Don’t fall for the clickbait reporting here. Musk has a history of making comically exaggerated claims. There won’t be a million satellites just like there wasn’t a 4000 km/h train, self-driving tunnel network, intercontinental rocket transport or Mars colony.
But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.
There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.
And I’m not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I’m jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).
If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn’t really matter).
The problem is that we offloaded “world leadership” to a bunch of ultra-rich sociopaths who only care about their own profit maximization. And they then made actual profit obsolete, since the only product they produce now is hype in the service of inflationary speculative assets. From a planetary perspective it looks like the human species is committing suicide.
Humanity is a self - resolving virus on this planet. Give it time and we’ll all be dead due to our own stupidity and nature will get back to where it should be.
Of all the permanent and irreparable things big corporations are doing to our world, I struggle to really put this high up. Yeah it sucks, but it provides a useful service and they naturally degrade. If anything Im more worried about all the pollution from them burning up in the atmosphere. If they stop launching them, the sky will be clear within the deccade.
Literally nearly ever claim and promise from Elmo has been a lie so far, no idea why anyone believes this conman
He literally is a billionaire because he lies. Literally.
He is incompetent as fuck, he’s a drug junkie, yet still there are so many people who look up to this shit stain
God, you sound like me. We should start a religion. CHURCH OF THE ANTI-ELMO.
It’s still infuriating that he could theoretically make the WALL-E earth a reality
This is how the night sky looks right now:
It’s crazy to think that all this will be privately owned by ultra rich techno-fascists that are beyond any democratic control.
You know what they aren’t beyond?
lmao I’m on PC and that gif takes up the entire screen in my notifications. Beautiful.
As much as I love the elegance of guillotines though, I do believe that we should use something a little more emblematic of the American working class… and which permits a feet-first approach:
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
If we get that we’ll also definitely get a Moon Banksy.
… ‘Bansky goes to Space’ …
That would make for quite a story.
That’s where you draw the line?
(Also, say hi to your chickens for me)
The Moon is a few 1000s of times more distant than LEO.
Well, at least we’ll always have Sinatra.
theoretically
i cannot describe how angry i would be at this shit.
Every day, these guys make our life worse and destroy what we love.
Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?
i am angry at the idea. want to share angers?
meet me at the launch site with some molotovs, we got some anger to share.
you know those water balloon slingshots?
A drone buzzing around the top of the rocket might do it.
I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can’t believe I’m saying this: Maybe we’ve gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
I was thinking more like Climate Change and Infrastructure and whatnot and suchlike.
That’s great, but that comes from funding those things, not shutting down a different industry. It’d be better to shut down non-productive industries like bombing brown kids in the Middle East.
This isn’t really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they’re passionate about, IMO they’ll be more motivated to research their field of choice
we should let scientists work on what they’re passionate about
*fund them
Why is it always 100x more on useless destruction and military? And yeah i know the sad answer already.
By work I meant study, not necessarily being employed by a company if that’s what you meant
True, that is how we got unit 731.
SpaceX has developed laundry list of new technology to enable Starlink and other endeavors. It’s silly to discount that as worthless.
If your scientific discovery disproportionately benefits a few billionaires then it’s worse than worthless.
AND makes life far worse for literally the entire planet.
Imagine unilaterally deciding that increasing your already obscene fortune is more important than every living creature that will ever exist in the future having a sky to enjoy, ever again. To these people, human joy is not something worth preserving.
Dude is so cartoonishly evil that it hurts
To these people, human joy is an indulgence for the weak.
You know how over-exaggerated cartoonish villains will talk about how love and caring make you weak? Basically that.
That’s because he’s an ogre who has to pay women to be artificially inseminated because, they won’t go anywhere near him, and his weener won’t work anyhow, due to botched enlargement surgery.
Just repellant.
lol just so you know a “laundry list” is a list of bad things.
And no, rockets that can put stuff into orbit where around even before Mama Musk shat out lil Mech-Hitler.
Not like these ones. I’m almost tired of having this discussion y’all are blinded by hatred.
First full flow staged combustion engine, dramatically lower launch prices than competitors (cheaper for the government and has enabled more interesting things to go to space), dramatically more access (SpaceX flies multiple times a week!), booster recovery & rocket reuse.
And again I know everyone really is blinded by their seething rage but starship is going to change the whole landscape again.
You can hate the man as much as you want, I’m not saying I don’t. But you discredit yourself by not knowing what SpaceX is actually doing.
I mean, we still wouldn’t have US access to space without SpaceX (Boeing fiasco…).
Not gonna happen. Not with the effective altruist cult running things.
I don’t think you are using altruist right, or I am missing some sarcasm here.
A lot of the ultra wealthy espouse a nonsense philosophy called “Effective Altruism”, which asserts a kind of utilitarian “most good for the most people” ethic, but in such a way that one can basically justify any action as being, eventually, for the most good ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Including being good to hypothetical, unlikely trillions that may live someday if we colonize Mars.
I’ve been really passionate about space. My bday is on the anniversary of the moon landing, and my one aunt has always reminded me of the fact. My great grandfather worked for NASA and my aunt gave me his stargazing binoculars that his brother gave him when he got hired at NASA. That part of my family instilled a huge love of science in me, esp space stuff. I wanna go to space more than anything, but I don’t have the brains or constitution to be an astronaut. So I just daydream, stargaze, and write poems about the cosmos.
