Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.

Fuckin space garbage is what it is.

Yes it was impressive that they landed a rocket again once, but the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone. It should've been a stepping stone for better technology, but instead they're just mining money. Privately owned space engineering is a disgrace to humanity.

Space engineering used to unite even the worst opponents as with the international space station, but now those institutions are underfunded, while billionaire space-musk can shoot his loads into the atmosphere without any regard to the rest of the worlds population living inside said sphere.

Tax the asshole already.

I was excited about starlink when it was announced, but already it's way too expensive, already bows to actual totalitarians and isn't affordable on the ocean and not available in remote places without a license.

And with more satellite constellations planned by amazon and others, it seems the kessler syndrome is just a question of time.
- On the Kessler point, Starlink birds fly at an altitude where they will deorbit in 4-8 years if they go dead, so that particular orbit will always be fairly clean, and if a Kessler event does happen, the debris will deorbit in a reasonable length of time.
- Wouldn't it be nice if those sattelites would work together instead of against eachother. What if Amazon worked together with starlink, and the other companies offering internet so there would be less sattelites in the sky. Why does every sat internet company need their own fleet of sattelites
- already bows to actual totalitarians
  
  Care to elaborate?
- It's extremely affordable on the ocean. What are you talking about?
  
  Just until recently satellite internet was really expensive. Like only large corporations could afford it. And the bandwidth was shit. Also it was barely available in the deep northern and southern hemisphere. Sure it's considered expensive for the regular kayaking dude. But it's insanely more available than ever before.
  
  The dudes an asshole. But don't invent arguments.
This. I wish I had more than one up vote I could give for this comment.
agreed. it's a technology we need but like everything meant to improve humanity, it should be publicly owned (no, not the stock market - truly public).
Enshittification happens to all things, sadly.
- It happens really early with that fuckin' weasel in charge.
When people talk about taxing these horrible people I think of tax as being a euphamism
the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone

Except for the millions of people accessing internet via Starlink to whom the alternative is either no internet, slow internet or extremely expensive internet.

starlink wouldn't have a leg to stand on (in the US, can't speak for elsewhere) if isps were held to installing/maintaining/upgrading infrastructure that was already paid for by the federal government decades ago and then the isps just didn't do the work.

Privatized networks are a crime and it should be treated legally as such.

Public network for the public.
That’s a nice thought, but

Starlink has no old infrastructure

Rural and remote customers are difficult to wire up

Even in the best case where US was close to 100% wired up like we paid for, Starlink would have a market in remote areas world wide, RVs, aircraft, ships
- The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they'd paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.
  
  If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn't have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.
- We managed to wire up large swaths of rural area for electricity back in the 1930's
- This, I'm both very rural and in an RV at the same time. Starlink is literally my only means of playing games. The only other even remotely viable option is LTE internet from something like T-Mobile but out here the towers don't really have much capacity so I might be able to play the game fine and I might just start disconnecting Midway through a match randomly as the internet struggles to even load a basic web page

Sending so many satellites also requires so many rocket launchers that Google passed on it because it was too polluting.

Starlink is the poster child of "fuck you, I got mine."

Google is the second largest shareholder of Space X.
- get rid of "do no evil"
  
  invest in evil
  
  ?????
  
  profit!
- Google Ventures got a 7.5% stake in SpaceX in 2008 (which wasn't the second-largest share at the time). Can you point me to resources that say they're the second-largest shareholder of SpaceX today?

Don't forget all the fun chemicals they leave in the atmosphere when they deorbit.

We're so fucked.
- In fact, increasing Earth's albedo by pumping certain types of chemicals into the higher layers of the atmosphere has been proposed as a possible geoengineering solution that could slow down global warming.
  
  I wouldn't be surprised if the entire project was architected as a way to completely sidestep regulatory approval and test geoengineering theories before climate change really starts to pop. Elon and his fellow plutocrats are undoubtedly sociopathic enough to do that.

