> How much sympathy can I really spare for a purely leisurely hobby like backyard astronomy vs. satellites, Starlink, and our space tech?

Your sympathy or lack thereof is your business, but astronomy is one of the rare sciences where amateurs still do a great deal of work and make important discoveries.

> I'm sure there are good examples of trade-offs that matter here like the impact on terrestrial research telescopes, but a guy snapping a pic of a comet and ranting about it on Twitter frankly has the opposite effect on me.

It's a shame you would allow your opinion on an important subject to be swayed by a single tweet on an issue you apparently know little or nothing about.

it is a tragedy. what we have in the ever shrinking dark night sky is utterly breathtaking if you have ever seen it; light pollution is a bigger problem imo than starlink, but they relate. survey astronomers and astrophysicists and you will find for many it was being able to look up and see stars, be awed by them and wonder about them that got them into their field in the first place. i am scared to lose that..

True, because professional astronomers, lucky them, are provided a completely different sky devoid of satellites, debris and other man-made objects.

If we can make space travel cheap enough to get more Hubble-like telescopes up there, then yes, this.

I believe that's part of the goal of SpaceX

Yes, but the point is that we should do that first before polluting the night sky.

There are also reasons for humans and animals to not want new, moving stars for reasons other than pure utility. At the very least, these shiny beacons are an insulting advertisement for Musk.

Next, people will be defending a Pepsi ad on the moon or something. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/pepsi-ad...

I am sure we will not have the space tech soon that can build giant telescopes in space, Hubble is small compared with the larger telescopes on the ground, and from what we can see today it takes decades to send a new telescope in space because you can't go and tweak it. I just hope the benefits are larger then the costs and we the public will not have to pay SpaceX to send telescopes in space to fix the issue SpaceX created.

Hubble costs are estimated around $10 billion USD in 2010[1].

The cost to put the thing into orbit is minuscule compared to the equipment and operation itself.

Put another way - SpaceX isn't solving any problems here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Challen...

How about when satellite stray signals or signatures start to pollute not just amateur hobbies, but GPS, weather? It's all related.

Satellites have very constrained transceivers. This is not only for regulatory reasons but efficiency. It's a literal waste of power to leak noise into non-target bands. Everything from the transceiver electronics to antennas are tuned for target bands. Satellites broadcasting stray signals is rare enough to not be a thing.

Interference with GPS and other signals overwhelmingly comes from ground based sources.