As someone who co-incidentally started dabbling in Astrophotography as a hobby in early 2019 before Starlink launched, back then you literally could capture a single 20-second exposure (on a very wide lens, so no obvious star trail/blur at that focal length due to the Earth's rotation), and get images with no satellites.
Now (and even in 2021 it was getting hard to do that) it's impossible to do that, even with 10 second exposures.
What's needed now is multiple exposures, and merging/integrating them in something like Siril (https://siril.org/) to remove the obvious satellite trails.
However, arguably, integrating multiple exposures, while annoying and time-consuming workflow-wise (i.e. can't just look at images directly from camera, and currently need to convert to TIFF first) is often the better way to get slightly-less-noisy images anyway, and integrate effectively longer exposures without star-trails, so it's a tricky one.
I don't doubt that this is a real problem for astronomers and photographers, but I feel like if you had to work that hard, it doesn't really make your case.
It sounds like you know what you're talking about until one realizes the earth is spinning. Wide field photos can be shot up to thirty seconds depending on the back and lens.
Anything more zoomy than 50mm uncropped you're getting streaks in < dozen seconds. There's a rule of thumb but I don't remember it.
Best course of action is to take a video and let a stacking program deal with it, especially if you use a real telescope.
Also the Sony a7r have like "150,000 ISO " and iirc cost like $3500 with a kit lens. That's a bit above consumer, but I may have mixed up models.
There was a Russian start up planning to do this a few years back. They had actually reached a deal with Pepsi’s Russian operations until the public backlash convinced them to find a different public relations strategy.
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-astronomers-russian-billboards...
That’s so true. I can see it too. The technology to make that must be super fun to work on but please I hope this will never happen. Can you imagine turning the whole sky as a giant pixelated screen to constantly show us ads? That’s as dystopian as it gets. Add to that the probable less than secure software to run it and hackers trying to show stuff up there. That’s something out of a Douglas Adams book. xD
I don't think such a thing could hold together very long, unless it was just a string in a line. Maybe in Morse code?
With multiple launches you could probably get several parallel strings, and use it like a dot matrix printer. It would be a heck of a stunt. But I wouldn't expect it to last for more than one orbit, and only part of the planet could see it.
You can change brightness and color of individual satellites as they move, so they would match the "pixel" they are in now. Just imagine swarm of very small emitting light bugs moving chaotically behind your screen and changing colors as they move from one pixel to an other. The only issue is to make sure that at every moment each pixel has enough bugs to get the required brightness.
Can't tell if you're joking or not, but SpaceX has indeed been collaborating with astronomical observatories to reduce the apparent magnitude (brightness) to ground for Starlink satellites. It's not as if the potential issues weren't apparent and reported on pretty early on, ie, [0] in summer 2020 before the network entered beta. It's not perfect and the period during orbit raising before the satellites enter operational orbits is more challenging, but very significant reductions have been achieved per recs, see for example "Starlink Gen 2 Mini Satellites Photometric Characterization" [1] in 2023 and "The Brightness of Starlink Mini Satellites During Orbit-Raising" [2] in 2024:
>When magnitudes are adjusted to a uniform distance of 1000 km the
means are 4.58 and 7.52, respectively. The difference of 2.94 between
distance-adjusted magnitudes above and below threshold implies that mitigation is
93% effective in reducing the brightness of orbit-raising spacecraft.
So there has been progress, though more may be possible particularly as Starship gives them more mass to work with for less money. That may bring new possibilities to spend mass on "cosmetic" purposes to shade and further reduce magnitude even if it contributes nothing to the core functionality. Same as more mass may allow regulators to feasibly require higher levels of redundancy and more margin for deorbiting in case of issues or at EOL.
