I think everyone making these comments is going to be eating their words in about 10 years when orbital telescopes are so cheap and plentiful that even third grade classrooms will be booking time for observations.

A comment below explained that we don’t have the technical capabilities to launch a 30 meters diameter telescope in orbit. And we’ll probably not have that capability in 10 years either. The extremely large telescope being build in the Atacama desert is almost 40 meters in diameter.

Sure maybe it can be fun for a third grader to look into images made for them by a cheep satellite telescope, but professional astronomers will continue to need the larger telescopes that remain technologically impossible to lunch into space for the next decade, or few.

Will you also claim that cheaper transistors will lead to more compilers? Because that's the sort of thing you just claimed.

Every phone on the planet has at least one compiler built in.

So you measure the number of programs by the number of binary copies?

Without wanting to get involved in the purpose of your rhetorical question (the purpose being some kind of analogy to the StarLink situation)...

How many compilers were there back in the 60s? By codebase or by install count, your choice. Hundreds of codebases and tens of thousands of installs?

How about now? Tens of thousands of codebases and billions of installs?

Do you think this could have happened without lowering the cost of transistors pretty hugely? (circa 3e7-fold price decrease in 50 years)

Seems to me that lowering the cost of transistors DOES increase the number of compilers, whether by counting the number of distinct codebases, or by counting number of users, or counting number of installed copies, or number of times executed, or whatever.

Here's the logic: If space launches are expensive, you spend more on your satellite to make it worthwhile. Give it more features, etc. Then spend even more to make it extremely reliable, because replacing it would also be expensive (both the launch and the hardware itself). If launches are cheap and routine, you can just launch a cheap simple satellite for each type of sensor you want, and even if it fails you can launch backups (or just activate stand-bys already in orbit). You can even aggregate the sensor data from a swarm of smaller satellites to generate the view of a single large virtual telescope, potentially bigger than anything you could construct on the ground.

Right, plus when launches are cheap and routine we can actually start assembling larger scale projects in orbit.

I'm sure you know rural California is not the only place without stable and fast internet access. And while that is one usage that will probably dominate in the developed world, have you considered the possibilities in Africa, Asia and the oceans?

If the marginal cost is low enough, it may be profitable to give rural populations Internet at a price that they can afford, even if it's way cheaper than in California, and so low that the entire system couldn't be run profitably if everyone could get it that cheap.

It's not. they're using phased array on the ground, which is far more expensive than the already-too-expensive-for-poor-countries parabolic dishes.

Does each household really need 600 Mbps link? I think that could serve as a whole city connection in many places.

Certainly not. But now you get in a much different business where you don't sell to consumers, but now you have to own/operate all your hot spots.

I don't think so. I run a freenet across my town and it's really not a problem at all.

SpaceX would have to run tens of thousands of what you're doing all over the world, where regulations and laws are different. It's not comparable at all.

Why would SpaceX run it? I am talking about freenets, the communities run these by themselves. SpaceX sells a station and connectivity to the group as a whole, and I'm pretty sure 600 Mbps (which conpares to nearly a hundred people watching a fullhd video, btw) is more than enough for a town - my network is still just 300 Mbps.

I think you're missing the point of spacex's business plan. First, what you're saying is somewhat common in the USA, but they have far too much competition in the USA for that to be profitable. Outside of the USA, WISPs aren't very common, and even if they were, it's a huge effort to sell your service through every other tiny company in different countries.

> Rural populations in Africa barely have electricity

and yet there are scads of cell phones there

It's not just the Africans who operate in Africa. This will enable foreign investment for them.

This is such a closed minded western centered mindset.

The idea of paying for infrastructure projects (or helping fund them) in foreign nations that you might do business with is just not on the horizon.

The only option on the table is to build some technologically obscene infrastructure that only those who can afford can use, leaving the local population in poverty.

So people that have some modest wealth in Africa shouldn't be able to get internet? Does it not matter that an entrepreneur and companies can get reliable internet? The local population can get together and buy one antenna is one more option they might be able to provide access to the net for a village. The government could provide one for each school. Human deploy infrastructure in so many different ways.

You can try to intellectualize everything away because you seem to have some intense dislike for this, but the fact of the matter is, this system will make internet easier and more affordable then any alternative system in a huge number of places all over the world. And in all those places it will have to compete with the alternatives and the people on the ground can make the choice what helps them the most.

Your counter argument boils down to 'We can't solve global poverty, therefore we shouldn't have global internet' and that is just such an insane position.

I’m sorry, my comment was very snarky and therefor not very clear.

What I was trying to say: A more reasonable way to get better internet connectivity to the poor parts of the world is to build tried and trusted traditional infrastructure funded by the wealthier communities around them.

You are right though, I do dislike Starlink. In general I have a big distaste for any endeavor that tries to solve a problem with new and untried technology, but that problem only exists because of wealth disparity.

Non of the individual parts of Starlink are totally untried. Its a new way to put it together really. Rockets being cheaper now is just a fact of the industry.

> What I was trying to say: A more reasonable way to get better internet connectivity to the poor parts of the world is to build tried and trusted traditional infrastructure funded by the wealthier communities around them.

The demand that you can live anywhere in the country and have people who live in the city provide you with a FTTH at the same price just seams like unreasonable to me. In most places, specially in the western world, its an organizational not a cost problem.

If Starlink is the cheaper way then why should richer communities not just provide Starlink antennas. Especially when you have large area and small communities.

> I have a big distaste for any endeavor that tries to solve a problem

Starlink solves many problems where other solutions simply don't exist. That is a plain fact. It just so happens that it will also be competitive in lots of other fields and if the competition is terrible, why not adopt Starlink?

Its global by design anyway so driving the marginal cost of utilization might make for a competitive price point in many regions and locations.

The reality is that its fine to talk about these potential changes, but they haven't happened for a long time now, and the most likely way for a totally dysfunctional system to change is with massive shock to the outside. Then ideas for reform might actually get adopted.

So even from that perspective, I really can't see any argument why putting another competitor in this market is not a fantastic idea.