I know reddit is experiencing some sort of mod-led black out right now but does that mean the kind of content that you'd find there need to make its way here? This is hackernews. We celebrate progress.
Not only can both of those be achieved, the ability to launch so many satellites means we can observe those distant stars from space, which gets around the much bigger problems of Earth's atmosphere and light pollution.
I've been to Africa and seen the real world impacts of the lack of communications. I'm against anything that stands in the way of solving that specific problem. Astronomers come second to that, plain and simple.
I guess you missed this recent news story: Starlink v2 reached the brightness reduction target recommended by astronomers
So we can now have both. Africans can have their satellite internet, and astronomers can see their dwarf stars. Both should be satisfied so what are you so bitter about?
Well I'm not sure about that. There are 3 African countries where Starlink is available (unlike for instance every single country in the EU where both fiber and 4/5G coverage is quite decent already).
Also even in these 3 countries it's still prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population.
Starlink Residential is not available in Africa except for handful of countries (Nigeria is the big one). The pricing is $600 for hardware and $100/mo for plan. Where the extreme poverty line is $700/yr.
Starlink will definitely help provide internet for whole villages, or to remote cell towers. And distributing the costs may make them affordable. But my suspicion is that charities will donate hardware and then when support runs out, the villages will cancel the service.
You seem to assume that Starlink is the only solution to communications in rural Africa. There are other proposed satellite constellations. There is the traditional fiber optics and cell towers. Starlink in the US is successful because of the failure of government and companies to run lines to rural customers. Most importantly, those options are available if Starlink doesn't work from light pollution.
I didn't quite understand what this meant from the headline. The introduction in the paper clears it up. The TLDR is that astronomers are concerned they won't be able to do space observations with so many satellites in the way, but SpaceX has optimized for some parameter the indicates this will not be an issue.
There's an interesting question concerning why (most) US stealth aircraft are black. Black isn't the best color to make an aircraft invisible at night; a dark blueish gray is best for that. One possibility is that the radar absorbent material is inherently black so they don't have a choice, and indeed the U-2 was originally a dark blue color before it received a new black RAM paint. That is probably the real reason I think, but another possibility is that when missile and radar technology made visual intercepts less relevant, they were freed to paint these secretive aircraft a less optimal black, which everybody knows is the proper color for secretive aircraft.
Incidentally the new B-21 apparently won't be black. Maybe they have a new RAM paint formulation that doesn't force the choice of black.
Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis? Neither the B-2, nor the F-22, nor the F-35 are black, they're all this bluish gray you mention, same as most non-stealth aircraft. The only stealth aircraft I can think of that was black was the F-117.
You're right that the F-22 and F-35 aren't black, but neither are they the blueish gray I'm talking about which is much darker: https://dragonladyhistory.com/2019/04/30/u-2-black-paint/ The B-2 also isn't very blueish, it's more on the dark gray end of the scale but I can see how that's subjective.
And you're forgetting the U-2 and SR-71, which lacked full blown RCS reduction geometry but were still fitted with the black RAM coating (the SR-71 also had some stealth geometry; that was the purpose of the chines.)
There's no stealth in space. Any sort of running electronics or photovoltaics will emit heat that can be easily picked up by spaceborne sensors. The strategic advantage for military satellites is going to be the fact that Starship can launch literal orders of magnitude more of them than the launch systems of rival countries, not the fact that they're painted black and thus marginally harder to spot from the ground with Mk. I Eyeball.
This is one of the classic online nerd arguments, much of which is documented there. I’m a little terrified of reigniting the whole thing here and now to be honest, but if people want to get into it, have fun.
SBIRS is intended to use infrared to track ballistic missiles through all stages of flight, including decoys and debris released during the mid-course phase in space (so we know it's meant to be extremely sensitive, not limited to tracking hot rocket engines during the boost phase) Seems like a good bet that orbital systems with such sensors could be used to track LEO satellites too.
These will be still easily bright enough to be seen through a light pair of binoculars, so the claim that they won’t interfere with astronomical observations is a real stretch.
The problem with Starlink vs other satellites isn’t just the individual brightness but the vast number of them, and that they are often visible in a swarm.
Funnily enough, I saw a train of Starlink sats from their most recent launch (which was Sunday I think?) on Tuesday night in the skies over northern Utah. I assume this reduction is for normal nighttime hours, and not the times immediately after sunset/before sunrise when they can catch the light while still ascending to their final orbit?
