Require by who and on what authority?
My point here was not to contest that but make the point that the cat is out of the bag and that it is indeed impacting SKA-Low EoR science and the people involved with that have to deal with that.
Getting the cat a little bit back in the bag via policy and other means is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success.
I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world.
I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".
I fully agree, and that's IMO the core-issue here: This strong-arm approach of just forcing the problem to be solved in your favor by scaling as fast as possible and then pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course, insisting that the other side should be pragmatic about this.
I don't remember this was a working strategy in the past (imagine a car-company just accelerating sales of a faulty car to scale THEIR issue and avoid having to do a recall), but nowadays it could even be turned into a geopolitical topic...
Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom comes to mind. Even Blockbuster could be on that list...
This reasoning has some parallels to "everything that can't be explained by science must be god". It stays valid even when proven wrong...
It’s essentially a form of market extortion though, so perception of ‘survivable’ matters as much as actually survivable eh?
You're right though, it's crappy and merits a lot of geopolitical reflection. But I suspect it goes back millenia and is a manifestation of basic evolutionary biology with the business world, rather than anything that can be solved/fixed.
And we've gone full circle about the balance of working for/against humanity in the name of progress.
Today, environmental/privacy/safety laws are suddenly not that strict anymore, because now we naturally need to also take economic interests of the violating company into account.
So you might end up in a situation where an official body will officially rule that the harmed party may be right, but needs to be pragmatic about its needs just because of the increased inconvenience it would create for the opposing party if THEY would have to change their way.
In my experience, this was not the case 15 years ago.
Someone, if we stretch that metaphor, intentionally opened the bag for profit. We can and should hold them accountable.
> the people involved with that have to deal with that
Yep, and they should hold the people who caused this accountable.
> is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success
You may be correct that it has a low chance of success. However, people who think like you are exactly the cause. People who value Musk's net worth more than science, people who fetishise "progress at all costs," regardless of whether or not the progress actually helps people or is what makes sense (municipal internet, folks!). Understanding physics is also critically important progress, but it doesn't make money next quarter so you don't care.
So you'll forgive me if I don't take your advice on the situation.
The Chinese (correctly) view these satellite constellations as a key military capability, and have gone all-in on creating their own version. (I mean, I don't see how that's even debatable at this point—having seen the influence of Starlink in Ukraine. Future conflicts will only amplify the gap between the haves and have-nots).
They haven't yet launched a large number (~120); they don't now have the launch volume for large-scale satellite constellations. Their race is to first catch up in launch capability. They have dozen private startups—heavily subsidized and favored by the state—in the race to build a viable, reusable launcher comparable to Falcon 9, that they would then use to launch Starlink-like constellations at the same cadence.
Some starting points:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra... ( https://archive.is/Ukmoa ) ("China’s Own Elon Musks Are Racing to Catch Up to SpaceX / Private sector takes bigger role in building reusable rockets, advancing Beijing’s goal of independence from Western technology")
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/st... ("This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX / It’s looking unlikely. Here’s why")
Your underlying question as to why some of those are launching satellites is much easier. They are apparently quite useful for things like communication, providing internet, etc. And people are willing to pay for that kind of stuff. It's not more complicated than that.
Humanity is what humanity is, not what we wish it'd be, so key military capabilities need to be developed or you get razed by the guy who did develop them. Doubly so now that we've rediscovered that culture is much more resilient than we'd thought, and that different people want Earth to look in different ways.
Do we all wish we'd stop ecological collapse instead? Yeah. But it's not going to happen so it's irrelevant.
Then whoever has the most sats will say "that's it guys, LEO is full and you need our approval to launch more" and if someone raises a stink you guessed it, they can get nuked from orbit
Improved first strike capability is worthless íf it isn't crippling, and "devastating enough" first strike capability from orbit is completely unaffordable, and impossible to build up unobserved.