Of course, that does leave older unmitigated working sats contributing to light pollution for the rest of their operational lifetimes, though worth noting that one of many major advantages for low-LEO/VLEO operation is that by design such lifetimes are much shorter, and in turn generation refresh will happen more quickly. Perhaps more importantly long term, there aren't as far as I know any actual international standards and agreements towards responsible brightness mitigation (or other issues like disposing of expended upper stages responsibly, standardized end-of-life deorbiting, etc). SpaceX has, for both PR and simple corporate self-interest reasons, been a pretty good actor so far even if they get a lot of attention for being the leading first mega constellation. But I really hope follow on efforts from other players can hit the ground running with magnitude reductions at least as good, and that SpaceX itself continues to improve (or at a bare minimum not backslide).
High bandwidth fully global comms is simply too valuable a capability to really imagine going back at this point. But that's no reason not to pursue reasonable compromise mitigations, and potentially some sort of funds to ultimately create far more orbital telescopes as well as part of the package taking full advantage of what upcoming cheap megalift will make possible.
It's not just optical pollution, the same satellites visible in the article photo over the Pinnacles are leaking radio spectrum noise into the ostensibly "Radio Quiet Zone" of the nearby Murchison that's home to cosmic microwave sensors and one regional part of the developing global SKA radio telescope platform.
This would be real simple to prove, Starlink Satelites downlink on the same band as Satelite TV so you can use the receiver from a dish that downconverts it to something a cheap dongle can handle and put that all inside a grounded, metal box in the bed of a diesel and just record spectrum.
I was under the impression that actual space business people had ways of not leaking RF when flying over.
In new research accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, we discovered Starlink satellites are also “leaking” radio signals that interfere with radio astronomy. Even in a “radio quiet zone” in outback Western Australia, we found the satellite emissions were far brighter than any natural source in the sky.
referencing: Detection of intended and unintended emissions from Starlink satellites in the SKA-Low frequency range, at the SKA-Low site, with an SKA-Low station analog (Sep. 2023)
It's an ongoing issue in that Starlink v1.0 leaked and as I recall promises were made that the next generation of satellites would leak less and turn off when over radio quiet zones .. that second gen group have (IIRC) more noise and continuing transmitting over RQZ's.
Not. Often obvious simple solutions are overlooked. For example, NASA spent huge sums of money trying to design a gas gauge that will work in weightless conditions. Until an engineer suggested just having a "reserve" tank that has enough to bring the spacecraft out of orbit.
Another one was NASA spend a lot of money trying to figure out how to not have the Apollo capsule overheat from the sun. The trivial solution was to make it a rotisserie, i.e. slowly rotate it.
>Not. Often obvious simple solutions are overlooked.
I'm not sure I'd say "often" has something like what you offered up been overlooked by SpaceX. We're long, long past the early eras when everything was first getting figured out, and the timescales and costs are totally different. Talking of "obvious", painting something black in orbit has clear enormous thermal implications, and there are aspects of the system that seem necessarily reflective as well (solar panels, optical links and so on) and in turn mitigation requires cascading design decisions. These aren't platinum plated Apollo era programs either. Like, gut check here: do you see ANY space stations or satellites in space, at all, where they "just painted them black"? I don't think it's actually trivial at all.
Anyway main point is yes, it's recognized and yes, it's getting worked on (successfully!), and I hope that will ultimately help pave the road for any other future megaconstellation efforts by showing what's possible.
It isn't that simple, is it? Even if you place the black surface on a spacer (adding mass, might I add), the black surface itself is going to radiate heat back onto the satellite via blackbody radiation. This is always going to create a worse thermal situation unless you can somehow radiate away as much heat as you could with reflections. To see what I mean, check out JWST's thermal shield.
Consider a shaped charge. It seems wild to me that you can direct an explosion with various shapes of the explosive. Perhaps a similar idea can apply to the blackbody radiation - get it to radiate mostly away from the satellite.
Also, the black part will be pointed at the Earth, not the Sun.
This is way more serious than global internet access.
Low and mid orbit are so polluted that the ISS has to correct it's path multiple times a day to avoid hitting satellite debris and it gets progressively worse.
