[HN Gopher] Starlink satellites hindering detection of near-Eart... ___________________________________________________________________ Starlink satellites hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids, study finds Author : nixass Score : 217 points Date : 2022-01-21 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.caltech.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (www.caltech.edu) | suifbwish wrote: | Why not put sensors on them that can used to help detect | asteroids. I'm guessing if the signals were combined in an array | and integrated you could gain quite a high resolution image. | me_me_me wrote: | because those things weight | | Weight == $$$ | | Plus starlinks have very short lifespawn | | > I'm guessing if the signals were combined in an array and | integrated you could gain quite a high resolution image. | | that's just wishful thinking, ironic since starlink is also no | more than wishful thinking of a business venture. | rubykaur wrote: | Incredible. | ricardobeat wrote: | Where is the link to the study? | | > Musk, the world's richest man, has been sending an increasing | amount of satellites into orbit since 2019 through his company | SpaceX. | | The personal tone in news about Tesla/SpaceX is funny. Sounds | like SpaceX is the post office where Elon Musk goes to send his | packages. | YATA0 wrote: | The fact that humanity got to a point where it made more "sense" | to shoot dozens of rockets and deploy hundreds of satellites into | space instead of running cables to houses and/or cell towers to | cover large areas is sad. | | The insane amount of externalities associated with this method of | going to bite us in the ass for years to come. | umvi wrote: | > The fact that humanity got to a point where it made more | "sense" to shoot dozens of rockets and deploy hundreds of | satellites into space instead of running cables to cell towers | to cover large areas is sad. | | 1. I think you are grossly underestimating just how many cables | and cell towers would be needed to cover just rural North | America alone (nevermind less developed places like Africa). | | 2. LEO satellite internet benefits more than just terrestrial | clients. Ships and airplanes can now have more reliable | communications. | YATA0 wrote: | >1. I think you are grossly underestimating just how many | cables and cell towers would be needed to cover just rural | North America alone (nevermind less developed places like | Africa). | | Not underestimating at all. Of course it will be a lot, but | it has many advantages, and is by far more eco-friendly than | shooting rockets into space. | | >2. LEO satellite internet benefits more than just | terrestrial clients. Ships and airplanes can now have more | reliable communications. | | There will always be a need for ship and airplane | connectivity, but LEO being more reliable is still up for | debate, and other forms of satcomms can be done with and | order of magnitude less satellites. | jamiequint wrote: | > is by far more eco-friendly than shooting rockets into | space | | Really? The energy usage is almost certainly much higher to | do it terrestrially. If you're concerned about the CO2 | generated by the launch burn you could easily offset that | and more using carbon removal with the energy saved versus | doing the same buildout terrestrially. | SECProto wrote: | > Not underestimating at all. Of course it will be a lot | | Do you have any data to back this up? Starlink (and other | possible future constellations) most effectively serve the | low-density or unconnected areas of the world. North | America alone has a land area on the order of 25 million | square km, with significant topographical and geographical | contraints. | | I have several relatives who had what the government | considered "high speed" internet available - one an old | adsl 1.5Mbit connection, the other a drastically | overprovisioned cell phone wireless that they were lucky if | it provided 0.5Mbit real world connections. The providers | offered no consolation, and there was zero prospect of them | upgrading services. Both relatives are now happily using | their starlink at ~200Mbit. | | > other forms of satcomms can be done with and order of | magnitude less satellites. | | There is effectively a per-satellite maximum bandwidth, as | well as distance-based power requirements. The same | satellite in low earth orbit can provide much better | internet than if it were in GEO. Non-LEO satellites will | remain second-class internet (with lower speeds and higher | latencies) because of fundamental physical limitations. | varelse wrote: | And yet countries like Vietnam have pulled exactly that off. | If we have $1.7T for the f-35 fighter, we have the money to | give everyone 100 Mb or better internet, it's just a matter | of priority. I'm a satisfied Starlink customer but only | because there are no other viable alternatives currently | where I live. | | https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/07/07/watchdog-group- | fi... | | Since the comparison to Vietnam is triggering some people, | let's add some hard numbers and really get the downvotes | going. | | Vietnam's GDP is $271B, The US is $21T or ~77x higher with | ~3.4x as many people living in a space ~30x bigger than | Vietnam. And yet we still cannot deliver cellphone reception | and broadband on par with Vietnam. Wonder why? Also wonder | why this is such a triggering statement to make but I guess | some things will just remain a mystery. And won't you do your | part to bring this post to -10? We can do this together. | Jtsummers wrote: | Vietnam is smaller than California with a larger | population. That cell towers can be made to work is not | really in dispute, it's the cost (both initial and ongoing) | for reaching the increasingly sparse population areas (like | Wyoming and Montana) or geographically hard-to-cover areas | (like the Rocky Mountains) that make satellites more | economically viable. | varelse wrote: | Sure but between the current situation and the outskirts | of Wyoming and Montana there's plenty of low-hanging | fruit. | | For example, my neighborhood is 1.5 mi away from gigabit | internet. Good luck with that last mile and a half so | Starlink it is. | | The study I'm linking here says it would cost $80B to fix | the current situation. That's chump change. I am so fed | up with the tiny minded thinking that is trapping America | in an endless loop of failure. But watch trillions | materialize instantly if we have to go to war with | someone again. | | https://www.brookings.edu/research/striking-a-deal-to- | streng... | Jtsummers wrote: | I'm having trouble finding how much Starlink has | currently cost to deploy, but per wikipedia in 2018 (yes, | 4 years old): | | > The cost of the decade-long project to design, build, | and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in | May 2018 to be at least US$10 billion. | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink] | | Which would be 1/8th the cost you describe (though | probably more by now, I haven't found any figures yet). | It also covers a larger geographic area (and therefore a | larger number of people) in a shorter time than any cell | tower + cable solution would, short of conscripting every | possible technician in the US to accomplish the effort. | | Starlink also gets to piggyback on other SpaceX launches | so they aren't eating the entire launch cost themselves, | it's subsidized (or can be) by their other customers. | This is what I'm talking about when I say that | _presently_ it 's more economically viable. It sucks | about your situation (being so close to gigabit Internet | without access), I've been there, too. Cable companies | and ISPs in the US suck. | | EDIT: | | https://www.ft.com/content/4f992537-59f6-4d09-b977-c33945 | dba... | | More recent, June 2021. Musk is expecting to spend $30 | billion to cover 12 countries, and expects to have spent | $10 billion before becoming cashflow positive with | Starlink. | | EDIT: Fixed link above, not sure why I ended up with a | link to a subheading. | varelse wrote: | You say we can't wire up America, but what's your source? | I'm not personally seeing a problem with a TVA-level | engagement to bring high-speed Internet to as many people | as possible. Starlink looks like it will be half the | price, but Musk has gone on record saying this is for | rural areas. | | https://arstechnica.com/information- | technology/2020/03/musk-... | | Further, I was getting 150 Mb a few months back, but now | I'm down to 30 Mb. This isn't a polished product yet and | it's in danger of losing federal funding. | | https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2021/12/starlink-download- | spe... | Jtsummers wrote: | > You say we can't wire up America, but what's your | source? | | I did not say that, reread what I wrote and quote where | you think I said that. | | > I'm not personally seeing a problem with a TVA-level | engagement to bring high-speed Internet to as many people | as possible. | | That's basically what I was getting at with this: | | >> short of conscripting every possible technician in the | US to accomplish the effort. | | But, sadly, it is politically not viable in the US. If it | were, I suspect we would have seen such an effort (though | probably not telecom focused) post 2007/2008 financial | crisis. Instead, a crap ton of money was dumped into the | hands of contractors to spend on infrastructure that | barely went anywhere. Just like a crap ton of money has | been dumped into ISPs that still can't be bothered to | cover the last 1.5 miles to your home. | | What I _did_ write: | | >> [Starlink] also covers a larger geographic area (and | therefore a larger number of people) in a shorter time | than any cell tower + cable solution would | | The first part is pretty obviously true, but the | parenthetical does remain to be seen. It depends on how | effective the fleet actually scales with connecting | additional users, and they're only at ~145k right now. | emn13 wrote: | However, starlink isn't a product _yet_. It 's hard to | separate the hype from reality; so whether starlink turns | out to be a practical alternative still needs practical | demonstration. Or to put it another way - I'm sure you've | heard of a few of the teething problems early adopters | have, but it's not so clear whether those are merely | small wrinkles, or just the tip of an iceberg of nasty | practical problems that will render the network | uneconomical. | | The idea is definitely very attractive, but it's not | quite yet proven itself - and it's definitely unclear how | realistic those cost guesstimates are. | SECProto wrote: | > However, starlink isn't a product yet. It's hard to | separate the hype from reality; so whether starlink turns | out to be a practical alternative still needs practical | demonstration | | Yeah, it's a product. It's out of beta. I know people | using it, I've video-chatted them for hours without a | single hiccup. It's a real, practical alternative and | it's here now. | | > I'm sure you've heard of a few of the teething problems | early adopters have, but it's not so clear whether those | are merely small wrinkles, or just the tip of an iceberg | of nasty practical problems that will render the network | uneconomical. | | I haven't, actually - the people I know using it have had | it running for 5 months without any issues. The only | issue I've seen online is someone's humourous photo where | their cats sat on it because it's warm. | thallium205 wrote: | What are you talking about it's definitely a product. I | use it right now in my rural area (USPS doesn't even | deliver here) and I'm getting 30ms latency with a 150/40 | Mbps link. Rock solid for months straight even during | snow storms. | Jtsummers wrote: | And varelse, the one who I was responding to, is also | using it right now. There are around 145k current users | of the system. Which is certainly not enough to keep it | afloat if it fails to grow in customer base, but it is a | real thing being used by real people. | emn13 wrote: | Yeah, that's what I meant - there's a beta out (i.e. a | development tool), not a self-sustaining product. The | scale is still too small; for this to be economically | viable they need to show they can scale much larger and | at competitive prices. I'm not saying that won't happen; | but let's not go counting chickens before they hatch | either. | zardo wrote: | I think Vietnam is significantly smaller than North | America. | Jtsummers wrote: | It's about 78% of the size of California. Per a quick | search: | Area | | Population Vietnam | 128,066 sq mi | 96.2 | million California | 163,696 sq mi | 39.2 | million USA | 3,797,000 sq mi | 329.5 | million | toast0 wrote: | Ignoring quality of service, a satellite constellation is | really very significantly less hardware for global coverage. | | Somewhere elsewhere in the thread says the full constellation | is expected to be 12,000 satellites. Yes, you have to replace | them every ten years, and yes you need quite a few base | stations, but by contrast, this random site[1] says there's | over 100,000 cell towers in the United States. That number | supports multiple networks, but only the US. Rocket launches | are expensive, but so is building a lot of cell towers over the | whole world. | | Starlink could provide a reasonable backhaul technology for | some terrestrial towers that are hard to service through wires | or terrestrial radio. I'm hopeful that it will provide a | service floor that inspires