Being in orbit is a hindrance more than anything, really, because maintenance becomes ruinously expensive, everything is trivially observable for all your adversaries and you have to align the orbit with your target beforehand, too (which, again, everyone can observe).
> It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough.
Enough for what? Threatening to nuke some satellites? Because anything else you can do easier, cheaper and on a larger scale from the ground. Why would you bother with nuclear warheads in space when you can just build/maintain like 10 ICBM silos for the same cost?
From GEO, no. From LEO, still probably no.
There may be a bird positioned just right so a small deörbit burn pots Moscow quicker than an ICBM could. But the moment you start burning, you’re caught. (Same as an ICBM.) And unless you have a really obvious orbital configuration that bunches a bunch of birds in a way useful for practically nothing but such a strike, you only get one or two such “early” shots before a wall of ICBMs would have landed.
Nukes in space aren’t about nuking the ground from space. It’s about space area denial through EMP.
"Elements within the Soviet space industry convinced Leonid Brezhnev that the Shuttle was a single-orbit weapon that would be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, manoeuvre to avoid existing anti-ballistic missile sites, bomb Moscow in a first strike, and then land. Although the Soviet military was aware these claims were false, Brezhnev believed them and ordered a resumption of [satellite destroyer] testing along with a Shuttle of their own."
Nukes from LEO aren't impossible. They're just impossible to do better than the current triad. Any breakthrough in propulsion that would make a plane change easier or less visible confers the same advantages to an ICBM. There is a narrow window in which orbital nuking can outperform, and that's almost entirely taken care of--and exceeded, in stealth--by SLBMs.
Space-based missile defence is not what’s implied by weapons that are “already up” and thus “give a lot less warning in a first strike situation?”
No. Your missiles have further to fly from geostationary orbit than a missile silo on the ground, not to mention the additional complexity of designing your ICBM for reentry
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nuke+it+from...
Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down.
With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP.
You're right that the majority of Einstein's theories were ultimately thought experiments but getting the parameters correct involved a lot of measurements and experimenting, to get to where tech like GPS and StarLink can be accurate. We were also looking at far away stars for centuries before Einstein so that he could have the environment for his ideas to be discussed, which I was including in my phrasing "looking at things light-years away."
I wasn't saying it to start an argument, though. I wanted to counter the rather dismal view of "why do we need radio telescopes."
Because they provide data that other types of telescopes do not. We have X-ray telescopes. We have infrared telescopes. We have optical telescopes. Also as a bonus, for ground based radio telescopes, we can use them 24/7 instead of waiting for nighttime.
To have internet everywhere you need to either accept bad latency (300-500ms round trip) or have closer satellites, which means they’re moving faster, which means you need more of them.
Yes, some of the premiere radio observatories have radio transmission exclusion zones around them, but they are also typically away from that exclusion zone impacting as few as possible. Starlink on the other hand is not attempting to do anything of the sort. It would be interesting of Starlink could respect a geofence kind of idea so that they stop broadcasting when over certain areas, especially since they do this over geopolitically exclusion zones.
Can't feasibly do VLBI or other radio astronomy at useful scale in space even if launches were free. Look up the scale of SKA or the EHT.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06708
Why can't humanity launch 2^17 small antennas into deep space, as a free-floating constellation?
> "would likely have to transmit the data via radio links"
No; you'd use free-space optical communication, which doesn't interfere at all, and which Starlink has pioneered. They have working laser links at 200 Gbps, per link,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200323 ("Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day (pcmag.com)")
The optical bandwidths potentially accessible, in vacuum, are much wider than that of microwave links to/from Earth.
> "a supercomputer with purpose built signal processing hardware"
I don't see why couldn't put that in space, today. That SKA signal processing system you're talking about amounts to 100 petaflops, drawing 2 MW of power. That's far less power than Starlink already has in orbit right now (somewhere in the 10's of megawatts). It's even within a factor-of-10 of raw compute—the figures I found say each V2 Starlink has 1.2 TFlops of local processing.