We're few disasters away from compromising future space exploration and potentially our own survival.
That isn't a big problem due to several factors. To begin with, OFCs on the ocean bed is how route the majority of the internet traffic already. You can easily bury it a few inches under the surface anywhere. Another point is that these are often used only just high capacity backhaul links. You don't need to criss-cross the terrain with it. And even in the case of the worst of terrains, you can switch to high capacity, highly directional RF or Laser data links for short stretches.
This is very easy to say sitting in a developed country where your access to information has never been in question. There are still millions if not billions that don't have access to the rest of humanity's knowledge.
I've been thinking about it for a while; and that's exactly the thing I've been questioning for some time. I'm not as convinced as I was that more knowledge equals a better life. I reflect back on how much time I've spent on countless hours of useless YouTube binges. I've wasted so much time on the internet that could have been spent on things that would have made me happier.
There's good and bad. The important thing is having an internet bullshit filter which the vast majority of people don't have because they didn't grow up with the internet.
There are massive telescopes around the world with adaptive optics doing cutting edge observations. Their service time is still under high demand. Those aren't just 'pretty pictures'.
Much of our current understanding of physics is rooted in astronomical observation.
Many planets and asteroids have been discovered by amateurs using telescopes and the visible light spectrum, even in the modern era.
More directly practicable, astronomy has given us an understanding of space weather and solar ejections which are fairly critical to things like grid stability and minimizing damages to man made satellites.
Dismissing the loss of the night sky as “pretty pictures” is dramatically underselling astronomy and the benefits that astronomy bring to all of us.
People have different priorities. Dismissing the needs of the scientific community based on meaningless comparisons for the financial benefit of a few megacorps isn't really a good argument. There are much less disruptive ways to provide good quality internet access for folks even in the most remote places. Considering the US especially, can you honestly say that the telecom companies did everything they could (or even a reasonable bit) to improve the situation, using all the subsidies and grants they took from the government in the name of improving the said connectivity?
>Unpopular opinion: global internet access is more important than pretty pictures of the sky.
You're right about one thing - It is an unpopular opinion. You're wrong about global internet access being more important than being able to take "pretty pictures" of the night sky.
Global internet access has become a tool for homogenizing opinion. It has become the most useful tool for propagandists and others who would push false narratives as facts in order to steer readers/listeners towards conclusions that are not based on facts. It has been subverted by well-funded groups with an agenda that does not serve the people out in the broad audience.
It could've been a critical part of bringing global societies up to speed on relevant issues that affect their lives and futures. Once the deep pockets with destructive agendas began funding tools to infect others with their world-views it became a weapon, not a tool.
Those of you who work in the industry should rebel against this subversion. I think many won't since the whole software industry appears to be trapped in a cycle of greedy grifts and subscriptions for worthless apps.
I don’t know what the hell you’re going on about for the most part, but the fact is it’s not economically viable for ISPs or even governments to build fibre out to most rural areas.
Satellite internet has been a game changer for people living in these areas. The people who grow your food deserve to be able to video chat with their family and stream videos at resolutions higher than 480p without constant buffering.
I agree that there are strong economic reasons in favor but lets not overstate things. If it was economically viable to build out copper telephone lines to those areas then there is zero reason fiber should pose an issue. As far as raw materials go fiber is much cheaper than copper.
Sadly, true. Those who work on the industry will never rebel, the pay is too good and the nerdy excitement of being able to solve very interesting problems is too addictive. Our greatest minds are wasted in the finance sectors and big tech.
This is a regressive view. Developed countries profit from the educational nature of the Internet. We're all better off from having banked and shared common knowledge.
It is so polluted you need professional camera gear and processing of hundreds of photos together in order to show it. Get real. Internet access for poor, remote rural areas across the global is more important than convenient timelapse photography.
You are so far from the mark out is staggering. Starlink is priced differently in different countries, and is wildly popular in developing and undeveloped countries.
