What To Do About Those Lights In The Sky
Elon Musk’s satellites threaten to disrupt the night sky for all of us, opinion, Washington Post
“if we let Silicon Valley disrupt the night sky, we will never get it back.”
Keith’s note: News flash – humanity started to change the nature of the night sky half a century ago. Without satellites we’d not know about weather until it happened. We’d have to use paper maps again. And we’d know far less about our planet and the universe. To truly bring back pristine night skies everywhere we’d have to forgo streetlights all together. Oh yes: A hundred thousand jets fill Earth’s skies with lights and artificial clouds every day and cars and industry further ruin the atmosphere’s clarity. They’d have to go too.
But this opinion piece singles out one company and goes after Elon Musk because he (and others) dare to offer the same level of Internet access developed nations have to everyone else on the planet. We have decided to become a planetary civilization – one that aspires further to become a spacefaring civilization. If we all believe in such a thing then that means that we will need to continue to transform our world so that everyone benefits.
There have been a number of op ed pieces like this that lament the loss of a dark sky for summer hikes with the kids. Yet none of them stop to ponder the question as to what these lights in the skies will mean to large portions of humanity: access to resources and opportunities that everyone else has had for decades – centuries.
It is confusing to see people such as the author of this opinion piece – who profess admiration for space exploration – ignore the obvious trappings that come with becoming a species that dares to go beyond the skies outward to the stars. Ancient peoples looked at those lights in the sky and immediately populated them with beings and created myths about their travels. Those stories served as the inspiration for innumerable feats of exploration. Astronomy has adapted to all manner of distracting things in the skies. It will adapt to these distractions as well.
We have gone from studying the lights in the night sky to building them. And in some cases, we now live on these lights in the sky. We have decided to become a planetary civilization. There is no turning back. Ad Astra.
Agree, Mr. Cowing. Civilization always involves trade-offs. So let’s have a show of hands by those who will do without electricity…?
Hmmm. Thought so.
These constellations are not the only way to expand internet access. Nor are they better at getting around government firewalls like the one used by China. VPNs are far better at that. It will be trivially easy for China and other oppressive governments to jam these signals if companies like Starlink refuse to implement government-controlled firewalls for people using their service in China and other such countries.
You want to grow internet access in the developing world? Fibre internet is the way to go. You want to help people get around government firewalls? VPNs can already do that. You don’t need to destroy the night sky to achieve either goal.
Just look at the projected cost to access such networks.These systems are primarily intended for the developed world. This idea that they are intended as some great, altruistic humanitarian gesture is just nonsense.
Have you ever actually spent time in a third world country like Nepal? I have. Fiber in the Himalayas? Not possible.
Until I see an actual plan by Starlink to provide high-speed internet at an affordable cost to people in Nepal, I’d be willing to bet the only people using it in Nepal will be the rich folks crowding up Mount Everest and turning it into the world’s highest garbage dump.
Oh, and look at this, fibre internet in Nepal:
https://www.ktm2day.com/201…
You do realize that there is more to Nepal than Kathmandu and that large portions of the country are within the Himalayas? You have made your point. Have a nice day.
“Just look at the projected cost to access such networks”
How? Other than random speculation, I haven’t seen any prices listed. SpaceX has mentioned $200 to $300 for the antenna, but nothing I know of about the monthly bills. So how, exactly, can I look at the “projected cost” and confirm your claim that it will be unaffordable to people in underdeveloped countries? Or very developed but less open countries like China or Russia?
And even if the price is still considered “high”, communities could pool their resources and use one connection to support multiple users (via a LAN, WiFi, etc.). At the very least, local governments and some public buildings, like libraries, could provide Internet to areas that would otherwise have zero access.
This is the modern equivalent of a public postal system.
Fiber is being used to good effect, but it’s in places with amenable terrain and where the population density is high. Billions of people live in places that don’t fit either of these descriptions. Fiber isn’t going to be pulled across mountains, nor is it going to be set up (at great expense) to service widely-scattered people in rural areas.
Yes, StarLink is intended to provide a stream of cash by which to finance SpaceX’s Martian visions, but access to the Internet and to the modern world by association is no less important here, your sneers notwithstanding.
Stop. The complaint isn’t that there aren’t pristine night skies everywhere, but that if StarLink and the other constellations go up in full there might not be valuable dark night skies anywhere on the planet (except maybe at the poles). That’s a big change from what’s come before, and given that we don’t allow obtrusive space advertising, it’s a fair question for Stirone to ask whether inescapably obtrusive satellite constellations should be allowed as well.
I hope it doesn’t come to any sort of restriction by law, and it’s a good sign that SpaceX and Musk seem to be realizing that they need to at least try and address this potential issue. That’s a lot more helpful than dismissively treating astronomy and the night sky as mere roadblocks on the road to the Space Future you didn’t get after the Apollo Program wound down.
Given the hyperbolic nature of all these op-eds, I think we should allow Keith the luxury of some counter-hyperbole as well. His basic point is that Starlink is not different in kind but only in degree to what already exists, all of which comes with benefits we cannot glibly dismiss.
Any new law would not impact the Starlink Constellation as it already has its license. The astronomers had their opportunity to speak up during the licensing process and did not do so, so they are out of luck. That said, the Antarctic Peninsula and Brooks Range have some nice high mountains to use for observatories.
