The only reason we can see them is the solar panels - right? Well, let this generation of Starlinks go up as they are, and once they are out of commission in about 5 years, send up the next generation. Instead of using solar panels, they will use small nuclear reactors that will enable much higher power, potentially higher orbits, higher bandwidth, longer life etc. If you want to go NIMBY on the light, you should embrace nuclear power sources.
I don't see any reason why we should allow these satellites, if we're talking about literally mass polluting the night sky.
What they provide is a service that's already widely available in first world countries, and is seeing rapid increase in availability in third world countries (well, most of them, the US seems to be stagnant).
While I understand this will have superb latency, it's still not clear to me why would Starlink be cheaper than existing VSAT. VSAT is quite expensive (starting from ~thousand dollars per month):
http://www.melatnetworks.com/price-list.asp
That’s simply not true. Viasat offers much lower cost per GB. The higher speed plans are less than $1 per GB. The cheapest plan is $50/40GB. That’s already far cheaper than mobile data.
Starlink and others are likely to significantly improve on that, too. Fundamental costs (especially for later versions) are cents per GB or lower, competitive with AWS transit fees.
The reason to expect Starlink to provide lower cost than VSAT is that SpaceX is currently paying less than $500k per functional Starlink sat (including both manufacturing and launch cost), and intends to dramatically reduce the cost from that before launching the larger stages of the constellation. In contrast, the geostationary satellites that are used by VSAT cost near billions per each.
This three orders of magnitude difference in cost can be expected to be reflected in the price of the service.
The night sky is impacted far more by blinking airplane lights and city light pollution than a few satellites.
This has been a thing since the dawn of space travel. These at least provide a service that most people would benefit from, either directly through service or indirectly through increased competition.
Honestly, I think more people enjoy watching Iridium satellites than are perturbed by them.
We’re not talking about pollution in the sense of significant changes in the brightness of the night sky (as we are with true light pollution from cities). We’re talking about the fact that they’re detectable with the naked eye.
Iridium satellites were causing flares because of a design issue - their main antennas were essentially large mirrors. New generation of Iridium satellites fixed that issue (to my and other flare catchers' disappointment). I don't recall Starlink satellites to be designed to cause flares.
Starlink would have to comply with what the country they are transmitting to permits or doesn't if they don't want to get in all sorts of trouble.
An effect that Starlink could have though, is, that people might protest censorship more because all that stands between them and freely accessing the internet is their government allowing import of receivers (instead of no cable or mobile available at all, ISPs, government, ...).
Even if astronomers wanted to, the cost of replacing all terrestrial optical telescopes by orbital ones would be astronomical. Especially if you include amateurs. Stargazing wouldn't be a thing anymore.
And illuminating all of earth? I don't want to imagine the damage that would cause to ecosystems. It would completely take away peoples' choice not to live in a place with street lighting, or even to have a vacation in such a place. Street lighting is bad enough for peoples' circadian rhythms as is.
> astronomers will want to use orbital telescopes anyway.
Not necessarily. With Adaptive Optics, ground based telescopes are getting incredible results. Also, they can build much larger primary mirrors on the ground than what can be lofted into space. Ground based telescopes also have the ability to be updated/upgraded/fixed/etc.
> Instead of using solar panels, they will use small nuclear reactors that will enable much higher power, potentially higher orbits, higher bandwidth, longer life etc.
You'd need like 12,000 kg of plutonium 238, more than has ever been usefully produced, from an enormous nuclear production infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, all for a price that's three or four orders of magnitude bigger than for a similar number of square meters of solar panels. Anti nuclear people aren't your problem here.
Was hoping this would be a calculation of a financial cost. Any idea how much that could be and how much would the consumer have to pay so that Starlink is profitable?
Can we make satellites with materials which don't emit or reflect in frequencies which pass the atmosphere? So those satellites won't send energy which would reach ground-based observers?
Radio astronomy relies upon internationally-recognized protection from transmission on certain frequencies. Even when satellites comply with these restrictions, these things have gotten so powerful they often overwhelm the telescopes.
People in cities can’t see stars anymore, so this complaint about the new satellite constellation is almost academic.
In decades past, people began to be concerned about light pollution. The city of Phoenix, Arizona passed its first lighting ordinances around 1983. One of the goals was to reduce sky glow.
After all those politicians retired LED lighting came out. Because the politicians who worked on the sky glow problem were two generations back, the current politicians didn’t realize there are very good reasons for using amber low pressure sodium bulbs for the street lights, and replaced those lights with white LEDs. The quality of light from the LEDs is terrible, but the city saves a few pennies a year (electricity, maintenance), so they probably won’t be fixing the problem.
My friend told me of how she takes her grandkids out to look at the phases of the moon, and how sometimes they find a single star in the sky.
I live near a highway- at night, the sky is often gray with light pollution- and we can still see stars through it all, though it's nowhere near as amazing as what the sky looks like when you go camping.
