
Amazon satellites add to astronomers' worries about night sky - bookofjoe
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/science/amazon-project-kuiper.html
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briga
It's a little baffling how monstrously big Amazon has become over the years.
Pretty soon there won't be an industry left untouched by Amazon's tentacles.
Hard to see how they can continue down this path without getting broken up.

On the bright side: each new satellite launch should lower the barrier to
entry for the next satellite launch. This combined with growing competition in
the space industry could lead the way to commercially viable spaceflight.
There's so much opportunity for off-planet industry, it'll be pretty exciting
to see where all of this leads.

~~~
missedthecue
It's regrettable and bitterly discouraging that the more Amazon works toward
improving mine and millions of others daily lives, the closer they get to
being broken up.

At least, that's the way I see it. They've added new competition in so many
areas. They've saved the consumer so much money that the federal reserve
literally blamed them for lowering inflation, but instead, the federal
government as painfully ironic as it is, views Amazon as the bloated
overreaching organization.

~~~
rscho
> Amazon works toward improving mine and millions of others daily lives

... thousands of small businesses and millions of retail workers are so
thankful for this "improvement". The day is nigh where you and I will also get
"improved", hopefully!

~~~
systemcluster
Occupations are always made obsolete when society advances as a whole and
better solutions become available. We would not have progress otherwise.

~~~
rscho
And one day we'll all be obsolete, implying we won't be able to show our value
through our work.

Brave New World. Ideal for a certain social class: the alphas.

~~~
saas_sam
Food, material goods, and services are cheaper and more plentiful than they
have ever been in human history. Add to that: jobs are easier to discover,
self-teach, and contact than they have ever been in human history. For the
poor as well as the rich.

The main thing people get unhappy about is wealth disparity ie., how much MORE
the rich have than the poor. That even today's poor have a rectangle that's
effectively a magic portal to the entire world's knowledge and population is
not satisfying to you when you read headlines about Bezos' mansions, right?
Allow me to humbly suggest to you that if the dominant emotion of your
worldview is envy, you would not have been any happier in decades past.

~~~
rscho
Nice narrative. Yes, poors are better in a materialistic way. Now, what about
their freedom? Is that also getting better? You might recall the magic
rectangle from Farenheit 451...

~~~
saas_sam
Don't strain your back moving those goal posts. ;)

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bryanlarsen
The article is behind a paywall so I don't know how much is FUD and fear-
mongering. These are real concerns but SpaceX has already addressed them.

1: risk of collision. The main mitigation measure here is active collision
detection. The second mitigation measure is that all of SpaceX's satellites
will be in an incredibly low orbit that decays rapidly without active station
keeping. If a satellite fails it will burn up in the atmosphere within a
couple of years.

2: light pollution. The latest generation of SpaceX satellites with the visor
are so dark that they are not visible to the naked eye. This is dark enough
that blooming is not a concern. Of course they'll still be visible in
telescopes but that doesn't ruin the shot the way blooming does.

I suppose it's possible that Amazon doesn't address concerns the way SpaceX
does, but it seems unlikely now that SpaceX has proven it can be done.

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onetimemanytime
and this is just the second company. Others will jump in once shown that it
works as a business model.

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CRUDite
Many people live in such dire conditions and under such stress, the idea of
looking up and 'enjoying' the sky will be meaningless. The stars could be a
curtain so far as most of humanity is concerned.

We will have to build observatories on the far side of the moon and at
lagrange points and in orbit.

Between now and then there is and will be a struggle to get out of the planets
gravity well and into space. There will be some detrimental effects, but the
benefit of planetary connectivity via sat internet will help so many its hard
to put a value on it. If capitalist competition is not desired then there must
be a state designated max cap on sat numbers forcing them to iterate on the
ground and possibly cooperate.

As someone who has been on the waiting list for an astrophysics scope for some
9 years (!) I can feel the light pollution trauma, though for normal people
observing from the ground the albedo of these things will not approach city
light pollution.

Disbarring space launches for this reason is similar in the notion to not
landing on mars until decades or millenia of sterile robot landers have
confirmed or otherwise the presence of life. Reality, waste decades doing this
and find you contaminated it anyway with your robot, but it had no effect on
life which is robust.

Lets just get out there finally and get stuff done. Most scope viewing is done
on cameras anyway now and not by eyeballs.

The world is still a big place. The day you can be connected anywhere and take
a vtol to tunguska is still some time distant. The sky of such a world will be
congested but there may still be sky slices present.

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alsdkfjkqjwer
Most important point everyone forgets to mention: this is NOT about having the
tech or not. We have artificial satellites for a very long time.

This is about spending a few dollars more to have them properly painted.

Think about this, Musk and Bezos are saving a few cents. In exchange of
astronomy.

~~~
ceejayoz
I don't think that's fair.

Other satellites are reflective, too. It's difficult to make a satellite
_completely_ dark, in part because dark = absorbs heat and it's hard to dump
heat in space.

