> The downsides are extremely minor. Nobody ever complains about jets polluting our night skies (as opposed to our atmosphere, which they do of course do bad things to).

Starlink's constellation will have 12000 satellites when fully deployed. There are between 8000 and 20000 jets in the air at any given time, so you might expect jets and satellites to be roughly equally present in any given person's sky.

But wait...satellites generally are higher up than jets, so a given satellite will be visible to a larger area than a jet will.

If the Starlink satellites were in orbits that covered all of the Earth equally then when the full constellation is deployed there would be about 360 visible from any give point on the surface at any given time. I believe they aren't using any orbits that cover the far north and south, so the actual number visible for most places should be a bit higher, but lets stick with 360 as a lower bound.

That's way more than the number of jets visible at any one place.

> And they are very easy to see because they actually have blinking lights on them that are designed to make the planes more visible. It's a complete non issue.

Interesting point. They'd also be harder to remove from your data because they'd be less predictable. Presumably someone could track/monitor all the satelite's so you could adjust for them (as best you can) in your data.

How would the world react if there was a Chinese company that was launching an equivalent number of satellites as Starlink?

I except the discussions would be very different, and there would be many more calls to stop SpaceX/Starlink.

If we expected Starlink internet to censor any negative opinions of Elon Musk or Tesla, there might be similar calls to stop it.

I can see the benefits of more competition for politically entrenched ISPs, but I’m afraid of a potential Kessler Effect happening

At Starlink's low attitude all orbits decay eventually without active station keeping

This is assuming that the satellites all remain in one piece, the idea behind Kessler Syndrome is that one impact will generate loads of fragments in unpredictable orbits and cause a chain reaction.

That being said I don't know what the probability of such an event is, I assume it's fairly small. I could look it up but I've got to fix an omelette.

I'm not an expert in orbital dynamics, but (logically) if the point of impact is low enough that it's within a high-drag area of space, then any orbits generated by the impact must have that point as part of their orbits, therefore all pieces after the collision should decay eventually as well.

This doesn't happen. The energy is not close enough to shoot things far enough up that they will not decay. On this altitude Kessler Syndrome is so close to impossible as to be a non issue.

Oneweb is 1000x more dangerous compared to Starlink but that not by Musk so nobody cares.

How was the omelette? There's one on my horizon after this all hands is over :)

Ended up falling back on my old standby of instant mi goreng with bok choy and fried egg on top. Tastier than anything you can make in 15 minutes has any right to be.

This is why I wanted orbital space to be treated as Antarctica. But the US and China are in a new cold war and both sides have no stomach for accountability.

Musk just destroyed America's moral high-ground on the issue as well so 10 years from now when we look up we'll see corporations battling it out.

You can't use the (false) premise that "nobody ever complains about jets polluting our atmosphere" to justify hindering the detection of near-earth asteroids, which is guaranteed to eventually threaten the safety of people in this planet, possibly in a country that is not opting in to this situation. This is why legality cannot be the sole basis of right/wrong. Just because countries do not (yet!) have jurisdiction over space doesn't mean that you can just do anything with it--and especially if the said countries without jurisdiction may be the collateral damage of such actions.