| ▲ | jillesvangurp 3 days ago |
| Mitigation is going to be the name of the game. Whether they like it or not, low earth orbit (LEO) is becoming a very busy place and it's not just SpaceX launching lots of little satellites there. The Chinese are very busy launching their own satellites into LEO. And there are other companies and countries doing or considering the same. Spacex and Star link get most of the attention; but the Chinese are doing a decent job to keep up with them in number of launches. And there are a growing number of companies with LEO launch capability. Mitigation might have to involve some sacrifices. I don't see how policy is going to be able to mitigate much here. And of course the Chinese are under no obligation to listen to US policy makers. They might have their own debates domestically around this topic and they might be reasonable about the topic internationally even. But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. A more practical approach might be accepting that earth based observations are inevitably going to suffer a bit as the number of satellites grows from thousands to tens of thousands and eventually well beyond that. Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. That's already happening of course. And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth. Unless of course the thing under observation is on a collision course with us. |
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| ▲ | barbazoo 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. “We” as in the select few countries that have the launch capability and the space tech. Again a public good is being commoditized and being sold to the highest bidder. |
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| ▲ | specialist 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > a public good is being commoditized Just like the inclosure movement, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act With privatization, the public is paid something. Whereas StarLink's use of LEO is a taking. They're denying others open access usage. Without any possibility or threat of consequences. "Use" is such an inadequate term, but I couldn't think of another. Commandeering? | | |
| ▲ | barbazoo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Wow what a rabbit hole to get into. The whole system of “lordship” is wild to me, I recommend watching Downton Abbey for a light intro into the topic :) |
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| ▲ | creer 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > “We” as in the select few countries that have the launch capability and the space tech. There has never been more access to space-based imagery and other sensing. With multiple companies selling this stuff ever cheaper. Every news outlet can now afford to buy images. And that's because of cheap launches. | |
| ▲ | Mathnerd314 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I thought that was the whole idea of spectrum auctions. | | |
| ▲ | blackguardx 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The RF spectrum is a public good in the US and there are requirements placed on the winners of those auctions to demonstrate it provides some public benefit. A company can't just buy spectrum and sit on it, for example. They must use start to use it in a certain timeframe. | | |
| ▲ | ggreer 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The RF spectrum is a common good, not a public good. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. The RF spectrum is non-excludable (anyone can transmit on any frequency, given the right equipment) but rivalrous (transmitting on one frequency prevents others from using that frequency). Requiring the winner of a spectrum auction to use it is a way to prevent anti-competitive tactics (since the government is granting a monopoly to the winner). The goal is to incentivize productive use of limited resources, not necessarily to benefit everyone. In theory, the winner could use the spectrum for entirely internal purposes. Though in real world spectrum auctions, the government usually has stipulations such as requiring interoperability or using open standards. This reduces the value that the government captures, but likely increases the value that is created overall. Before spectrum auctions, the government simply mandated what frequency bands were used for what, and by whom. Getting access usually meant lobbying and back room deals. Sometimes the FCC used lotteries, which caused speculators to enter lotteries and then license access (basically capturing revenue that would have gone to the government had the spectrum been auctioned). In practice, auctions are the worst form of spectrum allocation, except for all the others. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A global public good is being commoditized and being sold to the highest local bidder. | |
| ▲ | MichaelZuo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This seems circular… since the lack of a worldwide authority, that can decide the value of X public good is worth more than zero, is the issue in the first place. |
