, it depends on our goals. This is why these things need to be dealt with publicly and democratically.
Its not subjective question though, lot things (including working with the govt services) are moving online even in India. Having reasonably good internet connectivity is now a necessity.
First, if a state requires internet connectivity then it's their responsibility to provide it.
Second, just because somone's being forced to need something doesn't mean they don't ultimately value something else more.
Third, even valuing your survival over destruction of the commons is a subjective preference, so yeah, it's always subjective.
Anyway, this all needs to be worked out demoratically with all information and options, not by authoritarians forcing limited choices onto people.
> if a state requires internet connectivity then it's their responsibility to provide it.
That sounds good on paper but it does now work like that in real life, in India or the US people who live far away from metro regions, providing connectivity is not an important topic for getting votes so you wont see politicians fighting for it. So Democracy is not going to solve that.
I dont know about you but if there is a question about my survival then its not subjective to me, maybe you dont value your life but I do.
LEO satellites like StarLink are in earths shadow most of the night. Which means you can avoid unlimited satellites, you just need to wait longer to start and end well before dawn.
For astronomy, aim up. The closer to the horizon the longer their visible before and after sunset. The sky rotates at night and at different times of the year so the overwhelming majority of things are still observable without any satellites.
Also, this is almost exclusively about about wide angel shots. You can still do ultra long exposure closeups of various things, at worse you might need to cover the shutter for a few seconds while a satellite moves into and out of the shot but even that’s generally avoidable.
But what if something I want to click is near the horizon? For example trying to get a shot of the sky with mountains in the frame. Avoiding the parts where the satellites are is not a viable solution most of the times.
I agree it’s an going to show up in nighttime photography. You need better timing, manually remove them from photos, or take extra shots etc.
I am simply saying it’s not a major impediment for amateur Astronomy as you can time things to capture a clean picture of most objects as long as you time them so their above the horizon.
Also, if you want to aim for a mountain in long exposure all the stars are going to be smeared in the photo. If it’s short exposure their going to look like just another star.
Use Photoshop. Look I appreciate that astronomers, whether professional or hobbyists, may be inconvenienced by more satellites. But the odds that the public/governments will prioritize this over potentially much better rural broadband connectivity is approximately zero.
Things rotating up is only true for stuff that is close to the Eastern or Western horizon. And yes different times of the year help a lot, but there is plenty of objects that are only visible a bit over the horizon at the best of times. Source: have help a radio astronomer with source visibility calculations.
Sure, and Polaris is never visible from Australia etc. But, it’s a much weaker argument to say these constellations limit observations by less than 10%.
The reality is there is real impact, but no where near as bad as many generally portrayed. Imagine some senator canceling funding for new ground based telescopes because they heard these satellites would render them useless.
I have heard astronomers estimating it at up to 30% of the observing time for existing optical telescopes. Note that this is the instrument class that has t to 20 times as many proposals as they can actually observe.
Professional astronomers observe during the daytime too, using radio or microwave. Mega-constellations impinge on their ability to do science, especially for techniques like VLBI, where there's no obvious way to remove satellites from the data.
That applies to all satellites not simply large arrays. Large constellations all on the same frequencies aren’t even close to 1:1 as bad as normal satellites.
That isn’t strictly true. There are changes to the design of the instrument that the makers could’ve incorporated that would be better at dealing with the effects of satellite trails which has been a thing since Sputnik. They chose not to implement that capability, even though satellite constellations and proposed mega constellations have been a thing since well before Vera Rubin was designed.
Maybe I am a bit naive, but I don't understand how this is a big problem. Sure it would have been a problem in the past where long exposures were captured to film, where one satellite streak may overexpose the entire frame. But in the digital era, it will always be 100% known where the satellites were at a given point in time, so why can't software be used to exclude the affected frames and pixels for analysis? Surely that would not result in a very large amount of data being lost?
It's mostly solved for well-funded researchers with modern professional-grade telescopes and professional-grade analysis software. That's far from pervasive.
"100% known" is overstating the situation, there's no easy-to-use API for an amateur to query location, date and time, alignment, frames, and pixels to get the location of satellites.
