If you needed rescuing from there, or if a nearby village was affected by a natural disaster, this flying space trash is what's saving lives.
It makes sense for the vast majority of people to prefer that against the slight inconvenience in editing out satellite tracks faced by a tiny tiny community of ground bases astrophotographers.
No it's really not. Please don't think suburban USA can be extrapolated to the middle of bloody nowhere.
I might be able to get a message off, but how the hell do you contact the emergency services and who the hell is going to rescue me in a country with one rescue helicopter that was out of action at the time?
In circumstances like that it's better to actually get some mountain safety training, have some procedures and other comms equipment in place. And importantly travel in a group with the right equipment (including 4 legged transport devices).
As for the astrophotography that was opportunistic.
I have an InReach Mini 2. It is not necessarily useful. It depends on where you are. Don't make any assumptions about it until you've done research.
You'll find some places have only voluntary services and the phone is likely only manned on week days on limited hours. If you're lucky there might be a gmail address you can hit. No joke.
Low orbit satellites are unnecessary for emergency/comm. Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper, but LEO constellations are now subsidized by the military industrial complex (there is other value to be low).
> Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper
GEO satellites are pretty pricey. Each Milstar satellite cost $800 million, others in the same category are also in the hundreds of millions, WGS-11 was over $600 million. Starlink V2 cost $800k per satellite.
And if you spent $800 million on a constellation of 1000 Starlinks, you'd have better coverage and bandwidth than the entire 6 satellite Milstar constellation put together for 1/6th the price.
Digging around for more recent prices, GEO is around $100-300 million. That's still orders of magnitude more per satellite than LEO. At the low end this means you could get 100-400 Starlink V2s up there for the price of one GEO. One GEO that only covers part of the globe, versus 100-400 satellites providing global coverage.
Satellites have to pass through the Van Allen belts in order to get into such higher orbits, which may expose them to a not insignificant amount of radiation, especially if the final orbit injection is not done in a single impulse. Then, once they are comfortably out in their higher orbit, they have to endure yet more radiation without the aid of the Earth's magnetic field, and require more cooling capacity due to spending much less time in Earth's shadow than an LEO satellite.
They're also overlooking the actual prices of GEO satellites versus LEO. LEO is much cheaper than GEO, there's a reason DOD and others are moving towards it and it's not that it's a fad. GEO has a few specific benefits but cost is not one of them.
It makes sense for the vast majority of people to prefer that against the slight inconvenience in editing out satellite tracks faced by a tiny tiny community of ground bases astrophotographers.