Kessler syndrome is inevitable if Elon & Trump get their way, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2811927/trump-propos...

lol

There isnt nearly enough mass up there in all the foreseeable sat constellations. They need enough collective mass to overcome the extreem orbital inclinations/speeds we use for sats. For a visible ring to form, we would have to send billions of sats into high/slow orbits and then just forget about them for millions of years. Even then, they would likely form into mini moons first before those moons eventually broke up into rings.

I had to laugh thinking that we (or some alien race) might come across a ringed planet only to find its rings are made of orbital space junk from a long-dead species that once flourished on the planet.

This made me consider what sort of orbital archeology would take place. I imagine it would be a gold mine for anyone trying to study that civilization, and attempting to snatch pieces out of orbit would be a huge focus.

hopefully the sight encourages them from leaving their own waste behind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

I was about to make a snarky comment about starlink. It's getting harder to take a shot of the sky without one of those pesky floaties.

They low orbit satellites are only visible while they're in sunlight near sunrise/sunset.

Yeah this. I was 50 miles from civilisation in some mountains in central Asia last year trying to do astrophotography and I had to edit out the flying space trash after!

If you needed rescuing from there, or if a nearby village was affected by a natural disaster, this flying space trash is what's saving lives.

It makes sense for the vast majority of people to prefer that against the slight inconvenience in editing out satellite tracks faced by a tiny tiny community of ground bases astrophotographers.

No it's really not. Please don't think suburban USA can be extrapolated to the middle of bloody nowhere.

I might be able to get a message off, but how the hell do you contact the emergency services and who the hell is going to rescue me in a country with one rescue helicopter that was out of action at the time?

In circumstances like that it's better to actually get some mountain safety training, have some procedures and other comms equipment in place. And importantly travel in a group with the right equipment (including 4 legged transport devices).

As for the astrophotography that was opportunistic.

I'm subscribed to Garmin SAR that uses Iridium sats. When you signal an emergency, they contact the local rescue agencies.

And while they might not send a helicopter, a team if rescuers on foot can still help in most cases.

I have an InReach Mini 2. It is not necessarily useful. It depends on where you are. Don't make any assumptions about it until you've done research.

You'll find some places have only voluntary services and the phone is likely only manned on week days on limited hours. If you're lucky there might be a gmail address you can hit. No joke.

It might not be useful in Afghanistan or Somalia, but it has a pretty wide coverage. Even if it's a niche product.

Once satellite communication is truly accessible to everyone, I expect other companies to compete in this area.

Low orbit satellites are unnecessary for emergency/comm. Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper, but LEO constellations are now subsidized by the military industrial complex (there is other value to be low).

Aren’t you overlooking constraints on transmit power for mobile transmitters being better served my low earth orbit than higher orbits?

They're also overlooking the actual prices of GEO satellites versus LEO. LEO is much cheaper than GEO, there's a reason DOD and others are moving towards it and it's not that it's a fad. GEO has a few specific benefits but cost is not one of them.

great point; agreed

> Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper

GEO satellites are pretty pricey. Each Milstar satellite cost $800 million, others in the same category are also in the hundreds of millions, WGS-11 was over $600 million. Starlink V2 cost $800k per satellite.

And if you spent $800 million on a constellation of 1000 Starlinks, you'd have better coverage and bandwidth than the entire 6 satellite Milstar constellation put together for 1/6th the price.

Digging around for more recent prices, GEO is around $100-300 million. That's still orders of magnitude more per satellite than LEO. At the low end this means you could get 100-400 Starlink V2s up there for the price of one GEO. One GEO that only covers part of the globe, versus 100-400 satellites providing global coverage.

It's crazy how unnecessary things can be trillion dollar industries :)

yeah like carbon credits

Satellites have to pass through the Van Allen belts in order to get into such higher orbits, which may expose them to a not insignificant amount of radiation, especially if the final orbit injection is not done in a single impulse. Then, once they are comfortably out in their higher orbit, they have to endure yet more radiation without the aid of the Earth's magnetic field, and require more cooling capacity due to spending much less time in Earth's shadow than an LEO satellite.

Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. The Starlink constellation is at around 350 km and below.

Starlink is actually 550 km and Amazon's Kuiper at 620 km.

But the missile interceptors for the orbital 'American Iron Dome'* in the news lately would be ~ 350 km.

* 2024 GOP platform #8: https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 which developed out of Elon Musk and Mike Griffin's initiative for their founding of SpaceX: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career#:~:text...

it's a (Grok) ai transcript, but I found this SpaceX/Starlink history fascinating. Detailing how Musk has been working with key people on (Reagan's) Star Wars 2.0 for decades: https://archive.today/D2zIG#:~:text=Shotwell

The only explanation I've heard for Musk's political antics that makes cold sense.

Don't look for cold sense in mr musk's adventures, just look at whole twitter saga. He is a overgrown child with brilliant mind but very little control of his emotions (on top or other real mental issues under variable control). My almost-5 year old son has in some aspects more emotional maturity than him.

Doesn't mean that stuff ain't truth of course, but his recent conservative alignment has deeply personal reasons too.

why downvoting an accurate and helpful comment?

You are right, it looks like I got a mistaken number from the Reddit (who could have predicted that).

It says here that earlier this year Starlink was seeking permission to go lower. I wonder how that went.

https://universemagazine.com/en/below-the-iss-orbit-starlink...

I read that those things' orbits degrade in like five years tops. So at steady state, for a constellation of size N, you need to launch N/5 of them each year, with the attendant fuel burn. Seems like that kind of pollution is a bigger long term worry than the short-lived junk? On the other hand, until it does fall down, I suppose it's a risk to anyone who wants to launch up through it.

They are like the size of a coach and the distance between them is is about 550km or 342 miles aproximatly one Washington state wide, avoiding hitting them shouldn't be that hard. You would have to try to hit them. Space is big.

Sustainable space exploration is needed

Wouldn't all LEO stuff just de-orbit and burn eventually?