However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong.
The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern world, it does seem like it was a little thin on the ground here.
I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed.
Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.
The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite.
It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent.
EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.
North America and Australia (where I'm from) have the exact same issue. No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.
Why not? It has been done before. Every developed country went through a period of rural electrification whereby schemes were developed to encourage and/or force electric companies to run wires out into the rural farmland. Internet is the modern analogue for electrification. Those same approaches would work equally well for fiber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification
The American approach: "The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by executive order as an independent federal bureau in 1935, authorized by the United States Congress in the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, and later in 1939, reorganized as a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. It was charged with administering loan programs for electrification and telephone service in rural areas. Between 1935 and 1939 – or the first 4½ years after REA's establishment, the number of farms using electric services more than doubled"
I am talking about money already spent and delivered, not future project that will probably be delivered on.
EDIT: Wow, you guys are really bad at admitting your own blatantly obvious biases, aren't you?
There are equivalent places in central Australia, but even though I grew up here I haven't been more than a few hours drive away from the coasts.
I haven't been to North America. Russia didn't cross my mind, but I haven't been there either.
This isn't to say I don't have warped perspectives or prejudices about Africa. I didn't realize the population density is that high in the south, where I haven't been.
Western media only discusses African countries when things go wrong. The only people I know from there are three white families who left South Africa. If you asked me to draw a map of the countries it would be my worst continent.
The original post though really was just based on my personal experience with remoteness.
For what it's worth an initial rush of downvotes (or upvotes) is fairly common on HN; I'd ignore them for the first hour or so. After that you'll probably have a fair idea of the HN consensus (fickle as it is).
People that really care about an issue will sit there and refresh a thread constantly, so in the short term you're mostly knowing what they think about your comment. But they can't vote more than once.
My first comment in this tree was downvoted to -3 within two minutes of posting, but now sits at +40. I actually wasn't sure at first whether it was being downvoted by people for or against Starlink et al. Maybe both.
Except they could have been referring to the continent. "some of the places" could refer to different places in different African countries, hence "some"; and doesn't imply all, everywhere, or "forever" in Africa.
Perhaps you are. I'm from the same country, and I couldn't be happier :).
I mean, LEO Internet constellations are awesome for providing access (not just in rural areas, but also in remote areas and at sea). But more than that, we're talking Starlink here in particular. The problem it's solving isn't (just) how to improve Internet access for some people. The main problem it's solving is how to fund SpaceX's R&D on Starship. Which translates to dropping another order of magnitude from the cost of access to orbit. Which will, longer-term, translate to a boon for astronomy.
The North Slope Borough in Alaska is nearly the size of Romania, but has only about 9,000 people living there. The state as a whole is larger than all of Western Europe, but has only about 700,000 people.
Much of Canada is the same, only more so.
If we are just going to completely ignore costs, then I can say that getting great astronomical observations is solved as well, since we can just launch satellites to take the observations instead of doing ground-based observations. So it's not clear what the big deal about these satellites is anyway.
No it isn't. Just because it works for you it doesn't mean the same solutions can apply everywhere.
But I know people from rich countries like UK, US, Germany with download speeds under 5 mbps paying more than you would pay for the most expensive line on Romania.
I've gotten decent internet speeds in one place that looked pretty wild, therefore worldwide internet access is a solved problem.
So it's not exactly a good potential userbase for starlink. However, most of South America, Africa and Central Asia could benefit massively from Starlink and start participating in the global digital economy
Perhaps in the US, but other countries, even poor ones, manage to do rural internet fine without cluttering the night sky.
I, for one, am not stoked about the implications of an American ISP forcing worldwide coverage for themselves. Their shady business practices and the questionable reliability of the US government make it very hard for me to see many upsides.
Were this to be released only in remote areas and third-world countries, I would agree that there is a large net benefit to Starlink. However, because of the way the system is designed, every country on the planet will now be forced to deal with a solution for the anti-competitive behaviour of the American ISP market.
As long as Starlink is managed by a an American company, I have little faith in their intends and purposes. Being able to intercept or duplicate random internet communications worldwide seems like an NSA wet dream come true to me.
Current mitigations (visorsat) by SpaceX already make the satellites completely invisible to the naked eye. It’s less of a visual impact (zero once deployed) than any other visible LEO satellite or air travel. Celltowers high enough to need a light are highly visible and are a much greater visual impact than Starlink.