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| ▲ | aragilar 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A bit, it's 5 orders of magnitude over the required SNR?! From the article: "The authors estimate a lower limit of 93 Jy per beam in the frequency averaged images containing Starlink emission. Considering just 1 mJy of radio frequency interference could mess up an EoR power spectrum integration, this could severely affect SKA-Low EoR science." |
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| ▲ | jillesvangurp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > the required SNR Require by who and on what authority? My point here was not to contest that but make the point that the cat is out of the bag and that it is indeed impacting SKA-Low EoR science and the people involved with that have to deal with that. Getting the cat a little bit back in the bag via policy and other means is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success. | | |
| ▲ | 1dom 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This makes me want to say "is nothing sacred?!" I get your point from a pragmatic: this is the world we live in, work with it, not against it. I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world. I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue". | | |
| ▲ | rickdeckard 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue". I fully agree, and that's IMO the core-issue here: This strong-arm approach of just forcing the problem to be solved in your favor by scaling as fast as possible and then pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course, insisting that the other side should be pragmatic about this. I don't remember this was a working strategy in the past (imagine a car-company just accelerating sales of a faulty car to scale THEIR issue and avoid having to do a recall), but nowadays it could even be turned into a geopolitical topic... | | |
| ▲ | 1dom 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I instinctively want to agree with you here and bemoan the state and directions of the world. But if I really think about it, it's been happening my entire life. I'm mid 30's now. I assume someone older than me would have had the same experience of it happening their entire life. You're right though, it's crappy and merits a lot of geopolitical reflection. But I suspect it goes back millenia and is a manifestation of basic evolutionary biology with the business world, rather than anything that can be solved/fixed. And we've gone full circle about the balance of working for/against humanity in the name of progress. | | |
| ▲ | thfuran 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The EPA is only two decades older than you, and it enforced a bunch of brand new regulation on all the existing companies. There used to be a willingness to actually govern rather than cede everything to corporate interest. | |
| ▲ | rickdeckard 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm a bit older now, and while there has always been corporate meddling in public decision-making (which is unavoidable and also somewhat needed to help steer the boat a bit in some situations), the economic effort a company has to invest rectify wrongdoing mainly shaped the amount of spending for legal counseling and lobbying, but it didn't directly shape a ruling. Today, environmental/privacy/safety laws are suddenly not that strict anymore, because now we naturally need to also take economic interests of the violating company into account. So you might end up in a situation where an official body will officially rule that the harmed party may be right, but needs to be pragmatic about its needs just because of the increased inconvenience it would create for the opposing party if THEY would have to change their way. In my experience, this was not the case 15 years ago. |
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| ▲ | lazide 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s the definition of ‘too big to fail’, and it’s been a viable and effective strategy… for ever? Near as I can tell. He’ll, the Fed even got created because of the time the whole US economy cratered in the early 20th century and one man was the one whole bailed out the whole country. | | |
| ▲ | rickdeckard 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 'Too big to fail' is only said about companies that didn't collapse yet though. But such companies also failed already. Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom comes to mind. Even Blockbuster could be on that list... | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The take away is they weren’t big enough to have enough leverage eh? | | |
| ▲ | rickdeckard 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The take away is they weren’t big enough to have enough leverage eh? This reasoning has some parallels to "everything that can't be explained by science must be god".
