
SpaceX working on fix for Starlink satellites so they don’t disrupt astronomy - woliveirajr
https://spacenews.com/spacex-working-on-fix-for-starlink-satellites-so-they-dont-disrupt-astronomy/
======
dang
All: since people feel passionately about this, if you comment in this thread
please make sure you're doing so thoughtfully and following the guidelines.
Avoid flamebait, don't fuel flamewar, and definitely don't do personal
attacks.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
cbanek
(I'm not speaking for any of my current or past employers, just for myself,
and how I've seen this play out. One employer being a telescope impacted by
Starlink, and the other being SpaceX, I want both sides to succeed.)

First, astronomers know that satellites can disrupt observations. They've
known for a while, and have had to deal with things like flares from Irridium
satellites, which were probably when these problems were first taken
seriously. (It was a design defect where shiny panels would reflect the sun in
a very efficient way).

Astronomers use all sorts of image processing, because satellites aren't the
only noise in the picture. The CCDs have to be kept cryogenically cool, and
there's all sorts of electrical noise as well. There's not a lot of photons
being collected in the grand scheme of things, so dealing with the noise floor
is a real problem. There are all sorts of ways for removing tracks. And don't
forget weather!

Now, that being said, even I was confused why this would cause a problem. The
satellites are in low earth orbit, so low that they won't be able to reflect
the sunlight, since they are in earth's shadow. Only during twilight and dawn
will satellites be in the right position to reflect the sunlight back to the
ground off of some panel.

Now, these are not prime observing hours for many people, since it is still
not as dark as it could be. So most people point into the darkest parts of the
sky (up) rather than at parts where there is still twilight (like nearer the
horizon).

But for some types of observations, like near earth asteroids, you want to
point into the evening sky to look for them, since that is one of the places
you want to look, and the sky conditions should be good enough. In these
pictures you'll get streaks of light as the satellites pass through.

Even if there is no light reflecting, these satellites could occlude a distant
star or galaxy momentarily. You wouldn't see a streak as much as the light
would go away and come back. This would affect how bright you see the star,
since over the time of the exposure (let's say 30 seconds) you'll collect less
light while something is blocking the light. This can also make it a bit more
tricky to look at variable stars, where the light gets stronger and dimmer
naturally.

I would say that astronomers definitely knew about these problems, since they
have to deal with all sorts of similar problems, but the pitch didn't get
fevered until people saw the first set of Starlink satellites and just how
bright they were. SpaceX moves a lot faster than astronomy.

As for SpaceX not thinking about the astronomical implications of Starlink, I
could believe that. I think most of them were more concerned with if it is
possible rather than the implications of doing it. As much as I would think
the two fields would know more about each other, I find they are very
different and run in different circles it seems (launch vehicle industry vs
astronomers), so I could easily see not much cross pollination between the
two. For example, there were lots of NASA astronauts and air force people
visiting SpaceX, but I don't remember one astronomer (not that I met
everyone).

~~~
mstipetic
This sounds to me like a new technology and a way of operating has come and
we're trying to make it accommodate the old way of doing things.

If we really have a way to launch thousands of satellites easily, can't we
replace the terrestrial functionality with that? Let's launch hundreds of
satellites observing near earth asteroids.

If a private company can do it, governments definitely can

~~~
cbanek
So while it sounds good that we've fixed the launch industry and can launch
everything cheaper, that we should only have space based telescopes, space
telescopes are a very different game from ground based telescopes.

First, as others have pointed out, is size. Ground based mirrors are very
large, in the 10s of meters, and those mirrors are extremely heavy, like tons.
You can't lift one of those mirrors up on one rocket, so you'll have to figure
out some kind of in orbit construction. Not impossible, but we haven't
assembled a lot of things in space, probably the biggest would be the ISS. But
telescopes have tricky tolerances...

Which leads me to the next issue: not only is it heavy, but telescopes are
fragile. They have to be very carefully calibrated and put together. Launching
something into space tends to be a very bumpy ride, and making something that
can withstand that kind of vibration for launch, and then the thermal problems
while in space would be certainly not trivial.

But let's say you could build something and get it to work in orbit. Then it's
still hard to service. Servicing the hubble to fix the optics was a very hard
mission, and the hubble is relatively close to the earth. And that was when we
had the shuttle, which we don't now.