Amateurs with basic software - or researchers who don't have the funding/equipment/software triad - just pointing a DSLR at the sky have to manually stack their images, for these users it's far easier to use a long exposure. The other problem is that sensor thermal and atmospheric noise vs. photon signal ratio is mitigated by long exposures in a way that's not the same as stacking short-exposure images, each with their own changing contribution to noise.
If we're talking about the tradeoffs between feasibility of astronomy as a whole versus the interests of (potential) users of satellite internet, that may be an interesting debate, but if it's a situation where professional astronomy at major scientific institutions would be mostly okay but just amateur astronomers would be shafted, then I'm afraid that the debate would be very one-sided. Telecommunications is arguably more important for societies than astronomy - that might be debated, but they're definitely more important than amateur astronomy.
Amateur astronomers are a sufficiently small niche with limited practical influence so that any society - no matter if democratic or authoritarian - would IMHO quickly decide that sacrificing the whole hobby of amateur astronomy as such would be a trivial cost to pay for even small practical gains in rural telecommunications (which affect far, far more people than amateur astronomers), otherwise it would be a tail wagging the dog. Amateur astronomers can have their voice heard - and taken into account if it's not too difficult (e.g. the changes in Starlink satellite coloring to reduce brightness is a good example) but they do not get veto rights. Their interests matter if there are no conflicts, but when multiple interests collide, the niche community will likely have to concede.
You might convince societies that certain results of astronomy are essential and should not be traded away, but if these important results can be obtained even if "researchers who don't have the funding/equipment/software" are excluded, well, then excluding them is a plausible (and even likely) option and amateur astronomers will have to just take it and tolerate satellite streaks in their pictures.
Perfect exclusion is impossible. Even if you know how much photons you're going to get from a satellite, physics dictates you will actually get a close, but not necessarily exact number; this uncertainty alone can be many times larger than the entire number of photons you get from a faint star, essentially destroying the observation. Many estimates are talking about 1/3 of the entire useful observational time being discarded at many critical instruments, for only one mega-constellation of the Starlink size.
>But in the digital era, it will always be 100% known where the satellites were at a given point in time
This has little to do with the digital era, and a lot more to do with the Cold War. (and it's far from 100%)
> Many estimates are talking about 1/3 of the entire useful observational time being discarded at many critical instruments, for only one mega-constellation of the Starlink size.
Can you provide a citation for one or more of these estimates? The only public estimate I've come across (not that I've been looking) was under 4% for Starlink and OneWeb [1].
It has to do with design of the vera Rubin telescope imager. Because it uses CCD instead of CMOS (which has become useful scientifically in the last few decades), it is susceptible to light bloom washing out a whole row of pixels or more. They could’ve adjusted for the possibility of satellite trails (which have been a thing since Sputnik) and taken into account the possibility that satellite constellations would increase over time (after all, there are several LEO constellations in orbit already for over a decade and mega constellations have been proposed since the 1980s and 1990s), but they chose not to. Which is fine, perhaps. Other mitigations are possible.
That works when there are only a few thousand satellites, or when you have a very low FOV, but once you have 100k+ satellites or you are doing a sky survey that becomes unfeasible.
Because telescopes are so sensitive that the reflections of a bright satellite inside the optics bascially ruin all pixels in the frame. And there is so many satellite that all frames close to dusk/dawn are impacted. So you loose 1/3 of your observing time. And all of the time in which you are geometrically most likely to find object on orbits that intersect the Earth orbit.
The natural place for truly undisrupted observation is going to be the far side of the Moon, so let's put an observatory or two there and stop quibbling about LEO.
This is fine for really high budget astronomy, but anyone not having access to billions of funding will be out of luck. Not to speak of possible territorial conflicts on the moon, so billions might even not help you if you happen to be in the wrong country. Stargazers or hobby astronomers might as well just look at a desktop background ...
That's not to say we should not build a observatory there - this is a good idea[0]. But it does not solve most of the issues these satellites pose.
[0] Though a space station might solve a lot of similar issues without the need to land and take off.
Commercial use is going to be prioritized over hobbyists in any domain. Think about what the reaction would be if drone pilots wanted to add restrictions to airline routes so that they could use the airspace. I don't really see how this is any different.
It's not just hobbyists. Earth-based observatories have to contend with light pollution in many locations. And while, in some cases, there have been mitigations, astronomers aren't going to get cities to turn off their lights every night in general.