It stays valid even when proven wrong... | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Eh, if they died and everything didn’t actually break in a terrible unsolvable way, then…. It’s essentially a form of market extortion though, so perception of ‘survivable’ matters as much as actually survivable eh? |
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| ▲ | Teever 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Given that the offending entity is owned by the world's richest man certainly their 'pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course' should be dismissed instantly without a second thought. |
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| ▲ | uv-depression 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the cat is out of the bag Someone, if we stretch that metaphor, intentionally opened the bag for profit. We can and should hold them accountable. > the people involved with that have to deal with that Yep, and they should hold the people who caused this accountable. > is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success You may be correct that it has a low chance of success. However, people who think like you are exactly the cause. People who value Musk's net worth more than science, people who fetishise "progress at all costs," regardless of whether or not the progress actually helps people or is what makes sense (municipal internet, folks!). Understanding physics is also critically important progress, but it doesn't make money next quarter so you don't care. So you'll forgive me if I don't take your advice on the situation. |
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| ▲ | geraneum 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. No kidding! If something is worthwhile, people should and sometimes do go to the trouble! Just roll over is not good advice here! |
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| ▲ | perihelions 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > "The Chinese are very busy launching their own satellites into LEO." The Chinese (correctly) view these satellite constellations as a key military capability, and have gone all-in on creating their own version. (I mean, I don't see how that's even debatable at this point—having seen the influence of Starlink in Ukraine. Future conflicts will only amplify the gap between the haves and have-nots). They haven't yet launched a large number (~120); they don't now have the launch volume for large-scale satellite constellations. Their race is to first catch up in launch capability. They have dozen private startups—heavily subsidized and favored by the state—in the race to build a viable, reusable launcher comparable to Falcon 9, that they would then use to launch Starlink-like constellations at the same cadence. Some starting points: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra... ( https://archive.is/Ukmoa ) ("China’s Own Elon Musks Are Racing to Catch Up to SpaceX /
Private sector takes bigger role in building reusable rockets, advancing Beijing’s goal of independence from Western technology") https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/st... ("This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX / It’s looking unlikely. Here’s why") |
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| ▲ | velox 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Including astronomy related hardware Can't feasibly do VLBI or other radio astronomy at useful scale in space even if launches were free. Look up the scale of SKA or the EHT. |
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| ▲ | perihelions 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not clear why not. The scale of the completed SKA-low (512*256 = 131,072 antennas, 1.8 meter lengths) is the same as that of Starlink itself. It's even less mass; the antenna parts alone, they are wire dipoles, they say they only weigh 1.6 kg each. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06708 Why can't humanity launch 2^17 small antennas into deep space, as a free-floating constellation? | | |
| ▲ | thicktarget 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's just nowhere near feasible. Each element would need power, orientation, precise positioning and a data link to the processing stations. For SKA low the raw data rate from all antennas is something like 2 Pb/s. Which is more than all of Starlink combined. Which is massively stepped down to 7 Tb/s by the central processor, a supercomputer with purpose built signal processing hardware. Then the next stage takes it to 100 Gb/s. You would likely have to transmit the data via radio links, which would defeat the purpose of going to space. When a radio telescope is built in space it will likely be on the Moon (or in orbit), designed for lower frequencies and much less ambitious than SKA low. | | |
| ▲ | perihelions 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I still don't understand the case; sorry. Actually, we're not working with the same set of facts seems to the main thing. > "would likely have to transmit the data via radio links" No; you'd use free-space optical communication, which doesn't interfere at all, and which Starlink has pioneered. They have working laser links at 200 Gbps, per link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200323 ("Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day (pcmag.com)") The optical bandwidths potentially accessible, in vacuum, are much wider than that of microwave links to/from Earth. > "a supercomputer with purpose built signal processing hardware" I don't see why couldn't put that in space, today. That SKA signal processing system you're talking about amounts to 100 petaflops, drawing 2 MW of power. That's far less power than Starlink already has in orbit right now (somewhere in the 10's of megawatts). It's even within a factor-of-10 of raw compute—the figures I found say each V2 Starlink has 1.2 TFlops of local processing. I don't understand why it'd be impractical to put an equivalent signal-processing system in orbit. At any rate, there's YC startups getting funded for space-compute proposals more ambitious than that, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188 ("Starcloud (ycombinator.com)") | | |