terrestrial networks to do better | in areas where they have the capability but not the desire to | invest in upgrades. | | [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/521985/telecom-towers- | in... | mchusma wrote: | Know what will help the detection of near-Earth asteriods? | Starship, with its giant payload capability and low cost. | | I'm surprised about how many astronomers seem to...not want us to | go do stuff in space. | jagger27 wrote: | Would it be _totally insane_ for SpaceX to offer free /very cheap | launches every now and then to pure science missions to make up | for these types inconveniences? | | For context: plain old Falcon 9 could launch a Hubble-sized | telescope to LEO (with a bit of room to spare) and return for | reuse. | | It feels like the right thing to do and could gain them a bit of | goodwill. | markdown wrote: | OT but related... Starlink would really be useful in Tonga right | about now, with their fibre-optic connection severed and expected | to be out of commission for at least a month. | ceejayoz wrote: | Not in its current state; it relies on a local ground station | as they don't have the inter-satellite relaying via lasers | working yet. Coming "soon", but that's Elon saying so. | https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482424984962101249 | leobg wrote: | Are you sure? AFAIK the laser links are just needed to | further reduce latency. I don't think SpaceX needs any ground | stations. Elon even talked about governments in countries | like Afghanistan not being able to do anything against their | citizens using Starlink apart from "shaking their fists at | the sky". | emteycz wrote: | A ground station is required in the current version of | Starlink. Without it, the satellite has no internet | connection to offer to clients. | leobg wrote: | Ah. Of course. A ground station within the visibility | cone of the individual satellite. You are right! | cool_dude85 wrote: | Damn, Elon was telling a stupid lie? Consider me shocked. | Anyway, when's your dancing robot coming? Mine's about to | ship. | Thervicarl wrote: | > I don't think SpaceX needs any ground stations | | It is not magic. You signal from the user terminal has to | reach a ground station / gateway connected to the Internet. | Either there are inter-satellite links and the signal can | be routed to a gateway far away. Or there are not and the | gateway need to be at most a few hundred kilometers away if | you satellites are in orbit at 400km. | | > Afghanistan not being able to do anything against their | citizens using Starlink apart from "shaking their fists at | the sky". | | Or sentence to death people caught with a Starlink dish on | their roof. | leobg wrote: | You are right. | ErikCorry wrote: | There's only 568km from Tonga to Niue, who still have | Internet. I wonder if that's close enough to use a | hypothetical Niue base station to bounce Internet off a | Starlink to Tonga. Might be a little patchy depending on the | exact locations of the satellites at any time. | | Edit: Looks like Starlink doesn't have great coverage at this | latitude anyway, currently: | https://findstarlink.com/#4032402;3 | gpm wrote: | The site you're linking to is talking about _visible_ | starlink satellites, not starlink coverage. | | Starlink is definitely available at that latitude (in the | sense that there is signal, not in the sense that SpaceX is | currently taking customers or has set up base stations), in | the southern hemisphere the only significant landmass that | doesn't have more or less constant coverage is Antarctica. | | Back when coverage was more spotty, I made this map. I'd | probably change some things if I revisited it now that | there are lots of satellites up, but it's good enough for | demonstrating the point: https://droid.cafe/starlink | ErikCorry wrote: | Thanks yes I misunderstood the site | T-A wrote: | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/elon-musk... | iso1631 wrote: | Currently Starlink doesn't do Satelite-Satelite communication, | so you'd have to downlink reasonably close to Tonga. Even | ignoring the lack of downlink equipment, the maximum range is | about 250 miles. | | Fiji is the nearest realistic location to downlink, Suva, where | many cables land (including the cable from Tonga). It's 466 | miles, way over the horizon. | not2b wrote: | As the Rolling Stones said, "Paint It Black". | mzs wrote: | Here's paper, this article was unnecessarily alarmist: | | https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a | keewee7 wrote: | Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of | rural people in high income countries. | | Their claim about bringing Internet to poor countries is | bullshit. Countries like Kenya, Nigeria and India have already | shown that terrestrial long-distance networking (4G and soon 5G) | is the way to reach mass connectivity in developing countries. | | Why should we let one American ISP pollute our global nigh skies | with 42,000 planned satellites? What happens when an European or | Chinese competitor launches another 42,000 satellites? We need to | stop this madness. | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | Devil's advocate here- the sky either belongs to everybody or | it belongs to nobody. Why do astronomers think that they have | sole ownership of the sky? | RReverser wrote: | One is looking at it, another is polluting it and precluding | others from looking at it. Surely you see the difference? | jillesvangurp wrote: | For the same reason we can't do anything about people doing | things in international waters: it's outside the jurisdiction | of most countries. E.g. China might not like satellites flying | over their territory but there's not much they can do about it | legally. It's not part of their airspace. SpaceX doesn't need | permission; just for operating radios on the ground that | communicate with those satellites. Which of course a few | countries won't be willing to do because they'd instead prefer | to use their own satellites. | | Because SpaceX is of course hardly the only one with plans like | this. Like it or not, there will likely be tens or hundreds of | thousands satellites in orbit in a few decades. Millions even | long term. They are too cheap and useful for that to not | happen. It's more a question of when than if other rocket | companies get their act together. Lots of them have been | inspired by the success SpaceX has had in recent years. | | 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). There are thousands | flying at any moment. And they are much bigger than the puny | SpaceX satellites. And much closer too. 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. | axg11 wrote: | 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. | creato wrote: | If we expected Starlink internet to censor any negative | opinions of Elon Musk or Tesla, there might be similar | calls to stop it. | ekanes wrote: | > 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. | chaostheory wrote: | I can see the benefits of more competition for politically | entrenched ISPs, but I'm afraid of a potential Kessler Effect | happening | WithinReason wrote: | At Starlink's low attitude all orbits decay eventually | without active station keeping | 0_____0 wrote: | 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. | pc86 wrote: | How was the omelette? There's one on my horizon after | this all hands is over :) | WithinReason wrote: | 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. | rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: | 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. | tzs wrote: | > 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. | AniseAbyss wrote: | 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. | NelsonMinar wrote: | Starlink with laser links could be providing Internet access in | Tonga right now. Sadly they're a year (or more) from having it | working, they only just started yet. | | (I'm posting this message via Starlink. Admittedly I'm a rural | person in a rich country. Still grateful for it.) | kitsunesoba wrote: | > Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population | of rural people in high income countries. | | By the FCC's estimates[0], there are 26 million people in the | US alone, mostly in rural areas, who lack access to adequate | high speed internet. I believe that exceeds what most would | consider a small dwindling population by quite a large margin. | | This number could potentially increase too, with the recent | advent of full remote work. A fair number of people who live in | urban areas do so only because they have to for employment and | if they had the option would move somewhere less densely | populated. | | [0]: https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband- | progr... | SkyPuncher wrote: | I've been on the edge of buying Starlink, but am currently | waiting on a few other things to pan out: | | * I often have to drive through rural roads with my family. | Cell service is limited/spotty here. Starlink would allow me to | work on the road (and have an emergency backup). | | * My wife and I have been eyeing the possibility of purchasing | a small plot of land to "get away to" occasionally. Starlink | would enable me to work from that plot of land. | jacquesm wrote: | A plot of land to 'get away to' is a great thing to have if | you are getting away to it frequently enough to stop it from | turning into a jungle. Abandoned land turns into proto forest | with amazing speed, and any dwelling on there will be eaten | up in record time. If you are serious about this please | budget for a local caretaker. | s1artibartfast wrote: | Some people are OK with with proto Forest or or natural | environments. I have a getaway that has gone 40 years | without meaningful caretaking. | | Maybe once a decade a few hours are spent pruning trees | which encroach on the view or clearing brush for fire | safety. | | Hell, there are miners cabins built in the 1800s that are | still habitable without any dedicated caretaking | guest3456789a wrote: | Russians think there could be some hidden military use of | Starlink and there could be some truth in that, as from a | business point of view only Starlink somehow does not add up. | wcoenen wrote: | Let's say you put a 5G tower with battery+solar in the middle | of nowhere to provide coverage for a small village. How is that | tower going to connect to the rest of the world? You'd still | need to invest in fiber or microwave links to hook it up. | Starlink could be a cheaper and simpler alternative to connect | the tower. | parkingrift wrote: | >Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of | rural people in high income countries. | | If this is true then you've nothing to worry about. Starlink | will quickly fail, they'll close up shop, and the satellites | will de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. | | We need not worry about one American ISP or a European or | Chinese competitor. As you've said, this only serves a | dwindling population of rural people in high income countries. | No one else would be so stupid to try and enter this market. | There is clearly no need, terrestrial cellular will win. | trasz wrote: | Unless the government takes them over, like with Iridium. | giraffe_lady wrote: | We don't all subscribe to the philosophy that the only valid | limits to something are those imposed by market forces. | | If something is slightly bad for a great many people we're | allowed to just prevent it. We don't _have_ to wait for the | market to decide, there 's no virtue in doing so it doesn't | sanctify our decision. | michaelt wrote: | I'm not convinced starlink is slightly bad for a great many | people. | | Should a child struggle to access online learning simply | because their parents have chosen to live in a rural | location? Should a family in a town struggle when several | children need to attend classes online, because some inept | bureaucrat agreed to a telco monopoly decades ago? | | The fact starlink is an inconvenience to amateur stargazers | doesn't seem very important in comparison. | dTal wrote: | >The fact starlink is an inconvenience to amateur | stargazers doesn't seem very important in comparison. | | Hm, I recall reading recently that Starlink satellites | are hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids though. | Can't remember where. It's probably not important. | edgyquant wrote: | Wouldn't it be better to move the instruments for | detection outside of earth's atmosphere anyway? Same with | most telescopes. | addicted wrote: | Sure. | | And I'm sure Starlink will be ponying the money for that. | | Or wait to deploy their satellites until that process is | completed. | hackeraccount wrote: | What's the cost/benefit on the two options (and for all I | know there may be more then two) | | * get rid of starlink and any like minded projects | | * create work around so you can have Starlink type | projects and still detect asteroids. | | It seems like the second option should be viable - if you | know exactly where all the satellites are couldn't you | create a filter? | HWR_14 wrote: | > Should a child struggle to access online learning | simply because their parents have chosen to live in a | rural location? Should a family in a town struggle when | several children need to attend classes online, | | Children who struggle to learn in rural areas and have | parents who can afford a hundred dollars a month, plus | equipment costs? Assuming that the cost to use Starlink | doesn't rise (how many 35k Teslas actually shipped)? | Seems like a vanishingly small population right there. | | And the percentage of that population that is middle | class (the part that cannot help themselves) seems even | smaller. I'm not concerned about children hanging out at | their parent's 70,000 acre vacation ranch. | | Meanwhile, this article seems to be about professional | astronomers | flavius29663 wrote: | The more sensible solution is in ground based towers. The | US rural areas suffering from lack of coverage is due to | monopolistic/cartel attitudes of US ISP and carriers. | Other countries don't have this problem and true fee | competition made even rural areas have good wired and | wireless internet. This is a lack of political will | problem (to enforce cartel laws), not a technical one. | DennisP wrote: | Other countries with the population density of US rural | areas? Which ones specifically, and what did it cost | them? | ceejayoz wrote: | If Africa can manage it, we probably can. | | https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/08/in- | much-... | DennisP wrote: | That article is about telephony, not broadband internet. | We have telephony everywhere too. | ceejayoz wrote: | They're using _mobile_ telephony to access _broadband | internet_. | | https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/blog/the-state- | of-... | | > Mobile broadband coverage has also increased | substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is still the | region with the largest coverage gap; one in five people | live in an area without mobile broadband coverage - an | estimated 210 million people. | | If 80% of Africa can manage mobile broadband, it seems | likely the USA can. | parkingrift wrote: | We not need wait long. Launching satellites is comically | expensive. This endeavor will surely fail just as fast as | it started. | chaostheory wrote: | Why? If the market deems that there's an actual need beyond | "a dwindling rural population in high income countries", | Starlink will survive. If there isn't a need, then it won't | survive. The problem will take care of itself. Legislation | has a cost when there are other more pressing issues. A | politician's time is finite. | p_l wrote: | A huge early investor in Starlink is very not market | constrained and will always have politician backing - the | military. | chaostheory wrote: | How exactly is a "huge early investor not market | constrained"? For every Starlink, there is likely a | Webvan. Investors do not have infinite resources. | | Military and political backing are also not guaranteed. | SpaceX's origins are a good example of that. | HWR_14 wrote: | The military isn't constrained by market forces - they | are constrained by budgets and capabilities. That is, I'm | not sure what "market forces" justify being able to cause | a city to disappear in nuclear explosions across the | world in 20 minutes, but it definitely is a capability | the (US, Russian, Chinese, maybe more) military pays for. | | Meanwhile, GP is saying the military is a huge early | investor for Starlink, and they are doing it primarily | because they want to consume it. | chaostheory wrote: | Space X was at a severe political disadvantage vs | aerospace incumbents. It did not have full government | support. It still doesn't compared to the incumbents. | Could be wrong, but the military is not a major factor | for Space X especially at the beginning. Why? Elon is not | a fan of bribes. | p_l wrote: | Military literally paid for SpaceX to be a thing, and | USAF is IIRC something in the range of 25% if not more | initial funder for Starlink, and by virtue of very | specific requirements, the only stable client who | couldn't be easily served by few geostationary or Molniya | satellites (operating an ISP in various countries can | be... interesting. Elon is also very, very fond of | government handout, that's how SpaceX and Tesla got | funded pretty much, even if Elon provided certain capital | to get things moving at times. | | For example, how is Starlink going to provide local | Ministry of Defense access to the network in time of | emergency, which was at least in 2008 a requirement for | any ISP in Poland spanning more than one commune | (smallest administrative region)? Requirements like that | mean that ISPs need to seek waivers or just avoid having | customers in specific countries (or break the law - we're | talking Elon here after all, just look at latest FSD | brouhaha). And they greatly dimnish the value proposal of | building a constellation. | | OTOH, DoD had been shopping around for global satellite | provider for last 15-20 years, as bandwidth and | availability were often issues just in running bases, but | also making it harder to drone strike an usually innocent | group. | HWR_14 wrote: | > but the military is not a major factor for Space X | especially at the beginning | | The US military funded the first two launches of the | Falcon 1. Far from "not being a major factor", without | that money, Musk and Space X (and likely Tesla) would | have gone bankrupt in 200X. | keewee7 wrote: | You're forgetting the "backed by the richest man in the | world" benefit that Starlink will enjoy before any | significant market correction happens. | ben_w wrote: | Quite a lot of his wealth is predicated on this actually | succeeding, and is otherwise paper money. | parkingrift wrote: | If you don't care for Elon what more could you ask for than | he wastes tens of billions on such a fruitless endeavor? Do | you think he'll just keep launching satellites for fun and | pleasure? | HWR_14 wrote: | > If you don't care for Elon what more could you ask for | than he wastes tens of billions on such a fruitless | endeavor? | | Just because I don't care for Elon (nor think he should | have that much money), doesn't mean I don't care what he | does with his money. If he buys and shreds the Mona Lisa, | I care. If he pollutes LEO because a math error keeps the | satellites from deorbiting and causes Kessler Syndrome, I | care. If his Boring Company in Vegas has a disaster and a | hundred people die in his tunnel, I care. | | I care about a lot of other things he could do too, but | I'm not going to list them. | | Meanwhile, while I don't care for him, that doesn't mean | I want him to become poor. I _don 't_ care if he has a | megayacht or something. | AlgorithmicTime wrote: | Starlink is too low to cause Kessler Syndrome. The orbits | all decay within a few years naturally. | falcolas wrote: | Well, he launched a car out of spite, so, why not? | ben_w wrote: | The alternative was _literally_ a lump of concrete. | | That was the Falcon Heavy _test launch_ and he wasn't | able to even give away the flight for free to anyone when | he offered. | bhhaskin wrote: | They had a rocket they needed to test (Falcon Heavy) and | that requires a test payload. Usually test payloads are | boring mass analogs. Instead they decided to use | something different and get a bunch of marketing out of | it. Everything had to be approved by the appropriate | government agencies well ahead of time. So where does the | "spite" come from? | falcolas wrote: | I can't find the reference now, so perhaps I hallucinated | it. But as I recall, the car was intended to go to | another investor, and the early-Tesla investor/CEO | shenanigans put it into limbo, and so Musk launched it. | s1artibartfast wrote: | Interesting story if true. Why would Elons personal | roadster have been promised to an investor? | TheCraiggers wrote: | It only happened once, which was an obvious marketing | stunt that presumably served its purpose. There's not | much benefit to doing it over and over again. | | If he was really doing it "for the lulz" then there would | be many more such launches. Cars, a painting of some | artist that offended him, etc. We haven't seen that | though. | lnsru wrote: | It fantastically benefits US military providing reliable | communication channel and high speed networking everywhere. Not | sure if Europeans will want this. Not sure if Russians will be | able to afford this. Chinese might want the same very much and | they can built all the satellites for sure. | shantara wrote: | A large market for Starlink are ships and aircraft. It's | already been tested in these applications, but commercial usage | is pending regulatory approval. | | Plus there've been some discussions, and even a signed contact | regarding Starlink usage as a backhaul on cell towers. Link: | https://telecoms.com/511313/kddi-to-use-starlink-for-mobile-... | ctoth wrote: | > What happens when an European or Chinese competitor launches | another 42,000 satellites? | | Then there are 84,000 satellites in orbit and room for | literally millions more? Space is big. Each satellite is | smaller than a car. What happens if a company produces 42,000 | more cars? Will it blanket the Earth? Of course not! I think | you might just be a bit confused when trying to conceptualize | just how much room we're talking about here. | 7952 wrote: | I dont see why spacex has got to target the same niche (rural | people in rich countries) everywhere in the world. They could | provide low cost backhaul in developing countries for telcos. | Offer more expensive access for airlines and ships. Have an | offering aimed at organisations who want to run a WiFi network | (like schools or offices). The advantage of satellite is that | the same infrastructure can offer different services in | different places. | edgyquant wrote: | SpaceX bringing internet to rural areas is just another of | those Musk stories he tells. Like how SpaceX is "meant to | make us a multi planet species" when in reality it's just | another government contractor at this point. Starlinks real | business _will_ come from the military, airlines and shipping | fleets. | 7952 wrote: | I agree that most revenue will come from military, | shipping, airlines etc. But I don't see why that should | preclude other uses at other price points. Particulaly as | those users can be separated geographically. And the | marginal cost of bandwidth could become very low. If the | only customer in a footprint is a school in a remote area | then you might as well sell to them at a price they can | afford. It is more revenue than you would have got | otherwise. It's like selling seats on an airline. Most | revenue comes from expensive business class seats, but | there are still cheap seats. Because most costs are fixed | regardless of how many users. | kingcharles wrote: | > Starlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population | of rural people in high income countries. | | I live in downtown Chicago and I can't get wired Internet for | less than $70,000 installation. I would have gone with Starlink | except they had backorders on the receivers, so I went with | T-Mobile 5G Home Internet instead. So, it's not just people in | the boondocks that need wire-free Internet. | cute_boi wrote: | I think it is your privilege to give such opinion, however, I | can see the various advantage of Starlink. Many ISP in the US | simply refuse to provide proper bandwidth and people have to | live with ISP shenanigans, Starlink has helped those people. | Sometimes submarine cables are destroyed. We saw that in a | recent disaster where a volcanic eruption was responsible for | an internet blackout, Starlink would have been helpful there. | | And to counter your same example, in India around 41% of people | have access to the internet. I think the internet is a basic | right, at least in this century, so we shouldn't deprive people | of the internet. I do acknowledge that Starlink might be costly | but something is better than nothing. | rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: | I mean, I don't think that your argument justifies why we | should trade off near-earth asteroid monitoring with faster | internet connections just so we can consume more Instagram | and TikTok videos better. | cute_boi wrote: | To me, internet doesn't means "Instagram and TikTok | videos". And, we should focus on how to solve this asteroid | detection issue, that doesn't mean we should dismiss whole | idea. | devoutsalsa wrote: | If scanning for near Earth asteroids was really a priority, | there's nothing stopping us from building a detection | network in space, above the altitude at which Starlink | satellites fly. | gord288 wrote: | Okay so until such time as this higher-orbit asteroid | detection network is in place, let's have a moratorium on | these Starlink things. | rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: | Isn't it more the case that it is a priority precisely | because we have our current methods for detecting near- | earth asteroids, but we're letting capitalism get in the | way and launch Starlink satellites in space to trade off | the safety of our species for more profit that, honestly, | isn't even necessary? I mean, of course you can argue | that the survival of our species isn't necessary and is | not more important than money, but if you believe that, | you should state that plainly because that seems to be | where we'll have an impasse. | devoutsalsa wrote: | In my opinion... If we REALLY wanted to detect near Earth | asteroids, we'd focus on space based telescopes. They are | better in nearly every way, except for the raw size of | the mirror. But we use ground based telescopes because | they are cheaper. Capitalism has already prioritized | lower science budgets for finding big rocky planet | killers. | edgyquant wrote: | I don't think detecting near