Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
I thought they couldn’t take the sky from me!
Who needs to track asteroids when everyone can have NzI-Link internet?
LEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.
Polluting atmosphere doing so.
That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them
Which is also nothing compared to a slew of other pollution sources
sooo then this isn’t a problem if they all burn out eventually? hehe i’m just being pedantic of course
There’s reasonable hope at least that this is a problem that will solve itself, and unfortunately we have bigger problems to worry about.
Any way to help them do that?
No way that’s cheaper or easier than waiting
At least not legally
I’m wondering from a pure academic standpoint here honest. Like What about a laser?
Lmao I wish. Satellites and their components have to be “hardened” to survive extreme temperatures and radiation in space. There’s probably nothing on it you could disable with any laser you could buy. Plus there’s the matter of targeting them.
Good ole brute force is the best method, though, as you said, targeting is a huge problem. Basically you need a low Earth orbit shotgun.
Kessler syndrome though.
Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I suppose I need to study it a little more to make it stick.
Destroying these satellites with lasers poses a similar problem to what happens when you light zombies on fire: the satellites are held in space by their momentum and the reduced atmosphere vs Earth’s gravity. If you break the satellites into pieces via laser, then now you have uncontrolled and unpredictable space junk to deal with. Some of the pieces might return sooner, but what was once a concern is now a problem. Just like how a zombie at your door is very concerning, a zombie on fire at your door is an immediate problem.
Now, what could be interesting would be sending up another satellite that sprays black paint on the sun-facing side of other satellites. The energy absorbed and then exhausted could propel it towards Earth sooner. Maybe? I dunno, I’m just a simple country Fartographer, your honor.
Now with lasers you buy perhaps, what about with the lasers you build?
In the future where Federal Authority is concentrated on robbing and stealing elsewhere, I cannot imagine a high energy beam could not take these motherfuckers out.
If you have the capability to build a laser that can focus enough energy, from the ground through the atmosphere, with enough precision to lock on to an LEO constellation member long enough to disable it, you’d probably already either be captured, or working for DoD.
Also: great, you exploded it before reentry. Now we have a hundred thousand smaller, lighter fragments skipping off the atmosphere, disbursing randomly, and spinning around like hypersonic chaff bullets for actual worthwhile spacecraft and satellites to fly through, twinkling in infrared like a billion new streaky sparkles on those telescopes. It takes a lot longer for all that bullshit to rain down, and it pollutes just the same. Tell me, who were you fighting for again and why?
This is like when the humans blacken the sky in the Matrix to defeat the machines. Yeah it wrecked the earth, but is also didn’t defeat them and they just found something else to exploit.
I mean I was trying to Broach a theoretical, completely academic, discussion about what could or could not take these satellites out.
I expect that we will get in orbit refueling to extend their life once you get a good nuclear and solar panel power tug with an electric thruster that can deliver fuel, they’re in a similar orbit if you just do that.
Especially with the number of them it’s probably cheaper to just put up new satellites. LEO sats are designed to be temporary.
Cheaper and easier to upgrade the constellation to newer and faster tech. If you have backwards compatibility, you just start launching v2 and v1 will eventually just burn up, and hopefully finish just in time for v3 to start launching so you only have to be compatible with n-1 versions.
It’s so infuriating… I occasionally do astrophotography and it’s getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere… Fuck Musk.
I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.
Now I can’t look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.
You can actually see some in broad daylight. I was shocked one day looking up and seeing one (white dot in the picture, verified with sat tracking app).
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
They did a previous study on what 65,000 satellites would look like and that was pretty bleak. Also this bit:
Latitudes near 50° Will Experience the Worst Light Pollution.
Thats a large chunk of Europe.
Maybe it’s time to crowdsource a satellite killing satellite.
Now we just need to invent the Wall-E bot… We’re getting so close!
This conversation is a waste of time no matter how much of a nazi Elon is.
This is what the sky would be like in the majority of science fiction. If you want space exploration, there will be space infrastructure, and as time goes on that infrastructure will increase both in amount and size, not to mention the traffic to and from.
It is like complaining about the clutter of the marina while wanting to explore the ocean.
I’d almost understand where you’re coming from but most of us can’t afford a ship to explore, a slip in the marina, or even a property/room on the shore. For some of us, staring out at the ocean & capturing images from land is all we have. There’s gotta be a better way that doesn’t ruin it for the majority.
Well said.
I can’t afford a boat, but I benefit from the goods and food that they transport.
Nothing is being transported via constellation satellites that wasn’t already paid for by the American people (and then not delivered on).
Why would we want our infrastructure to be the most polluting expensive version (with shit latency BTW so you can’t selfhost), in control of basically one asshole billionaire who will gleefully censor whatever he feels like, after a critical mass of dependency has been reached?
Are you glad we put our communication into such a restrictive model under a monopoly that’s cozy with a fascist government?
Stop lying to yourself and others that this was “the most efficient outcome”.
People want houses, that doesn’t mean they want forests clear cut.
Similarly people want space exploration, that doesn’t mean they want to speedrun Kessler syndrome.
The infrastructure isn’t the only issue here. Its the fact that this is being done by a corporation owned by a nazi, with many other companies looking to compete. So instead of having one set of LEO satellites, we’ll have several.
If this was actually used to benefit humanity the light pollution caused by this would be understandable and minimized. But this isn’t being done in a sustainable way, or owned by the people.
And that’s all before considering the detrement to the environment from these satellites constantly burning up in the upper atmosphere.
And with all that said, this isn’t space exploration, and it isnt the type of space infrastructure that would aid exploration. Actual exploration doesn’t need thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of these tiny satellites aimed only at Earth.
for everyone on Earth
The people that are doing the actual space exploration aren’t even effected by it!
If all we pick up out of the ocean is flotsam from the marina we’ll get the wrong idea about what’s in the ocean.
I think it’s a waste of time to fight it.
Elon just has to ask daddy Trump and he will get anything necessary to get the autorisation.
I don’t think the Astrophysicists will convince Trump obviously.
Maybe you can’t fight a rocket, but an autonomous taxi on the other hand…
An autonomous taxi can fight a rocket…?
They move the rockets on the highway and instead of a giant flatbed they bolt wheels on to the rocket. It would be really easy for a robot Tesla to merge into the side and total it.
