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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.
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.
*Bandstop filters
Shouldn’t the FCC have a say in this?
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.
“Don’t worry, you can just build one on the moon. You can even pay me to use my rockets to get there.” - Elon
Takes money. Does nothing. China builds lunar science complex with particle accelerators and all the cool shit.
Capitalism!
Great. Musk is building a Sophon.
Fuck Leon Skum
I’m sure Musk is perfectly willing to turn certain constellations off at specific times… For a price, of course.
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!
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.
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
In a lot of places, that only happened because people banded together and made it happen for their area - the existing suppliers weren’t interested, even with federal loans available. That’s where the “Electric Co-op” companies came from.
Somehow capitalism has become about more profiteering, self-serving, instant gratification
But also there were no choices. Starlink may be a valid choice and the infrastructure is already there
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
Welp, I guess we’ll all have to suffer the consequences so that Lordkitsuna can game in the middle of nowhere. Truly first world problems.
https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-reentry-ozone-depletion-atmosphere
Welp, I guess we all have to suffer with no internet in rural areas because of some astronomy nerds. I’ll take global, high-speed, expensive, but still affordable internet over some shots of distant nebulas any day. Not a Musk fan, but this sounds like a desperate attempt to find something to dunk on him for. There’s tons of reasons already, but this ain’t one.
The point of this thread is that Starlink only exists to solve this problem because the ISPs were paid to do it the old fashioned way and decided to fuck off with the cash instead. It wouldn’t have solved the RV issue, but if nost rural areas had the cable internet the government bought, then Starlink likely never gets off the ground, pun intended.
I’m just saying blindly calling for it to go away entirely (which i see a lot of on stuff like this) isn’t helpful. Clearly they need to tone down emissions but it’s a useful service.
I work 10hr shifts at work and it’s 1hr 30 both to and from work, moving isn’t really an option for me atm. I don’t think it’s unreasonable I’d like to be able to stream my shows or play games with my friends to relax
lordkitsuna is the answer, dude. more people getting away from the grind of the big machine to live remote lives far from society is the answer. i don’t like starlink either but these networks are crucial for the modern nomad to exist.
The answer to what? If everyone does this, there won’t be a single remote place on earth that isn’t crawling with sprinter vans. It can’t scale, and it doesn’t need to be specifically catered to. You want the wilderness, you get the wilderness. You want low latency Internet, then get to a fiber connection. We don’t need every first world amenity everywhere.
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.
50Euros a month, almost twice as much as I current pay
Wow Canada sucks in 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…
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.
not exactly. many starlink users are not your grandpa in his $500k RV. it’s the digital nomad in their $5k RV held together by duct tape. some of us would do anything to get away from all the bullshit of modern society, and quite frankly i think the world needs more of us.
I was being sarcastic. I simply don’t believe that there’s enough money to be made selling satellite internet to support replacing a large constellation of satellites every 5 years. Especially since Starlink’s competitors use higher up satellites, meaning they don’t have to replace their satellites as often.
Yes, RV travelers, cruise lines, multiple militaries.
not exactly my friend.
Its their data thats worth money. Now its collectable.
Starlink is expensive, but it’s not that expensive.
And they’re running at a loss.
it is looking like that flipped this year to over 200 million in profit off over 2 billion in revenue
I just checked Wikipedia, and there it also says small profit. Could be caused by how the satellites are being written off, though.
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.
I think that’s how we end up in a train perpetually circling the frozen earth.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised.
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.
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).
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.
A portion of the debris from collisions would enter elliptical orbits though so might need more time to de-orbit. But loosing all LEO satellites and even just 4-8 years without use of LEO would be an absolute catastrophe. You could still launch satellites to medium or geosynchronous orbit though.
Where will they go after they deorbit? Do we get em back?
They burn up on re-entry, at least they’re supposed to.
Thanks, atmosphere 🙂❤️ that’s interesting design! Will any of the debris reach the planet or is it designed to break apart in a particular fashion?