Most of sub-saharan Africa has slow and expensive internet. I would guess there is 1 billion people who will have access to the internet via mobile tower with starlink & competitors backhaul in a few years. This is enormous.
There's nothing in the landscape that prevents Africa from running fiber to every house like Eastern Europe has been proven to be capable of. In fact, a lot of infrastructure is already there. Geopolitical instability, poverty and instability of the power grid makes it very unattractive to build data centers in the continent and that's what's forcing ISPs to use expensive cables to access most websites, driving up the cost and reducing the speed.
This problem can be partially mitigated by using StarLink instead of oceanic cables, but I don't imagine their system will be able to replace the fiber optics that carry most large volumes of data between governments. StarLink is fast, but still depends on ground stations for decent speed internet access. Collecting internet traffic for one entire continent on another isn't feasible in the plans I've seen.
StarLink will reduce latency and improve coverage for customers already using satellite internet connections. African people can already use those if they have the means to afford it, yet many African cities have dial-up or slower internet access because of the lack of resources.
Has any nation ever successfully outlawed satellite reception? The roofs of buildings even in nations like Iran and KSA are studded with dishes.
Musk has already admitted that providing satellite services to countries like China can become a problem [3]. Countries that don't want StarLink and don't have the capabilities to take out LEO satellites might start to team up with China, Russia and other countries that do to protect their sovereignty.
Of course there's no way to prevent hardware that someone managed to sneak in from connecting to the satellites. Those devices will all need to come from the black market though, severely limiting the reach and future business StarLink might have in such a country.
[1]: http://www.gard.no/web/updates/content/26690148/ban-on-use-o...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone#Countries_with...
[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-co...
The obejective is noble but can you provide any realistic data or estimates of how this infrastructure can scale to more than a few million users and _still_ be high bandwith. Beyond that your bandwith will go down as you add more users.
The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).
Actual rich people can afford to put in fiber or line of site wherever they are. $100,000 or whatever, doesn’t matter. This is for the regular people in rural areas.
Seriously, has no one making these claims ever talked to someone whose best internet is geosynchronous satellite? Do they think only the very rich live in rural areas?
Rural internet access is absolutely not an US-centric issue, many parts of the world have much worse infrastructure. Being opposed to new technologies because "I already have fast internet" is unbelievably narrow minded.
2) The only limitation on bandwidth (and thus users) is the number of satellites in orbit. If the constellation bandwidth is saturated, launch more satellites and you get more bandwidth.
3) I guess you'll just ignore the use cases for the tens of millions of non-rich people who literally can't get decent internet because it doesn't exist where they live?
One nation launching thousands of satellites because three companies want to make a pile of money and also because that one country can't get it's act together and do something about its own predatory cable companies seems like a weak argument to make from a moral point of view.
But what about third world countries and such? Summary opinion: The people who could afford Starlink already have broadband, and we wouldn't want to subsidize others access, would we? That path leads to socialism and the USPS. Or indeed broadband as a right attached to cable company's license. Impossible! (In that one country.)
Let third world countries sort out their own broadband and make their own money. And let them have their own view of the damn stars.
If the internet was simply a wellspring from which one could obtain knowledge you may be correct.
But most likely, the internet will instead be used to proliferate bigoted and intolerant opinions, while spreading lies and misinformation in the form of crude memes. As the last of human populations without high speed internet comes online, they will expand their capacity to inflict harm at speeds never before seen.
Weep for the clear skies we have lost. Forever.
Using keps and scrubbing exposures in post is something we could already do decades ago. It’ll just be a new part of the workflow and eventually the space NIMBYs will quiet down.
Let’s not pretend this was the one true way to get around Comcast et al’s stranglehold though. That problem could have been solved politically with regulation plus (in the countryside) ground based radio, or (in cities) with regulation of cable infrastructure such that it was separated from packet-routing and customer-service.
If satellite ISPs genuinely are the solution to entrenched telcos then every streak of light in the sky is a testament to the failure to find a solution. We will look back and wish we had been able to achieve a system of sensible business regulation delivered by those elected to do so.
I agree. However it's going to be a tough nut to crack because that belief is self-reinforcing. People who believe the government can't do anything right also seem to advocate policies that make the government more ineffective, which provides false confirmation of the initial belief.
The response to COVID-19 has been an expectancy on equal access to Internet and either the telco gets to capitalize on their geographic monopoly or the rural folks get short changed with 1980s dial-up or GEO satellite link.