There's no concept of airspace in space. You have very few avenues to keep a sat restricted to a geographic region. Orbits like geostationary and molniya exist - but they come with their own limitations for many applications.
As someone who co-incidentally started dabbling in Astrophotography as a hobby in early 2019 before Starlink launched, back then you literally could capture a single 20-second exposure (on a very wide lens, so no obvious star trail/blur at that focal length due to the Earth's rotation), and get images with no satellites.
Now (and even in 2021 it was getting hard to do that) it's impossible to do that, even with 10 second exposures.
What's needed now is multiple exposures, and merging/integrating them in something like Siril (https://siril.org/) to remove the obvious satellite trails.
However, arguably, integrating multiple exposures, while annoying and time-consuming workflow-wise (i.e. can't just look at images directly from camera, and currently need to convert to TIFF first) is often the better way to get slightly-less-noisy images anyway, and integrate effectively longer exposures without star-trails, so it's a tricky one.
Auto stakkert
I think it runs off a .mov or other video file, you add black frames, etc.
"Stitching together 343 distinct photos,"
I don't doubt that this is a real problem for astronomers and photographers, but I feel like if you had to work that hard, it doesn't really make your case.
These photos are taken in pitch-black darkness.
You need to take a lot of exposures in order to get the data necessary to even see anything.
This is a single 10sec exposure in the Aussie outback on old consumer gear ( Sony a7iii )
https://www.instagram.com/p/CersLuLBfCz
You don’t need multiples, and you don’t need an overly long exposure.
It sounds like you know what you're talking about until one realizes the earth is spinning. Wide field photos can be shot up to thirty seconds depending on the back and lens.
Anything more zoomy than 50mm uncropped you're getting streaks in < dozen seconds. There's a rule of thumb but I don't remember it.
Best course of action is to take a video and let a stacking program deal with it, especially if you use a real telescope.
Also the Sony a7r have like "150,000 ISO " and iirc cost like $3500 with a kit lens. That's a bit above consumer, but I may have mixed up models.
Tens of seconds is about right. It's something like 500/f(mm) in seconds, but you get a feel for what will blur and what won't. Here's an example I shot with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 20s: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-mU6iIp0re/?igsh=cm16bWx1cGp3OG...
No, you need to take a long exposure. Multiple exposures may improve the quality but isn’t necessary at all.
You know those airplanes with a banner at the beach?
I can imagine a constellation of satellites writing ads (live) in space using mirrors and other nifty tech.
Unless regulation stops it.
> Unless regulation stops it.
Or a ground-based megawatt IR laser with steerable optics.
There was a Russian start up planning to do this a few years back. They had actually reached a deal with Pepsi’s Russian operations until the public backlash convinced them to find a different public relations strategy. https://phys.org/news/2019-01-astronomers-russian-billboards...
That’s so true. I can see it too. The technology to make that must be super fun to work on but please I hope this will never happen. Can you imagine turning the whole sky as a giant pixelated screen to constantly show us ads? That’s as dystopian as it gets. Add to that the probable less than secure software to run it and hackers trying to show stuff up there. That’s something out of a Douglas Adams book. xD
earliest sci-fi antecedent i know off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon
I don't think such a thing could hold together very long, unless it was just a string in a line. Maybe in Morse code?
With multiple launches you could probably get several parallel strings, and use it like a dot matrix printer. It would be a heck of a stunt. But I wouldn't expect it to last for more than one orbit, and only part of the planet could see it.
You can change brightness and color of individual satellites as they move, so they would match the "pixel" they are in now. Just imagine swarm of very small emitting light bugs moving chaotically behind your screen and changing colors as they move from one pixel to an other. The only issue is to make sure that at every moment each pixel has enough bugs to get the required brightness.
I wonder what uncontacted tribes think about starlink
You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette. The benefits of satellites seem worth the cost, at least in the foreseeable future.