I honestly like the LED's more for driving at night- their wider spread drastically increases visibility, and if the lower cost of them means that more of them go into poorer neighborhoods, than switching to slightly more light-polluting LED's could actually be a very good thing.
There are 'okay' LED streetlights and there are 'bad' LED streetlights. Most of Phoenix's new streetlights are three LEDs pointed down. It seems like some of these use ~5000K leds (daylight / blue-white), while the others use ~2700K (much closer to incandescent). Some of the 2700K-ish streetlights lights I've looked at recently have different power output - a dimmer one was 'okay', the others were uncomfortable to be in the vicinity of.
All of Phoenix's new lights have no diffusion effect - they just have three LED chips pointed down. I commented on a recent submission about the invention of the frosted light bulb [0], which were more popular than the previous bulbs because it diffused the light generated by the filament.
Another LED streetlight model I've noticed (not in Phoenix) has a much more diffuse effect, because it has dozens of LEDs poined in different directions. That intersection, while inferior to the previous amber LPS bulbs, wasn't an active hazard, just mildly annoying.
Flagstaff, Arizona has some amber LED streetlights. They're too intense (too bright), but they're not painful to be in the presence of, as long as I don't look directly at the amber LEDs.
> People in cities can’t see stars anymore, so this complaint about the new satellite constellation is almost academic.
There are designated areas of dark skies, and around observatories there are limits as to the lighting that can be used around.
But all that is being rendered irrelevant - there are no areas that won't be affected by these satellites - that's the whole point, they will cover pretty much everywhere.
And these are professional astronomers saying that they are affected. The fact that you, and others, don't really care and aren't affected isn't the point. There's a very real risk that these satellites will kill Earth-based professional astronomy, and large scale space astronomy isn't cost-effective.
The point of my post was supposed to be that people who care about earth-based astronomy really need to resist the proliferation of white led streetlights. Kids who grow up without ever seeing stars aren’t likely to care about the night sky.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a story about going to a planetarium as a child and seeing a realistic depiction of what the night sky looks like in the countryside. His immediate reaction: Fake!
I don't think I've seen anyone simulate the full Starlink constellation including the ~7500 VLEO satellites. For your amusement, here it is: https://youtu.be/bKj4GDNhH0Q
Wow, at first glance, that seems like a nightmare scenario, but then one must realize that the animation is not to scale. For it to end up seeming as crowded as that animation looks, each satellite would likely have to be the size of a small city.
The vastness of just the Earth is hard to comprehend sometimes. In comparison, if you put mountains, to scale, on a table top globe, Mount Everest would be about the height of a grain of sand.
The article doesn’t provide any luminosity estimates. It is entirely possible that when they claim up to 70 satellites would be “visible” that they mean in a low light pollution area when you can see thousands of stars. On the other hand if they mean the satellites would be visible with high luminosity, I would be skeptical of that until they show their estimates of the size and matterial since these are very small and mostly under Earth’s shadow.
This issue astronomers have with Starlink is not with increased light pollution per se, where the effect is negligible, but with the fact that when there are 10,000 of these in the sky at one time, it will be much more difficult to point a telescope and not have one of your exposures contaminated by a Starlink satellite passing through. Some telescopes will sit on a source for hours for the faintest objects and the odds of encountering one of these becomes worrisome.
Anything visible to the naked eye or even binoculars is honking bright to modern astronomical telescsopes, which are sensitive to sources millions of times fainter. Even if they're not directly in the field, off-axis reflections and glints can contaminate exposures. A train of these moving through the field would be a total disaster.
For those saying let's just build space-based telescopes, sure, but it's 10-100X more expensive, and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).
On the bright side Starlink is something that can help to solve both of this issues by helping to lower the price of rockets and by improving the antennas.
> For those saying let's just build space-based telescopes, sure...
Weird idea: add some kind of telescope thing to the back of each Starlink satellite. Wonder if it'd be feasible to make up for the lower quality (of each small telescope) by the earth sized potential aperture? :)
The twitter thread (and most of the discussion here) is focused on the optical impact of these satellites. As @watersb mentions in a reply[0] these satellites will likely have an impact on radio telescopes. I've found conflicting information on the frequency bands starlink will use, but all of them would put the emission in the 10s of GHz regime, which is in the middle of commonly used bands by current radio telescopes (e.g., the Very Large Array), future expansions of existing telesopes ("Band 1" for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array), and future radio telescopes (High-frequency Square Kilometer array, Next Generation Very Large Array). Surely these are outside of the "protected" radio frequency bands, but they may still affect the measurements made by the sensitive electronics of radio telescopes.
The linked twitter feed notes that 84 satellites would be in the sky at any time. I don't know how colimated their radio transmissions would be, but it's possible more of them would be "visible" in the radio, compared to the optical. So it could be a significant effect on radio astronomy.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadWhat they provide is a service that's already widely available in first world countries, and is seeing rapid increase in availability in third world countries (well, most of them, the US seems to be stagnant).
