Comment on A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca 5 days agoIt might be super cheap in the future to launch them but it will be into a field of fast moving garbage. The cost effectiveness of throwing more and more telescope up into space to try and get pictures before they get knocked out by the debris of the past will be a losing proposition.
pennomi@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Nah, everything at super low orbits like these constellations decay quite quickly. Even in cases of total loss of all satellites (eg Kessler Cascade), they would all reenter within a couple years.
You could relatively easily just put your space telescopes above that orbit and they’d be just fine.
Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Ok so they would orbit above the field of space junk, would they by any chance have to fly through that field of space garbage to get up to that higher orbit?
pennomi@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Generally no. The proposed orbit for these datacenter satellites (which is still a ridiculous idea for oodles of reasons) puts them all in sun synchronous orbit, leaving nigh infinite paths to send a space telescope up through.