Ground-based radio requires line-of-sight to somewhere with both power and an uplink. Nevermind "third-world" countries - the vast majority of the United States, by square foot, does not have this. Rural wireless is incredibly dependent upon topography, many places will just never get it.
I live one hour from SF. I have rural wireless broadband (bounced off a solar relay I installed on a hill). It's terrible, but I'm still one of the lucky ones - most of the properties we looked at when shopping did not have this access, and the only internet option was Hughes.
The valley is 400’ deep and has 50 copper pairs coming up the side, of which 20 come to the road the house is on, and 10 remain by the time you get to the family property. 3 more are taken by properties down the way, so 7 pairs (or ~50Mbps) lay unused. It would be interesting if the copper was changed to a 100% utilization rate.
The point though is there is power and copper telephone at the site. And a road! At some point, someone managed to invest in infrastructure for this house. In some sense it’s quite disheartening that the only modern equivalent to that kind of infrastructure investment is the spaceship endrun around the incumbents.
My hope is that these constellations put pressure on the ground based incumbents to fix their shit. The result might be that we get cheap enough internet on the ground that the constellations become unprofitable and shut down. Might be a win-win without politics and regulation.
No.
-- Rural Resident
So you're straight up saying that because the regulation of US telco companies is ineffective and/or corrupt, the entire planet should pay for it? That's your argument? Please tell me that's not your argument.
As a reminder, astronomy is not as much about the 'image' as it is about the 'measurement'. Editing pictures like in Insta is not the point here, you can't fill things in.
Remember, astronomy images generally have long exposure times, which already involve tracking the sky, and then averaging out values in the exposure across minutes/hours/days/whatever.
A satellite passing over a point in the sky means that area of sky is affected for only a tiny fraction of the total exposure. As long as you have a database of all satellite locations, you just don't include data from those time slices in the final average. Or if you don't know where satellites are in advance, you just do basic outlier detection -- the kind that already eliminates things like airplanes, birds, the ISS, etc.
Nobody's filling in anything with "black", and the area of satellite interference can be easily expanded to include the "glow" area.
In the end, the quality of the overall image is degraded by a tiny fraction of a percentage, which can be trivially overcome by extending the total exposure time by the same tiny fraction of a percentage.
The image implies that all the data is from the same instant, when it's not. Normally that's OK, but it's not always.
Taking multiple exposures isn't always possible, this may be a continuous multi-hour exposure. Additionally if you're looking for transients, NEOs, or star field mapping then there is definitely lost data that can't just be inferred.
The conversation isn't just about halting launches. It's about recognizing and working to mitigate the issue now before we get too far down this path.... and accepting that it's not a trivial "photoshop" problem.
I'm frankly amazed at the arrogance on display here. Do you honestly think you know better then the entire field of astronomy?
Think for instance about CO2 levels. Is it such a big deal if they reach 1% of the atmosphere? It's only a small part after all.
(1) astronomers are pretty darn aware of everything going on, and it's really shocking as an astronomer to see these sorts of claims. There have been close collaborations with Space X to try to mitigate some issues, but these are partial mitigations and the most important ones are only planned, not implemented. The "successful" mitigations I think you're referring to is their "DarkSat" coating, which is not actually a successful mitigation. It is still ~2x as bright as the ~maximum level of acceptable brightness for e.g. LSST.
(2) Space-X did not release any details about brightness characteristics, and they themselves claim that they were "surprised" by the brightness. To people that work in space rather routinely, that is staggeringly incompetent.
(3) > why do most not know Starlink was never visible except at dawn or dusk
Near earth object (NEO) detection only happens during these times. NEO includes "asteroids that threaten human life" so I would hope you agree that this is pretty important. Also, depending on latitude and time of year, "dawn or dusk" can constitute your entire observing window. So this doesn't really make things better.
(4) all of these mitigations should be done before companies can start doing ~10,000 satellite launches. The only reason this isn't done is outdated legislation that never conceived of this being possible.
In space infrared detectors are the most effective way of searching for dangerous NEOs, and SpaceX has made them far cheaper to launch. How come you don’t know that?
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasem_r...
I guess that's a specific version of the "cherry-picking data" fallacy.
Then they claim SpaceX is only trying paint.
Let me guess, if the visual radius of a one meter satellite 550,000 meters away is (1/X)^2. Thirty thousand would be 1/one trillion, or far less?