Right. Elon hires people on the basis they’ll be making Mars travel possible, but that Starship is really for dumping metal all over the night sky.
maybe just for this one guy you know
Believe it or not, you can do two things at once. Some people are interested in space, some in geology. That’s fine.
i just tried to chew gum and walk and my personal injury attorney would like to know your address (they think you’re cute)
Kinda missing the point there.
Which is?
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they’re certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn’t mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren’t environmental disasters anymore.
It’s either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.
Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn’t listen
To cool the iss they’re exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
For real. Thermal regulation of spacecraft is a problem that current, non-data center, satellites are struggling with and increasing the load by orders of magnitude isn’t going to make things easier. You can easily calculate the area needed for radiative heat transfer for a perfect radiator and you quickly end up with some gargantuan panels. Perfect radiators are also perfect absorbers, so the whole system goes to shit if the panel isn’t facing deep space.
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware in a single satellite.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That’s all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Edit: so his power argument is mostly fine. Different components do dissipate different amounts of heat at the same power. Antennae will not run as hot as GPUs, the fact they radiate power by design helps here. However, even if you could use all a v2 satellite’s power generation for compute, you need 35 sattelites per MW of compute. So at the lowest estimate 35000 for a GW data centre. For 2024 data centre capacity (47 GW computed from 415 TWh used) you need around 1.6 million sattelites. Now you need to network a vast cloud to get reasonable inter GPU performance.
The required orbit would probably mean a whole strip of earth gets insane light pollution, due to the reflectivity of so many sattelites jammed into the narrow orbit. Note that each satellite is about as bright as a star visible to the naked eye.
Edit edit: The lifetime of a data centre GPU is around 1-2 years for serious uptime. The sattelites are meant to have a 5 year lifetime.
Which is why Musk had proposed putting into orbit a million plus sats
Right, but that’s just for present compute capacity in the most optimistic scenario. Neglecting anything realistic, and the fact that starlink cooling isn’t actually sufficient (the sattelites have low power downtime to cool). On top of that the GPUs still die faster than the sattelites and you can’t just walk over and replace them in the rack. Let alone the end of ground-based astronomy or light pollution.
It’s already sufficent to cool 20kw of compute.
When starship goes up it’ll be crazy cost effective to throw them up in orbit and do compute there then to waste the time, money and power on earth
Billionaires don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we’ve all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
We’re just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There’s not that many of them.
I don’t see the beginning of anything to rein in the power they get from just being overrich assholes.
Ironically, the only countries on Earth that control tightly (some of) their billionaires are Russia and China. I rememer Vietnam also executed one for tax fraud. Something for which they are barely slapped on their hand in western countries.
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Elon Musk is a plague upon the human condition. Our best hope in the US, right now, is that a Starship launch goes horribly right and hits the White House during a cabinet meeting with Elmo as a a guest. Burn it black…pave over it and start over. Preferably after a mandatory prison-raping of all billionaires, especially those who loved Epstein. Fuck em all…let god sort em out.
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
I thought they couldn’t take the sky from me!
We haven’t even finished burning the sky and boiling the sea!
And serenity is nowhere to be found.
If this actually happens, I will dedicate my life to getting the funding to create a laser weapon that can shoot them out of the sky from Earth.
Then we’ll play Space Invaders for keeps.
Won’t they just become space debris and remain in orbit?
They’d last as debris for about 5 years before falling. Atmospheric drag among other things causes orbital decay that cause them to eventually fall to earth without adjustments.
The unfortunate thing about debris falling from space is that it could hit you or me and we could get killed.
They’re too small and fast for that. They burn up in the atmosphere.
Larger space debris on a different trajectory can, but not LEO communication satellites.
Well there’s still chances it wouldn’t burn fast enough…
You’re not wrong. They’re designed to burn up completely but there have already been failures and documented cases of 2.5kg pieces hitting the ground. The FAA predicts at current trajectories we’re looking at about 1 person hit every 2 years by stray debris. And it’s only going to get worse the more they launch.
Just need the Kessler syndrome to put a stop to it all.
Does that apply to LEO? Seems to be self clearing in the medium term
It has always applied to LEO. Scifi media transformed it into the idea of “nothing will ever be able to leave the planet ever again” but the original studies that the phrase originated from included LEO. Despite the fact that there is enough atmosphere that a lot of the debris would experience sufficient drag for their orbits to decay within several years, not decades or millenia, it would still have huge impacts.
Yes it does because parts of LEO have such low air resistance that the junk will stay up there for a very long time. However, I think part of how the Starlink satellites work is being so low that they do deorbit pretty quickly.
I was like wtf does this have to do with law enforcement 🤦🤦🤦
Doesn’t make visibility better!
Don’t get mad. Think of the shareholders.
Now I’m curious. Can a satellite fly over a country without permission? I know that an aircraft can’t. How far up from the Earth’s surface does sovereignity end?
However high they can shoot
There are international rules though i’m not sure either, if 50 Km or less or more.