Tourist flights to the moon will be $1-2 mil/person in 2035 ($1000 or so in today’s money). College students will get to visit and set up their own experiments as part of their billion dollar tuition.
This was exactly what I was thinking. Space is big and we don't use it as much as we should. Let's fix that instead of taking the Internet from people who need it.
As if millions of people around the world are benefiting from low cost satellite internet.
Space should be open for all - nobody should be able to restrict vision. I won't be surprised if we have to use weaponry to remove these satellites in the future. Space boundaries will be a hot topic in the future.
> As if millions of people around the world are benefiting from low cost satellite internet.
Do you have any numbers? I don't, but in my country of 11 million people, the dictatorship got scared last week of popular protests and cut out the Internet for everybody. How I wish they didn't have that power.
"This is impressive, but it's crazy that we've let China beat us in the race to universal broadband. The US needs to catch up!"
The "SpaceX fanboy" mindset is about a belief that humanity has a future outside the earth. Not about jingoism. I've seen literally nobody rooting for the Chinese space station to fail, or the Chinese rovers to crash on Mars.
Maybe, but what I see from Musk fans is a lot of statistics and reality bending.
so, on short example,you have dudes in big cities with more shit internet then me in a village in eastern Europe so they are pushing for 10000+ of satellites to pollute the entire planet because they and their elected people are incapable of running some cables.
Sure, put internet satellites up for the people in isolated places but use the right tool for the job and use cables for the rest, you will use less satellites in the end.
Also maybe we should demand this satellites to be placed in a stable geocentrically orbit so it only affects the country of origin.
(1) Latency would be extremely high in geosynchronous orbit. It's a very high orbit.
(2) Geosynchronous only works for countries on the equator. There's no such thing as a stable orbit at any orbital inclination (ie, you cannot cover Canada at all).
>(1) Latency would be extremely high in geosynchronous orbit. It's a very high orbit.
Is still a shit thing, because of bad infrastructure you have to pollute the sky , make many things harder for astronomers
, so population needs to pay more for better software and ground telescopes AND the cherry on top the Musk fans suggest we pay him billions so he can gracefully fix the issue by lifting some telescopes into space (though I am not sure SpaceX can do this yet)
Giant satellite swarms will enable space based astronomy at an unprecedented scale. Instead of complaining that we’re putting stuff in space why aren’t astronomers trying to get more telescopes added into next launches? Is there any instrument of astronomy that benefits from being on the surface under the atmosphere instead of up in clear space?
There are some (that are also likely not affected by Starlink at all)! Some observe high energy particles as they produce visible ligh as they break in the atmosphere. Also some neutrino telescopes use a lot of water or ice to observe neutrino collision with the given dense yet transparent mass.
Fiber latency is way lower and doesn’t require the sharing of ambient spectrum. Society loses little by curtailing for-profit retail ISP satellite deployment.
Not sure what you mean about ambient spectrum, but Starlink has better theoretical latency than fibre over large distances once they have inter-satellite laser links.
There are also huge areas of the Earth's surface that are hard to or not worth running fibre to. E.g. very remote areas or moving bodies like ships, motor homes and aircraft.
Those members of society wanting to live a more rural life will benefit directly. Those in countries without expensive infrastructure will also benefit.
Fiber optics obviously use light so I didn’t want to use the term ‘spectrum’ exclusively. The idea I want to communicate is that shared wireless channels have to be regulated by the FCC and similar groups.
Starlink presently has real-world latency that is comparable to VDSL in the best of cases. It is superior to other satellite-based networks that operate at higher altitudes, but not to terrestrial fiber optics if you compare like for like (ie, a comparison of theoretical maxima).
Obviously a ship would not be a good candidate for a fiber line. That said, many developing and/or rural communities will eventually get fiber anyway, so we as a society and as voters should push for a concerted effort to do it sooner rather than later. A good beachhead would be fiber to 5G base stations in remote areas. Latin America and Africa have surprisingly strong wireless data infrastructure. The existing market for distributing phones and wireless services (often a kiosk in a shopping center or a SIM card from a corner store) can also be used to distribute modems, no satellite dishes involved.