"Don't worry, you can just build one on the moon. You can even pay me to use my rockets to get there." - Elon

*Terms and conditions apply

**Rocket may or may not be capable of reaching low earth orbit, payload fractions subject to change, not responsible for loss of equipment, habitat, or lives
Capitalism!
Takes money. Does nothing. China builds lunar science complex with particle accelerators and all the cool shit.
It will also harm the ability to use rockets in the long time, as satellites are abandoned when decommissioned, and create debris in low earth orbit.
- Starlink satellites are low enough that they'll burn up after a few years.

To me Elon Musk is like the real-life, slightly less dramatic and slightly less evil Handsome Jack out of Borderlands

Less evil than Handsome Jack?! Jack's at least a good guy in the Presequel. Was Elon ever good?
- Good point
- He certainly seemed good a decade ago. Look up how we internet folk spoke about him when he was the fun guy who wanted to explore Mars and provide electric cars, not the neonazi who ruined the internet!
- I'll never get over Handsome Jack killing Bloodwing. Fuck him.
"Kirkland brand Dr evil" has been my go to.
- That's not fair to Kirkland though, lol! They never treated us like that asshole 😛
Ugly Musk
He's Weyland.
- I thought he was X.
I don't know which has said wilder shit honestly.
Less?

I'm sure Musk is perfectly willing to turn certain constellations off at specific times... For a price, of course.

Exxcellent.

If it can interfere with large aperture ground telescopes.. it would be a shame if those ground telescopes grew transmitters and started interfering back.

Is it weird I agree these are terrible and yet also hope this spurs the end of ground based observation in favor of a larger orbital presence?

We could and should be doing both ground and orbital radio telescope observations. One really interesting idea I've seen floated is to put one on the far-side of the moon; it'd be shielded from all our radio emissions but, of course, it would be somewhat suspectable to interference from the sun for weeks at a time.

What I've never understood about Starlink is how it's better than existing satellite internet beamed from geosynchronous craft... like, geosync is crowded (especially over North America and Europe), but it's not so crowded we couldn't put a couple more transponders up there. Objects in geosync rarely have the astronomical side effects that Starlink is apparently causing. It would even solve the Starlink issue of having to have an expense af receiver with active tracking... just nail up a stationary ku-band dish that doesn't need to move ever. This is already solved technology.
- The problem with geosynchronous orbit is that you need to be at a high altitude to maintain it. That increases the packet round trip time to a receiver on the ground. Starlink satellites orbit low enough to give a theoretical 20ms ping. A geostationary satellite would be at best 500ms. It’s fine for some tasks but lousy for applications that need low latency, like video calling.
The scale at which we build radio telescopes on the ground simply isn't possible in space.
- Just to add, radio telescopes easily have diameters of several 10 to several 100 meters, you won't put that easily in space. And even if you do, maybe one, not tens of them. And these are often used in network as well for interferometry to have higher spatial resolution, so that would be gone as well.
- Not easily, perhaps. But it's certainly possible. We already have space technology for unfolding small packages into large sheets. Not to mention, you don't need a single 100m collection surface when you can accomplish similar things with many smaller surfaces spaced apart. See the Very Large Array.
- Not with that attitude.
It's never been cheaper or easier to launch, ironically enough thanks in part to Starlink.
- How about we check back in on your comment in say, oh, 5 years, when we become forcibly earthbound, victims of Kessler's Syndrome? Because by then, a starlink satellite will collide with another creating a chain reaction of collisions, birthing an ever-growing cascading field of Elon' space debris bukkake all over the Earth's face.
  
  But hey, Pocket Rocket Boy has got to have an excuse to keep launching so he can continue collecting his government welfare checks. $15.3 billion since 2003 and climbing.
exactly what i was thinking.
No it’s utterly pragmatic.

The future of space exploration is in space.