Even opening and closing the shutter multiple times during one exposure will cause issues - but probably still possible to get under control. But covering parts of the detector will create significant variants that will be extremely hard to control for. Keep in mind we don't really want pretty pictures, but we use these images to measure the brightness of objects in those images (photometry).
In space that approach would work quite well indeed, but then you wouldn't need it in the first place..
Edit: Even if one still has to mask the streak in the data in the end, it might still be useful to do, since it will protect the rest of the image from any excess blooming.
I think you could mitigate the problems with conditions changing if (instead of blocking out the streak in the image with some per-area shutter) you tracked the satellite in the image with a horizontal (or vertical) shutter stripe which has the right width to cover the entire satellite. This would make the data lost really minor, and changing conditions wouldn't be a problem, and the exposure would be even. Does that make sense?
And space observatories are much much more expensive than ground-based ones. JWST for instance will cost around 10 billion dollars in the end - and they don't even have to pay for the launch cost (one of the contributions of ESA to the project is free launch on Ariane rocket). JWST will have a 8m mirror. Currently three 30m class ground-based observatories are being built (ELT is 39m, TMT 30m and GMT 24.5m) each with an estimated cost between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars. So you get three much much larger ground-based telescopes for the price of one large space observatory (and still have money left over).
What is a loss of some percentage of astronomical observations today, if it means putting a telescope on the backside of the Moon in 20 years, or a ridiculously large "virtual telescope" via a satellite constellation doing interferometry?
I already have to do this for aircraft, and aircraft do a LOT more photobombing than satellites.
The satellite trail images people post all over the internet to fear monger the public are actually processed exactly the OPPOSITE way that astrophotographers would process an image stack. They are processed by taking the max at each pixel stack to emphasizing the outliers in the stack instead of eliminating the outliers and averaging the rest. No astronomer would ever do that.
I can imagine they might be a bigger threat to radio astronomy, though.
It's silly to die on a hill that's inevitable, it's much wiser to stand on the hill and reach higher. The future of space exploration is in space, not on the ground, and the proliferation of these satellites is a sign that space exploration is getting cheaper.
Just like people were shocked that there was only one or two computers in the world at one point, they will be shocked that we only had Hubble for so long.
> So in April, SpaceX instead began launching Starlinks with a sunshade to block sunlight that would otherwise reflect off its antennas, which are the main source of the Starlinks’ brightness once they have reached their final positions.
> So far, only one of these ‘VisorSat’ Starlinks has finished the journey to its final orbit of 550 kilometres above Earth. Amateur astronomers have reported that the sunshade appears to make the Starlink fainter than it would otherwise be.
> But astronomers are still awaiting further confirmation that the modifications have a significant effect, says Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Regardless, SpaceX is now launching all of its Starlinks with the sun-shielding visor.
It seems that the impact of the sunshade mitigation is not yet fully measured?
With plentiful availability of orbital delivery, we can also expect more earth-orbiting space telescopes in our future, including private ones and with numbers possibly several orders of magnitude higher than what we have today. These will have higher orbits so that will help, and they will be largely immune to atmospheric effects.
I would suggest the astronomy community ask SpaceX and others to commit to giving key projects free or low cost launch services or ride sharing to orbit, to help compensate for some of the costs you allude to. If asked directly, Elon is often responsive.
Yeah, but the responses can be unpredictable :)
It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.
Well, that isn't really a useful distinction in any sense of the word. The American companies are doing it, because they are allowed to do so by their country. Most countries which have any kind of space capability have their own space agencies which say what is or isn't ok to launch. If the American space agencies approve things like Starlink, then the pollution of the Earth's view into space isn't purely on Elon Musk.
Point of order: intercontinental missiles, rockets, and radio telecommunications are highly regulated industries. The US regulators have approved (and not stopped) Starlink on both fronts. I do not know if there’s any international / UN body that performs the same roles?
I can see it "Trump: China puts 10000 eyes on the sky, they pretend they want to give Internet to the poor but they have cameras and spy on the traffic, and some reliable sources told me they can release viruses from this satellites in a targets back yard, this needs to stop , I will build a space wall and China will pay for it...
This should start a golden age of space astronomy, even if Elon doesn't give away some telescope launches as PR.
Are you sure SpaceX is allowed to do business with China? As I understand it NASA is forbidden by Congress from collaborating with China. Since NASA and SpaceX work together, might that limitation extent to SpaceX as well?