That’s not to say Starlink lacks utility, but it wouldn’t be my first suggestion for rural or developing areas. (For what it’s worth, I have lived in both.)
Fiber construction is $6,000/HHP for dense suburban deployment and much much higher for rural. So a meaningful chunk of the world's rural population may not be able to afford the NRE. Getting the world high speed Internet is going to require a battery of solutions. The real competition for LEO satcomms is a 5G cell site a few miles away with fiber backhaul.
For long distances satellite is in principle faster than fiber since the speed of light is significantly lower in the latter due to the high index of refraction.
The length of the hop is almost always far shorter with fiber though. With satellite, you have to go to space to receive Akamai-delivered content, game with other people in your neighborhood, or hit your ISP’s DNS cache. Don’t get so caught up in the physics that you forget to consider the implementation.
The Starlink satellites weight about 200+ kg and have big solar arrays to power their electric thrusters. I'm sure they could squeeze in some space rated (or massively redundant) SSDs to provide some CDN capacity in some of the later revisions.
Wouldn't that end up costing $300k+ per house when you get to the really remote areas? I know some people that had to pay that amount to get a few houses connected up, and they weren't that far from civilization. Hard to imagine there is political will to spend that much taxpayer money on such a small portion of the population when it looks like Starlink will provide decent internet for a tiny fraction of the cost.
But providing practically every service to a rural person is more expensive, but we do it anyway since we like to have a somewhat equal living standard for our rural citizens. Hell, the same goes for suburbs too. In many cities, poorer urban areas end up being net tax positive compared to suburbs because of the extensive amount of low-density infrastructure required outside the core.
I think it’s more likely that you’d lay fiber to a backbone of 5G base stations and rent wireless modems to customers. This would work fairly well in non-mountainous areas.
Yeah. If there were truly no other options, I'd certainly be in favor of a debate about bringing near-universal broadband to people, in the same manner as electricity and telephones.
Of course, that only applies country by country and presumably leaves poorer countries SOL.
However, given that we do seem to have a good option with the tradeoff that there will be more satellites in LEO, that seems to be a reasonable tradeoff. There are already a lot of satellites in orbit, to say nothing of planes, and a lot of light pollution. So this idea that we're besmirching the virgin night sky seems... overwrought.
I think this is one of those problems where the only solution is to go forward. Astronomy will be done in the future off-Earth. It will take a long time to get there, but that's the real solution.
Individuals and companies need permits from their respective governments, but the governments can launch (or permit their citizens/companies to launch) pretty much anything they want that does not disrupt other countries spacecraft and does not fall on their land. They can also deny permits for any arbitrary reasons, though multinational companies might seek another "flag nation" in that case.
In general, the United Nations, by means of the International Telecommunications Union, coordinates orbital assignments between member nations [1]. In the US, the FCC mediates for the American satellites to the ITU, so the FCC, as a member of the ITU, approves satellite orbital assignments [2]. In addition, the FAA plays a role in approving satellite launches as a matter of air traffic and safety, etc. [3]. The FAA doesn't get involved once the satellite is in space though.
As an example, one US company got in legal hot water by trying to skirt around the FCC in getting its satellites to orbit [4].
The trick is that they don't just need the FCC for the orbit clearances the FCC also deals with spectrum management in the US and Starlink needs similar approval to have (legal) nodes in any country they want to have customers in.
How much light pollution will this actually create? I've read that SpaceX wants to launch 40k satellites that are 200 miles above earth. Each satellite is the size of a table. Could one see a table-sized satellite 200 miles away? Also given the surface area of the earth, the satellite density would be something like one every 50k square miles. How meaningful is that when it comes to light polution down at the surface of earth? How about for astronomers?
The issue is for long exposure capture needed for quality astronomy. In that context any reflection from the sun on a satellite can trash any shot in an instant. SpaceX has tried to reduce the reflectivity of the Starlink sats but they still are a factor. Supposedly it was actually really bad at first.
Does that actually affect real science, or is it just a matter of astophotographers wanting a nice picture without streaks? It's not like long exposures have to be done on film these days. Anomalous light sources can be removed in software.
I think if this is affecting basic science it's a real concern, but if it's just a matter of making long exposures of galaxies and nebulas less pretty then I have a hard time being overly concerned about it.