Isn't Starlink also too expensive because you have to replace the satellites every 5 years? As in you'd have to sell to basically everybody on earth to be profitable. And they charge 50Euros a month, almost twice as much as I currently pay, and I'm satisfied with my current provider.

Their target market is people who don't have a better option, not people who already have fibre to the door.
- And those people are famously wealthy.
50Euros a month, almost twice as much as I current pay

Wow Canada sucks in our ISP choices
- Cries in long island
  
  I have one option that isn't 4g wireless crap... It's $110/month for 500mbps... It was $80/month but they felt the need to make more money by eliminating their lower tiers and "forcing" you to upgrade... I just suddenly had a 500mbps plan and $110 bill without asking them to change anything...
I'm sure they ran the numbers and saw a goldmine in the future, except goldmines pale in comparison. They can serve a global market and can grow basically to serve the entire world. Their internal launch costs will continue to get lower and satellites can be improved to last longer.

Great. Musk is building a Sophon.

Disclaimer - I have a starlink terminal. I feel that the complaints should be made to the various governments that haven't mandated modern terrestrial technologies to those of us outside metro areas.

I live 14km/9m from a town with underground fibre optic. The best I can hope for is geo-synch satellite with data caps and latency around 600ms. I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it's quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

So, Starlink found a need and filled it. Had governments filled the need instead, the problem wouldn't exist.

The problem isn't that they are filling a niche, the problem is that they are doing it carelessly and ruining other people's work in the process.
While I don't begrudge you your choice, I don't think this is a good defence of Starlink. It sounds too close to defence of leaded gasoline.

Someone else not solving a problem isn't a good defence for someone who creates a solution to that one problem that ends up being a net negative for humanity as a whole, and it's definitely not a defence of a second generation that makes a known problem with the technology even worse.
- Not a fan of Starlink. But net negative to humanity? Idk about that.
  
  Let say we do lose that band of the em spectrum. Does that take away more than we gain by improving the life of the dude above and many like him?
  
  As much as I like science and space, shouldn't "humanity's" first concern be the well-being of humans? I'd say we live at a time where Internet access should be a public utility, not having it marks a dramatic difference in opportunity. Starlink isn't that, but it's better than nothing.
  
  Having scientists looking at space is important, but it doesn't help everyday joe, who needs the most help.
  
  That being said. I agree it is up to governments to find their balls and regulate the use of space. Like they did with gasoline.
But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

Yeah, the justification was the federal government basically forcing providers to do that. Remember back in 2008 when we handed a bunch of money to telecom companies to expand their networks? Then they laughed at us and just kept the money and basically said fuck you? That also was a part of this act, or at least related to it, since broadband was added to it as an amendment in 2008.

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

Anyways, point being the companies didn't roll our electricity and pstn to rural areas out of the goodness of their heart or even a strict profit motive. It took a literal act of congress for it to happen.
I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it’s quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

Yeah, but you see, the electricity and telephone rollouts were done in the New Deal era or shortly thereafter. The government has been subjected to way too much regulatory capture since then to ever consider doing something that would help the public at the expense of corporate profits nowadays.
While I don't begrudge you your choice, I don't think this is a good defence of Starlink. It sounds too close to defence of leaded gasoline.

Someone else not solving a problem isn't a good defence for someone who creates a solution to that one problem that ends up being a net negative for humanity as a whole, and it's definitely not a defence of a second generation that makes a known problem with the technology even worse.

elon musk is a terrorist that will make astronomy harder if not impossible if he trashes orbits too much

SpaceX is in the business of launching satellites. It's in their best interest if ground-based astronomy gets harder. They should be required to pay for their negative externalities.
- Hahahaha imagine if we made everyone pay for their negative externalities! It would probably be paradise.
For how lauded the dude is as a visionary entrepreneur, I'm still wondering what one single thing he's done right to earn the title with any of his businesses. Everything he touches turns to shit even when accounting for run-of-the-mill corporate practices. The dude sucks.