The problem with these internet constellations is that, to work, they have to
have _thousands_ of them in each constellation. SpaceX has permission for 12k
and is seeking permission for 30k more ([https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-
paperwork-for-30000-mor...](https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-
for-30000-more-starlink-satellites/)).

~~~
roughly
It's definitely fair. Per the article, there's currently ~2600 satellites in
orbit; Amazon is looking to more than double that, and SpaceX is asking to add
~16x that number. I think we're well within our rights as society and as
humans generally to put the onus on them not to fuck up astronomy for the next
century.

And since when has "It's difficult" been a free pass? Both of those companies
beat their chests about how neat their tech is, but when it comes to a
genuinely hard problem - as in, how to launch this fleet without fucking up
humankind's ability to gaze into the cosmos as we have for our entire history
- you're going to let them duck it?

And, to head off the obvious objection: I really, genuinely, truly don't care
how difficult it is, why the physics make it difficult, what a vacuum does for
heat, etc. I know. It's a hard problem. Maybe you don't get to launch fifty
thousand satellites into orbit without solving it.

~~~
scroogeydop
Time to start building tools to jam the spectrum. Make these things useless.

~~~
jsilence
So that we'll have the negative impact of the satelites, but no benefit? How
is that supposed to solve anything?

~~~
silon42
Eventually they will deorbit.

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zeepzeep
Astronomers should chill, it's not like they HAVE to watch the space from
earth, they could also just send sattelites out there like idk hubble?

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nindalf
The two problems pointed by the article - light pollution caused by high
reflectivity and potential crashes appear to be difficult to solve because
solving one makes the other worse.

If the satellites tried to become more difficult to detect, perhaps with light
absorbent coating they would also become more difficult to detect by other
satellites in orbit.

~~~
nelaboras
There already was this story of a $bn research satellite having to dodge a
throwaway SoaceX satellite. Real issue is accountability and the difference in
risk and cost - SpaceX should pay for the reduced lifetime of this satellite
(as it costs fuel to change height).

[https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_la...](https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_large_constellation)

With many more satellites on the way there will be more such stories.

~~~
Isinlor
Collision avoidance is standard practice in the satellite industry.

Here is Iridium CEO:
[https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168582141128650753](https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168582141128650753)

BTW - Satellite operators (including governments) are currently the only
customers of SpaceX. Their interests are SpaceX interests.

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thereisnospork
Parisians hated the Eiffel tower when it went up, claimed it was an eyesore.
Give it a few years, and these constellations will be something we look up at
with pride and aesthetic appreciation.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
It's not about aesthetics, if you keep adding satellites with extremely high
density, at some point you run out of gaps in the sky, that are dark enough
and unobstructed for long enough time to make any meaningful measurements of
the observable universe.

~~~
shajznnckfke
This overstates the problem I think. It will be an issue for wide-field
astronomy. On the other hand, even with tens of thousands of satellites, they
will only be covering a tiny fraction of the sky. For narrow-field you should
be unobstructed most of the time, and able to turn the sensor off momentarily
when the odd satellite is going to obstruct you.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
> This overstates the problem I think. It will be an issue for wide-field
> astronomy.

I think you are downplaying the problem. They are already reporting issues
with Starlinks and there are "only" a few hundred of them right now, Amazon
wants to deploy 3k low orbiting satellites.

Look at this list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observato...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observatories)

The very large majority of the world's observatories are doing wide-field
astronomy.

This is not scientific progress, this is just two billionaires trying to one
up each other and muscling their way around the world to rub their egos.

~~~
renewiltord
> _This is not scientific progress, this is just two billionaires trying to
> one up each other and muscling their way around the world to rub their
> egos._

Starlink claims to have other objectives. Why do you think their stated
objectives are dishonest?

~~~
DoingIsLearning
Internet service is a solved problem, you have transoceanic cables and
distribution networks which garantee reliable, high bandwith, internet
service.

This is a gimmick to sell the imaginary joy that you can go anywhere remotely
and enjoy the pleasures of the modern connected world. There are already niche
providers for Satellite services that users can use, if they are truly
isolated and are able to afford internet.

There is no sense in having all of this infrastructure duplicated and done via
RF transmission over a low-orbiting constellation (with all the losses and
realibility issues around it), if it can easily be achieved through expanding
the existing infrastructure.

The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go
off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military
deployments (Which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).

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ckdarby
Is this really a worry? Won't all the gear eventually be moved off Earth and
into space making this argument pointless?

I'm guessing amateurs with a telescope in their backyard are the ones
suffering?

~~~
astrophysician
This is really a worry.

* Many experiments and a lot of science cannot be done from space, even if delivery costs were much cheaper. E.g. LSST (0.5 billion in US funding alone, + lots of other funding sources), or wide-field astronomy important for near earth object detection and monitoring (e.g. ASASSN). These things are too complex and too large to realistically do in space.

* Ground-based astronomy is inherently cheaper (no space costs, no extra engineering effort, and importantly, the ability to fix things and upgrade equipment), and therefore has a much lower barrier to entry. You can do truly meaningful research from the ground for ~$1 mill + a team of 4 or 5 core people, whereas space requires 10-100x this + an entire fleet of people with all of the associated bureaucratic nightmares + extra time required and engineering challenges. Space offers some benefits, but often times the tradeoff is either not worth the cost, or the experiment is not feasible to do in space.