Won't there be a lot of constellations up there, possibly soon-ish? I can't imagine SpaceX will remain the only ones who can do this for very long. They are very innovative, but once they figure out how to make those cheap launches a boring process, I guess espionage will take care of transferring that knowledge elsewhere.
When it becomes clear what such a constellation can do, no doubt it will become a strategic asset – no way the Chinese will be content to just buy access from a US company.
Militaries will be very interested – put cheap-ish sensing capabilities on those birds, or decent ones on some, and you get a pretty decent global surveillance network on top of very useful infrastructure and low-latency, possibly even quite covert global communication infra that can't be taken out with existing tech.
And maybe some of those constellations will use higher orbits and care less about the night sky, and that's it for spotting the Milky Way without a computer processing out the bright flashes. That's not a happy thought.
There will be no debate. This is just another commons, and we all know what happens to the commons when private industry is given a free pass to exploit them. It'll be just another tragedy.
I really wonder if this is a real issue or not or is some edge cases being hyped up and being projected as a grave crisis?
For example while in earth shadow these satellites would be dark and not visible. Only in cases where observer on dark side earth surface while satellite is at elevation still able catch the sun, would these satellite be visible?
Somewhere I read that there are two kinds of arguments or dialogue that can be made: scientific (or rational) and poetic. One must be very careful of those who insidiously offer a poetic argument in the guise of a scientific argument. I fear that's what might be happening with the arguments on this subject.
This is what a telescope sees when Starlink crosses it's view during an observation. They have a picture of what they look like in the article too btw...
I don't deny that under certain conditions it can appear in images. But these conditions need to be weighed in while discussing the merits on this issue. And the article is silent on this.
From this image it looks like they'll be visible pretty high in the sky so it'll be an issue over a significant portion of the sky. If you've ever looked at the ISS that orbits below the Starlink constellation so it's more in the Earth's shadow than the Starlink constellation will be and it's visible all over the night sky.
If orbital launches are cheap enough to make these mega constellations economically viable, then we should be having the debate about moving commercial astronomy into space.
Until we get a space elevator, our most sensitive optical telescopes will be terrestrial. Space is hard, and modern telescopes have enormous optical elements.
The situation isn't quite so bad as requiring a space elevator, since we can apparently use interferometry to combine the power of several smaller telescopes. However as I understand it, we lack the capability to do this on satellites at present and there are unique challenges to address.
From what I see there, the largest mirror is 30m. JWST has a 6.5m mirror. Assuming that 6.5m is the largest that can be launched at once (which is probably not true, and will be less so when Starship is operational), it would take 25 launches to get a 30m diameter meter built. 25 launches from SpaceX costs $1.5 billion, which is in the budgetary realm of space telescopes. So I don't think it's as far fetched as you think.
Yes, the famously operational JWST. The telescope that should be used as a benchmark for how to implement an orbital system on time, under budget, and if I may be so bold: easily. /s
1) You're talking about replacing existing capabilities.
2) It's easy to spend someone else's money.
Those terrestrial telescopes are paid for, built, and running. Finding funding for them was really hard the first time around, and do you think constellation operators will spring for the replacement costs?
I'm not saying it's technically impossible to replace all of our terrestrial telescopes because some people want to make a lot of money from the commons of our night sky, but $1.5 billion is just for the launches. It doesn't include design, fabrication, assembly, testing, or contingencies.
JWST is the cutting edge of space telescopes, hasn't actually been successfully deployed and now you're suggesting building and launching 25+ of them and then assembling them in orbit.. Right now the only things 'built' in space are all handled by astronauts on the ISS assembling things by hand which adds on the conservative end a staggering amount of cost to the budget. Add on to that that now you have a much harder job of building any new experiments to run on this monster space telescope which is a fairly common thing for ground observatories. We're many steps away from being able to move the best ground observatories into space and get equivalent data out of them.
The idea of assembling large space telescopes is very exciting, although there are obviously many engineering challenges to solve. What that doesn't yet address is large, ground based radio telescopes. Consider the square kilometer array, which will have one million square meters of observing surface. How many launches would it take to get something comparable into orbit? Oddly, the bandwidth requirements (about one terabyte/second) for the SKA might be the hardest thing to meet in space.