Or those, with prices around 50usd/gb: https://www.vsat-systems.com/service-offerings/VAR-VNO-Deale...
Even if Starlink is 10x cheaper than existing VSAT it does not come even close to LTE cost. And we have 5g on the horizon.
Starlink and others are likely to significantly improve on that, too. Fundamental costs (especially for later versions) are cents per GB or lower, competitive with AWS transit fees.
(look for "data cap") ...note that, for instance, the $50/month plan goes up to $70 after 3 months. But the data cap of 40GB is a soft cap.
This three orders of magnitude difference in cost can be expected to be reflected in the price of the service.
This has been a thing since the dawn of space travel. These at least provide a service that most people would benefit from, either directly through service or indirectly through increased competition.
Honestly, I think more people enjoy watching Iridium satellites than are perturbed by them.
We’re not talking about pollution in the sense of significant changes in the brightness of the night sky (as we are with true light pollution from cities). We’re talking about the fact that they’re detectable with the naked eye.
If all the Starlink satellites are this bright, the night sky will have more Starlink satellites than visible stars.
That and people using the service, even solely receiving can be tracked
And illuminating all of earth? I don't want to imagine the damage that would cause to ecosystems. It would completely take away peoples' choice not to live in a place with street lighting, or even to have a vacation in such a place. Street lighting is bad enough for peoples' circadian rhythms as is.
Not all, and probably as little as one or two species.
Not necessarily. With Adaptive Optics, ground based telescopes are getting incredible results. Also, they can build much larger primary mirrors on the ground than what can be lofted into space. Ground based telescopes also have the ability to be updated/upgraded/fixed/etc.
You'd need like 12,000 kg of plutonium 238, more than has ever been usefully produced, from an enormous nuclear production infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, all for a price that's three or four orders of magnitude bigger than for a similar number of square meters of solar panels. Anti nuclear people aren't your problem here.
In decades past, people began to be concerned about light pollution. The city of Phoenix, Arizona passed its first lighting ordinances around 1983. One of the goals was to reduce sky glow.
After all those politicians retired LED lighting came out. Because the politicians who worked on the sky glow problem were two generations back, the current politicians didn’t realize there are very good reasons for using amber low pressure sodium bulbs for the street lights, and replaced those lights with white LEDs. The quality of light from the LEDs is terrible, but the city saves a few pennies a year (electricity, maintenance), so they probably won’t be fixing the problem.
My friend told me of how she takes her grandkids out to look at the phases of the moon, and how sometimes they find a single star in the sky.
I honestly like the LED's more for driving at night- their wider spread drastically increases visibility, and if the lower cost of them means that more of them go into poorer neighborhoods, than switching to slightly more light-polluting LED's could actually be a very good thing.
All of Phoenix's new lights have no diffusion effect - they just have three LED chips pointed down. I commented on a recent submission about the invention of the frosted light bulb [0], which were more popular than the previous bulbs because it diffused the light generated by the filament.
Another LED streetlight model I've noticed (not in Phoenix) has a much more diffuse effect, because it has dozens of LEDs poined in different directions. That intersection, while inferior to the previous amber LPS bulbs, wasn't an active hazard, just mildly annoying.
Flagstaff, Arizona has some amber LED streetlights. They're too intense (too bright), but they're not painful to be in the presence of, as long as I don't look directly at the amber LEDs.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19474110
There are designated areas of dark skies, and around observatories there are limits as to the lighting that can be used around.
But all that is being rendered irrelevant - there are no areas that won't be affected by these satellites - that's the whole point, they will cover pretty much everywhere.
And these are professional astronomers saying that they are affected. The fact that you, and others, don't really care and aren't affected isn't the point. There's a very real risk that these satellites will kill Earth-based professional astronomy, and large scale space astronomy isn't cost-effective.
No-one can say that SpaceX lacks ambition.
The vastness of just the Earth is hard to comprehend sometimes. In comparison, if you put mountains, to scale, on a table top globe, Mount Everest would be about the height of a grain of sand.
Anything visible to the naked eye or even binoculars is honking bright to modern astronomical telescsopes, which are sensitive to sources millions of times fainter. Even if they're not directly in the field, off-axis reflections and glints can contaminate exposures. A train of these moving through the field would be a total disaster.
For those saying let's just build space-based telescopes, sure, but it's 10-100X more expensive, and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).
For now.
and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).
Yet. I think it's inevitable that astronomy is going to be space based well within the next 50 years.
Weird idea: add some kind of telescope thing to the back of each Starlink satellite. Wonder if it'd be feasible to make up for the lower quality (of each small telescope) by the earth sized potential aperture? :)
The linked twitter feed notes that 84 satellites would be in the sky at any time. I don't know how colimated their radio transmissions would be, but it's possible more of them would be "visible" in the radio, compared to the optical. So it could be a significant effect on radio astronomy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20016619