* Regardless of whether or not you care about the impact on astronomy research (hey, astronomers care about humanitarian stuff too), the way SpaceX bowled through and just started launching their Starlink constellation was irresponsible, reckless, and actually quite ignorant (e.g. they were _surprised_ by how bright their satellites were...this is basic stuff people). On the other hand, I'm not sure how much blame you can really place on a company being reckless when the law allows for such recklessness. There should absolutely be more regulation and oversight. It's in the governments' best interest because it's going to just destroy (needlessly) a lot of R&D already paid for.

Ninja edit: mentioned Space-X in here but this article is technically about
Amazon's Kuiper constellation; however statement is the same (this isn't
really a single company problem, this is a new-technology-without-appropriate-
regulations-problem). Starlink is the largest constellation and the biggest
problem (planned to have ~10x the satellites as the Kuiper constellation, they
are lower orbit than anything else, and not sure how the albedo compares to
Kuiper, but the brightness is > 99% of other satellites).

So: these constellations will multiply number of orbiting satellites by
10-100x, they are extremely bright (> 99% of all satellites), and they are
very low orbit. So its a perfect storm of problems for astronomy.

final ninja edit: check out
[https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/satellites/](https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/satellites/)
to see one astronomer's page about this stuff, some actual images that
illustrate how big the problem is with the _extremely limited_ amount of
starlink satellites currently in orbit, and some other links. OK that's all

~~~
renewiltord
What do you mean by the "bowled through"? Didn't they go through the FCC (US)
who took it to the ITU (UN) and get it all cleared? Looks like the
international body in charge permitted it?

What does good behaviour look like?

~~~
astrophysician
You make a fair point -- I think maybe it is not totally fair to blame the
companies here -- they are in a competitive environment and really the best we
can expect is for them to follow the letter of the law, which it seems they
mostly did. There is a suit against the FCC that argues they incorrectly
claimed that their constellation would not have an "environmental impact"
(which would have required an environmental impact study) but not sure how
well that will hold up in court; it looks like that's best legal avenue we
have at the moment to fight this.

The problem is really that there needs to be better oversight and more
regulation. The laws as they stand do not address the problems that these
constellations produce, because they were written in a time when starlink-like
operations were scarcely imaginable. SpaceX and amazon, etc., should
definitely be allowed to do cool and serious projects like this, but the
oversight agencies basically saying "hey do whatever you want" is a recipe for
serious accidents like collisions, as well as a needlessly enormous impact on
astronomy research. If there were, say, albedo requirements or something,
everyone would have to plan for that, but that is not in place today.

One part that irks me even in the absence of regulation is that SpaceX
provided no forewarning of how bright their Starlink satellites would be,
which astronomers were shocked by. Space-X claimed they were "surprised" by
their brightness which is either a lie or belies serious incompetence.

~~~
renewiltord
Is it a cost thing or a capability thing? i.e. is it possible for Starlink to
have what they want without interfering with terrestrial astronomy or are we
really choosing one or the other? Quite sympathetic to astronomers if it is
cost thing, but undecided (maybe slightly leaning Starlink) if it is
capability thing.

Assuming that within 20 years we can have sufficiently cheap space launch
systems that there are sufficient geosynchronous telescopes for amateur use
would that solve this problem?

Genuine questions, not Socratic method.

~~~
astrophysician
> Is it a cost thing or a capability thing? i.e. is it possible for Starlink
> to have what they want without interfering with terrestrial astronomy or are
> we really choosing one or the other? Quite sympathetic to astronomers if it
> is cost thing, but undecided (maybe slightly leaning Starlink) if it is
> capability thing.

I think it's a bit of both; right now SpaceX is trying to get the brightness
of their starlink sats down to ~7th mag (they're at 5th mag now, they have an
experimental coating that should bring this down to ~6th mag), and it sounds
like if they can do this the problems will be far more manageable (for LSST
specifically this amounts to a few extra months of observing time, however the
impact even with these mitigations is strongly dependent on the specific
science case).

However, this work should be done before approval. What happens when SpaceX
realizes that getting things down to 7th mag is too difficult and costly and
time-intensive? Without regulations in place, I would expect they shrug their
shoulders, do some PR to frame the problem as "us vs those pesky astronomers"
and launch what they want to launch. We have virtually no leverage. But from
the standpoint of people that operate in space pretty regularly, what we're
asking is pretty basic. Astronomy of course isn't going to be thrilled with
the amount of satellites growing by a factor of 10-100x, but we live in the
real world. But something that monumental needs to be done thoughtfully and
carefully and with respect to the billions of dollars of R&D already paid for
that will be impacted.

> Assuming that within 20 years we can have sufficiently cheap space launch
> systems that there are sufficient geosynchronous telescopes for amateur use
> would that solve this problem?

Again, space delivery costs are only one factor. Not to say this wouldn't
enable new kinds of instruments or make some new things possible, but it would
not solve the problem, no. There are too many things that can't realistically
be done from space.

~~~
renewiltord
Cool beans. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

~~~
astrophysician
Sure! I think your questions are very reasonable, we'll have to see how it all
shakes out.