earth asteroids has become | impossible. Developing space infrastructure is just as | important to our survival as detection. | supperburg wrote: | Somehow I prefer the timeline where the earth is blanketed in | internet. | edhelas wrote: | Big +1 on this. Elon Musk is not a philanthropist. The goal of | Starlink is just to bring Internet to people that can afford an | expensive system just for themselves by literally annoying | everyone else. | | It's the same thing with the Boring Company and public | transports: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward- | dislike-mass-t... | noutella wrote: | You're absolutely right. It's saddening to see how little | regulation there is, or even how little focus there is on | regulating business in space. I don't want to sound naive, but | it's frustrating that us citizens of any countries have no | weight on such important matters. All for the Musks and Bezos' | of this world I guess. | edgyquant wrote: | Regulations will come with time. Space is the new Wild West, | once we have a decent amount of infrastructure (and people) | in space governments and regulations will follow. | akagusu wrote: | refurb wrote: | A man who everyone bet against but probably did the most in | terms of pushing 100% electric cars and making them mainstream | and you say he's fucked the earth? | | Listen, 2 years ago I would have said Elon is a clown and Tesla | is going to zero. | | And I was 100% wrong. | | Dude has massive balls and the kind of personality (warts and | all) that pushes humanity forward. | | We need to nurture people like him, not condemn them. | kaba0 wrote: | Building goddamn infrastructure for public transport would | put us so much ahead than stupid luxury cars transiting a | single person. | | Also, did you calculate the production of batteries and their | limited reusability into the picture as well? Or the not even | close to renewable-only sources of electricity used to | recharge the cars? | refurb wrote: | You did an _amazing_ job of not addressing a single point I | made. | DennisP wrote: | Well if you can figure out how to actually accomplish a big | expansion in public transport, please let us know. People | have been trying for decades. You have to get politicians | and taxpaying voters on board and that's not so easy. | | In the meantime, Tesla is making real progress on | decarbonizing transport. And it's not just "stupid luxury | cars," the whole idea was to start with that and work their | way down to the mass-market as they scaled up mass | production and batteries got cheaper, and that plan seems | to be progressing nicely. | | Batteries can be recycled and Tesla's 4680 cells are | designed to make recycling easy. And a recent Yale study | found that, even taking all indirect emissions into | account, electric cars are far better than gasoline cars: | https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/yse-study-finds- | el... | nothis wrote: | That's kinda the plot of Don't Look Up. | oneoff786 wrote: | I felt this movie was truly awful. Vacillating between a | comedy and a serious movie. As a leftist I felt offended at | the leftist pandering and idiotic portrayal of conservatives | in the film. It felt like a dangerously left populist film | cheering on the decline of public trust. Similar to how the | kingsmen did so for right populism. | | This film really made me feel apathetic to US cultural | direction. Not because of the portrayal of political | incompetence. But for the eagerness and shamelessness of | pretending that the only good smart folks are the little | people on the left and that everyone else is comic book evil | in a mostly serious film, or at least, a film that felt like | it was trying to have a serious point. | | Anti science and intellectualism in the US is a problem but | Christ this movie was just as bad in the opposite direction. | kaba0 wrote: | What was leftist about anyone in the film? I swear most | Americans really have no idea what even leftist politics | are -- both of your parties are so on the right from a | European perspective that it is laughable when people call | democrats left-leaning. They are so corporate-loving that | calling it left is just bad. | | [SPOILER] And I don't really see a dark satire "cheering on | the decline of public trust".. it showed how ridiculous it | is that science is looked at this cute nerd hobby which is | interesting when they "discovered a new planet" or | whatever, because it makes people feel proud that they are | also intellectuals. But when science mandates something, it | is suddenly something we can go against and question, shown | by the poll in the film where people were asked about | whether they think the meteor is dangerous, or if it's a | hoax. | oneoff786 wrote: | Yes everyone knows that American left is still pretty | damn right. But it's the left in America. I don't care | about the global spectrum. | | I disagree with your lighthearted assessment of the | film's values. | | I saw all business and political elites being portrayed | as truly sociopathic villains, and just generally, | assholes in private contexts. | | I saw conservatives being portrayed as fucking idiots. | Like showing the military commander shooting an assault | rifle at the comet, or the Fox News equivalent covering | stupid content instead of the meteor. | | I saw constant appeals to young liberal folks as the only | ones that get it. And for some reason Arianna Grande. | | If this movie were clearly a comedy, sure, but it | frequently tried to be a serious film, and I think it | just adds chaos and anger to what is otherwise an | important set of issues. This is just as divisive as the | bullshit the movie calls out. | kaba0 wrote: | Well, that empathetic and caring business and political | elite got fking rich during a pandemic that hit the US | particularly hard. The military commander shooting at the | comet was a goddamn joke, come on (and not even that is | baseless, just see how many idiot shoots at goddamn | hurricanes)! And let's be honest, Fox News is trash, I | can honestly claim that even as a European. And it's not | like the film took a particular stance regarding the | portrayal of the media, the main tv show that was | actually part of the story (and not just a gig) was like | a central target of the whole satire thing. | | > I saw constant appeals to young liberal folks as the | only ones that get it | | I guess this is similar to how conservatives wonder why | science is always on the side of "the left" or whatever.. | so mysterious why is that. | | And the movie is listed as dark comedy - are you not | familiar with this genre from eg. Russian novels? Those | are probably the best known uses of this specific genre - | but putting a serious issue into a comedic setting just | highlights the ridiculousness of the real world - which I | think it managed to do quite well, as we are doing pretty | much exactly that with climate change (and covid, though | the film was not originally about that). | | Like, perhaps my favorite part was the film interview | inside the film where the producer was about "america is | divisive enough as is, we should unite instead so that's | why i made this logo" and shows a don't look up and look | up logo at the same time, which is really funny and | ridiculous satire of the "enlightened centrist" thinking. | oneoff786 wrote: | FWIW that was also my favorite part. It was a great | scene. It was very separate from the rest of the film. | Funny. Clear satire. | Jtsummers wrote: | > Like showing the military commander shooting an assault | rifle at the comet | | I haven't seen it, but that sounds like a sendup to | _Doctor Strangelove_. What are you going to do when faced | with your inevitable death? Why not something totally | absurd! Like ride a nuclear bomb or shoot futilely at a | comet heading your way. | fullstop wrote: | > I felt this movie was truly awful. Vacillating between a | comedy and a serious movie. As a leftist I felt offended at | the leftist pandering and idiotic portrayal of | conservatives in the film. | | They were more of a blend of left and right than you might | appreciate. The president's smoking habit was a clear | reference to Barack Obama, and all of the photographs of | her with celebrities was a reference to Hillary Clinton. | Unqualified children working as advisors was a reference to | Donald Trump. | | I would argue that what you see in the characters is more | of a reflection of your political leanings. | oneoff786 wrote: | I agree with that on the presidential piece. Which is why | I say left populist. | | It's anti political elite. Anti business elite. Anti | American right. | | It's not pro Democrat. Much as the Kingsmen wasn't pro | Republican. | | The Fox News equivalent, idiot military man shooting at | the moon, and conspiracy theory culture were all | "liberal" pandering though. | kaba0 wrote: | The Bash CEO is not a Bezos, Musk, Steve Jobs combo by | accident. | [deleted] | toolz wrote: | I find it interesting how opposite my view is of yours. I see | earth as flourishing with 100k+ people lifting themselves out | of extreme poverty, daily, for the last 25 years. I see | violence on the decline for decades. I see new discovery | happening at an insane rate that gives me hope. I see people | identifying issues and the world responding, maybe not | perfectly or even effectively, but there's certainly huge | movement with real problems across the board. People are more | connected to information than ever and as a whole I see | progress dominating and the future looks incredibly bright. | andrekandre wrote: | > 100k+ people lifting themselves out of extreme poverty, | daily, for the last 25 years. | | where are these people located? | kaba0 wrote: | Are there new discoveries happening at an insane rate? I feel | that due to the knowledge circle always expanding in radius, | we effectively have a continuously increasing surface area to | learn about, slowing it down significantly. | | Also, I fail to be that optimistic given how wealth imbalance | is greater then ever, and the looming climate change we do | jackshit about. The people being connected to information | suck up bullshit conspiracy theories like they were nothing | (and those kind little FAANG companies help them in that). | And this anti-intellectualism is even scarier than climate | change, might I say. | stupidcar wrote: | Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one | planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near- | Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic. | gitfan86 wrote: | The ironic thing would be if we detected a large asteroid and | had no way of deflecting it in time because we had shutdown | SpaceX in an attempt to better find smaller asteroids. | sschueller wrote: | Or we can't launch anything to save us because of Kessler | event caused by startlink sometime back. | simondotau wrote: | The Kessler Syndrome doesn't apply at Starlink's altitude. | buzzwordninja wrote: | My knowledge basically ends at knowing of the concept, so | can you elaborate how/why it is different in different | orbits? | kitsunesoba wrote: | The lower the orbit, the more quickly objects de-orbit. | This is especially true of the lowest LEO orbits that | Starlink sits in, where atmospheric drag also enters the | picture. Worst case scenario, a totally dead satellite | will deorbit on its own in a couple of years and they can | very easily suicide if required to avoid catastrophe. | throwaway2048 wrote: | collisions can easily push things into higher orbits. | aidenn0 wrote: | I'm not a rocket scientist, but this seems unlikely; sure | two large satellites colliding could create smaller | debris with a much higher apogee, but it seems to me that | the perigee would not increase, so it would still spend a | significant fraction of its orbit in atmospheric drag. | throwaway2048 wrote: | but could easily collide with something at apogee, | especially if the collision lead to a cascading style | kessler syndrome event. | gpm wrote: | Kessler syndrome will never prevent us from launching | things, it could theoretically stop us from parking things | in certain orbits, but the risk to launch through those | orbits will be minimal. | | Source (wikipedia): | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Implications | ZetaZero wrote: | LOL. Unfortunately, we still are not in any position to do | anything about any detected asteroid. | netsec_burn wrote: | We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our | solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on | Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have | almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an | asteroid. | | [1] https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw | ceejayoz wrote: | > We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our | solar system. | | We really haven't. We found Sedna in 2003. Makemake and Eris | in 2005. | gitfan86 wrote: | If only someone was trying to build a spaceship company that | could launch massive payloads everyday. | Qem wrote: | Only in the near planetary region of the solar system. | There's lots of comets with very long periods we didn't | detect yet, because their last visit to the inner solar | system was centuries or even millennia ago. | sschueller wrote: | Sadly that is what happens when you blindly follow someone | without ever questioning their doctrine. | danieldrehmer wrote: | Humans had no NEO monitoring for about 500k years, we'll do ok | for