There are several related things I find odd about Starlink, with the ongoing defense of the impact it has on scientific research being one of them.

Having used it it is genuinely impressive, but it will inevitably lead to everyone wanting their own independent LEO constellation for military purposes (communication and observation), which will then lead to a big interest in anti-satellite weapons since these will become major targets in a hot war.

The end result here is going to be huge quantities of space junk and investment in defense over-the-horizon ground radios (again) which to some degree is already happening.

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93po 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

this is what we call a slippery slope fallacy

there is no evidence that there will be a hot war, that it will involve destroying satellites, or the process of destroying the satellite would result in space junk that didn't naturally deorbit within a few years

if we have a hot war with a country capable of launch rockets into space to destroy satellites, then we're super fucked anyway, because that's also a nuclear country. satellites would be the last of my concerns, i would be digging a bunker in my backyard

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flufluflufluffy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree. The sky is gonna be so full of sh*t in the future

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theultdev 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's impossible for VLEO constellations to create space junk.

They naturally fall out of orbit after a few years.

And no they can't be "blown into" GEO orbit.

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maxglute 2 days ago | parent [-]

Big % of mega constellations will be be >500km where deorbit is decades to centuries. Unless regulatory changes, VLEO will be minority because orbit slots is limited.

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theultdev 2 days ago | parent [-]

Care to share where you're pulling that information?

1. The amount of "orbit slots" is vast. There is plenty of room.

2. I'm unaware of any mega constellations planned >500km. Latency would be worse and doesn't make sense for an aspiring Starlink competitor to do that.

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maxglute 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

1. UN/ITU regulates orbit slots/shells (really frequency assignments that effectively limits orbit slots), high decay V/LEO, as in ~500km was basically exhausted by starlink. Big reason PRC announced multiple 10-20k mega constellations a few years ago (without reusable for to put-up payload) was to sign up for next closes shell which is 500+. At those distances orbit decay is decades/centuries. So regulatorily, the fast decay orbit slots are legally mostly gone.

2. All mega constellations including starlink has layers from 500-1500km. Every 100km is like 0.3ms latency but trade off is cheaper station (longer life time) keeping and wider coverage per satellite, but cost more to get there.

Related to 1&2 is this is byproduct of UN/ITU regulations... they can open up more <500km slots, increase congestion, confliction and chance of recoverable Kessler... but that would mean SpaceX (read US military) would... have to share strategic orbits with PRC and whoever comes next.

E: extrapolate to future of cheap space launch, if multiple blocs or even countries want their own mega constellations, and no changes to regulations, then they would have to start occupying higher orbit shells (assuming they follow ITU). Also geometrically, the shell lowest/closest to earth has the least volume / capacity.

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perihelions 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Starlink competitors don't have SpaceX rockets and will tend towards different kinds of solutions to compensate. It is indeed significantly worse (signal strength, beam overlap) to go up to higher LEO altitudes, but that's a tradeoff you might make if you're inconfident about your orbital launchers and want to minimize risk there. You would need fewer satellites for initial coverage—fewer launches.

China's Thousand Sails (Qianfan) is secretive but possibly targets 800 km shells; I'll just quote Mike Wall and Jonathan McDowell,

> "That number is growing all the time; SpaceX has already launched more than 50 dedicated Starlink missions this year, with many more on the docket. Elon Musk's company already has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink spacecraft in LEO, and it has applied for approval for another 30,000 on top of that."

> "Qianfan won't be quite that big, but it's in the ballpark."

> ""The satellites are similar to the V1 Starlinks, with flat-panel morphology and a mass of 300 kg [660 pounds] each. This 'G60' constellation is planned to eventually have 14,000 satellites," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, posted on X shortly after today's Qianfan launch."

> "The Qianfan satellites will apparently orbit at an altitude of about 500 miles (800 kilometers), he added in another post. That's higher than the Starlink constellation, which orbits at about 340 miles (550 km)."

https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-...

	▲	perihelions 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Late update: and the other one, Guowang, goes up to 1,145 km—there was one launched a few hours ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang https://bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post/3lwdf3c...

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TMWNN 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>which will then lead to a big interest in anti-satellite weapons since these will become major targets in a hot war

If anything, the other way around. Were Starlink a traditional satellite constellation, with a few in geosynchronous orbit, they would be very appealing targets. But there are thousands, and soon tens of thousands, of Starlink satellites, which makes any sort of weapon against them other than maybe a laser impractical.

>The end result here is going to be huge quantities of space junk

... the Starlink portion of which naturally falls back to earth within five years.