Fuck Leon Skum

All worth it so lord Musk can push his shitty memes to remote tribes in the Amazon.

Don't worry, greed ensures that Kessler Syndrome will get them in the not too distant future. Sure hope you aren't reliant on GPS or other satellite services, but at least, for a shining moment, shareholders got some value. /s

Starlink is a very low orbit. Even if something like that happened, it would clean itself up in like five years
- The satellites are constantly giving themselves small boosts to maintain orbit and then are deorbited in 5 years when they run out of fuel. It should be well less than 5 years to resolve a LEO Kessler type situation from starlink.
- When 2 satellites collide, the pieces don't all stay on the same altitude. Even though none of them will be in a stable orbit, all it takes is for one piece to smack into a satellite that's a bit higher up before it de-orbits, and boom, now you've got a debris field that won't de-orbit.
- Not wrong, and yet small parts of that 'orbit' would kinetically increase, in a Kessler sort of way...
- Sorry, you're probably right. It's a thing I expect to be problematic if the future. Of course all problems will burn up in the atmosphere...
- and isn't that a nice thought, but no, it raises orbit fairly naturaly...
GPS/GLONASS/Galileo are at ~20,000km vs starlinks ~500km, all the LEO satellites would be fucked but global positioning would be fine. Sounds good to me.
- Wouldn't interference from all the junk in between be at least somewhat of a problem, particularly given that the average GPS receiver already isn't super sensitive nor accurate?
- Yup, but scatter might be bad...Still, in principle, better satellites live...

Down em all then. We need a satellite with lasers to take out other satellites: whether it's Russia's, China's, or Elon's.

Alien 1: "I don't get it, we've been trying to contact them for ages now. You don't think they sacrificed their chance to join the interstellar community in order to have better phone reception or something, did they?"

Alien 2: "Well maybe if you didn't keep sticking probes up their asses, they'd be more communicative!"

Honestly astronomy from earth is notoriously difficult, for various reasons.

there's already a lot of light pollution, due to atmospheric light dispersion, so finding a good spot for telescopes is already difficult.
there's the issue that images become blurred, again because atmosphere.
We already have telescopes in space, why no re-use them with an additional camera?

Spaceflight is unstoppable at this point. I look at the colonization of Mars like a distillation process: we remove all of the restless assholes and billionaires from Earth, and they leave us and leave us the fuck alone. That's a good thing; We should support it.

Honestly astronomy from space is notoriously difficult, for various reasons.

It takes a lot of energy and infrastructure to propel a telescope into space.

Radiation can cause issues with electronics, so they all need to be hardened.

Typically satellites use older proven technology to make sure that they don't run into new issues, which means they're not able to be bleeding edge.

New technology is next to impossible to add to a space telescope, meaning upgrades rarely happen, if ever. Ground telescopes can continuously upgrade with relative ease.

There's a lot of pros and cons. Neither solution is better than the other. They're only better at certain things. We need both.
- The seemingly straightforward solution is that SpaceX needs to be legally required to get into the radio astronomy business. As part of being allowed to launch such noisy satellites. If they are going to wreck radio astronomy on Earth's surface, they should have to launch orbital radio telescopes of such quality and quantity that SpaceX is actually a vast net boon on radio astronomy. This should simply be a legally required cost of doing business if they want to launch so many noisy satellites. Yes, these orbital telescopes would have a finite lifespan and need to be regularly replaced to be updated, but thankfully the greatest rocket company on Earth will be legally required to launch them regularly.
The problem is radio wavelengths are much longer than visible light thus the huge size of radio telescopes on earth, which would also make a space-based one a challenge
- ooh i see

What’s up with some meme communities and people not posting memes on them?

Never miss a chance to milk some of those anti-Elon upvotes
This is not a meme community.

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts
- It’s called microblogmemes

Is the majority of high detail astronomy done from earth or is it done with satellites? I'm struggling to understand the significance of this

Mostly from earth. You’ e probably heard of the big names in space astronomy. There’s like three.

