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Fuckin space garbage is what it is.
Yes it was impressive that they landed a rocket again once, but the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone. It should’ve been a stepping stone for better technology, but instead they’re just mining money. Privately owned space engineering is a disgrace to humanity.
Space engineering used to unite even the worst opponents as with the international space station, but now those institutions are underfunded, while billionaire space-musk can shoot his loads into the atmosphere without any regard to the rest of the worlds population living inside said sphere.
Tax the asshole already.
I was excited about starlink when it was announced, but already it’s way too expensive, already bows to actual totalitarians and isn’t affordable on the ocean and not available in remote places without a license.
And with more satellite constellations planned by amazon and others, it seems the kessler syndrome is just a question of time.
On the Kessler point, Starlink birds fly at an altitude where they will deorbit in 4-8 years if they go dead, so that particular orbit will always be fairly clean, and if a Kessler event does happen, the debris will deorbit in a reasonable length of time.
A portion of the debris from collisions would enter elliptical orbits though so might need more time to de-orbit. But loosing all LEO satellites and even just 4-8 years without use of LEO would be an absolute catastrophe. You could still launch satellites to medium or geosynchronous orbit though.
Where will they go after they deorbit? Do we get em back?
They burn up on re-entry, at least they’re supposed to.
Thanks, atmosphere 🙂❤️ that’s interesting design! Will any of the debris reach the planet or is it designed to break apart in a particular fashion?
Will any of the debris reach the planet
Not in a solid form. There may be some undesirable effects though at greater numbers, we don’t really have good data. Here’s a blog post by the European Space Agency talking about a couple studies on the effects of satellite reentry. Note that the satellites they simulated were significantly larger than the Starlink satellites.
My understanding is they’re designed to completely disintegrate.
And by doing so, aluminium in them is attacking the ozone layer that is already having a tough time…
Wouldn’t it be nice if those sattelites would work together instead of against eachother. What if Amazon worked together with starlink, and the other companies offering internet so there would be less sattelites in the sky. Why does every sat internet company need their own fleet of sattelites
Well presumably to make more money lol. The good thing is that there will at least be some competition to bring prices down and keep service quality up. A monopoly would be bad. But of course that leads to more satellites. This really shows how our capitalist system can’t really make rational decisions that are for the benefit of humanity. Ideally we’d have a separate economic institution to regulate industry like this under direct democratic control.
already bows to actual totalitarians
Care to elaborate?
Turkey and Russia. It’s clear that profit seeking corporations would bow, but then Elon screams bloody murder when reactionary forces in Brazil manipulating social media get censored.
I feel like that explanation is missing a verb or something.
To bow, or bow down or kneel for. But I’m not going to google that for you haha. The basic problem is that starlink theoretically has immense power so it becomes a political tool. He bows to those ones but not to legitimate democratic interests.
Especially once starlink and others can make landline based internet connections obsolete by pricing them out - which they are not currently doing though, but it seems only a matter of time with competition. Basically we could get to a situation where there are only like 2 or 3 internet provider practically controlling internet globally.
They won’t be able to price landline based connections out as long as they have to replace their satellites every 5 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re running at a loss currently.
I’m pretty sure they ran the numbers for potential profits and determined it’s a goldmine - in the long run. Maybe they’ll need to increase the lifespan of satellites. Their internal launch costs are pretty low already. Amazon wants to build it’s own constellation and is building new glen partially because they can’t get launch slots from SpaceX. I’m sure you can find some numbers to do some napkin math.
Theoretically they can serve the whole world with internet without requiring only minimal land based infrastructure. That is a gigantic market they can reach. And incredibly power to wield for such a psycho.
Another strange case is high-frequency trading on stock exchanges - because light is faster in the vacuum of space compared to fiberglass they can trade on the stock exchanges around the world like nobody else can. Not sure how much money that makes.
When I searched “Elon bows to Turkey” I got this story about Twitter censoring some tweets during the Turkish election… Is that what you’re talking about?
Yeah. Which is in stark contrast to Musk’s rhetoric in Brazil, which had a legal court order for censoring. Maybe Ukraine/Russia wasn’t the best example. My point is that it’s immense power. In the hands of a soulless corporation it’s bad enough but an outright fascist like Musk is much worse.
What about Turkey and Russia? Starlink doesn’t work in Russia.
Follow the news so we don’t have to catch you up.
Replies like this from people like you is why social media sucks. Thanks for your contribution on keeping it so.
It’s extremely affordable on the ocean. What are you talking about?
Just until recently satellite internet was really expensive. Like only large corporations could afford it. And the bandwidth was shit. Also it was barely available in the deep northern and southern hemisphere. Sure it’s considered expensive for the regular kayaking dude. But it’s insanely more available than ever before.
The dudes an asshole. But don’t invent arguments.