Will any of the debris reach the planet
Not in a solid form. There may be some undesirable effects though at greater numbers, we don’t really have good data. Here’s a blog post by the European Space Agency talking about a couple studies on the effects of satellite reentry. Note that the satellites they simulated were significantly larger than the Starlink satellites.
My understanding is they’re designed to completely disintegrate.
already bows to actual totalitarians
Care to elaborate?
Turkey and Russia. It’s clear that profit seeking corporations would bow, but then Elon screams bloody murder when reactionary forces in Brazil manipulating social media get censored.
I feel like that explanation is missing a verb or something.
To bow, or bow down or kneel for. But I’m not going to google that for you haha. The basic problem is that starlink theoretically has immense power so it becomes a political tool. He bows to those ones but not to legitimate democratic interests.
Especially once starlink and others can make landline based internet connections obsolete by pricing them out - which they are not currently doing though, but it seems only a matter of time with competition. Basically we could get to a situation where there are only like 2 or 3 internet provider practically controlling internet globally.
They won’t be able to price landline based connections out as long as they have to replace their satellites every 5 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re running at a loss currently.
What about Turkey and Russia? Starlink doesn’t work in Russia.
Follow the news so we don’t have to catch you up.
This. I wish I had more than one up vote I could give for this comment.
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.
To me Elon Musk is like the real-life, slightly less dramatic and slightly less evil Handsome Jack out of Borderlands
I don’t know which has said wilder shit honestly.
Ugly Musk
Less evil than Handsome Jack?! Jack’s at least a good guy in the Presequel. Was Elon ever good?
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!
Funny how he had many of us fooled. I think it was more my naivete that led me to think he was legit. For some reason I’ve kept returning to the idea that an altruistic billionaire isn’t an oxymoron 😑 as many have said and i will dutifully repeat: nobody becomes a billionaire because they’ve worked that many hours or made that giant of a contribution to the human race–they only acquire that much by withholding a significant share of the profits they’ve received from the other people that did the actual work to make the money in the first place.
Good point
I’ll never get over Handsome Jack killing Bloodwing. Fuck him.
He’s Weyland.
I thought he was X.
Bravo
Less?
If it can interfere with large aperture ground telescopes… it would be a shame if those ground telescopes grew transmitters and started interfering back.
All worth it so lord Musk can push his shitty memes to remote tribes in the Amazon.
What’s up with some meme communities and people not posting memes on them?
This is not a meme community.
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts
It’s called microblogmemes
And? See the description of the community and don’t create fuss out of nothing.
You realize a meme is an image or anything else that’s shared right…? The second you post any image here, it automatically becomes a meme whether you intended or not.
Never miss a chance to milk some of those anti-Elon upvotes
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
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…
Not wrong, and yet small parts of that ‘orbit’ would kinetically increase, in a Kessler sort of way…
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.
Pieces don’t gain kinetic energy in a collision. Even if they collide and get sent off in an “upwards” direction, it’s not up very far relative to the orbit, and that’s just a less circular orbit at lower speed that will burn up even faster
For you scenario to work, there would have to be a chain reaction
- collision, sending a few pieces upwards
- during that small number of orbits they survive, collision, sending a few pieces upward
- repeat many times
Each chance is remote enough, and ricocheting pieces only go so far, and any higher satellites they could reach are also low orbit, that I can’t imagine how remote the chances of this happening are
Kessler syndrome is a real worry, but not in this low orbit
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.
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.
Yup, but scatter might be bad…Still, in principle, better satellites live…
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?
GPS works under tree cover, I doubt some spread out space junk is much of a problem.
Unlikely. There would be very little, if any, interference with signals unless they were extremely precise. The issue is physical stuff getting destroyed by debris.
Think of a very light sprinkling of rain, but imagine if every raindrop was solid and moving faster than a bullet. Walking out in it would be deadly, but likely wouldn’t affect your cell phone service. Well, besides the tower itself and every structure in the area getting absolutely shredded.
Yeah, I suppose I’m over-estimating the density/amount.