Doesn’t mean new sanctions can’t be levied and certainty China seems a likely target for future increased sanctions.
There is already history here where a failed Chinese rocket crashed with a classified American payload and caused the whole satellite anything is now ITAR
If NASA is forbidden from working with organizations affiliated with China, it seems to me that SpaceX working with China might imperil their collaboration with NASA. Then again maybe not, I don't know the answer.
Edit: It seems the situation is not nearly as clear as you believe: https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2020/08/2...
Considering a less direct relationship with China already has some congressmen evidently perturbed, I think there is a decent chance SpaceX would refuse any contracts with China if for no other reason than to avoid provoking Congress further.
But they also aren’t likely to pass any specific legislation or change what Elon does.
You destroy my house and I should be happy you offer me a discount when I buy new blueprints from you.
Falcon 9 is a heavy launch system that can lift up to 50,000 lbs of payload to orbit, similar to the Shuttle.
Falcon Heavy is a super heavy launch system that can put 140,000 lbs of payload in orbit.
Starship is designed to be significantly cheaper than both of the Falcons, and to put over 200,000 lbs of payload in orbit with a far larger fairing size (though Falcon Heavy is getting a larger fairing shortly).
These are all game changers the scientific and commercial space customers haven’t yet taken advantage of.
Having to use lightweight materials is the least of your worries (and not even that expensive - and sometimes done for ground-based instruments as well).
That's the vicious cycle of space mission costs put in reverse. The missions are expensive today, because launches are expensive, meaning you have one shot at doing your decade-long project, so you need to max out on risk mitigation - increasing your project length, labor costs, and launch mass. Significant drops in launch costs and increases in cadence translate to ability to launch much less robust mission (and launch a replacement if/when it fails), which drops the costs all across the board.
> Big thermal swings, no easy air cooling, no AC outlet to get your power from, no convenient anchoring point for your telescope to push against to point a certain direction, no just bolting several racks full of off-the-shelve electronics to the telescope
While by no means easy, that's still table stakes for space missions, and something there's decades of experience in around the world.
> none of them work in vacuum
Nobody is, nor was, sending the equivalent of a ground telescope installation upwell. You only send the looking part, with a downlink bolted on them. You do control and data processing planetside.
> no possibility to repair or upgrade anything
Cheap launches = you can replace. Even cheaper launches = you can try to repair. We'll need to develop that capability anyway, if we want a cislunar space economy.
I do not believe that. The hardware and software is expensive because regular stuff will fail in space and you can't call some guy to just go and replace parts. I know it was done but it was expensive and risky.
There are many existing communication and navigation satellites but not that many space telescopes so I think this proves that launching shit is not prohibitive expensive but I will read any claim that proves you right.
Radhard stuff is expensive, but not that expensive. Also space missions don't need all that much compute - they carry only as much as is needed to operate the hardware and maintain a radio link with Earth. You don't use more than you absolutely need to, because more compute = more power demands = more waste heat => need more thermal management => heavier satellite => need to cut down mass (or power demands) somewhere else => ballooning R&D costs => ...
Look, I'm not making this up. It's widely known in the industry. See e.g. [0] and [1] for the first two references I could find. I actually learned about this concept from some NASA report that featured a beautiful flowchart, but I can't find it now for the life of me. But the phenomenon is real, and that's why SpaceX has been a big deal in space circles for years now. More and cheaper launches translate to a qualitative difference in how we approach space systems.
> There are many existing communication and navigation satellites but not that many space telescopes so I think this proves that launching shit is not prohibitive expensive
Communication satellites pay back for themselves in rent the owners can extract from the users. Navigation satellites are first and foremost military projects with huge implications for national security of the states that own them - which gives them almost infinite budgets. Space telescopes are research platforms funded by taxpayers, most of whom don't understand the importance and don't care to. Astronomy can't afford space telescopes at current prices.
--
What I am saying if Elon or Jeff makes a telescope work harder or impossible they should pay for fixing the issue not the public and it should be fixed today not in 50 years. Also a tax on opoluttion would make the management at SpaceX considering using different paints(or doing more with less) in before the satellite is designed and not after bad PR.
IMO you did not convince me that the reason we don't have tons of space telescopes is the launch price.
IMO we will probably need to have a few bases on the Moon and build telescopes there to get around the light pollution.
