The night sky is impacted far more by blinking airplane lights and city light pollution than a few satellites.

This has been a thing since the dawn of space travel. These at least provide a service that most people would benefit from, either directly through service or indirectly through increased competition.

Honestly, I think more people enjoy watching Iridium satellites than are perturbed by them.

We’re not talking about pollution in the sense of significant changes in the brightness of the night sky (as we are with true light pollution from cities). We’re talking about the fact that they’re detectable with the naked eye.

The thing with Iridium watchers is that there were a small number of them. Seeing one was exciting.

If all the Starlink satellites are this bright, the night sky will have more Starlink satellites than visible stars.

Iridium satellites were causing flares because of a design issue - their main antennas were essentially large mirrors. New generation of Iridium satellites fixed that issue (to my and other flare catchers' disappointment). I don't recall Starlink satellites to be designed to cause flares.

Someone has been doing calculations very wrong. That's not even close. https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1132672683974549505?re...

Starlink could provide global connectivity that can’t be censored or regulated in most countries - and that’s huge.

Starlink would have to comply with what the country they are transmitting to permits or doesn't if they don't want to get in all sorts of trouble. An effect that Starlink could have though, is, that people might protest censorship more because all that stands between them and freely accessing the internet is their government allowing import of receivers (instead of no cable or mobile available at all, ISPs, government, ...).

That's incorrect. They will need permission from countries to transmit to its areas.

Until they either get jammed or shot out of the sky

That and people using the service, even solely receiving can be tracked

While I understand this will have superb latency, it's still not clear to me why would Starlink be cheaper than existing VSAT. VSAT is quite expensive (starting from ~thousand dollars per month): http://www.melatnetworks.com/price-list.asp

Or those, with prices around 50usd/gb: https://www.vsat-systems.com/service-offerings/VAR-VNO-Deale...

Even if Starlink is 10x cheaper than existing VSAT it does not come even close to LTE cost. And we have 5g on the horizon.

The reason to expect Starlink to provide lower cost than VSAT is that SpaceX is currently paying less than $500k per functional Starlink sat (including both manufacturing and launch cost), and intends to dramatically reduce the cost from that before launching the larger stages of the constellation. In contrast, the geostationary satellites that are used by VSAT cost near billions per each.

This three orders of magnitude difference in cost can be expected to be reflected in the price of the service.

That’s simply not true. Viasat offers much lower cost per GB. The higher speed plans are less than $1 per GB. The cheapest plan is $50/40GB. That’s already far cheaper than mobile data.

Starlink and others are likely to significantly improve on that, too. Fundamental costs (especially for later versions) are cents per GB or lower, competitive with AWS transit fees.

Touché. Where can I find such offers?

This one: https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/viasat-reviews/

(look for "data cap") ...note that, for instance, the $50/month plan goes up to $70 after 3 months. But the data cap of 40GB is a soft cap.

It is much cheaper than I thought. Thanks!