Radio telescopes don’t need to be above the atmosphere. We’ll, at least they didn’t before…
- Earth has natural interference, the moon, any other satellite…. so yeah they should have always been above the natural interference, they’ve always just “accounted” for it, but who knows how accurate that is. Obviously avoiding the interference is the better option. Any satellite also provides interference, it’s not star link is the only ones here… you don’t think that do you?
  
  They’ve avoided spending the money putting radio in space, for what reason who knows, but there’s always interference here on earth, it’s odd you claim otherwise. There is actually radio astronomy in space, they point it towards earth instead, so take from this what you will, but it’s better away from interference than passing through it.
Well.......yeah, but what about the "Fuck Elon Musk" initiative? YOU HAVEN'T THOUGHT OF THE "FUCK ELON MUSK" INITIATIVE YOU BITCH!!

This is the equivalent of the 5G panic, but it suits the perpetually online population better, so it's totally not a conspiracy theory this time.

Starlink satellites are like vampires. If we cut off the head of the original vampire they'll all die. I suggest launching Elon musk into the sun on one of his starships

I'd rather have less space junk, not more.

I have my own suggestion of where to store him.
- Ah good point, he is rather toxic

Science cannot get in the way of profits!

Where's the FCC and ITU on this?

Theoretically if you started lasering these down somehow from international waters... uh, what would happen? Hypothetically?

Depends on what flag the boat is flying and what port it left and returned too after.
- It's a ship flagged from the Holy Imperial Nation of Ocean-Sea. It's a floating, autonomous nation-state in the middle of the ocean that harvest food from the sea and desalinates drinking water from the same. Their national history states they haven't touched land in 2000 years. Also they have lasers and can launch predator satellites. It's a very fascinating country.
- Vatican. Sri Lanka. Hawaii.
The government of whatever country owns those satellites would have an issue with that, regardless of what the law says.

If you did it to satellites belonging to a US company, providing a service used by the US military...

Let's just say they can deliver explosives to any point on the globe in 30 minutes.
- So laser them from the moon. Got it, thanks!

And also how does space law work? If you launched a predator satellite that starts taking these out, again, launched from international waters, is that, like, illegal? Considering they're a private company?

It would be way more risky, space debris is no joke
- 4mm paint fleck traveling at 23000 mph/10 kms has entered the chat
- What if the predator satellite just ties little rockets to them that are aimed at deep space?
Given that someone owns those satellites, yes.

Outer space is under maritime law, oddly enough.
- I would have assumed it's closer to bird law.

Starlink is ruining law enforcement here in South America already. Drug cartels and people on illegal activities acting in Amazon rainforest are getting increasingly creative at turning their starlink devices on, then off, then on again at different points. Also, such devices switch hands rather quickly - and international borders sometimes - in order to avoid tracking.

I'm confused because band pass filters exist. Can they not add a filter to eliminate the frequencies that starlink uses?

Also, the starlink satellites use phased array antennas, guess that wasn't a great idea either.

That works great unless you're specifically looking for results in those frequencies.

It's the equivalent of trying to look for a red laser pointer dot on a wall and some jackass put red floodlights in front of you aimed at the wall.
- Agreed. Idk I dunno enough about radio telescopes to know what frequencies they typically look at.
  
  Nor do I know what bands star link works on.
  
  Either way, maybe Elon should stop launching trash into space.
- They could just shift the frequency up and down so they can get data in those ranges. There’s advantages to them being linked together and being able to communicate with them. They could probably also Shut down those bands completely temporarily so some science can get done.
  
  I get this is a HUGE issue, but this also isn’t this massive non accountable issue to get some science done. Just makes it harder, these embellished headlines don’t help stuff.
Yes, that completely destroys the information in that band. That is the point, the satellites are using these bands, overpowering what was already naturally there.
- Yup. I understand and agree that it would make any work in those bands essentially meaningless.
  