a few years of diminished capacity | kaba0 wrote: | Dinosaurs didn't have one either and are still doing... ooh | XorNot wrote: | Astronomy as a whole probably needs to move off world. | | Eventually someone was going to fill up orbit, and cheap global | internet connectivity is a really good reason to do so. | | The telescopes you need for NEO detection aren't very big, so we | really should fund a full high orbit web of them for planetary | defence. | kaba0 wrote: | Why don't we do instead the starlink equivalent but at a lower | altitude -> lower radius -> less satellite. We could easily put | a "satellite" at each roof and be done. It's just not as good | PR as space. | gitfan86 wrote: | Because air seems clear people don't realize that using a | telescope from sea level is like adding a layer of ice to your | windshield while driving. | travisporter wrote: | The title doesn't reflect the contents of the article; was the | link changed but the sensationalist title remains? | | "the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a | percent of the pixels in a ZTF image." | andrewclunn wrote: | Wait, we're using terrestrial telescopes for this? I would have | assumed that satellite based ones would be favored for this kind | of thing. | iso1631 wrote: | You can build far more and far larger telescopes on the ground | than you can in space, for the same money. | gitfan86 wrote: | The whole point of SpaceX is to make the cost of payload to | orbit 1000x cheaper. At that point you can build a much | better monitoring system that isn't dealing with the | atmosphere. | iso1631 wrote: | And when we have daily starship launches that will be | great, but we aren't there yet. Hopefully some people are | thinking how they could design mass produced satelites to | perform this type of detection and the best way to build | such a network (thinking outside the box // low earth orbit | assuming low cost launches) | | But ultimately prices will have to drop far more than that | to be cheaper to build an orbiting telescope rather than | one on the ground for most requirements. | CaptArmchair wrote: | > better monitoring system | | There's the Vera C. Rubin observatory: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory | https://www.lsst.org/ | | > NASA has been tasked by the US Congress with detecting | and cataloging 90% of the NEO population of size 140 meters | or greater.[68] LSST, by itself, is estimated to detect 62% | of such objects,[69] and according to the National Academy | of Sciences, extending its survey from ten years to twelve | would be the most cost-effective way of finishing the | task.[70] | | https://www.universetoday.com/153620/nasas-new-asteroid- | impa... | | > The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be a powerful tool for | detecting NEAs. It'll image each area of the sky about 1000 | times in its ten-year survey. And it'll do so with a | powerful 3,200-megapixel camera. The Rubin will image the | entire visible sky every two nights, and Asteroids will | have nowhere to hide. | | And there's NEO Surveyor which is a satelite which does | exactly that as well from orbit to get full coverage. | | https://www.universetoday.com/151539/nasa-has-approved-a- | spa... | | https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-approves-asteroid- | hunting-... | gitfan86 wrote: | FTA: "30% to 50% of the exposures around twilight" So the | rest of the night it is collecting data. Sounds like | ground based detection will work just fine even with more | satellites in orbit. | iso1631 wrote: | The satelites are still going across the sky whether they | are reflecting light or not | gitfan86 wrote: | So are bugs and birds and planes and dust particles and | uneven temperature gradients, that all have to be | corrected for already when you use ground based | telescopes. | tejtm wrote: | true, but those are included of the natural cost of doing | business. these additional occlusions are because a | private entity has chosen to take the space for their | profit with zero consequence or compensation for our | loss. | dantheman wrote: | You don't think availability of internet around the world | isn't compensation? | gitfan86 wrote: | And you are asking people in rural areas to give up | cheap/fast internet access without compensating them for | that loss. | sbierwagen wrote: | The classic gif of the Wide-field Infrared Survey | Explorer satellite detecting asteroids: https://en.wikipe | dia.org/wiki/File:PIA22419-Neowise-1stFourY... | eyko wrote: | I don't have any experience with telescopes or satellites | but I can imagine that the cost of running a satellite in | space is not just the cost of launching it. Everything | after that is necessarily more complex and expensive: | repairs, corrections of orbit/trajectory, availability | windows if it's not geostationary, monitoring, protecting | from debris, limited bandwidth, etc. | cblconfederate wrote: | Then you have to maintain it | oneoff786 wrote: | Counterpoint: below a certain price point, no you don't. | theptip wrote: | Yeah this is my take too. Version N+1 of satellite internet | breaks Version N of asteroid detection. The answer is | clearly to build Version N+1 of the detection system using | SpaceX to launch cheap satellites. | | There was some discussion (Ars Technica maybe?) about why | the Webb telescope took so long and was so expensive -- | basically because heavy launch is (was?) so expensive, they | needed to contort to fit everything in one payload | (telescoping heat shield etc). But if you could do 10 | launches for the same cost, you could iterate on the | satellite much more easily, and the total cost to build it | would be much less. (Waterfall vs. agile, to analogize with | software development.) | juanani wrote: | samwillis wrote: | For now. | | Planet have shown that for earth observation constellations | are not only possible but cost affective. | | Now imagin if SpaceX stuck a camera/telescope facing outwards | on even 10% of their constellation. With modern ML image | proccing pipelines I could see that providing us with very | valuable additional astroid detection. | | I really hope to see SpaceX "renting" space on some of their | constellation for uses such at this. | sklargh wrote: | Momentarily setting aside the human tragedy of losing the night | sky for...broadband internet. We can manage externalities through | taxation. Large constellations should be funding space-based | sensors across all spectrums for regular astronomy and planetary | defense. I feel like we could get here via a launch license fee. | hunterb123 wrote: | Only HN will downplay the role of the internet when it comes to | Elon hating. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Satellites are relatively cheap. Certainly cheaper than the | right-of-way to run cables through every expensive heavily | populated city in America for instance. | | In fact, it would seem obvious that a LEO power station would | make a lot of sense for the same reason. Earth-bound stations | have the disadvantage of ~50% duty cycle due to a periodic | eclipse phenomenon known as 'night'. | CaptArmchair wrote: | Link to study: | https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a | shantara wrote: | Any explanation how it affects the asteroid detection? It is not | a manual sky search it was decades ago, but a completely | automated process with a computer controlled telescope, orbit | calculation software, check against a database of known objects | and a submission of the new findings. | Symmetry wrote: | Also I thought that Sentinel was doing most of the near Earth | asteroid work. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope | | EDIT: Oops, I was actually thinking of WISE but found the wrong | thing Googling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide- | field_Infrared_Survey_Exp... but apparently that isn't nearly | as important as land based surveying. | SiempreViernes wrote: | "This article is about the cancelled Sentinel Space Telescope | for detecting asteroids." | | Don't think it's doing a lot of monitoring honestly. | iso1631 wrote: | If you have to remove the streaks, you're losing data behind | those streaks. It's possible that in that frame, you miss the | data that would be needed. | | Of course an expanding space economy is just what we need to be | able to survive an asteroid on a collision course. | oneoff786 wrote: | Seems a little silly. Streaks are small and a tiny part of an | image. So long as the satellites don't block a constant part | of the sky, if they block < 1% of the frame you can probably | just ignore the problem entirely. Assume that by chance | anything missed on photo n will be captured on n + 1. | | I'm assuming it's totally fine to delay asteroid detection by | one search with regards to whatever we can do about | asteroids. | simondotau wrote: | Those streaks are what, 0.0000001% of the sky? Probably less? | | It's like if there were just a few thousand cars and boats on | the entirety of planet earth, evenly spaced out across the | land and sea. And then someone pipes up to complain about the | heavy traffic, or the constant sound of horn honking. | throwaway2048 wrote: | The problem isn't so much missing pixels, its that bright | satellites raise the noise floor of the image | significantly, the more satellites in shot, the worse it | is. | | Its the same reason telescopes can't just "filter out" | stuff like city lights and human radio sources. | robocat wrote: | The satellite streaks affect a limited number of pixels. | The optics are not perfect, so a bright object can smear | light over all the pixels of the sensor (noise floor). | | Do you have any facts to show that the streaks raise the | noise floor significantly (say more than 10%)? | | I would guess from your lack of hard information that you | are just suggesting it could potentially be a problem. | | Edit: for a quick and dirty calculation, I estimated the | pixels on a horizontal line in the image in the article, | ignoring the galaxy, and the streak is not significant | compared with the light from the stars. I presume because | the satellites move fast across a slow time-lapse image | capture, your hypothetical problem is not actually | significant. | robocat wrote: | Your metaphor is poor. Imagine 2000 vehicles travelling at | 25000 km/h across your location ocassionally from seemingly | random directions. | | Orbital period is ~90 minutes, and the surface area of the | planet is ~510 million km2, so they would only occasionally | pass you closely. The Doppler effect would prevent you | hearing the horn, but the sonic booms would be rather | noticeable (the speed of sound is 1080 km/h). | Johnny555 wrote: | _Your metaphor is poor. Imagine 2000 vehicles travelling | at 25000 km /h across your location ocassionally from | seemingly random directions._ | | But are they actually random? I thought satellite orbits | (even LEO constellations like Starlink) were well know | and tracked? | | To a human observer, the orbits may be 'seemingly | random', but a computer should know if a Starlink | satellite crossed its field of view. | gpm wrote: | Incidentally, even to a human observer they are very far | from random (though they aren't entirely regular either). | | Go to https://droid.cafe/starlink (disclaimer: my site), | click the gear icon in the top right, and drag the speed | slidebar all the way to the right to see... | mkj wrote: | "So far, ZTF science operations have not yet been severely | affected by satellite streaks, despite the increase in their | number observed during the analyzed period" | | So it requires processing for mitigation, but isn't as dire as | the title suggests. | shantara wrote: | From the paper linked in the other comment: | | >approximately 4 x 10-4 of all pixels would be lost over the | course of a year. | | I don't believe this is a significant enough impact | Frost1x wrote: | It's probably seen more as a herald of things to come. SpaceX | will not be the last private entity throwing things in orbit. | There have already been concerns about the amount of space | debris that currently exists and coordinating it to avoid | costly and time consuming repairs/replacements (or in the | case of ISS, life threatening) accidents. | | It's probably seen more as an opportunity to acknowledge a | problem early to try and prevent issue before the problem | grows too large and to consider mitigation strategies now. | WithinReason wrote: | Starlink gets a lot of bad press from astronomers, so I want to | leave this here to balance it out. It's written by Casey Handmer, | an (ex) NASA astrophysicist. Source: | https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside... | | Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it's worth reading: | | Starlink will ultimately be a network of tens of thousands of | satellites connecting to hundreds of millions of user terminals | located all over the Earth. Its radio encoding scheme adapts the | signal rate to measured atmospheric opacity along the signal line | of sight across 10 different frequency bands in real time. | Collectively, the system measures trillions of baselines of | Earth's entire atmosphere every day. This data, fed into standard | tomography algorithms such as those used by medical CT imagers, | can resolve essentially all weather structure in the atmosphere. | No more careful scrutiny of remote weather station pressure gauge | measurements. No more reliance on single mission oxygen emission | line broadening. Instead, complete