“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky (eso.org)

Worrying for sure. But I doubt the current USA, along with Israel and Russia are going to be bothered about this. Everyone is launching satellites and other gear into orbit for war.

Ugh the part about Munich is depressing. Finding a dark clear sky spot is one of the worlds greatest joys and most awesome experiences.

For the first time in human history, the generations living now have been systematically robbed of their ancestral right to witness the night sky and its jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring magnificence.

I am a science and astronomy fan, but I am sorry, in this case progress is more important. If we regret our decision, the LEOs will fall out of the sky by themselves in a few years and it will be ok.

Why are they bright? Do they have big lights flashing or is it reflection

This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?

Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?

Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.

If we can launch 1M satellites, how many telescopes can we launch?

[dead]

Should it be possible to coordinate orbits to create permanent clear spots on the sky where observatories are? A LEO no flight zone of sorts.

These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves to these desires to hold the status quo. Anti-energy, anti-housing, anti-industry and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to live and have chosen to spend their life in leisure.

But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet[0] so that the Europeans can use one specific method of looking at the stars, I don't find that convincing. In time, as we expand, space-based observation will become fairly feasible for everyone. And the satellites we have will decay to the Earth should we fail to keep them up there.

We will build Earth orbital structures and swarms, and we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms, and we will go to the stars, and it will be better for humanity as a whole.

0: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/02/...

ah and guess what. only western US / European countries are allowed to have them. The rest are called shadow fleet satellites.

Title is: One million satellites and mirrors in space pose grave threat to the night sky

It’s a public space. No one should be able to just take it over for free. We aren’t being compensated for the pollution of our skies. And also, higher orbits require much longer for debris to fall back and burn up.

99.99% of the world would rather watch a train of Starlink satellites than some star they couldn't see anyway. Not to mention the satellites' other benefits.

Of course this comes from a European organisation.

too late

https://satellitemap.space

there are already several starlink competitors and even other countries planning to launch their own 1000-10,000 node networks

It upsets me that an establishment like ESO would grip on the “data centers in space” narrative given the absurd physics constraints.

I'm not sure how exactly they are making these calculations but I just don't see it. Both Reflect and SpaceX are targeting SSO orbits where they are only reflecting for an hour or two at sunset. That isn't true of Starlink, but that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now, I don't see it getting much worse as the materials on it get refined to be less problematic.

More regulations would just have the result of cementing a monopoly for Spacex.

How much CO2 does launching a million satellites produce? Is is significant compared to other sources of CO2?

Perhaps we have 100 years to spread consciousness to space before civilisation is devastated by demographic collapse or nuclear war or some horrible virus or islam.

99.9% of species that have existed on earth are already extinct. Climate change happens constantly over long periods. Our CO2 emissions will be background noise on a million year timescale.

Time to ignore the whingers and the NIMBYs and colonize the universe.

For a very imprecise visual, I like the site https://satellite.love

>SpaceX plans to send one million more satellites into orbit, for space-based data centres, ...

I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...

>Reflect Orbital, a US start-up, aims to launch a constellation of very large mirror-like satellites to provide sunlight at night, with reflected beams that span at least five kilometres on Earth's surface.

Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.

Yes okay, good luck with that. The strategic importance to nations is far too high, it just means astronomy will evolve to a thing where it's done from space. But if you want to be the region where you support these ideas and undermine your own political support for national self-interest then that's your choice. Europe is overrun by these professional class types with nice ideas that are misprioritized. It's like a land of people that behave like pets lacking practical self-sufficiency.

I do not understand why the astronomers feel entitled to determine fair use of the sky. I feel like it's much easier and more reasonable to ask what the telescopes can do to mitigate the problem than to insist that others back off from use of the communal resource.

The great observatories are marvels of engineering - a focused effort on technical mitigations to the satellite problem would likely push the problem out for decades into the future.

Two possible paths forward: 1. inserting a shutter into the beam path while a satellite is transiting the field of view of the telescope, or 2. (somewhat worse from an SNR perspective) terminating an exposure right before it's corrupted by a transiting satellite and starting a new exposure once the satellite has passed.

I for one would much rather see effort put into advancing telescope design than blocking advances of our use of space!

Fortunately, no one owns space, so we don’t have to listen to these decels.