> we should be having the debate about moving commercial astronomy into space.
What on earth is "commercial astronomy"? Nearly all astronomy is either publicly funded, research for public benefit, or hobbyist. Which part of that do you believe is "commercial" in any way?
What if Elon started putting telescopes on the back of every starlink satellite and provided the raw live data as a public service? I think there would be plenty of bandwidth to spare for this sort of mission enhancement.
The undersides are going to have to be painted in vantablack or something similar. Then I’m sure people will notice dark streaks on their photos. But it will at least be a bit better.
They've trialed a couple darker bottomed satellites but they still left streaks across the images. If you get too black the satellites will need bigger heat management fins which can also catch light along with the solar panels.
Astronomy is nice to have, but it absolutely pales in comparison to the things satellite swarms can bring us on earth. The cost is well worth it, and if astronomy is affected the solution will have to be more reliance on space-based observation.
That's speculative and subjective, hence the debate.
I actually disagree to some degree as well, as there are more costs associated with these constellations than just missed photo opportunities for people's hobbies. Knowing the effect a single cheap kitchen microwave can have, I worry about what these constellations may mess up with regard to physics research. Important discoveries can be delayed to the detriment of everyone, and in exchange we just get cheaper faster internet out in the boonies for a small portion of the population.
Astronomy may or may not be humanities savior on a larger timescale. I think it's worth debating if we shouldn't just accept poor connectivity in the middle of nowhere as a feature as opposed to a bug.
Nearly half of humanity doesn't have Internet access, not a few rednecks in the boonies. That's billions of people, the world is much larger then the US.
And it's not even just some rednecks in the boonies in the US either. My dad's house in Maine is just 10 minutes from a fairly sizable city (by Maine standards). He can get maybe 1Mbps down and the houses further down the road can't get wired Internet at all. Cell phone reception is also almost non-existent.
Being ten minutes from a city, it seems a single cell tower would solve the issue much better than a satellite no? In that instance, satellites feel like a work around for poor development practices (whether that be city or state regulation, or provider investment) than a reasonable solution.
Maybe, there aren't enough houses to justify the cost, sure. I figured that probably wasn't the case given the proximity to a city.
I'm not arguing that a satellite solves the problem of remote data access generally, they definitely do. My original question was whether or not that specific use case is worth the cost to science.
They don't solve access generally, so the other threads which reference large swaths of the planet not having internet yet feel beside the point to me. The vast majority of humanity lives in densely populated areas, and therefore these satellite based systems still won't solve that problem.
Yes, but these constellations aren't designed to serve 'everyone without internet', they are designed to serve areas with low population density where physical connections are financially infeasible, hence my usage of 'boonies'.
It's perhaps worth noting that Starlink is about much more than network access in remote areas. The laser links between satalites should enable a considerable improvement in intercontinental transmission, both bandwidth and latency.
That's simply not true. The throughput provided by starlink absolutely pales in comparison to an optical fibre link. AFAIK current plans might look at 100 Gbps transponders for the interlinks (I think it might even just be 10 Gbps). Even if they go to future 800 G or 1T transponders (which is questionable if it's possible, especially because most of the constellation needs this, so a whole exchange of satellites would be required), that's still much less than 70 Tbps that can be transmitted through a single fibre over submarine distances, and a submarine cable typically contains tens to hundreds of fibres.
So in short starlink will have no influence on available crosscontinental bandwidth.
Source: I research on optical fibre and space communication
If you're using the satellites purely as continental links, then the overall number needed would be much much lower, as you could plan service areas as opposed to trying to services the entire surface of the planet.
Which is much more expensive and risky, just look at the Hubble($4.7B) failure recently, or the Kepler ($600M) failures before that. How many years (decades?) has James Webb($8.8B) telescope been in development? Ground based can't be easily replaced by space based and will leave lots of people and nations out of astronomy, which will truly be a terrible loss.
I'll just point out that not all ground-based astronomy is affected. Satellites are only visible when the sky is dark but the satellite is not in Earth's shadow, so only observations at dusk and dawn are affected.
Are you sure this is true? You can frequently see satellites in the dead of night. Further, they show up quite plainly in non-visible wavelengths like radio or infrared even during the day.