Cooling is very tricky for both telescopes and space. Since there's no air to
radiate to, you can get big thermal gradients over the length of your craft
and you have to be very careful how you point it. Same for the optics and the
camera, you want to make sure they have as little thermal gradient as
possible.

Unlike a lot of commercial satellites, many scientific probes and telescopes
are constantly refitted and reused. Ground based telescopes frequently reuse
the same expensive (typically one-off) mirrors and put better cameras on them
all the time. This is pretty hard to do in space.

That being said, being in space does have a lot of advantages, the most
obvious one being a lack of atmosphere to mess with your observations. But
assembling large telescopes in space still isn't exactly easy.

I think over time though, we will be heading to more space based telescopes as
the cost comes down. But many slower moving telescope projects (mostly slow
due to government funding) were started before Starlink was even announced.

~~~
strainer
> Ground based mirrors are very large, in the 10s of meters, and those mirrors
> are extremely heavy, like tons.

Seemingly fantastically - SpaceX is currently constructing a system designed
to launch 100 tons to LEO, for as low as $35/kg [1]. Musk says this capability
is what the Starlink business is to pay for. It appears lately, more realistic
than it has sounded.

[1] [https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-
sta...](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-
a-very-big-deal/) (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397285)
)

~~~
sectiondetail
One of the things I'm most excited about related to Starship is its landed
mass capability for science purposes. Imagine being able to build radio and
optical telescopes in the Daedalus crater on the central lunar far side.
They'd be shielded from the optical and radio noise of the sun for 2 weeks out
of 4, and permanently shielded from Earth. Or imagine infrared telescopes at
the bottom of permanently shadowed polar craters, where ambient temperatures
are even colder than in interplanetary space. No need to design and deploy a
complex sunshield and worry about maintaining spacecraft orientation. The
science potential of reusable heavy-lift rockets can't be understated.

------
dylan604
“No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy
community didn’t think of it.”

I really have trouble believing that nobody mentioned adding thousands of
satellites would go unnoticed. It is damn near impossible to take any image of
the night sky without having a satellite streak through the frame. I have
plenty of images with multiple satellites visible at the same time. In wide
angle timelapse sequences, they are just small dots that move against the
natural movement of the stars. In longer lenses/telescopes, they appear as
long straight lines totally ruining the image.

The first time I heard about thousands more of lower altitude satellites, my
first thought was about this very thing. We had already had the discussions
from the giant disco ball that was launched. It was planned to be short lived,
but it caused quite the stir. Saying people at SpaceX didn't think about it is
one thing, but to claim nobody in the astronomy community didn't is hard to
take. Maybe they didn't have any way to voice those thoughts in a way that
SpaceX could hear.

~~~
9192631770_Hz
Yes, I’m an astronomer and I can tell you this SpaceX statement is pure BS.
The astronomy community absolutely thought of this before any of these
satellites were launched. I’ve personally talked about it at public outreach
events (and it was members of the public who brought it up) and topic has
definitely come up at professional meetings...but there is just a general
feeling of powerlessness, both from the point of how do you fight a company
like SpaceX and a charlatan like Musk, and also from the point of many members
of the public don’t care.

I also know a lot of people directly involved in SSA and all of them are very
concerned with how much these new constellations are going to increase the
risk of collisions, and they all think it’s completely irresponsible when the
SpaceX cultists just dismiss the concerns with, “space is a big place,” or,
“they’ll deorbit in 20 years or so.”

~~~
allovernow
>charlatan like Musk

I'm not a fanboy by any means but the guy built two companies and launched a
car from his factory into space from a rocket his other business built. He's
personally spearheading the early stages of commercial space exploration. I
don't know that I'd describe him as a charlatan.

~~~
ForHackernews
Musk did not found Tesla, but would like you to believe that he did:
[https://www.quora.com/Did-Elon-Musk-found-Tesla-1](https://www.quora.com/Did-
Elon-Musk-found-Tesla-1)

Maybe 'charlatan' is unfair, but he's certainly more of a sales-and-hype man
than a real engineering type. I don't understand why so many technical people
are snowed by his razzle dazzle.

~~~
greglindahl
"Founder" is a label decided by the company, not by outsiders. Many Silicon
Valley companies have "founders" who were not there on Day 1.

~~~
La1n
Founder is a word that has meaning, we shouldn't let companies dictate our use
of language.