| ▲ | thicktarget a day ago | parent [-] | | Laser links would make everything more complicated and expensive. Radio antennas can share the same hardware to link with many terminals, not so with laser systems. They are point to point, so you need many more. They also require precise pointing, you can forget passive spacecraft. The number of 42 PB per day is about three orders of magnitude lower than the data rates required by SKA Low. >I don't see why couldn't put that in space, today. Because the electronics are not built for space. Space rated electronics is about a decade behind their ground based siblings. Radiation is one of the most problematic, degrading electronics and disrupting digital memory. You also need petabytes of temp storage. Which, again, doesn't exist. For reference, JWST carries a 70 GB solid state recorder, I think Roman has about 1 TB. Then there is all the cooling, which is difficult in space. Saying there are some start-up considering computing is not the same as it being possible to order a system like this today. The question is not could it theoretically be done, but can it be done on even the sorts of budget of a space science mission. And the answer to that is no. SKA pushes computing and technology to the limit on the Earth, where these things are much more advanced. |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | galangalalgol 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Geosynchronous satellites could give us even longer baselines couldn't they? Or even at l4 and l5. They don't get shielded by the earth like l2, but the station keeping would be easier. That would be a massive baseline | | |
| ▲ | velox 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Baselines are one thing, you need a huge collecting area to get useful sensitivity, which there is barely budget for to build on earth, let alone in space |
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| ▲ | rlt a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. Honestly once Starship is operational SpaceX should subsidize launches of non-commercial astronomy hardware. Could build some goodwill to offset the negatives. |
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| ▲ | butlike 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You just made me realize that the younger generation is never going to be able to reliably "wish upon a <shooting> star" ever again. |
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| ▲ | elcritch 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. That's already happening of course. Seems more effective for astronomers to embrace it. Perhaps by getting SpaceX to add a few dozen hundred satellites kitted out for radio astronomy. Link them together and it could be amazing for radio astronomy! |
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| ▲ | saddat 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No , regulation. That’s what is necessary for cars, planes etc , otherwise the competition would lead to low emission cars . Plus the space debris creation , which is also unregulated , but threatening humanity - for profit |
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| ▲ | insane_dreamer 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How do the various LEO constellations mitigate band interference issues? Does the US/China have some agreement as to which bands their respective countries' companies will use? |
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| ▲ | sneak 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Spacex and Star link get most of the attention; but the Chinese are doing a decent job to keep up with them in number of launches. Nobody anywhere is anywhere near SpaceX’s launch cadence, reusable or non. |
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| ▲ | uv-depression 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ah, the techbro defence. "We already started doing it, so I guess you're just going to have to let us". > Whether they like it or not, A swarm of LEO satellites because in the current political climate it's easier to massively pollute orbits and prevent astronomy than do municipal internet is not, in fact, a law of nature; nor is it inevitable. > But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. Ah, a challenge! Let's all give up immediately; this could make some rich people a lot of money, after all! > Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. Would you like to pay for launching Vera C. Rubin (8.4m, nearly 20,000kg for just the camera and mirrors) into space? How about the TMT (30m, expected ~2.6 million kg)? Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing about astronomy. > And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth. Apparently fundamental physics is not very relevant to us here on Earth! This is one of the most small-minded statements I've ever read. |
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| ▲ | stronglikedan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We're fucked once they have the ability to launch payloads that are too big and/or beefy to fully burn up on reentry. |
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| ▲ | squigz 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Why do we have to launch tens of thousands or even more satellites? |
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| ▲ | jillesvangurp 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There is no royal "we" that "has to" do anything. There's just groups of people and countries making use of a shared resource, LEO. Your underlying question as to why some of those are launching satellites is much easier. They are apparently quite useful for things like communication, providing internet, etc. And people are willing to pay for that kind of stuff. It's not more complicated than that. | |
| ▲ | JonChesterfield 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This internet fad seems to be hanging around and bandwidth is probably linear in satellite count. | |