The parent post said that only observations at dusk and dawn are affected. I'm pointing out that, even at astronomical midnight, large fractions of the sky aren't in earth's shadow. For other wavelengths the shadow is irrelevant, since satellites contaminate data even without the sun's direct illumination.
Well sure, at high latitudes and during certain seasons that may be true for higher altitude LEO satellites (Starlink is fairly low), but if we’re talking corner cases, sometimes the surface of the Earth isn’t in Earth’s shadow at astronomical midnight (land of the midnight sun).
Corner cases don’t really count as “frequent,” however.
That traditional space telescope cost is heavily driven by how expensive space launch used to be, which is already changing now.
Also with the upcoming RLVs in space repair or retrieval and redeployment might also become an option, this time much more affordable than with the Shuttle.
My point is that not every use case is viable for space telescopes due to cost, next to impossible repairs, required technology, etc. They can't replace ground based observations completely.
Starship (which will get its bread and butter from Starlink) actually WOULD enable much cheaper space telescopes, cheaper repairs and maintain by astronauts. Starlink satellites themselves are very inexpensive and show there’s no fundamental reason why space hardware MUST be extremely expensive compared to ground hardware.
Space telescopes could actually be cheaper than ground telescopes if SpaceX succeeds in reducing cost of human spaceflight to their goals. Space telescopes don’t need massive structures to keep the mirror from deforming under gravity, they don’t need advanced adaptive optics to adjust for seeing, they can point almost anywhere in the sky and can observe objects day and night without weather or seasonal concerns.
I find the naivity inherent in believing the claims of starlink being almost humanitarian by bringing cheap Internet to the unconnected masses fascinating. Satellite constellation are still extremely expensive way of deploying Internet even if (and that's a big if) spacex brings costs down by an order of magnitude.
The users of these constellations will not be the unconnected masses, it will be users with big pockets, military, intelligence, and large enterprise who operate in remote areas (i.e. mining and oil). Also who are the early adopters who bring down launch costs of constellations for everyone by paying a premium? I doubt starlink has the deep pockets needed. No it will be intelligence services who'd love satelitte constellations capable of near real time surveillance from LEO orbit.
Somehow nobody talks about this in their fawning over Musks latest tweets. And let's not even talk about the environmental impact of largely increases rocket launches.
Strongly disagree with this. If Earth based infrastructure was better there wouldn't be as much need for satellite based services at this scale. Depriving people of the opportunity to look at the natural sky, without it being besmirched by human objects, is a terrible downside.
It's bad enough that many people in light polluted cities can barely see major stars, never mind Andromeda or subtler constellations.
This just isn’t accurate. Starlink is only barely visible under certain conditions near sunrise and sunset and most of the time cannot be seen by the naked eye, due to SpaceX inventing and deploying sunshade technology to reduce satellite visibility to the visible limit.
I think there is a lot of miss information out there about star link. Yes it does affect large survey telescopes but for the most part it isn’t a huge impact on the actual naked eye visible night sky. ISS & other space stations are FAR easier to see, outshining out even the brightest stars vs Starlink which can only be seen a small portion of the time with the naked eye (once in operational orbit). It has absolutely no impact on reducing visibility of Andromeda or subtle constellations.
This isn't just Starlink. Of course, hopefully Starlink's satellites will adhere more closely to the agreed threshold in the future, but that isn't set in stone, and once this becomes a profitable industry it seems unlikely corners won't be cut and lawmakers lobbied like in any other sector.
Of course, even meeting the agreed threshold currently still renders them visible in telescopes, and that applies to amateurs as well.
I think it be good idea to have international rules and regulations with common sense limits to continue and improve upon what SpaceX has done voluntarily.
I don’t think it should be surprising or considered bad that you can see objects in space with telescopes. I don’t think we should stop sending stuff into space just because it’s detectable with sensitive instruments (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find ways to make scientific observations coexist). But I can definitely see an argument for limiting naked eye visibility.
This is another case where something freely available to all (the night sky) is being affected by the externalities of a for-profit business (satellite internet). In that sense, comparing these things directly is a bit "apples and oranges". And it's important to note that the profits of said business will accrue to a small number of US companies, while the costs will be borne (in a small way) by basically every human on earth. Did Musk ask them all if they're ok with the tradeoff? Are they all going to be compensated? Probably not, right?