real time resolution of the | present state of the entire atmosphere, a gift for weather | prediction and climate study. | | Starlink satellites are equipped with perhaps the most versatile | software defined radios ever put into mass production. Each | antenna allows the formation of multiple beams at multiple | frequencies in both send and receive. With sufficiently accurate | position, navigation and timing (PNT) data from GPS satellites, | Starlink satellites could perform fully 3D synthetic aperture | radar (SAR) of the Earth's surface, with enough bandwidth to | downlink this treasure trove of data. Precise ocean height | measurements. Precise land height measurements. Surface | reflectivity. Crop health and hydration. Seismology and | accumulation of strain across faults. City surveying. Traffic | measurements in real time. Aircraft tracking for air traffic | control. Wildlife study. Ocean surface wind measurements. Search | and rescue. Capella has produced extraordinary radar images with | a single satellite. Now imagine the resolving power with birds | from horizon to horizon. | | Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same | principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network | of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT | information and high speed data connections. It is practically | begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With | 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO | Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired | direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically | holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. | Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based | antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing | Arecibo and independent of Earth's rotation. Potentially capable | of resolving exoplanets. | | There's no reason to do only passive radio astronomy. Starlink | can exploit its exceptional resolving power and onboard | amplifiers to perform active planetary radar, for examination of | close-flying asteroids and transmission of radio signals to | distant missions in support of the Deep Space Network. As of | November 2021, all Starlink satellites are flying with lasercoms | so in principle the DSN application could also support laser, as | well as radio, communication with distant probes. No need to | build even larger dishes than the 70 m monsters. The potential to | greatly increase our data rates from distant probes. | | And while Starlink can derive PNT from the GPS constellation, it | need not depend on it forever. High capacity radio encoding | schemes such as QAM4092 and the 5G standard contain zero-epoch | synchronization data, meaning that any radio capable of receiving | Starlink handshake signals is able to obtain approximate | pseudorange information. What Starlink's onboard clocks may lack | in atomic clock-enabled nanosecond stability, they make up in | sheer quantity of connections and publicly available information | about their orbital ephemerides. Already a group from OSU has | demonstrated <10 m accuracy, while a group based at UT Austin is | developing a related method for robust PNT estimation using | Starlink hardware. It seems likely to me that Starlink could | support global navigation with few to no software changes and no | hardware changes, improving the resilience of satellite | navigation especially in a case where the relatively small GPS | constellation is disabled. I won't go into vast detail, but GNSS | signals are not only used for pizza delivery, but also support a | vast array of Earth science objectives, including the monitoring | of tectonic drift. | | Starlink has received its fair share of criticism, drawn perhaps | by its overwhelming scale and potential impacts to ground-based | astronomy. But Starlink can also be the single greatest | scientific instrument ever built, a hyperspectral radio eye the | size of the Earth, capable of decoding information about the | Earth and the universe that is right up against the limits of | physics. | gala8y wrote: | Few days ago I watched 'Debunking Starlink' video [0] (posted | by @qsdf38100 in another thread [1] on Starlink) and it got me | thinking. I am just a lay person, but, after watching it, am | not so sure if Starlink is such a good idea. | | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975352 | ricardobeat wrote: | Might not want to take that at face value. I skipped through | most of the video but it seems like a series of thoughtless | jabs. The cost estimates are way off, ignores the fact | commercial launch prices are a large multiple of the actual | cost, ignores economics with Starship. It handwaves the fact | that Starlink orbits are so low that the satellites naturally | decay in 5 years, so no permanent space trash. Comparing the | addressable market (telecom alone is already 2T) to average | income per capita is pointless.. I stopped there. Too much of | the "i am very smart" vibe. | schiffern wrote: | De-debunk: https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/rppkb | 5/very_well_... | | You just described all of CommonSenseSkeptic's 'debunking' | content (along with his predecessor Thunderfoot, who | should've stuck with creationists and Kickscammers). | | Lately I find the word "debunking"/"debunked" in a title is | a high-reliability signal of low-quality content. | WithinReason wrote: | > De-debunk | | Rebunk? Anyway, Musk-hate seems to be becoming its own | religion. | schiffern wrote: | Linguistically it's an awkward case. Currently, | "debunked" (see also: "busted") is just the latest | version of the phrase "scientists say X." The literal | semantics and how it's actually used in practice are | polar opposites. But "re-bunked" still sound like false | information. | | Right now the words are mainly used as a cheap way to | sound like Carl Sagan or Mythbusters without any of the | deep knowledge and research. | | "De-debunked" IMO gets the message across, but also | highlights the absurdity. | __m wrote: | i doubt that it can handle that many users. I even doubt it can | handle enough users to cover the cost of replacing its | satellites every 5 years | DennisP wrote: | Somehow I suspect SpaceX did the math on how many users it | can support and the cost of replacing satellites, before | betting the company on the project. | RReverser wrote: | Yeah, like every start-up clearly did before them (example: | Uber). /s | me_me_me wrote: | What?? Noooo... they would only have to launch indefinitely | something like 10 rockets a month to keep replacing aging | nodes, I am sure that is financially viable way to compete | with a copper/fibre cable -_- | | The tech works, its just completely non feasible. Geosync | satelites can give you global access with handful of | satelites. | | Trans-sea cables give you cheap and quick connection speeds. | | Starlink is middle of the road solution that solves both | problems are immense costs. | | I can only imagine high frequency traders being able to | afford it vs utilise the advantage of the latencies. | vkou wrote: | HFTs use direct, point-to-point terrestrial connections. | They rarely need to send trades out of <middle of nowhere, | that does not have a fiber link>. | | They've already optimized the hell out of their latency, to | a ridiculous level. | ericd wrote: | It's certainly not going to require 10 starships/month. And | they're aiming to get those down to <$10M/starship launch. | thro1 wrote: | Great idea! ;) Feasibility study - regarding _outwards_ , by | teraflop (Nov 2020) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25051151 , shortly: | | _.. dishes on every one of the 12,000 satellites_ for _the | same total area_ [as Arecibo] _each have to be over 9 feet. | That 's about the same size as the chassis of the satellite | itself.._ | | _.. the receivers need to have very precisely synchronized | clocks, and their relative positions need to be known to within | a small fraction of the wavelengths you 're interested .. you | might need to add atomic clocks to every satellite as well.. | | .. you have to think about how to aim the antennas.. | | .. fairly sensitive, low-noise, specialized signal processing | equipment .. power .. weight.. | | .. satellites have a roughly 5-year design lifetime.._ | | then, can it be done ? | [deleted] | GuB-42 wrote: | I think that's the thing we should strive for. It has been | shows time and time again that Elon Musk takes PR very | seriously. We should make the company aware of astronomers so | that they incorporate scientific objectives into Starlink. And | pointing both the the nuisances and potential is one way to do | it. | kaba0 wrote: | Why should that be owned by a private entity though? What right | do they have for that? I wouldn't mind it being run by a public | (international) organization, for public good, but that's very | different. | AlgorithmicTime wrote: | No government decided to build it? Like what kind of question | is this? | kaba0 wrote: | On what right can a US. private entity spam the sky? Was it | approved by people living in Europe or China or whatever? | | This is my question regarding the morality of that. | secondcoming wrote: | That's great but sometimes it's nice to be able to see the | stars unobstructed on a cloudless night. | WithinReason wrote: | Starlink doesn't stop you from doing that, the satellites are | only visible when they are in direct sunlight (dusk and | dawn). | RReverser wrote: | For pure visual observation you might be right, but any | sort of amateur astrophotography is already significantly | affected and is only going to get worse because 1) it's | usually more wide-field than in professional observatories, | which significantly increases the chance of Starlink | streaks and 2) the ~6.5 magnitude is still a lot brighter | than all the interesting deep-sky objects and is only | dimmer than stars visible to the human eye. | WithinReason wrote: | Amateur astrophotography usually stitches multiple short | exposures together to simulate long exposure, where it's | trivial to remove frames with streaks. You could also | automatically detect the extent of the streaks and only | remove those. | RReverser wrote: | With guiding you're usually aiming for 5-10 minute | exposures per frame. That usually results in each frame | having at least several streaks. Sure, those are | technically still short and can be cancelled out, but | astrophotography is already challenging enough and has | plenty of other noise sources without adding more fuel to | the problem. | | And that's now, when we're not close to the planned tens | of thousands of satellites by Starlink above, and other | vendors like Amazon only starting to plan their similar | programs. That's why early feedback is important - | otherwise the sky will be ruined in the best case for | decades to come. | juanani wrote: | finnx wrote: | > approximately 4 x 10-4 of all pixels would be lost over the | course of a year. However, simply counting pixels affected by | satellite streaks does not capture the entirety of the problem, | for example resources that are required to identify satellite | streaks and mask them out or the chance of missing a first | detection of an object | | It looks like the main problem is not the amount of data lost but | amount of extra manual work this situation causes. I assume | Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why | don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who | might be affected by their satellites? That way researchers could | automatically classify these trails. | simondotau wrote: | It seems to me that if you know where the satellites will be, | it's not so much a problem of removing streaks but rather | factoring it into automated scheduling so that you never have | any streaks to remove. | Frost1x wrote: | I'd be surprised if the positions weren't already public data. | Surely the US government requires or pressures knowledge of the | positions since its a US based company and the satellites could | certainly interfere with things NASA and other agencies want | and need to do. | japanuspus wrote: | My understanding is that all startlink orbital data is | available via https://www.space-track.org/. | capableweb wrote: | > I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites | are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third | parties who might be affected by their satellites? | | I'm not sure if this is in any way official and/or the right | way of doing it, this area is all outside of my normal | competence. But, stumbled upon a python library | (https://github.com/python-astrodynamics/spacetrack) that | supposedly connects to space-track (space-track.org) and you | should be able to get the position there. How the data comes | into space-track I'm not sure. | | But there are bunch of small services for seeing the live | location, so I'm sure someone is tracking the location | somewhere, like this one: https://findstarlink.com/ | tephra wrote: | http://www.celestrak.com/Norad/elements/table.php?tleFile=st... | SiempreViernes wrote: | Starlink satellites are supposed to perform movements on their | own, mainly to avid other satellites. But this means you might | not know where they are all the time, just for the most part. | Buttons840 wrote: | I don't know about that. The satellite must know where it's | at to avoid other satellites. And if the satellite knows | where it's at, why can't it tell us? | yosito wrote: | It really drives me crazy how "study finds" just means that | somebody built a hypothetical model to confirm their opinion. | BurningFrog wrote: | The Replication Crisis has taught me that "a scientific study | shows X" only gently hints that X might be true. | drran wrote: | Science is about replication of results. | | For example, if Alice did X and got Y, then published a paper | about it, and Bob did X and got Y, and Charlie did X and got | Y, then X->Y is scientifically proven. | | If well known and proven scientist Alice said that X may | cause Y, then it is just Alice words, not a science. | kaba0 wrote: | This is very field specific. As sibling poster mentioned, | claiming it true for all of science is throwing out the baby | with the bathwater. | yosito wrote: | Science and predictive models are two entirely different | things. A study !