~~~
greglindahl
It's fun to watch people up and downvote me for just relaying what Silicon
Valley founders have actually been doing for decades. I totally agree that
it's a surprise to most people how it works, but I don't think "they" are
going to change. It just is.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I find the "did Musk found Tesla thing" petty and unnecessary. Without Musk it
would have been a footnote in history.

But I dislike your assertion that just because SV companies feel free to
rewrite their history, we should consider that canonical.

It's totally valid to point out that Musk wasn't a founder, though using it as
some kind of slight is juvenile.

eBay is free to claim it was invented to sell Pez dispensers and we're free to
point out that's PR spin. Neither side is in the wrong.

~~~
greglindahl
I didn't assert that, nor did I say it was invalid to not understand the
inside-Silicon-Valley use of "founder".

I was just explaining how to not embarrass yourself.

~~~
reitzensteinm
With all respect, I can't read your previous posts without taking the meaning
I did, but the fault may be mine.

------
topologistics
>“No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy
community didn’t think of it.”

That is absolutely ridiculous. The Iridium satellites were decommissioned
recently and it was a big deal because, for the longest time, you had to check
for "iridium flares" if you were using any type of sensitive equipment.
Basically, the entire class of iridium satellites was highly reflective and
they tended to create shooting star type phenomena, sometimes really really
bright, bright enough to be seen during the daytime!

Maybe she didn't think of it, but to say the astronomy comunity didn't think
of it is just blatantly absurd on its face.

On another note, I miss spotting iridium flares and I'm looking forward to a
new class of satellites being added into my weekly observations.

~~~
readams
They announced their plans years ago. The astronomy community could have
raised concerns then. The fact that they didn't would indicate nobody
connected the dots.

~~~
dylan604
> The fact that they didn't would indicate nobody connected the dots.

Or that nobody knew who/where to contact someone to raise their concerns. A
lot of people will think that if I just had this thought, then it must be
pretty obvious so that others will have the same thought as well. No need for
further action. Others will just not feel the need to spend their time/effort
trying to look up the complaints department. Others might not even feel like
it is their place to say anything.

~~~
cobookman
It’s not that hard to get in contact.

If you cared you could LinkedIn message a SpaceX employee. Tweet at Elon Musk.
Connected with nyt or other media who’d love to run such a story.

...etc

~~~
cobookman
They also list contact info on their webpage.

[https://www.spacex.com/about](https://www.spacex.com/about)

~~~
Ididntdothis
I would expect this to work as well as contacting Google when you have a
problem with their service.

------
rrss
Last time this was in the news, there was another discussion on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20095462](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20095462).

User 'twtw asked the following, with no responses:

> Why didn't the IAU petition the FCC during the comment period for SpaceX's
> application? Seems sorta weird to wait for the first launch to express
> concerns when the application was submitted to the FCC many months ago (and
> I think I recall an earlier version years ago).

I think this is an interesting question. There are a number of commenters
criticizing SpaceX's claim that "no one thought of this." I'd be interested in
their response to this question. If so many people knew it was going to be a
problem, why not raise those concerns to the organization tasked with
regulating this stuff?

------
antognini
As an astronomer once upon a time I follow a number of my former colleagues on
Twitter and pretty regularly see them posting images that have been ruined by
Starlink. Here is one from just 12 hours ago:

[https://twitter.com/MassiveStarGuy/status/120358895831320576...](https://twitter.com/MassiveStarGuy/status/1203588958313205760)

This is going to have a bigger impact on the more expensive observations that
require long-duration exposures.

~~~
justin66
This definitely wasn't _ruined_ (it's amateur video) but if anyone wants to
see Starlink photobombing an astronomer, this amateur video of a recent meteor
shower is an example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHI8Z5qpd6I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHI8Z5qpd6I)

(an astronomer friend thought I'd be able to identify the satellite amongst
all the meteors, which was sweet... I think it's a bit after the 2 minute
mark)

~~~
woliveirajr
Aside note: I didn't imagine one could see / film that much meteors during the
night in some city. If I remember correctly, I saw 2 or 3 my whole life, and
was driving at some road.

~~~
justin66
I know you can see the Leonids in San Francisco, at least if you're not
standing directly under a streetlight. Some years are brighter than others. A
lot of it is making note of when to go outside and look.

