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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.
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!
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.
When people talk about taxing these horrible people I think of tax as being a euphamism
This. I wish I had more than one up vote I could give for this comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about Turkey and Russia? Starlink doesn’t work in Russia.
Follow the news so we don’t have to catch you up.
Replies like this from people like you is why social media sucks. Thanks for your contribution on keeping it so.
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.
When I searched “Elon bows to Turkey” I got this story about Twitter censoring some tweets during the Turkish election… Is that what you’re talking about?
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
Well presumably to make more money lol. The good thing is that there will at least be some competition to bring prices down and keep service quality up. A monopoly would be bad. But of course that leads to more satellites. This really shows how our capitalist system can’t really make rational decisions that are for the benefit of humanity. Ideally we’d have a separate economic institution to regulate industry like this under direct democratic control.
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.
If it can interfere with large aperture ground telescopes… it would be a shame if those ground telescopes grew transmitters and started interfering back.
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)
But… memes.
?
Concern: Starlink will ruin science.
Rebuttal/joke : But… I want memes.
MEMES, BRO, LISTEN BETTER
Expanded: ‘but, how will I receive memes if not for a satellite constellation beaming them to me’
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….
And radio telescopes aren’t exactly compact enough to build in space. Radio telescope arrays tend to be fields withs dozens-hundreds of dishes several meters across.
You can do the same in space…
There is also the fact that the starlink satellites are depleting the ozone layer, in case you haven’t decided we should remove these things yet.
And? What’s that got to do with radio interfernce?
Theoretically if you started lasering these down somehow from international waters… uh, what would happen? Hypothetically?
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!
Depends on what flag the boat is flying and what port it left and returned too after.
Vatican. Sri Lanka. Hawaii.
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.
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
What if the predator satellite just ties little rockets to them that are aimed at deep space?
Then you’d be defeating the careful planning which went into making sure the satellites don’t become a long term problem, by raising them out of the orbits which decay in just a few years and into orbits which never decay.
Perfect!
4mm paint fleck traveling at 23000 mph/10 kms has entered the chat
Given that someone owns those satellites, yes.
Outer space is under maritime law, oddly enough.
Science cannot get in the way of profits!
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!”
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
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?
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.
Starlink is a very low orbit. Even if something like that happened, it would clean itself up in like five years
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
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…
Not wrong, and yet small parts of that ‘orbit’ would kinetically increase, in a Kessler sort of way…
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.
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.
All worth it so lord Musk can push his shitty memes to remote tribes in the Amazon.