  I'm not by any means giving Elon, or anyone else, a green light to just pollute the airwaves with my comment. Simply put, he should have not done what he did. Star link is a cool concept but it should have gone through more review before being put into orbit. I suspect if that had happened, it wouldn't have been put in orbit.
  
  IMO, it's kind of just space junk at this point.
The quote says "it will stop us doing science in that spectrum."

They can filter out starlink's frequencies. What else does that filter out? If the radio telescope uses that spectrum, they can't filter it out and continue to do their work. As I understand, this would be all radio telescopes looking within our solar system.

Space pollution frustrates me because there's truly nothing I can do about it. Maybe someone will democratize a laser or something to shoot down these bullshit non-science satellites, like some Johnny Pneumonic shit, or was it Escape from L.A., no, it was Congo.
- Maybe we should stop the billionaires from launching so much crap into orbit.
  
  Namely Elon.
*Bandstop filters

Shouldn't the FCC have a say in this?
- They do, and they did. Since star link is global by nature, I'm sure many countries radio regulatory bodies had a say.
  
  Apparently radio telescopes were not on their minds when they made a decision.

Pentagon: Link 16+++++v2 go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

He literally came all over the planet and ruined it... More.

Starlink, isn't that the planetwide wi-fi initiative? Do they need those emissions to function? Other than the fact that it's from a corporation, it seems to me that internet connectivity across the whole planet would be more valuable to humanity as a whole than clearer views of space on one invisible part of the spectrum (which they can still watch from space if it's that important.)

Though the competition between multiple corps trying to launch satellites doesn't seem good, and it'd be nice if some FOSS initiative and/or intergovernment collaboration were to step in and make it one set of satellites free for everyone.

heheheheheheh.jpg

Free satellites.

I mean maybe this is the push they need to actually spend the cash and get one up in space that is away from natural interferences as well?

Sucks for the home radio Astro guy, but they have the solution, have had for a long time.

The best solution is probably to not have starlink satellites up in space tbh
- Any satellite would provide interference, and the earth naturally has its own, so that’s a non-factor, when the best results can only be had in space.
  
  Radio astronomy isn’t exactly a home hobbies thing if you didn’t know….

If we had the money, there's no legal repercussions to going up there and deorbiting the satellites right? Maybe install a defense platform to shoot down any more from spacex, oneweb or whoever else tries putting them up.

If we had the money

If you had that kind of money, you could just build extensive ground-based fiber and radio networks that invalidate Starlink.

there's no legal repercussions to going up there and deorbiting the satellites right?

Lmao, what would ever make you think deliberately destroying communication infrastructure would be legal?

Maybe install a defense platform to shoot down any more from spacex, oneweb or whoever else tries putting them up.

If you're talking about shooting satellites out of orbit from the ground, you don't understand how orbital spaceflight works. If you're talking about putting weapons in space, that's a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

Also, blowing up satellites just creates clusters of space junk we can't get rid of, so it's a non-starter.
- It's obviously a joke lol.
  
  And we could easily deploy land based connectivity solutions with the money being spent on satellite internet.
This is one of the dumbest takes I've ever seen here.

They're a US company, and the US military uses Starlink for some applications. They'd fuck you up very quickly.
- You are very smart.
  
  (I just realised this is lemmy world, the reddit part of the fediverse. Oops)

Thats the plan - and nothing will be done because there is no law, no faith, only money.

Democrats are no better. They'll argue for women's or trans rights (when convenient) but even most of their "progressive voters still worship at the altar of Money and think to limit greed in any meaningful way is inherently sinful.

Agree with the money worship thing, disagree with democrats not being better. Arguing for people's rights IS better.

But... memes.

?
- Expanded: 'but, how will I receive memes if not for a satellite constellation beaming them to me'
- Concern: Starlink will ruin science.
  
  Rebuttal/joke : But... I want memes.
- MEMES, BRO, LISTEN BETTER