------
vasili111
Also do not forget that SpaceX is not the only company that wants to launch
low orbit satelites. I do not think it is possible to find any other real
solution other then to move telescopes to space.

~~~
Tomte
Sure there is another solution: we ban them, or at least highly regulate them.

The idea that private companies can just do whatever, and there's nothing we
can do is just so cliché HN.

~~~
dang
You broke the site guidelines badly with this flamebait and generic tangent,
which predictably started a wretched flamewar. Then you perpetuated it.

You do a lot of good for HN with your interesting submissions, but you've also
been vandalizing HN with destructive comments for years. We've asked you not
to do this many times.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356880)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887148](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887148)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17952388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17952388)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17441941)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17432633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17432633)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17113849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17113849)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17111984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17111984)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14693327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14693327)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705439)

Eventually the cost outweighs the benefit. I definitely do not want to ban
you, so would you please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and fix this? All users here need to have self-control, and experienced
contributors more so.

~~~
kbrwn
How is this comment flamebait? First time that I have really thought you
missed the boat.

Please don't censor people just because they criticize HN or the community.

~~~
dang
"The idea that private companies can just do whatever" distorted the other
comment into something ideologically inflammatory (which the site guidelines
explicitly ask not to do), and took the thread on a generic ideological
tangent. Those routinely turn into flamewars. Posting something that
predictably induces a flamewar is flamebait.

------
mentos
Not a valid solution but I thought maybe SpaceX could launch a bunch of
telescope satellites that could be used by hobbyists.

~~~
wongarsu
SpaceX directly profits from space enthusiasm, and having their in-house
satellite team design such satellites (during downtime, as practice or
testbed, etc) and launch them using unused capacity on existing launches would
be way cheaper than anything NASA could do. It's not as absurd as it seems at
first glance. Not a good replacement for a proper solution, but a nice idea
for something they could do in any case.

~~~
dylan604
Could you imagine the enthusiasm from amateur astronomers, kids in school, etc
where they could schedule time on a space based telescope? Sure, they won't be
anywhere close to Hubble, but even a 6"-12" mirror in ~0% atmosphere would be
very cool. And if it were a true constellation, you could schedule time on a
satellite in the night time part of the sky during normal daytime class room
time rather than trying to take a class field trip to a typical astronomy
facility. You would also eliminate the most frustrating thing about astronomy:
cloudy skies. And you'd also be able to see parts of the sky that you wouldn't
normally based on location, ie Northern/Southern hemisphere.

~~~
remarkEon
Yeah there’s a ton of other engineering skills you could teach in parallel. It
really isn’t that crazy of an idea. If SpaceX is putting them in orbit on
excess capacity from scheduled flights I’d hope they’d give away the time for
free. Or they could invent their own market here for scheduling time.

------
close04
> “No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy
> community didn’t think of it.”

This implies the community was asked or involved in such a discussion and no
objections were raised, which is unlikely.

Whenever some "armchair specialist" commented about Musk's plans to put people
on Mars and the challenges with the radiation, the magnetic field, the etc.
the answer was always "Do you think a room full of scientists haven't thought
about that?". Well there you have it, straight from the source: sometimes they
(claim they) do not think about "that". Question everything, worst case
someone already thought of that.

~~~
ChrisClark
Yeah, that's why Musk always asks people to come to him if they have a better
idea. Even in large groups, or maybe especially in large groups, things can be
overlooked.

He recently said in a video that if anyone can convince him an aerospike is
better than their solution, he wants to know.

~~~
jdsully
He also has a history of calling people pedophiles for disagreeing with his
designs. Even when they are domain experts and he is not.

I think that’s more just PR and he’s not honestly seeking feedback.

~~~
ceejayoz
CEO's "open door policies" tend to be a way to quickly get fired.

~~~
close04
Just to be clear, because I'm aware objecting what your (potential
egomaniacal) CEO says is as career-limiting as it gets, I suggested that
everyone else should publicly question everything. Having the objections out
there makes plausible deniability claims a lot harder.

------
notatoad
Hoping i can get an answer here from somebody who actually knows, and not just
a spacex fanboy or hater: what's the actual scope of the problem here?

Shotwell's response and other comments i've seen seem to imply starlink
satellites are primarily impacting amateur astronomy ("kids looking through
telescopes") and that scientific research is performing post-processing to the
recorded images which can mostly eliminate the effects of the starlink
satellites. Is that accurate, or is this also impeding telescopes at the big
observatories?