== science. | cblconfederate wrote: | I don't think there is a replication crisis in astronomy. | It's important not to generalize from other fields | dang wrote: | " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article | or post to complain about in the thread. Find something | interesting to respond to instead._" | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | hiptobecubic wrote: | I think "This title is misleading" is a pretty worthwhile | thing to mention. | dang wrote: | The GP didn't mention that. | yosito wrote: | Noted. I'd delete my comment, but it doesn't seem possible | now. | dang wrote: | Appreciated! No need to delete - it's all about learning | (and we're all in the process of doing that) | [deleted] | cool_dude85 wrote: | That's not what the published article says at all. | anshumankmr wrote: | Why did this somehow remind me of the movie "Don't Look Up"? | hunterb123 wrote: | Because this article and that movie have the same agenda. | cblconfederate wrote: | Even if you look, you can't see | DennisP wrote: | For anyone who would like a better source than the Daily Star, | here's an article at Caltech: | | https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument... | | It includes this perspective: | | > Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of | Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single | streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in | a ZTF image. | | > "There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or | another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to | the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather | small effects for ZTF." | dang wrote: | Ok, we've changed to that URL from https://web.archive.org/web/ | 20220120172234/https://www.daily.... Thanks! | onphonenow wrote: | How do these idiots deal with CLOUDS? Weather? Airplanes? | | Observation from space at a fraction of existing costs would be | game changing to astronomy. Instead we get these idiots for | scientists. | wwilson wrote: | Funny given that Starlink itself has potential to be one giant | synthetic aperture radar installation. | | From Casey Handmer's excellent post | (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science- | upside...): | | "Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same | principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network | of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT | information and high speed data connections. It is practically | begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With | 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO | Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired | direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically | holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. | Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based | antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing | Arecibo and independent of Earth's rotation. Potentially capable | of resolving exoplanets." | cronix wrote: | You could also install cameras pointing back towards Earth and | basically have 24/7 coverage of everyone's movements similar to | what Darpa's ARGUS-IS[1](2013) does except using a global | network of satellites instead of drones and build the greatest | video surveillance platform on the planet. Instead of covering | a city for a limited time with a drone stuffed with an array of | off the shelf cell phone cameras, you could have "persistent | stare" for the entire planet. I wonder if the NSA has thought | about that. | | [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA | staplers wrote: | Wouldn't you basically already have that telemetry if you | tracked wifi/cell signals. I imagine that tech is already | installed on starlink sats. | | I haven't done much research on them though. | sockpuppet69 wrote: | bberenberg wrote: | You may be interested to know about Planet Labs | https://www.planet.com/ | echelon wrote: | I can't imagine that the NSA hasn't already had several talks | with Musk. | Retric wrote: | Starlink satellites are tiny which limits how much you can | slip in undetected. You can't get anything close to useful | resolution from something like a cellphone camera at those | altitudes. Maximum resolution really requires something the | size of Hubble. | Teever wrote: | I was under the impression that spy satellites are put into | much higher orbits to increase their lifespan but | necessitating larger optical systems. | | One of the advantages of a LEO based surveillance system is | that the optics could be smaller at the cost of requiring | more satellites with shorter life span. | Retric wrote: | ~500km is still a common NRO orbit, and presumably that's | to take the highest resolution images possible. The | earliest spy satellites where under 150km and had | extremely short lifespans. By comparison the commercial | KOMPSAT-3 can provide 0.7m b/w images and 2.8 m color | images from a 980kg satellite at 685 km and a multi year | lifespan, I doubt classified satellites are that much | better than that. | | Some NRO satellites are sent to geostationary orbit, | presumably for other missions. So, it really depends on | the goals as not all satellites are designed for ground | imaging. | welterde wrote: | Even the full planned constellation has a smaller collecting | area than Arecibo had (~60 000 m^2 vs ~73 000 m^2 for Arecibo) | - and that's not even considering that for half the | constellation the earth will be in the way, not the full | dimensions of the satellite are usable as antenna, they are | pointing the wrong way, etc. etc. Nevermind that one looses | quite a lot of sensitivity when using these arrays.. | nuccy wrote: | It is not about collecting area, but about synchetic aperture | [1] alike very-long baseline interferometry (e.g. used by | Event Horizon Telescope [2], which is a combination of many | radio telescopes to observe the accretion disk around the | supermassive black hole in M87 galaxy [3]). For that you need | as long as possible distance between antenas, good time | synchronisation, and as many as possible pairs of antenas | (i.e. baselines) [3]. | | Though unfortunately advances in radio don't compensate | losses in optical and survey quality due to strays. Different | sources emit at different wavelengths differently and usually | one needs the whole picture (spectral energy distribution) | from radio, ir, visible light, uv, x-rays up to gamma-rays to | explain the properties of a source. | | 1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science- | upside... | | 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long- | baseline_interfero... | | 3. https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/black-hole- | files... | welterde wrote: | Depends on what you are after. | | You need long baselines if you want high resolution. | However if you want high sensitivity there is no way around | having a large collecting area. And since we are not | looking to detect the sun in super high resolution, but | very far away objects that will be extremely faint we need | very high sensitivity. There is a reason the VLA (and other | arrays such as ALMA) move their antennas into different | configurations. A more compact configuration achieves | better sensitivity at the cost of lower resolution and a | more spread out configuration gives the inverse. | | Your hypothetical Starlink telescope would always have | extremely high resolution but virtually no sensitivity to | detect anything at all (maybe the sun). Certainly not any | NEO objects - those were the prime targets for large | single-dish radio telescope like Arecibo. | | The closest radio telescope to the concept you have in mind | is LOFAR, but even for that one each station has many times | the collecting area of many dozens of Starlink satellites | (total collecting area of all stations together is up to | ~1km^2). | thro1 wrote: | I made that question once on HN (2020, relating to Arecibo) and | it was downvoted: _Couldn 't it be receivers on Starlink | satellites plus some computing power instead?_ - but I've got | great feasibility study by teraflop as the answer for that: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25051151 . | [deleted] | suifbwish wrote: | Their claim is the equivalent of complaining that the weight of | a large vehicle engine is bad because it makes the vehicle more | difficult to carry up a hill. Get in, start the engine and | drive up the hill lol. I'm curious what you mean by | "holographic levels of detail" | | If starlink were used as an outward sensor array, with the | correct software and enough compute you could generate a live | 3D model of the entire sky and almost anything in it down to | quite a small resolution. | idealmedtech wrote: | Your second paragraph answers the first question, I think! As | you probably know, more antennas spread further apart | dramatically increases the effective antenna size when phased | correctly. | ben_w wrote: | While that does increase the angular resolution, it does | nothing for weak signals -- only area can boost that. | suifbwish wrote: | Wouldn't the area of the combined sensor be the sum of | the areas of each sensor? | ben_w wrote: | Yes, if that's what you're asking (which is not what I | thought this was about). Thought as someone else said, | even combined it's still less than Arecibo. | lokimedes wrote: | Does the StarLink constellation have sufficiently accurate time | synchronization and phase stability to allow it to act as a | long baseline multi-static radar? I have been contemplating | using it as a passive radar source, but here the limitation is | its phased array nature. It is not really optimal for non- | cooperative receivers. | justinjlynn wrote: | One would imagine so given that the satellites are eventually | meant to collaborate via peer to peer direct laser links. | Time synchronisation and phase stability are required for | direct links but it's a good question as to how much is | available in terms of the microwave SDRs. | ianai wrote: | Yes. If Elon was as concerned about the survival of humanity as | he claims with his mars initiatives then he'd outfit these with | some equipment for this. There's got to be a way to do both | internet and radio astronomy. | immmmmm wrote: | putting extremely sensitive RF detectors on top of extremely | power RF emitters doesn't seems the best match | hypertele-Xii wrote: | Until you realize every single satellite that both | transmits and receives information has solved this problem | already, including Starlink. | emn13 wrote: | I'm somewhat skeptical that every radio receiver is | interchangable. Yes, starlink will have some kind of | transceiver - but do you have any citation to back up the | claim that it can be used effectively for astronomical | observation? | | Even if the physics are fundamentally the same, all kinds | of practical implementation details like orientation, | bandwidth, frequency, and probably all kinds of stuff an | actual expert in the field would know about may well | differ. | enchiridion wrote: | Maybe it just hasn't gained enough steam for him to notice? | Maybe it's not directly applicable to colonizing Mars? | | All of his current business ventures make sense when viewed | through the lens of setting up a highly autonomous Martian | colony. Each self funds R&D. | | Tesla: power generation, storage, management. Autonomous | vehicles and droids to operate in hostile environments. | | SpaceX: transportation and communications. | | Boring Co.: protected subterranean environments. | | NeuraLink: Humans are more expensive to send. Augment the | ones there with AI | ianai wrote: | I'd bet he could get funding from various governments by | just hiring 1 astrophysicist and adding minimal hardware to | the satellites. They're SDR so it might just be a software | update. | enchiridion wrote: | Would be great! Especially because they plan to send so | many more satellites up. | | Hopefully someone from SpaceX will see it here. | cdash wrote: | That is all based on the assumption that anything could be | done to prevent an extinction level event with current | technology. | cryptonector wrote: | It takes enormous amounts of capital to do all of this. He's | got to build some of that capital first, and to do that he | has to pursue commercial interests first. Once he's got | positive cash-flow and growth and demonstrated a sustainable | business, then he still can't quite build a radio telescope | on SpaceX's dime for fiduciary reasons, but he'd have built a | launch facility that governments could use to do it. | justapassenger wrote: | > It takes enormous amounts of capital to do all of this | | He's literally