Just paint the satellites black?
Yes https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-a...
Can't tell if you're joking or not, but SpaceX has indeed been collaborating with astronomical observatories to reduce the apparent magnitude (brightness) to ground for Starlink satellites. It's not as if the potential issues weren't apparent and reported on pretty early on, ie, [0] in summer 2020 before the network entered beta. It's not perfect and the period during orbit raising before the satellites enter operational orbits is more challenging, but very significant reductions have been achieved per recs, see for example "Starlink Gen 2 Mini Satellites Photometric Characterization" [1] in 2023 and "The Brightness of Starlink Mini Satellites During Orbit-Raising" [2] in 2024:
>When magnitudes are adjusted to a uniform distance of 1000 km the means are 4.58 and 7.52, respectively. The difference of 2.94 between distance-adjusted magnitudes above and below threshold implies that mitigation is 93% effective in reducing the brightness of orbit-raising spacecraft.
So there has been progress, though more may be possible particularly as Starship gives them more mass to work with for less money. That may bring new possibilities to spend mass on "cosmetic" purposes to shade and further reduce magnitude even if it contributes nothing to the core functionality. Same as more mass may allow regulators to feasibly require higher levels of redundancy and more margin for deorbiting in case of issues or at EOL.
Of course, that does leave older unmitigated working sats contributing to light pollution for the rest of their operational lifetimes, though worth noting that one of many major advantages for low-LEO/VLEO operation is that by design such lifetimes are much shorter, and in turn generation refresh will happen more quickly. Perhaps more importantly long term, there aren't as far as I know any actual international standards and agreements towards responsible brightness mitigation (or other issues like disposing of expended upper stages responsibly, standardized end-of-life deorbiting, etc). SpaceX has, for both PR and simple corporate self-interest reasons, been a pretty good actor so far even if they get a lot of attention for being the leading first mega constellation. But I really hope follow on efforts from other players can hit the ground running with magnitude reductions at least as good, and that SpaceX itself continues to improve (or at a bare minimum not backslide).
High bandwidth fully global comms is simply too valuable a capability to really imagine going back at this point. But that's no reason not to pursue reasonable compromise mitigations, and potentially some sort of funds to ultimately create far more orbital telescopes as well as part of the package taking full advantage of what upcoming cheap megalift will make possible.
----
0: "Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations" | https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/SATCON1-Report.p...
1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.06657
2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.12007
It's not just optical pollution, the same satellites visible in the article photo over the Pinnacles are leaking radio spectrum noise into the ostensibly "Radio Quiet Zone" of the nearby Murchison that's home to cosmic microwave sensors and one regional part of the developing global SKA radio telescope platform.
This would be real simple to prove, Starlink Satelites downlink on the same band as Satelite TV so you can use the receiver from a dish that downconverts it to something a cheap dongle can handle and put that all inside a grounded, metal box in the bed of a diesel and just record spectrum.
I was under the impression that actual space business people had ways of not leaking RF when flying over.
It's been proven by several teams already, eg:
from: https://theconversation.com/starlink-satellites-are-leaking-...referencing: Detection of intended and unintended emissions from Starlink satellites in the SKA-Low frequency range, at the SKA-Low site, with an SKA-Low station analog (Sep. 2023)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15672
It's an ongoing issue in that Starlink v1.0 leaked and as I recall promises were made that the next generation of satellites would leak less and turn off when over radio quiet zones .. that second gen group have (IIRC) more noise and continuing transmitting over RQZ's.
> Can't tell if you're joking or not
Not. Often obvious simple solutions are overlooked. For example, NASA spent huge sums of money trying to design a gas gauge that will work in weightless conditions. Until an engineer suggested just having a "reserve" tank that has enough to bring the spacecraft out of orbit.
Another one was NASA spend a lot of money trying to figure out how to not have the Apollo capsule overheat from the sun. The trivial solution was to make it a rotisserie, i.e. slowly rotate it.