~~~
joshvm
Shotwell's comment is extremely patronising under the circumstances. This
doesn't affect kids looking through telescopes at all. If it's bright enough
to see through an amateur telescope, it's bright enough to ruin a precision
observation from a real instrument. A large part of the outcry is lack of tact
from Spacex.

Satellites in images is not new and has caused astronomers problems for a
while. It's not common, but most people in the field know someone it's
happened to.So now the issue is there will be an order of magnitude objects in
space.

Any kind of time series where you observe brightness over time would be
affected by a satellite impinging the field. Spectroscopic measurements would
also be affected. Astronomers use incredibly sensitive instruments looking for
very faint objects - if a bright object is in the field of view, it can
saturate the detector and ruin the image.

For context some measurements, like imaging exoplanets, are so precise that
you have to block the light from the (already faint) target star to see what's
around it.

In reality it's amateurs that can compensate with post processing.
Professional astronomers are likely to just trash the data and try again.

Then there are upcoming survey instruments like the LSST which take very wide
angle images (I expect they already have some mitigation strategy becuase of
other spacecraft). That said, the smaller your field of view, the lower the
chance of a satellite impinging.

One solution could be a mechanical shutter which could be activated when a
satellite is about to impinge the field, or triggered by a database of
satellite ephemirides.

------
kerng
Isn't it obvious that this will happen? It's like taking a picture of nature
and having airplane evidence in it, or take a picture of a city or even
countryside and there are cars in it.

I'm sure the same was said about cars and planes. It will be weird and things
will drastically change - but so have things the last 2000+ years.

~~~
rtkwe
You can easily get yourself between cars and whatever natural thing you're
trying to observe on the rare cases that what you're trying to study is
anywhere near cars. The only way to do the same for Starlink is to launch
multi-million dollar+ space telescope.

~~~
kerng
But in that case you have to travel to a remote location (most likely using a
car or plane ironically).

Hence, is it so far fetched that if you want to explore space in future you
will do it from a different vantage point? Like via a satellite, or maybe in
50 years you go to a space station or the moon directly to do so.

With tech it has always been this way- it's nothing new.

~~~
rtkwe
The costs are orders of magnitudes more than simply travelling to study nature
where it is and will continue to be hugely expensive for a long long time.

~~~
kerng
I'm sure people said that about cars, trains and the steam engine also.

------
acd
Good that is is being fixed!

Regarding "The astronomy community didn’t think of it"

I think just because we have public spaces does not mean one can do whatever
one wants with them.

1) There has been disturbances in the past of radio astronomy spectrum from
communication equipment, this limits our ability to learn and observe space.
2) There will be visual disturbances if we launch of satellite constellation
for visual astronomy 3) There will be space junk when these satellites run out
of service.

------
wongarsu
It will be interesting how they solve it without causing thermal issues. Just
absorbing all light won't work, the energy has to go somewhere and the only
viable way to loose it is through radiation (not much air around even in these
low orbits). Maybe the satellites will be black on the earth-facing side and
radiate heat on the other side?

My impression from the article is that they launch one coated satellite just
to see if the coating helps at all, and how bad the thermal issues get, so
SpaceX is still in the early stages of solving this. But if they keep up with
launching 60 satellites every 2-3 weeks for the next months they have to make
progress fast.

~~~
Fronzie
Diffuse reflection might help as well. A sphere and a cube have very different
maximum reflection values.

------
clon
> “No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy
> community didn’t think of it.”

It seems probable that this is one of the things that can be ruled out. I find
it inconceivable that none of the thousands of brilliant heads in SpaceX never
_thought_ of this.

\- They spoke, but were not heard

\- They never felt like speaking

------
ErikCorry
I'm not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but isn't this fixable
with mirrors and angles?

For a satellite in LEO most of the light is coming from the sun and a much
smaller amount is coming from earthshine and perhaps the moon. If your solar
panels are on an articulated arm it should be possible to place them so they
reflect the light upwards and the satellite's body is in the shadow of the
panels. Now the only light on the satellite (and the back of the panels) will
be the earthshine, and you can perhaps combat that by painting the satellite
black. If it's always in the shadow of the solar panels then heating shouldn't
be a problem, right?

As I say I'm not an expert and there are probably multiple reasons this won't
work.

------
Spare_account
My first thought was that they should paint them with Vantablack, but then I
wondered if that might be _too_ dark?

Do they need to aim for a specific reflectivity or just aim for the lowest
possible value?