richest person on earth and SpaceX is his | playground. | cryptonector wrote: | He can't just dedicate it to this or anything else in one | go. That wealth is largely paper wealth based on other | people's idea of what he can deliver, but then he has to, | you know, deliver -- if he suddenly dedicated himself | entirely to non-commercial projects, then he'd suddenly | not be all that rich anymore. | | So, he has to make SpaceX more clearly a success before | he can dedicate any capital to a space-based | radiotelescope. And even then, he can't use SpaceX's | capital -- he has to use his own. | hinkley wrote: | I think it's likely there will be a dope deal at some point | where low-earth satellite clusters have to offer sky | observation services that offset the loss of fidelity from | ground-based systems. | | If the satellites can swing between sky and ground scanning | several times in a single orbital period, they could use off- | peak hours in the early morning to scan the skies. | | I don't know if that practically will work out, as Starlink has | lower speed of light delays than undersea cables. Accessing | content on the other side of the world will become more | attractive with lower latency. For instance a lot more people | using VPNs to watch BBC.co.uk at 4 am GMT. | Jtsummers wrote: | More likely, instead of dual purposing the satellites they'll | end up finding a customer who is willing to pay for them to | send up additional satellites that offer imagery, radio | telemetry, or other sensor data. They'll get mixed in with | the rest of the fleet, possibly acting as relays between | satellites rather than downlink/uplinks themselves. Removing | the downlink/uplink components would free up quite a bit of | mass that could be dedicated to various sensor platforms, and | the comms left would be the inter-satellite system already | being used by the fleet. | | There are lots of potential customers for this (especially if | used for terrestrial imagery or similar sensing), and | piggybacking on their existing telecom fleet to handle the | uplink/downlink side could be a phenomenal bit of cost | savings for them. And they get the benefit of improving the | inter-satellite network with the additional relays. | idealmedtech wrote: | If their primary mission was observation, they would be an | incredible astronomical resource. However, I think that given | the fuel constraints and SLA they aim to provide, I would be | shocked if they used any fuel to orient for extraterrestrial | observation. | jillesvangurp wrote: | I think that SpaceX has convincingly proven that it is not | that expensive to send up thousands of satellites. So, anyone | interested in launching a telescope satellite could do worse | than talk to them to see if they could help out. Also, given | enough money, I don't see why SpaceX would not be using their | satellite network for more than communication. Positioning is | another interesting use case for them, for example. | devnulll wrote: | For the amortized cost of 1 strategic modern bomber, or a | submarine, or an aircraft carrier, the DOD or US NRO could | easily just pay SpaceX to do this. At the nation state | scale, this constellation has proven to be trivially cheap. | | The resulting arms race would be... interesting and would | probably get us closer to Kessler Syndrome quickly. | sumtechguy wrote: | I would be shocked of DoD was not buying its own version | of the same thing. There is even a company out there that | has shown they can do it... | [deleted] | didericis wrote: | One thing that makes me less scared about Kessler | Syndrome than other environmental problems is that | there's a very strong and immediate economic incentive to | clean things up and prevent things from getting dirty by | the people at risk of making things dirty. If you can't | do maintenance on or launch satellites, that destroys the | industry's source of income. | | The consequences for pollution from other industries is | usually longer term and less dramatic/direct on the | business itself, if it even effects the core business | directly. | | I think all the effort put into monitoring space debris | and the amount of attention things like starlink is | getting speaks to this. | shagie wrote: | Starlink isn't at the top of my list for "likely Kessler | Syndrome starters" because its a rather low orbit. | | They're at 550km up. From | https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm | puts it at likely a 10 year lifespan with some variation. | The published lifespan of a satellite is 5 years. | | Its the stuff in the 700km to 900km range that's a | problem. | | http://stuffin.space | | https://www.satview.org/spacejunk.php - and you'll see | things like STARLINK-1204 already getting deorbtied ( | https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=45203 - note its | perigee is 204.0 km - its already well below the other | orbits) | | https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45203 for more | on that satellite. | | Starlink-61 appears to be one of the oldest ones still in | orbit - https://in-the-sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=44249 | though its on its way down and you can see the type of | impact and the duration of the "ok, this is going down". | | Even with the maximum starlink, that's 1,700 satellites | that will last about 10 years. | | The 2007 China anti-satellite test created approximately | 150,000 debris at 865km. Those are in an orbit that is on | the order of 500 years. | | Starlink isn't going to be the cause of Kessler Syndrome. | | --- | | In hunting this up, I also found | https://planet4589.org/astro/starsim/index.html which is | relevant to the main topic - the impact on astronomy. | nonesuchluck wrote: | 550km is also just the operational altitude. SpaceX | initially releases satellites in a much lower initial | orbit. If they fail to POST, they fall into the | atmosphere months after launch. Starlink climbs slowly to | 550km with the same ion thrusters used for station | keeping. SpaceX does not want dead birds in their orbital | shell. | shagie wrote: | Looking more closely at https://in-the- | sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45203 - that makes sense. Its | released right about 350 km in a rather eccentric orbit | which is then stabilized at just under 400, then after | about a month there, it climbs to its target orbit over | the course of a month up at 550km. | | A more natural one is https://in-the- | sky.org/spacecraft.php?id=45229 which has the same | initial orbit pattern. | | The key thing with this is that without anything else, | the satellite has a lifespan that is measured in months | to years and up to a decade... not centuries. A Kessler | syndrome at 550km would certainly be rather up there on | the "suck" scale, but wouldn't keep humanity grounded for | more than a decade. | | One of the important things to remember about debris at a | given altitude, without additional energy, an object | cannot climb further out of the the gravity well into a | higher orbit. It will always come back to the same spot | in its orbit one orbital period later. | Diederich wrote: | > not that expensive to send up thousands of satellites | | It's relatively inexpensive for SpaceX to do it, but their | external prices are still quite high, even if cheaper than | the competition. | shantara wrote: | Another thing that SpaceX has proven with Starlink is that | the benefits of economy of scale could be applied to | satellite production and the aerospace industry in general. | | It is so incredibly wasteful that the companies and | governments keep coming up with unique designs for the | satellites serving similar purposes. Imagine if we had a | standard design template for an optical telescope that | could be cheaply and easily mass produced and launched by | the thousands. | mcguire wrote: | As someone mentioned above, weak signals require large | receivers. | mlyle wrote: | Does it take any fuel? Isn't fuel used to desaturate reaction | wheels? | ajnin wrote: | > Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets | | I was curious about that claim, so I did a bit of research and | made a "back of the envelope" calculation. According to | Wikipedia [1], the angular resolution of a telescope is | proportional to <wavelength of light>/<diameter>. Starlink | seems to operate from 10 to 40GHz, so assume the hardware has a | 50% design margin so is capable of reaching 60GHz. Visible | light has a frequency of 400 to 800THz, so take the middle of | 600THz. Using those figures, it come out that the Starlink | satellites, used as a telescope, would have the same angular | resolution as a 1.3m visible light telescope. Is it enough to | resolve exoplanets ? I'm not sure but I think not. Hubble is 6m | and can apparently resolve some exoplanets so it's not too far | off. Some launches to GEO would boost the resolution to the | equivalent of 8.4m in visible. (IANAA) | | 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution | jcims wrote: | This is the one that specifically discusses telescope array | (but your formula is still correct) https://en.wikipedia.org/ | wiki/Angular_resolution#Telescope_a... | | 60GHz has a wavelength of 5mm. Effective diameter would be | ~13000km. Someone check my math but I end up with 5e-3/13e6 | radians or ~.0001 arcseconds. Hubble is ~.05 arcseconds. | gliptic wrote: | Hubble is 2.4 meter aperture. | mcguire wrote: | Certainly, Starlink's ground equipment has multiple functions: | https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/outdoor-cats-are-u... | seventytwo wrote: | Or... | | We just stop letting the broadband companies regulate | themselves and nationalize the system. | | Then we don't have multiple layers of bandaids. | robocat wrote: | Why isn't space junk also a problem? | | "The current count of large debris (defined as 10 cm across or | larger) is 34,000." - Wikipedia | theptip wrote: | LEO decays quickly because of atmospheric drag. (5-10 years | IIRC). | caaqil wrote: | Recent discussions: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973626 (12 comments) | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995026 (11 comments) | LinuxBender wrote: | Semi off-topic question. Would it be possible or reasonable to | mount small energy efficient high resolution cameras on the | opposing side of the satellite and make a real time grid picture | of space, then open source the data to any scientists or | astronomers that want it? Could that be a feature request for the | next model of their satellite? | thro1 wrote: | I wish it too. The cost of static, not synchronized, efficient | cameras shall be marginal. Semi off-topic answer by teraflop, | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055543 : | | _.. Now you have to think about how to aim the antennas. | Presumably you can 't just reorient the entire satellite, | because its main job is to keep its ground-facing antennas | aimed at the ground and its solar panels aimed at the sun. So | you need to add a separate antenna pointing mechanism, with a | fairly wide range of very accurate movement along multiple | axes, so that all of the radio antennas can observe the same | region of the sky simultaneously.._ | kitsune_ wrote: | Stupid question, but what international treaties currently | regulate private citizens and corporations when it comes to | space? Like, who can claim which orbits? Is this just first come, | first serve? What would happen if someone crashes Starlink | satellites, for instance by putting projectiles on a collision | course? | | Edit, found an interesting link: | https://www.spacelegalissues.com/orbital-slots-and-space-con... | | > The geostationary orbit is part of outer space and, as such, | the customary principle of non-appropriation and the 1967 Space | Treaty apply to it. The equatorial countries have claimed | sovereignty, then preferential rights over this space. These | claims are contrary to the 1967 Treaty and customary law. | However, they testify to the concern of the equatorial countries, | shared by developing countries, in the face of saturation and | seizure of geostationary positions by developed countries. The | regime of res communis of outer space in Space Law (free access | and non-appropriation) does not meet the demand of the developing | countries that their possibilities of future access to the | geostationary orbit and associated radio frequencies are | guaranteed. New rules appear necessary and have been envisaged to | ensure the access of all States to these positions and | frequencies. | mattr47 wrote: | Starlink satellites are in LEO, not geostationary. | sbierwagen wrote: | Always fascinated by these useless, "shaking fist at sky" | denunciations by small countries. What, exactly, is Zaire going | to do about a satellite operator in GEO not paying a tax for | their orbital slot? Start up a space program real quick to go | move the satellite? | y4mi wrote: | You don't need a space program to destroy satellite | | It's not trivial, but it's still easier then a space program | sbierwagen wrote: | The highest satellite ever hit by an ASAT missile was FY-1C | at 865km. | | GEO is 35,786km. | | Every nation ever to field ASAT missiles demonstrated | orbital launch first. | narag wrote: | what about a laser? | Melatonic wrote: | As far as I know: Not enough | fallingmeat wrote: | "...they want you to look up so they can look down on you!" | | Best line from that movie ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-21 23:00 UTC)