Don’t get mad. Think of the shareholders.
A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
Submitted 1 day ago by Beep@lemmus.org to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Bieren@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
andallthat@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Now I’m curious. Can a satellite fly over a country without permission? I know that an aircraft can’t. How far up from the Earth’s surface does sovereignity end?
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
However high they can shoot
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
There are international rules though i’m not sure either, if 50 Km or less.
bcgm3@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
List of Starlink and Starshield Launches - Wikipedia
Check out the list of launches under “Falcon 9 Launches > Starlink Launches.” It’s every other day now (sometimes consecutive days) that they launch another rocket, and each payload is carrying 20 to 60 satellites.
eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Starlink is 2/3rds of all satellites. They add 5-6 pdr day, lose one øer day.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
i cannot describe how angry i would be at this shit.
1984@lemmy.today 9 hours ago
Every day, these guys make our life worse and destroy what we love.
mirshafie@europe.pub 6 hours ago
Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
i am angry at the idea. want to share angers?
umbrella@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
meet me at the square with some molotovs. we got some anger to share alright.
Asafum@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
yucandu@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
errer@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
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).
Link@rentadrunk.org 21 hours ago
For the uneducated, what do these look like and can you see them in areas with light pollution?
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 17 hours ago
I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can’t believe I’m saying this: Maybe we’ve gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
Trilogy3452@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
This isn’t really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they’re passionate about, IMO they’ll be more motivated to research their field of choice
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
we should let scientists work on what they’re passionate about
*fund them
Why is it always 100x more on useless destruction and military?
Sp00kyB00k@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
True, that is how we got unit 731.
cole@lemdro.id 6 hours ago
SpaceX has developed laundry list of new technology to enable Starlink and other endeavors. It’s silly to discount that as worthless.
pennomi@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
I was thinking more like Climate Change and Infrastructure and suchlike.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Not gonna happen. Not with the effective altruist cult running things.
Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
I don’t think you are using altruist right, or I am missing some sarcasm here.
LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’ve been really passionate about space. My bday is on the anniversary of the moon landing, and my one aunt has always reminded me of the fact. My great grandfather worked for NASA and my aunt gave me his stargazing binoculars that his brother gave him when he got hired at NASA. That part of my family instilled a huge love of science in me, esp space stuff. I wanna go to space more than anything, but I don’t have the brains or constitution to be an astronaut. So I just daydream, stargaze, and write poems about the cosmos.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Believe it or not, you can do two things at once.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
i just tried to chew gum and walk and my personal injury attorney would like to know your address (they think you’re cute)
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
Kinda missing the point there.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
maybe just for this one guy you know
betanumerus@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
Right. Elon hires people on the basis they’ll be making Mars travel possible, but that Starship is really for dumping metal all over the night sky.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
discocactus@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
If we get that we’ll also definitely get a Moon Banksy.
clif@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
That’s where you draw the line?
(Also, say hi to your chickens for me)
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
Well, at least we’ll always have Sinatra.
theoretically
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
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.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
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.
zpiritual@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.
grandma@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
You know capitalism has reached peak efficiency when instead of laying some cables or even build a few more cell towers we decide to litter the atmosphere with satellites instead
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn’t matter for download.
cole@lemdro.id 6 hours ago
it’s such a game changer when you’re actually using it. night and day, completely different experience.
also, GEO is in many regards more at risk for Kessler syndrome because stuff up there doesn’t deorbit
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you’ll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 17 hours ago
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
MuteDog@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they’re certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn’t mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren’t environmental disasters anymore.
how_we_burned@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
Wigners_friend@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That’s all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
echodot@feddit.uk 19 hours ago
It’s either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.
Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn’t listen
fishy@lemmy.today 17 hours ago
To cool the iss they’re exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Billionaires don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we’ve all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
discocactus@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
We’re just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There’s not that many of them.
matlag@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I don’t see the beginning of anything to rein in the power they get from just being overrich assholes.
Ironically, the only countries on Earth that control tightly (some of) their billionaires are Russia and China. I rememer Vietnam also executed one for tax fraud. Something for which they are barely slapped on their hand in western countries.
youCanCallMeDragon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Any way to help them do that?
youCanCallMeDragon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No way that’s cheaper or easier than waiting
Manjushri@piefed.social 20 hours ago
Don’t count on it. These things don’t just zip along in their orbits. LEO is crowded. They have to maneuver to avoid collisions… a lot.
Over the past six months, Starlink satellites have been increasingly performing collision avoidance maneuvers. According to a report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX broadband satellites were forced to avoid more than 25 thousand times from December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023. And since their launch in 2019, the total number of maneuvers has reached 50 thousand.