>Not. Often obvious simple solutions are overlooked.
I'm not sure I'd say "often" has something like what you offered up been overlooked by SpaceX. We're long, long past the early eras when everything was first getting figured out, and the timescales and costs are totally different. Talking of "obvious", painting something black in orbit has clear enormous thermal implications, and there are aspects of the system that seem necessarily reflective as well (solar panels, optical links and so on) and in turn mitigation requires cascading design decisions. These aren't platinum plated Apollo era programs either. Like, gut check here: do you see ANY space stations or satellites in space, at all, where they "just painted them black"? I don't think it's actually trivial at all.
Anyway main point is yes, it's recognized and yes, it's getting worked on (successfully!), and I hope that will ultimately help pave the road for any other future megaconstellation efforts by showing what's possible.
I've been designing things my entire professional life, and yes, engineers overlook the obvious all the time (me too!).
I always look for simpler ways, and often enough find them.
It should also be possible to de-orbit obsolete satellites faster if they can at end-of-life deploy a "sail" that will cause more drag.
Eddy-current-generating tethers seem a more practical option:
<https://www.colorado.edu/faculty/kantha/sites/default/files/...>
(A plot point in Neal Stephenson's Seveneves.)
Might then have a lot of overheating satellites :)
Put the black surface an inch away from the satellite, supported by standoffs. That'll keep the heat away from the satellite.
Also, the black surface only needs to be on the Earth facing side.
It isn't that simple, is it? Even if you place the black surface on a spacer (adding mass, might I add), the black surface itself is going to radiate heat back onto the satellite via blackbody radiation. This is always going to create a worse thermal situation unless you can somehow radiate away as much heat as you could with reflections. To see what I mean, check out JWST's thermal shield.
Consider a shaped charge. It seems wild to me that you can direct an explosion with various shapes of the explosive. Perhaps a similar idea can apply to the blackbody radiation - get it to radiate mostly away from the satellite.
Also, the black part will be pointed at the Earth, not the Sun.
To complicate it further I thought that some of the military sats had rotating black panels to shield them from ground visibility?
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This is way more serious than global internet access.
Low and mid orbit are so polluted that the ISS has to correct it's path multiple times a day to avoid hitting satellite debris and it gets progressively worse.
We're few disasters away from compromising future space exploration and potentially our own survival.
Starlink and similar do not have the capacity for true global internet access.
They are suitable only for their current, niche markets e.g. rural areas.
If you truly want global internet access fibre is the best option.
How do you get fiber to the top of a mountain or the middle of the ocean?
That isn't a big problem due to several factors. To begin with, OFCs on the ocean bed is how route the majority of the internet traffic already. You can easily bury it a few inches under the surface anywhere. Another point is that these are often used only just high capacity backhaul links. You don't need to criss-cross the terrain with it. And even in the case of the worst of terrains, you can switch to high capacity, highly directional RF or Laser data links for short stretches.
Most people don't live on the top of a mountain or on boats.
So in that case a small satellite constellation is fine.
Even more unpopular opinion: it's highly debatable that internet access increases the quality of life for most people.
This is very easy to say sitting in a developed country where your access to information has never been in question. There are still millions if not billions that don't have access to the rest of humanity's knowledge.
I've been thinking about it for a while; and that's exactly the thing I've been questioning for some time. I'm not as convinced as I was that more knowledge equals a better life. I reflect back on how much time I've spent on countless hours of useless YouTube binges. I've wasted so much time on the internet that could have been spent on things that would have made me happier.
There's good and bad. The important thing is having an internet bullshit filter which the vast majority of people don't have because they didn't grow up with the internet.
Perhaps there is more to be gained from terrestrial astronomy than pretty pictures?
Such as?
There are massive telescopes around the world with adaptive optics doing cutting edge observations. Their service time is still under high demand. Those aren't just 'pretty pictures'.
Much of our current understanding of physics is rooted in astronomical observation.