| ▲ | jocaal 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why do we need radio telescopes. Satellite communications are infinitely more useful for people on earth than some research papers about things light-years away | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Why do we need radio telescopes. Because they provide data that other types of telescopes do not. We have X-ray telescopes. We have infrared telescopes. We have optical telescopes. Also as a bonus, for ground based radio telescopes, we can use them 24/7 instead of waiting for nighttime. | |
| ▲ | voxlax 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, but if it hadn't been for the efforts of visionary scientists at NASA trying to reach the stars, there would be no means of putting those satellites into orbit. | | |
| ▲ | brookst 3 days ago | parent [-] | | This is the but I don’t see the relevance. Is there an argument / position there or just an observation? | | |
| ▲ | flufluflufluffy 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The point is basic science (e.g. radio astronomy) is, if not necessary, then highly desirable, because it can lead to unimaginable advancements in humanity (or in a country’s technological and military capabilities if that’s how you think). | | |
| ▲ | brookst 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure, and industry is also valuable and contributes to progress. I don’t think it’s useful to say one must always take priority over the other regardless of specifics. | | |
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| ▲ | kevindamm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ironically, those satellites would not be able to communicate effectively without the understanding of relativity that was obtained by looking at things light-years away. | | |
| ▲ | jocaal 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Einstein developed relativity from mathematical reasoning. A major influence was the michaelson morley experiment, which was solely done on earth. Relativity was developed in the early 1900's and the first radio telescope was made in the 1930's. Also, orbital mechanics uses mostly Newtonian mechanics and the communication of satellites is radio waves which were understood way before einstein. There is no relativity involved. Literally everything you said is factually incorrect. | | |
| ▲ | kevindamm 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Satellites experience time dilation because of their orbital velocity and gravitational field being significantly different at their altitude. Without accounting for this, the clock drift would become unmanageable and Newtonian models are insufficient to correct for it. You're right that the majority of Einstein's theories were ultimately thought experiments but getting the parameters correct involved a lot of measurements and experimenting, to get to where tech like GPS and StarLink can be accurate. We were also looking at far away stars for centuries before Einstein so that he could have the environment for his ideas to be discussed, which I was including in my phrasing "looking at things light-years away." I wasn't saying it to start an argument, though. I wanted to counter the rather dismal view of "why do we need radio telescopes." | |
| ▲ | sidewndr46 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Einstein developed a theory that includes General relativity and special relativity. Experimental results confirms both of them, with special relativity being the easiest one to understand the consequences of. Without experimental confirmation, neither theory would be valuable. | |
| ▲ | madeforhnyo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Communication requires accurate timing. Time dilation occurs between Earth and satellites, a phenomenon that isn't part of Newton mechanics, so relativity is indeed involved. | | |
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| ▲ | mlindner 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "We" don't have to launch anything at all. SpaceX needs to launch enough satellites to satisfy customer demand for their constellation. In general the trend actually is that SpaceX is launching fewer but larger satellites (initially they were doing 60 satellites per launch, but they made them larger and now launch 24-28 satellites depending on the orbit inclination. | |
| ▲ | wang_li 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You should also ask why do we have to do this particular research? Both parties are impacting this particular band of the spectrum. One by excluding others and the other by radiating in those frequencies. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Excluding others only in a way that is not dissimilar to you locking your doors/windows to exclude others from freely entering your house. Yes, some of the premiere radio observatories have radio transmission exclusion zones around them, but they are also typically away from that exclusion zone impacting as few as possible. Starlink on the other hand is not attempting to do anything of the sort. It would be interesting of Starlink could respect a geofence kind of idea so that they stop broadcasting when over certain areas, especially since they do this over geopolitically exclusion zones. |
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| ▲ | XorNot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you think the internet is a big deal, you haven't run into how happy the military is to have high bandwidth low-latency communications anywhere on the planet. Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down. With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP. | |
| ▲ | literalAardvark 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As others have said, because it's a key military capability. Humanity is what humanity is, not what we wish it'd be, so key military capabilities need to be developed or you get razed by the guy who did develop them. Doubly so now that we've rediscovered that culture is much more resilient than we'd thought, and that different people want Earth to look in different ways. Do we all wish we'd stop ecological collapse instead? Yeah. But it's not going to happen so it's irrelevant. | |