If Starlink or any other mega-constellation company loses control of their satellites for any reason, there could be collisions. A recent study (Note: PDF) suggests that a sufficiently powerful CME could cause a runaway Kessler Syndrome in as little as 2.8 days.
tempest@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
I mean with proper regulation or would be slightly better. If they can maneuver to avoid collisions they can likes deorbit themselves at a quicker pace.
The main issue is if ever they went under someone would buy it, or try to buy it, at a discount. So they likely wouldn’t go away even if Star link went under.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 17 hours ago
Eh, i’m not so sure. I just did a quick doodle.
My opinion is that when a collision happens, it’s probably very unlikely for a single fragment to actually stay on a stable orbit around Earth. Chances are high that it gains a lot of energy and the orbit is significantly distorted. Now, if an orbit is already very close to Earth, that means that any distortion will make it not fit tightly around Earth anymore, instead will make it go elliptic and therefore on trajectory of collision with Earth. The only way a fragment would not do that is if it’s accelerated perfectly sideways, in which case it would continue to circle around Earth for 10 years before deorbiting due to atmospheric friction. So, the cascading is a bit limited.
youCanCallMeDragon@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
And the orbits of that debris would still decay within a decade in LEO.
Mihies@programming.dev 23 hours ago
Polluting atmosphere doing so.
youCanCallMeDragon@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them
Einskjaldi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
youCanCallMeDragon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Especially with the number of them it’s probably cheaper to just put up new satellites. LEO sats are designed to be temporary.
Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] 22 hours ago
sooo then this isn’t a problem if they all burn out eventually? hehe i’m just being pedantic of course
youCanCallMeDragon@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
There’s reasonable hope at least that this is a problem that will solve itself, and unfortunately we have bigger problems to worry about.
vane@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Night as a Service
TransNeko@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Just need the Kessler syndrome to put a stop to it all.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Doesn’t make visibility better!
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
Monty Burns approves.
THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
I thought they couldn’t take the sky from me!
Zorque@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
We haven’t even finished burning the sky and boiling the sea!
Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
redsand@infosec.pub 21 hours ago
KneeTitts@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
everything the tech bros touch, dies
fossilesque@mander.xyz 20 hours ago
He never respected his fellow man, why start now?
TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 20 hours ago
There are roughly 15,000 total at the moment ? I wonder what that will do to animals and insects lives.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
While this very well might fuck up land-based stuff looking at space, people are often overlooking what this would mean to stellar photography from space.
If they can truly launch these million data center sats profitably, that means starship works. That means payload to space is relatively cheap.
That means we could also send large quantities of large telescopes into space on the cheap, and avoid the crazy expensive cant fail telescopes because the cost to get them up there isnt prohibitive.
Things very well might change, but it will also open up possibilities in the same area.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Why not vantablack them? I thought they were already sending prototypes up that aren’t reflective and avoid the light pollution problem.
The real issue is when other countries that don’t give a shit throw stuff up there and we can’t do much about it.
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Now we just need to invent the Wall-E bot… We’re getting so close!
green_goglin@thelemmy.club 21 hours ago
Down with the space clankers
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Maybe it’s time to crowdsource a satellite killing satellite.
chahn.chris@piefed.social 16 hours ago
Who needs the night sky when you can download the old night sky via satellite internet with gig speed downloads in vr? /s
Innerworld@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Here are the numbers as of March 2026.
inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Who needs to track asteroids when everyone can have NzI-Link internet?
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Doubtful.
This is just a way for SpaceX to try further integrate itself into the spheres of government and public funding, and thus, make it easier to justify government bailouts.
ZMoney@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Don’t fall for the clickbait reporting here. Musk has a history of making comically exaggerated claims. There won’t be a million satellites just like there wasn’t a 4000 km/h train, self-driving tunnel network, intercontinental rocket transport or Mars colony.
matlag@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.
There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.
And I’m not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I’m jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).
If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn’t really matter).
ZMoney@lemmy.world 44 minutes ago
The problem is that we offloaded “world leadership” to a bunch of ultra-rich sociopaths who only care about their own profit maximization. And they then made actual profit obsolete, since the only product they produce now is hype in the service of inflationary speculative assets. From a planetary perspective it looks like the human species is committing suicide.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Of all the permanent and irreparable things big corporations are doing to our world, I struggle to really put this high up. Yeah it sucks, but it provides a useful service and they naturally degrade. If anything Im more worried about all the pollution from them burning up in the atmosphere. If they stop launching them, the sky will be clear within the deccade.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
It’s still infuriating that he could theoretically make the WALL-E earth a reality