Edit: the launch was early in the morning on Monday
Starlink brightness concerns are mostly for around dawn and dusk. During the night, since they're pretty low, they're mostly in complete shadow. However, the darkness design is for operational altitude and attitude; during orbit raising, they are in an unusual mode.
It seems like the wrong title. I couldn't find any support for it in the paper.
The paper does say 'Their goal is to “make its second-generation
satellites invisible to the naked eye when they are on station”.' Which to me sounds like "make it so ordinary folks don't notice" and has very little to do with astronomy. It's a nice improvement but doesn't solve the problems.
Whataboutism refers to a Soviet-era habit of rhetorical distraction, i.e. "The USSR does something terrible," to which the reply was, "Whatabout the terrible things the US does?"
How does the comment you're referring to add up to that?
I honestly don't get your point, you probably misunderstand me, we might disagree, but this is not the opposite case of whataboutism.
This advancement is objectively good, it's one of the issues raised later in the twitter thread even, and (s)he chooses to change the focus to another subject.
Ah yes, because Musk is a philanthropist and is doing this for earth as a whole. That's why for poorer, thrid world countries, he'll... keep charging the usual rate, making Starlink a non-starter in those countries ?
Starlink is a rich idiot's toy, not a solution to bring communications to everyone.
They do price discriminate to a cheaper price for poorer countries (in Ukraine it went the opposite despite being a poor country, where they tried to jack the price up by thousands of percent, but we don't know the terms of the recent pentagon deal to say what price it finally went through at).
As I understand it, the cost of fiber repair has gone down and we should be able to wire everywhere that has grid electricity with high speed fiber very economically, but it doesn't happen for rent seeking and bureaucratic reasons. That would still leave the oceans and some more remote areas that don't have power.
A big portion of the population of those can be covered by cell towers and relays cheaper than launching cell towers into space that only last a few years.
In addition to rent seeking and bureaucracy, attempts to expand ground infrastructure are plagued by obstructionism by the giant telecom incumbents, not only in the form of legalized monopolies for some areas, but also by such underhanded methods as weaponization of environmental regulations with fake environment preservation groups and stoking NIMBYism in residents. It's nearly impossible to get anything done in some parts of the US especially.
Starlink isn't a good fit for towns that big, as it would overflow the rough limit of 300 dishes per cell (maybe changed with some of the recent fights with Dish?).
I don't want starlink. I'm old fashion I want fiber. I was just throwing out pricing for rural broadband installs in New England. I realize now my initial comment neglected that important detail.
That's a good point. One way to look at Starlink is as a proxy to the cost of government bureaucracy and oligopolies and monopolies that restrain trade. It's actually cheaper and more effective to build Starlink than it is to arbitrate all of that terrestrial mess.
No it isn't, the "energy costs" are negligible. That link is a joke, he's fear mongering about the effect of satellites falling back to earth but can't point to any specific harm; "Effect? WE HAVE NO IDEA." Classic Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt; aka FUD.
YouTube channels are bogus, but he's not wrong. It's wildly unlikely. Any actual project would require not just a payload that can handle insane stresses, but also rockets for orbital insertion. Rockets that can handle those kinds of ludicrous launch stresses are hard to conceive.
I can't prove that it's impossible, but the gap between the requirements and even the most extreme conception of what's feasible is so immense as to basically dismiss out of hand. They're welcome to keep trying, but it absolutely will not happen soon and is not worth the level of attention it receives.
That video actually explicitly says that the concept _can_ work, he's just skeptical that the current company is likely to achieve it. I wasn't particularly impressed. Yeah, maybe spinlauch the entity _won't_ achieve it. Most people who try to do very hard things fail. But the only way we advance is because sometimes they don't.
Well, spinlaunch doesn't exist yet. It also imparts _much_ higher accelerations on its payloads than a rocket does, and a rocket is already appreciable.
Spinlaunch is a joke. No payload is built to withstand those kinds of forces during a launch and the added weight to reinforce them to do so makes it uneconomical.
They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.
> They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.
It certainly can't help that Spinlaunch can't put anything into space.
That thread claims the Starship launches for Starlink are "expected to have a significant effect on the atmosphere," but for support it links to an article about the black soot emitted by kerosene-fueled rockets like Falcon. Starship is fueled by methane, a much cleaner-burning fuel.
> Starlink Generation 2 Mini Satellites: Photometric Characterization
I'm a professional astronomer and I don't know what the "brightness reduction target recommended by astronomers" is. I do know that a 7th magnitude source will likely saturate most large research telescopes, rendering a good chunk of that data useless.