| ▲ | sneak 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because the speed of light is slow and orbital mechanics can’t be changed. To have internet everywhere you need to either accept bad latency (300-500ms round trip) or have closer satellites, which means they’re moving faster, which means you need more of them. | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If we had a trusted powerful peacekeeper with a track record then we wouldn't need to. But now that masks are off everybody is busy launching dual purpose sats and whoever launches the least can literally get nuked from orbit if they don't do whatever the guy with more sats wants. Then whoever has the most sats will say "that's it guys, LEO is full and you need our approval to launch more" and if someone raises a stink you guessed it, they can get nuked from orbit | | |
| ▲ | myrmidon 3 days ago | parent [-] | | There are no kinetic NOR nuclear orbital strike capabilities for anyone right now, nor is anyone really working on it either, because it just makes zero sense (primarily because suborbital launches achieve the exact same outcome for a tiny fraction of the cost). | | |
| ▲ | galangalalgol 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? Also redundancy if all your subs, silos, and bomber bases got hit first by their satellites. It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough. It seems really optimistic to think they haven't all already done this. | | |
| ▲ | myrmidon 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? Improved first strike capability is worthless íf it isn't crippling, and "devastating enough" first strike capability from orbit is completely unaffordable, and impossible to build up unobserved. Being in orbit is a hindrance more than anything, really, because maintenance becomes ruinously expensive, everything is trivially observable for all your adversaries and you have to align the orbit with your target beforehand, too (which, again, everyone can observe). > It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough. Enough for what? Threatening to nuke some satellites? Because anything else you can do easier, cheaper and on a larger scale from the ground. Why would you bother with nuclear warheads in space when you can just build/maintain like 10 ICBM silos for the same cost? | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? From GEO, no. From LEO, still probably no. There may be a bird positioned just right so a small deörbit burn pots Moscow quicker than an ICBM could. But the moment you start burning, you’re caught. (Same as an ICBM.) And unless you have a really obvious orbital configuration that bunches a bunch of birds in a way useful for practically nothing but such a strike, you only get one or two such “early” shots before a wall of ICBMs would have landed. Nukes in space aren’t about nuking the ground from space. It’s about space area denial through EMP. | | |
| ▲ | axus 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Here's a fun snippet from Wikipedia's anti-satellite weapon page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon#Soviet_U... "Elements within the Soviet space industry convinced Leonid Brezhnev that the Shuttle was a single-orbit weapon that would be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, manoeuvre to avoid existing anti-ballistic missile sites, bomb Moscow in a first strike, and then land. Although the Soviet military was aware these claims were false, Brezhnev believed them and ordered a resumption of [satellite destroyer] testing along with a Shuttle of their own." | | |
| ▲ | m4rtink 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The exact claim might have been false, but at least i theory it could do this maneuver from orbit - e.g. during a regular space hab or satellite lunch mission it could dipp into the atmosphere, do a rapid oebit inclination chang using its wings, then boost back to orbit using the OMS. Next thing it would deliver the "totally science experiments" on the way to their targets once comming over the horizon. Maybe it could then even do the manuever again to either regain the old orbit parameters ir at least reach a more surivable random other one. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > at least i theory it could do this maneuver from orbit Nukes from LEO aren't impossible. They're just impossible to do better than the current triad. Any breakthrough in propulsion that would make a plane change easier or less visible confers the same advantages to an ICBM. There is a narrow window in which orbital nuking can outperform, and that's almost entirely taken care of--and exceeded, in stealth--by SLBMs. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Nuking from orbit was not literal. The point of sats is intercepting. Sats allow you to nuke the other guy while intercepting his rockets. Same result... | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The point of sats is intercepting. Sats allow you to nuke the other guy while intercepting his rockets Space-based missile defence is not what’s implied by weapons that are “already up” and thus “give a lot less warning in a first strike situation?” |
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| ▲ | notahacker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation No. Your missiles have further to fly from geostationary orbit than a missile silo on the ground, not to mention the additional complexity of designing your ICBM for reentry |
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| ▲ | m4rtink 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You could have ballistic missile interceptors in orbit, standing by: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a figure of speech, sats have been used many times to intercept missiles, for spy purposes etc | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “nuked from orbit” is an ancient meme from Aliens (1986); it’s not meant to be taken literally. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nuke+it+from... |
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