Yeah it’s much cheaper, but still like $250 excessively expensive compared to $50 land based starlink. For no technical reason since there is vastly less utilization on ocean. It’s price gauging because of lack of alternative and because rich cruisers can afford it. So poor people are still forced to use cell phone based internet (or starlink) only near the coast and nothing has changed. For me it’s a disappointment. Of course that is just capitalism.
Theoretically the sea could be one of the cheapest places to live if you build and maintain your own solar powered electric boat. Or use kite power. No taxes, produce your own electricity, produce your own water, incinerating toilet and emit only grey water. The one thing that is missing is cheap internet.
This. I wish I had more than one up vote I could give for this comment.
agreed. it’s a technology we need but like everything meant to improve humanity, it should be publicly owned (no, not the stock market - truly public).
Enshittification happens to all things, sadly.
It happens really early with that fuckin’ weasel in charge.
When people talk about taxing these horrible people I think of tax as being a euphamism
the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone
Except for the millions of people accessing internet via Starlink to whom the alternative is either no internet, slow internet or extremely expensive internet.
starlink wouldn’t have a leg to stand on (in the US, can’t speak for elsewhere) if isps were held to installing/maintaining/upgrading infrastructure that was already paid for by the federal government decades ago and then the isps just didn’t do the work.
Privatized networks are a crime and it should be treated legally as such.
Public network for the public.
That’s a nice thought, but
- Starlink has no old infrastructure
- Rural and remote customers are difficult to wire up
Even in the best case where US was close to 100% wired up like we paid for, Starlink would have a market in remote areas world wide, RVs, aircraft, ships
The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they’d paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.
If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn’t have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.
this is exactly what I meant
We managed to wire up large swaths of rural area for electricity back in the 1930’s
In a lot of places, that only happened because people banded together and made it happen for their area - the existing suppliers weren’t interested, even with federal loans available. That’s where the “Electric Co-op” companies came from.
Somehow capitalism has become about more profiteering, self-serving, instant gratification
But also there were no choices. Starlink may be a valid choice and the infrastructure is already there
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This, I’m both very rural and in an RV at the same time. Starlink is literally my only means of playing games. The only other even remotely viable option is LTE internet from something like T-Mobile but out here the towers don’t really have much capacity so I might be able to play the game fine and I might just start disconnecting Midway through a match randomly as the internet struggles to even load a basic web page
Welp, I guess we’ll all have to suffer the consequences so that Lordkitsuna can game in the middle of nowhere. Truly first world problems.
https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-reentry-ozone-depletion-atmosphere
I’m just saying blindly calling for it to go away entirely (which i see a lot of on stuff like this) isn’t helpful. Clearly they need to tone down emissions but it’s a useful service.
I work 10hr shifts at work and it’s 1hr 30 both to and from work, moving isn’t really an option for me atm. I don’t think it’s unreasonable I’d like to be able to stream my shows or play games with my friends to relax
lordkitsuna is the answer, dude. more people getting away from the grind of the big machine to live remote lives far from society is the answer. i don’t like starlink either but these networks are crucial for the modern nomad to exist.
The answer to what? If everyone does this, there won’t be a single remote place on earth that isn’t crawling with sprinter vans. It can’t scale, and it doesn’t need to be specifically catered to. You want the wilderness, you get the wilderness. You want low latency Internet, then get to a fiber connection. We don’t need every first world amenity everywhere.
nah. you can live in the city if that’s what you like. i’ll do what i like. do you really want to alienate non-urban liberals?
depopulation is a possible alternative to preventing swarms of sprinter vans too. you really don’t want to put everyone in a city.
I’m not trying to alienate anyone, I’m trying to understand why low latency gaming needs for digital nomads is worth the real downsides of providing such a service (scientific, GHG, atmospheric tinkering, etc). I also believe that we should leave a lot more of the earth alone and that nature matters. I’m not trying to put people anywhere, just recognizing there are pros and cons to different living schemes, humans are social creatures, and population of 2 areas don’t warrant large societal investments. I’m similarly against a hypothetical drone sushi delivery service for rural Canadadian boreal forests if that happens to have real downsides too.
Does the modern nomad need to exist in the first place? Taking your money into an RV so you can guzzle gas on it, and just stream videos while you pretend to enjoy nature?
you can just exist in a remote place and not make videos too my friend. sorry that your understanding of what life outside a city looks like has been shaped by the internet instead of reality.
My rv doesn’t move, i drive a smart fortwo and get 40+MPG
I have solar on my RV and don’t use utility electrical. No propane appliances, heatpump hot water, and heat/cooling. Top rated efficiency washer and a heatpump dryer to go with it. Just because i want to be rural doesn’t mean I’m wasteful.
I’m out here because it’s the only place land is remotely affordable and I’m tired of renting. I saved up what i could, managed to get a great deal on 5 acres. And built up a sustainable rv to live in till i can build a house.
Supposedly there are plans for fiber to deploy in this area within the next 5 years. When that happens I’m all over it, i regularly go on hikes the trails out here in the mountains from old logging roads are amazing.
That doesn’t mean i shouldn’t be allowed some modern entertainment as well