How many of those who are saying that this is for the greater good could be bothered to call up and fight for local fiber. Comcast and ATT spend billions in a town and stall that and that ad campaign gets you side tracked.
Your inabilities at distinguishing the fake from truth shouldn't take away the night sky from all of us.
Go fight the big companies instead of sitting here and talking. Start a local WISP.
Stop waiting for the billionaires to save you.
This is exactly how the rich stay rich. By dividing us and preying on the natural resources.
Nobody goes and fights BSNL in India or the local telecoms in Philippines to establish better wireless links.
This is basically moving the goalposts from one duopoly to another one soon.
For those that haven't seen the sky, go take a trip to natural park. This is akin to saying, I don't use sea water because it is salty. Let some company mine to for oil, because it is for the "greater good"
Nobody should be apologizing for a company. Companies as is cause as much harm as possible. We need better regulation to put checks in these comments and rich ass billionaires who think the world is their toy.
I want a mesh of satellites around the earth. I’m a normal guy who’s has wanted that before anyone was doing it. I don’t think I was brain washed by the billionaire sat mesh propaganda, probably because it doesn’t exist. Huh.
I don’t think your position is very strong. Your team isn’t very large. The vast majority of people live in super light polluted areas, light pollution that takes a way bigger bite out of the night sky than sats ever will. And they don’t seem to care. Plus you have the fact that this emerging space industry, the only part of which you seem to be able to appreciate is low earth orbit, will bring people closer to space than ever before. So who are you to deny space and astronomy enthusiasts of the future the opportunity to actually be in space and experience the stars from there?
For real. Minimal changes to the night sky especially for people (majority) who aren’t into space. Revolution in prices that cascades to space telescopes and actual space tourism and multi planetary society. have you lost your mind?
I assume your motivation is (alongside with a bunch of us), "bring people closer to space than ever before", but you have provided no evidence, that polluting low earth orbit with arguably redudant satellites is a good approach.
You seem to imply that it will lead in "revolution in prices". I too, commend SpaceX for the landing boosters, but for now it doesn't reduce the price nowhere near enough to let humanity approach the space age. Starlink comparatively, IMO does nothing.
Seems like a per-satellite tax could incentivize reducing the number of satellites where possible, and could help fund some of the research hindered by too-many satellites.
The largest ground based mirrors are pushing 30m now while the largest space mirror we've built (but not launched) is the JWST at 6.5 which requires a complicated folding mechanism to achieve because it has to fit in a faring. So to make one 30m telescope in space we'd need around 20 JWST sized telescopes plus the cost of launching and assembling them in space which currently means using people. That's far from a small tax.
And perhaps that's something that needs to be discussed. I would absolutely love to see street lights be given a sort of 'shield' that reflects them downwards towards the ground. I'd also figure it could require them to use less energy if it reflected downward since so much of the light wouldn't be escaping. Could also go for red wavelengths like they do in some towns near where turtles hatch, so that they don't miss the moonlight needed to guide them to the water. I think there's many ways we could make cities darker while still keeping it light at ground level for pedestrians.
Granted, these are all just speculations on my part, but I feel there's a way somehow.
Also, many people who live on those lit streets would rather those street lights didn't exist, shining in their windows all night. I feel fortunate to live in an unincorporated urban area that's like a city in many ways but we don't have street lights nearby. Cities don't need to be illuminated 24/7.
Having one outside my window, I absolutely 100% agree. I just always hear the issues of "What about pedestrians being safe" (which isn't even an issue where I live; it's not a pedestrian street or anywhere near the city center area), so was trying to find a way to combat that. That's why I think some reflective shielding could do well, pointing the light where we want it to go, and also enable us to light with less energy and light needed in general.
For the night sky and astronomy the externality is not so great in the grand scheme, but if unmitigated it does mean that there will be fewer discoveries per taxpayer dollar sent to the NSF/NASA. I'm a postdoc in astronomy and am all aboard Starlink-style networking. But it also seems fair to me that SpaceX should be the party that's responsible for treating that externality with light pollution, or else it's the same old "privatize the gains and socialize the cleanup." We've already effectively achieved this for radio astronomy by regulating protected bands in the spectrum for passive listening.