Many planets and asteroids have been discovered by amateurs using telescopes and the visible light spectrum, even in the modern era.
More directly practicable, astronomy has given us an understanding of space weather and solar ejections which are fairly critical to things like grid stability and minimizing damages to man made satellites.
Dismissing the loss of the night sky as “pretty pictures” is dramatically underselling astronomy and the benefits that astronomy bring to all of us.
And pollution down here on earth is way higher priority than light pollution in long exposure photographs of the stars
People have different priorities. Dismissing the needs of the scientific community based on meaningless comparisons for the financial benefit of a few megacorps isn't really a good argument. There are much less disruptive ways to provide good quality internet access for folks even in the most remote places. Considering the US especially, can you honestly say that the telecom companies did everything they could (or even a reasonable bit) to improve the situation, using all the subsidies and grants they took from the government in the name of improving the said connectivity?
>Unpopular opinion: global internet access is more important than pretty pictures of the sky.
You're right about one thing - It is an unpopular opinion. You're wrong about global internet access being more important than being able to take "pretty pictures" of the night sky.
Global internet access has become a tool for homogenizing opinion. It has become the most useful tool for propagandists and others who would push false narratives as facts in order to steer readers/listeners towards conclusions that are not based on facts. It has been subverted by well-funded groups with an agenda that does not serve the people out in the broad audience.
It could've been a critical part of bringing global societies up to speed on relevant issues that affect their lives and futures. Once the deep pockets with destructive agendas began funding tools to infect others with their world-views it became a weapon, not a tool.
Those of you who work in the industry should rebel against this subversion. I think many won't since the whole software industry appears to be trapped in a cycle of greedy grifts and subscriptions for worthless apps.
I don’t know what the hell you’re going on about for the most part, but the fact is it’s not economically viable for ISPs or even governments to build fibre out to most rural areas.
Satellite internet has been a game changer for people living in these areas. The people who grow your food deserve to be able to video chat with their family and stream videos at resolutions higher than 480p without constant buffering.
I agree that there are strong economic reasons in favor but lets not overstate things. If it was economically viable to build out copper telephone lines to those areas then there is zero reason fiber should pose an issue. As far as raw materials go fiber is much cheaper than copper.
>If it was economically viable to build out copper telephone
It wasn't, it was subsidized by the government.
Sadly, true. Those who work on the industry will never rebel, the pay is too good and the nerdy excitement of being able to solve very interesting problems is too addictive. Our greatest minds are wasted in the finance sectors and big tech.
I would question the idea that it is the greatest minds. I would like to think a great mind (IMO) would rebel, a greedy mind would stay.
This is a regressive view. Developed countries profit from the educational nature of the Internet. We're all better off from having banked and shared common knowledge.
It is so polluted you need professional camera gear and processing of hundreds of photos together in order to show it. Get real. Internet access for poor, remote rural areas across the global is more important than convenient timelapse photography.
a) You can take these photos with a smart phone.
b) In Australia we are rolling out fibre to rural areas and are testing 10Gb plans. Starlink will never come close to those speeds.
Starling et al are about profit, ignoring their impact to humanity
And they profit because people need the valuable service they provide.
I doubt astronomy is as important as providing good internet access to millions of people in low-service areas around the globe.
The poor can't afford it. Military use is the only way Starlink will stay afloat.
You are so far from the mark out is staggering. Starlink is priced differently in different countries, and is wildly popular in developing and undeveloped countries.
A startup idea: launch satellites to capture clean night sky photos, with tiered subscription model of course.
Startup idea: launch anti-satellite satellites to de-orbit other satellites littering your airspace.
There's no concept of airspace in space. You have very few avenues to keep a sat restricted to a geographic region. Orbits like geostationary and molniya exist - but they come with their own limitations for many applications.
The Kessler syndrome will take care of it
HN Startup idea: train a gen. AI on NASA photos and sell custom photos /s
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