My parents recently got starlink internet in a developing country with measured 70mbits down and 12mbits up. It costs about the same as wired internet, which is available where they live. But the speed is higher and they can run it on a battery so the internet stays up even when the power goes down, which happens often.
I think it’s a game changer for people in rural areas and cabins, people in RVs, people on boats, etc.
I’ve worked remote my whole career, but now it is possible for me to do that from anywhere on earth with starlink service. That’s amazing to me.
I have what might be a controversial opinion. Sacrificing terrestrial visible light astronomy for a well developed worldwide satellite communication constellation seems like an easy trade. Astronomers can still do terrestrial radio astronomy, and as far as I know, it seems like the utility of orbiting telescopes far outweigh the utility of terrestrial telescopes.
Yeah I tend to agree. My opinions on the internet in general have soured greatly in the last few years, but even still enabling things like telehealth to rural areas seems like an overall win.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadSo we can now have both. Africans can have their satellite internet, and astronomers can see their dwarf stars. Both should be satisfied so what are you so bitter about?
Well I'm not sure about that. There are 3 African countries where Starlink is available (unlike for instance every single country in the EU where both fiber and 4/5G coverage is quite decent already).
Also even in these 3 countries it's still prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population.
Starlink will definitely help provide internet for whole villages, or to remote cell towers. And distributing the costs may make them affordable. But my suspicion is that charities will donate hardware and then when support runs out, the villages will cancel the service.
You seem to assume that Starlink is the only solution to communications in rural Africa. There are other proposed satellite constellations. There is the traditional fiber optics and cell towers. Starlink in the US is successful because of the failure of government and companies to run lines to rural customers. Most importantly, those options are available if Starlink doesn't work from light pollution.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
Incidentally the new B-21 apparently won't be black. Maybe they have a new RAM paint formulation that doesn't force the choice of black.
And you're forgetting the U-2 and SR-71, which lacked full blown RCS reduction geometry but were still fitted with the black RAM coating (the SR-71 also had some stealth geometry; that was the purpose of the chines.)
This is one of the classic online nerd arguments, much of which is documented there. I’m a little terrified of reigniting the whole thing here and now to be honest, but if people want to get into it, have fun.
The problem with Starlink vs other satellites isn’t just the individual brightness but the vast number of them, and that they are often visible in a swarm.
Edit: the launch was early in the morning on Monday
We'll probably have more constellations of satellites in the future, so it's good that there are clear goals to hit to limit their negative effects.
"Therefore, the Mini satellites are fainter than Gen 1 Starlink satellites despite their larger sizes. "
OK, but no mention of "the brightness reduction target recommended by astronomers" anywhere. If there is a missing source please can we see it?
The paper does say 'Their goal is to “make its second-generation satellites invisible to the naked eye when they are on station”.' Which to me sounds like "make it so ordinary folks don't notice" and has very little to do with astronomy. It's a nice improvement but doesn't solve the problems.
Edit linked elsewhere in the discussion: https://cps.iau.org/news/nsf-and-spacex-sign-agreement-to-mi...
https://pay.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/14bhto5/observation...
How does the comment you're referring to add up to that?
This advancement is objectively good, it's one of the issues raised later in the twitter thread even, and (s)he chooses to change the focus to another subject.
Whataboutism would be "Yeah, well, who cares what Starlink does, NASA launches rockets all the time and no one complains about their emissions"
Starlink is a rich idiot's toy, not a solution to bring communications to everyone.
1. https://www.spinlaunch.com/
[0] https://youtu.be/9ziGI0i9VbE (Spinlaunch: BUSTED! by Thunderf00t)
He also busted Starlink because apparently technology costs never reduce, and single geostationary satellites have infinite bandwidth
I can't prove that it's impossible, but the gap between the requirements and even the most extreme conception of what's feasible is so immense as to basically dismiss out of hand. They're welcome to keep trying, but it absolutely will not happen soon and is not worth the level of attention it receives.
They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.
It certainly can't help that Spinlaunch can't put anything into space.
> Starlink Generation 2 Mini Satellites: Photometric Characterization
I'm a professional astronomer and I don't know what the "brightness reduction target recommended by astronomers" is. I do know that a 7th magnitude source will likely saturate most large research telescopes, rendering a good chunk of that data useless.
People wouldn’t know why they should be interested.
https://cps.iau.org/news/nsf-and-spacex-sign-agreement-to-mi...
I think it’s a game changer for people in rural areas and cabins, people in RVs, people on boats, etc.
I’ve worked remote my whole career, but now it is possible for me to do that from anywhere on earth with starlink service. That’s amazing to me.