SpaceX is doing what it can to "fix it". There's not much more that can be done beyond just not launching satellites. At this point, you have to choose whether you want clean skies or humanity spacefaring; you can't have both. I'm strongly in the "humanity spacefaring" camp, especially that once some sort of permanent industrial presence is established in the cislunar space, we will be able to build large telescopes in orbit or on the Moon.
> IMO you did not convince me that the reason we don't have tons of space telescopes is the launch price.
I'm trying my best :). Consider also economies of scale: expensive launches means your payload is pretty much unique, which makes it expensive. Cheap launches means you can make more, which drives architecture & hardware standardization, which lets manufacturing scale up, reducing its costs significantly.
The tax would also insensitivese to launch better/smaller satellites and not abuse the fact that launch is cheap so let's put as many stuff in orbit because we can (maybe US can get their shit together and use cables for internet like rest of the world) so Internet satellites would be used only by remote communities. IMO if you managed to somehow have electricity and old fashion telephone cables then what the hell is expensive to drag a new cable for internet to this places ?
That hinges on the quantifying and pricing of the solution. A smart accountant could probably figure out a fair calculation (something along the lines of % of wasted observation time, against operating costs of telescope facility in that time + depreciation). I'd love to see it.
> SpaceX tried to "fix" things only when bad PR hit them, before that some leaders there decided that this is not an issue.
I'll concede on this since I haven't been following the story until it hit media, and only then I've heard about SpaceX painting the satellites. I'm guessing they just didn't consider it at all, or were betting on astronomers not being that upset.
> IMO if you managed to somehow have electricity and old fashion telephone cables then what the hell is expensive to drag a new cable for internet to this places ?
That was before telcom monopolies, and also before people figured out they can hold infrastructure projects ransom, or block them out of spite, just because they own a piece of land that needs to be dug up or paved over.
That rack full of electronics is the looking part (temperature controllers, power supplies, CCD controllers, motor controllers, ...). The data processing happens in a server rack on the other side of the planet in either case (ground-based or space-based).
And you somehow are under the impression that telescopes and instruments are so cheap that it doesn't matter if we loose one every year and then just launch another one. If that were the case we would be building dozens of 3m+ telescopes all over the planet every year - but we are not, because we don't have the money to do that.
Telescopes are multi-decade investments by the institutes, so even with free (free!) launches exactly as much testing will be done as before, because we can still only afford one shot.
I have a view over the ocean, 50 miles up the coast in another country a marina opens, and dozens of sailing ships start arriving over the hour.
I have a view, and an airport opens down the road, I'm now under a flight path, not only is my view obscured, I'm getting noise too.
So you have a home and someone makes noise so you can't sleep, you have a home and your neighbor has pig shit in his backyard and the smell enters in your yard.
Also I amargueing from a public(international) point of view. As an individual with terrible eyes sight I already can't see the stars anymore.
They don't owe you anything.
I also do remember the story how NASA got a couple decommissioned telescopes from some intelligence agency, which turned out to be an order of magnitude better than Hubble is, and the agency was getting rid of them because they were already outdated. I do remember reading that if those were put into astronomy use they would be a lot better than anything we have currently, but of course those are being used for taking pictures of military sites and tanks, rather than stars.
And the main limitation is quite simply money.. and since a lot of the things that were only possible with HST in the past are possible from the ground now people started focusing on building space observatories for the parts of the optical spectrum that simply cannot be done from the ground (x-ray, far-infrared, gamma-ray).
Be warned: it isn't a pretty picture.
Separately, I was surprised to learn how many observatories there are in space. Here’s just a selection:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_telescopes.j...
Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit, then there is an intensive to make the satellites less bright and we make the people that pollute pay and not the public.
Well, couple small problems with this idea
1) who collects the taxes? I can imagine some international agency in charge of it which then proceeds to spend the money on other international projects, but how could you guarantee compliance?
2) Countries which are only now starting to launch things into orbit would(rightfully) say - hey, how is that fair? Others have been able to launch thousands of satellites for free, but now that we finally got the capability to do so, we have to pay? Why?
2) this always happens, look at intellectual rights. The country with the bigger army forces the rest to play by their rules.
Space telescopes offer advantages for particular types of observations, but there are many types of observations for which ground-based telescopes are superior. The basic advantages that ground-based telescopes have are:
* Larger collecting area, which means more photons collected, which means you can see fainter objects.