~~~
SEJeff
That is often considered, but the light is absorbed and turns into heat. Where
does that heat go? It would fry the electronics with no way to get rid of it.

~~~
kevingadd
You could use some mechanisms to convert and dissipate the heat, though that
doesn't come for free. Though the atmospheric pressure at that altitude is
pretty low, you might be able to rig up some sort of peltier cooler setup to
dissipate heat. Alternately if you can convert enough of the heat to
electricity some other way, you could convert the heat back to light using
LEDs or something and only turn on the ones facing away from earth, perhaps?

Plenty of other orbital devices have to deal with heat so I'm sure this is
something that has existing solutions.

~~~
DuskStar
> Alternately if you can convert enough of the heat to electricity some other
> way

Thermodynamics says "lolnope", I'm afraid. You need a temperature differential
to convert heat to power.

------
jsjohnst
Since there are folks here in the field, does anyone know what the feasibility
of building something similar to the VLA, but with thousands of smaller
satellites? If doable, seems potentially possible to cover a lot more sky at
once with less terrestrial interference. No idea if this is practical or not.

~~~
Rebelgecko
There's a number of problems w/ doing interferometry in space, which vary a
bit depending on the frequencies you're working with—

Thermal: Parts of the detectors need to be very cold. Depending on what you're
doing you may have to cool parts of the satellite down to 5 kelvin (-450°F) or
even lower. You need to use a cryocooler than won't vibrate too much and
impact your measurements.

Power: Each VLA antenna uses about 18kW just for cooling. That's a lot of
juice— back of the envelope math says you need a lot of solar panels for that.
An area smaller than a football field but bigger than a tennis court. It's
manageable if you're only building a few of these, but less practical if you
want to build 64 or even thousands.

Positioning: Most proposals for space based interferometry didn't actually
consist of individual satellites. They're typically one big satellite with
telescopes sticking out on different arms. If they're free-flying, it gets a
lot harder to know the precise relative positions of the different receivers.

~~~
jsjohnst
> Each VLA antenna uses about 18kW just for cooling.

That’s likely at minimum partially proportional to the size of each VLA
antenna, no? Each VLA antenna is larger than any antenna ever put in space I
believe.

> If they're free-flying, it gets a lot harder to know the precise relative
> positions of the different receivers.

That’s exactly what I thought would be one of the biggest challenges, but
wasn’t sure if we’d solved that problem or not yet.

~~~
Rebelgecko
True that 18kW isn't a totally fair comparison. On one hand it's easier to
cool because you don't have to worry about the air warming you up. OTOH it's
harder because sunlight is way stronger once you get out of the atmosphere.

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tehjoker
I don't understand why SpaceX is allowed to make this decision nearly
unilaterally. This is so similar to how the modern tech companies treat data
extraction: they find something unregulated and push until they get pushback.

This should have a been a worldwide consultation.

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phkahler
On the plus side, Starship will be able to launch more and bigger space
telescopes for lower prices, to places beyond the Starlink constellation. That
doesnt help ground based observations though.

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buboard
On the other hand we could use all this reflectivity ( and a ton more! Adding
space sails on each of those) to cool the earth

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clSTophEjUdRanu
LEO just got a lot cheaper. Get ready for humans to fill this space with shit
since it's economical.

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coretx
SpaceX sabotaging earth based astronomy sounds like yet another business
trying to create a market/demand for itself. Herefore I bet my ass they'll do
just too little to fix things and just enough in order to not be prosecuted.

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pcunite
_We want to make sure we do the right thing to make sure little kids can look
through their telescope_

Before the end of next year, there is going to be 12,000 of these units above
our Earth. One must certainly hope.

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portillo
I would bet that there will be no more than 1,200 (if they raise the money
needed to launch and manufacture that many).

And I would also bet that even in an 8 year time-horizon, they will not launch
12,000 satellites for Starlink because simply, there will be no market for so
much capacity. In my opinion, we are heading towards an Iridium, Teledesic,
Globalstar 2.0 scenario.

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chmaynard
Here's a novel idea for a fix: admit that Starlink is flawed, shut down the
project, and come up with another way to make money.

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avocado4
This has already been tried by Luddites in 19th century, not a new idea.