I don't understand why it'd be impractical to put an equivalent signal-processing system in orbit. At any rate, there's YC startups getting funded for space-compute proposals more ambitious than that,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188 ("Starcloud (ycombinator.com)")
>I don't see why couldn't put that in space, today.
Because the electronics are not built for space. Space rated electronics is about a decade behind their ground based siblings. Radiation is one of the most problematic, degrading electronics and disrupting digital memory. You also need petabytes of temp storage. Which, again, doesn't exist. For reference, JWST carries a 70 GB solid state recorder, I think Roman has about 1 TB. Then there is all the cooling, which is difficult in space. Saying there are some start-up considering computing is not the same as it being possible to order a system like this today.
The question is not could it theoretically be done, but can it be done on even the sorts of budget of a space science mission. And the answer to that is no. SKA pushes computing and technology to the limit on the Earth, where these things are much more advanced.
No kidding! If something is worthwhile, people should and sometimes do go to the trouble!
Just roll over is not good advice here!
Nobody anywhere is anywhere near SpaceX’s launch cadence, reusable or non.
Seems more effective for astronomers to embrace it. Perhaps by getting SpaceX to add a few dozen hundred satellites kitted out for radio astronomy. Link them together and it could be amazing for radio astronomy!
“We” as in the select few countries that have the launch capability and the space tech.
Again a public good is being commoditized and being sold to the highest bidder.
Requiring the winner of a spectrum auction to use it is a way to prevent anti-competitive tactics (since the government is granting a monopoly to the winner). The goal is to incentivize productive use of limited resources, not necessarily to benefit everyone. In theory, the winner could use the spectrum for entirely internal purposes. Though in real world spectrum auctions, the government usually has stipulations such as requiring interoperability or using open standards. This reduces the value that the government captures, but likely increases the value that is created overall.
Before spectrum auctions, the government simply mandated what frequency bands were used for what, and by whom. Getting access usually meant lobbying and back room deals. Sometimes the FCC used lotteries, which caused speculators to enter lotteries and then license access (basically capturing revenue that would have gone to the government had the spectrum been auctioned). In practice, auctions are the worst form of spectrum allocation, except for all the others.
Just like the inclosure movement, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act
With privatization, the public is paid something. Whereas StarLink's use of LEO is a taking. They're denying others open access usage. Without any possibility or threat of consequences.
"Use" is such an inadequate term, but I couldn't think of another. Commandeering?
The whole system of “lordship” is wild to me, I recommend watching Downton Abbey for a light intro into the topic :)
There has never been more access to space-based imagery and other sensing. With multiple companies selling this stuff ever cheaper. Every news outlet can now afford to buy images. And that's because of cheap launches.
> Whether they like it or not,
A swarm of LEO satellites because in the current political climate it's easier to massively pollute orbits and prevent astronomy than do municipal internet is not, in fact, a law of nature; nor is it inevitable.
> But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging.
Ah, a challenge! Let's all give up immediately; this could make some rich people a lot of money, after all!
> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware.
Would you like to pay for launching Vera C. Rubin (8.4m, nearly 20,000kg for just the camera and mirrors) into space? How about the TMT (30m, expected ~2.6 million kg)? Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing about astronomy.
> And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth.
Apparently fundamental physics is not very relevant to us here on Earth! This is one of the most small-minded statements I've ever read.
Honestly once Starship is operational SpaceX should subsidize launches of non-commercial astronomy hardware. Could build some goodwill to offset the negatives.
Mitigation might have to involve some sacrifices. I don't see how policy is going to be able to mitigate much here. And of course the Chinese are under no obligation to listen to US policy makers. They might have their own debates domestically around this topic and they might be reasonable about the topic internationally even. But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging.
A more practical approach might be accepting that earth based observations are inevitably going to suffer a bit as the number of satellites grows from thousands to tens of thousands and eventually well beyond that. Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. That's already happening of course. And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth. Unless of course the thing under observation is on a collision course with us.