* With adaptive optics, ground-based telescopes can actually achieve better resolution than space telescopes over small fields of view.
* Ground-based telescopes are far easier to maintain and upgrade.
* Much looser weight, size, radiation-hardening requirements mean that you can do things on the ground that would just be unthinkable in space. You can attach things like massive spectrometers to ground-based telescopes, without having to worry nearly as much about form factor and weight, or whether radiation will damage your electronics.
The advantages that space telescopes have are:
* No weather to deal with.
* You can observe UV and IR wavelengths which the Earth's atmosphere absorbs or emits in - which is extremely difficult/impossible from the ground.
* You can get high resolution over large fields of view. However, you can't reach the same resolution on small fields of view, because ground-based telescopes with a large aperture + adaptive optics will beat you there.
Basically, at any fixed budget, you will be able to build a much larger, more complex instrument on the ground. You only go to space when there's a compelling technical reason to do so (e.g., you need to observe UV light).
Optical aperture synthesis with electronically connected telescopes https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7852
And even with free launches space telescopes are still extremely expensive, since the telescope and all it's instruments has to work in space without any tweaking or possibility for upgrades. Ground based telescopes are used for decades and upgraded with newer instruments over time.
Optical aperture synthesis with electronically connected telescopes https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7852
Interferometry gives you high resolution at the cost of sensitivity. And there way more things that require high sensitivity than high resolution. And I haven't even mentioned spectroscopy, which is hugely important in modern astronomy. And there is no way around having a big light bucket - I wish there was.
"Won't somebody please think of the astronomers!" is a moral panic that I just can't get behind.
Astronomy is great. But world-spanning wireless internet is great too. If 5% of astronomical observations get messed up because 100% of people can now have access to the internet, then that is just a big shrug from me.
Not to mention there will be far fewer non-processed photos. Most people won't care, but it just seems like nothing we see anymore is real.
I am now imagining a science fiction story where visitors to Earth initiate communication with us using faint arcs of light across the night sky. No one notices and the telescopes and cameras filter them all out. The visitors go home, sulking.
To me it seems completely impossible. How exactly do you expect to replace the missing information? Statistically from the neighboring pixels or frames? That works if your goal is to make an image prettier, but if you want to make measurements on the data "inventing" the background is not good enough.
Yes, the sats will occlude things anyway, and their brightness is a big problem, but they are fast moving, they can be mitigated by moving to may short expo images combined. Yes, it's an undue burden, SpaceX should do more, but they can't solve it completely.
In LEO the apparent movement of satellites is around 3.6 arcmin per second, which means for an average sized detector that covers maybe 20 arcmin it takes about 6s to produce a streak that covers the full length of the detector (bit longer depending on the angle). If you want it to cover less than 50% of the length of the detector you have to limit your exposure time to under 3s, which means your duty cycle will be between 60% (if you have a fast camera) and 10%(!).
And that's without even considering the loss of sensitivity you incur, because each image will have lower signal to noise since even with those long readout time the readout noise is still significant.
What am I missing?
Second of all: I highly doubt that this is "trivial", given that observatories are built in the most remote areas of the planet because light pollution was already an enormous problem before these satellites appeared, despite the extra costs that adds to any such project.
A 30 arcsec stripe on an (apparently average) 20 arcmin detector is 2.5% of the total area, so it's not a very large area.
Overall, 20000 satellites at any given time cover 20kπ15acsec² of sky area, which is 0.0005% of total sky area, and over 1 second (assuming a satellite speed of 3.6 arcmin per second) it's 0.02424% of the sky, so roughly 1.45% of the surface area of a 1 minute exposure would have to be thrown out. This assumes that satellite streaks don't overlap, with overlap it would be less.
bit dramatic for a comment on the Internet
This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet.
There are plenty of other factors interfering with astronomy and they can largely processed away.
>This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet.
This is complete bullshit, and a reminder that anti-capitalists are not worth arguing with.
It’s only real Achilles heel is tragedy of the commons (like this), which is a problem for the isms as well.
Space is a shared resource. One use shouldn't infringe on another.
That is a very naive viewpoint.
Starlink is looking to be a multi-billion dollar business by itself.
Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three companies from one country.
This is cost turned into an "externality" and foisted upon astronomers--at every scale of investment--all over the world. Stock holders in these companies won't pay for it, but tax payers everywhere will pay for the mitigations. Not cool. This is a hill I'll die on.