This is going to impact every person on the planet. To simply say “you had your chance to oppose it now just shut up and accept it” is just stunningly arrogant.
No, it’s called following the law. There’re a good reason retrospective law is very rare, in fact I believe the US constitution forbids it.
So if the law sucks, suck it up because it’s the law? Don’t try to change the law? Governments change law all the time. I’m not sure why you’re saying it’s “very rare”.
Government can change the law but it’s rare they enforce the law retrospectively, i.e. if you did something in the past that is legal then, then government changes the law to make it illegal, you shouldn’t be arrested just because government changed its mind.
And good luck getting a law changed in this case, since this is not just a US issue, it’s a global issue, needs something like the Outer Space Treaty or organization like International Telecommunication Union to take on it, by the time you get all the negotiation done the constellation deployment would be completed.
He was correct to say “retrospective” laws are rare. Technically, the term is ex post facto laws, and they are specifically prohibited by the US constitution. You can not pass a law and then convict someone for violating the law _before_ it was passed. New laws can only apply to things done _after_ the law was passed.
In any case, you can certainly change laws and prevent future actions you consider inappropriate or criminal. But under the current laws, astronomers worried about light pollution could have objected and stopped the SpaceX constellation. The vast majority of astronomers chose not to do so. There is nothing arrogant about saying that’s their own fault and they have no one to blame but themselves.
No, you are the one being self-centered. At most it will only impact a few hundred astronomers. The rest of humanity will be far too busy using their smart phones to give it a second thought. Even most amateurs won’t notice it. Maybe instead of demoting planets like Pluto, which most common folks actually did object to, the AIU should have been lobbying against LEO Constellations. You should be directing your anger at the AIU leadership for dropping the ball on it and not the messenger. Tell me, what are you going to do when they start building the Solar Power Satellites?
I don’t think he has a license yet to put the full 12,000 up, just a much smaller number of them (at least the 60).
You were misled by the op-ed, FCC already gave permission for the whole constellation (actually it’s two constellations, ~4,000 satellites in LEO, ~8,000 in VLEO).
SpaceX has the license for the full constellation. And, as a nice touch, they must launch at least half of it by a certain date, or they lose the license.
More likely, on Mt. Erebus or Terror. The nearby infrastructure is better, and astronomers are used to putting observatories on top of volcanoes. But you would only be able to observe the souther sky. The arctic is a pretty flat region. Well, mostly. What’s the latitude of Denali? 63 deg.? Would that be north of these constellations?
The orbital inclination of the Starlink Constellation is 53 degrees so that should put Denali north of it. The Brooks Range is even further north so it would work fine.
Yeah, Keith set up a strawman and burnt it to the ground. It’s a misleading and therefore useless post. He sets up a false dichotomy, pretending that the choice is between either having streetlights or having ground-based astronomy, which is absurd.
Well “Joey” You do understand that streetlights cause an immense amount of light pollution, yes? But we have decided that they are more important than the impact that they have on astronomy.
There are designs for streetlights that significantly reduce the amount of light pollution they emit up to the sky while still providing amble illumination. Why would it be so terrible to take a pause and make sure these internet constellations have a very minimal impact on the night sky and astronomy?
Why is a few thousand astronomers needs more important than the billions that can benefit from internet access?
Actually, astronomy and related fields are much larger than that today. Those were the numbers in the US about 30 years ago. But in any case, you’re basically arguing we should sacrifice an entire branch of science so that a company can make come money. This is a classic tragedy of the commons issue, and I’m not seeing where there is a clear regulatory body in charge of public discourse on preserving the sky.
Nobody is sacrificed, Starlink is merely a minor inconvenience to astronomers, one astronomer from LSST said it’s a “nuisance”.
Maybe sacrifice ground based branch and find newer spaced based methods to push the science forward.
Umm…because astronomers make discoveries that could benefit all mankind?
But you can do astronomy off the earth and make discoveries. Is staying grounded worth sacrificing billions of internet access.
As a note, you can put a spectrometer anywhere on Earth and see a bright line at 589.3 nm. That’s the sodium D line, and I really do mean anywhere. You can be a thousand miles from the nearest street light, and I’ve been told you will still see it.
“make sure these internet constellations have a very minimal impact on the night sky and astronomy”: Except SpaceX is already doing this, what the Op-Ed is trying to do is to kill any satellite constellation (well western ones at least, good luck getting Chinese to follow your rules).
That seems to be what they are doing, constellations will take years to deploy and improvements can be made as they go along. And they won’t be up there forever they will be replaced with new generations.
Until now satellite manufacturers didn’t pay any attention to how their satellites affected ground based astronomy. Even Iridium flares were an unintended fluke, which went away in the replacement satellites but again only by accident. Musk’s comments may in fact be the first time a satellite manufacturer has mentioned being willing to adapt designs in order to take light pollution into consideration.
And there are many places on Earth that you can go to minimize light pollution. Constellations could potentially screw up astronomy EVERYWHERE on Earth.
Additionally, there are many ways you can mitigate the effects of street lights, including simple ones such as making sure they only shine down and not up. You’re acting like the choice is either bright constellations that completely screw over astronomy or no constellations at all, which is a false dichotomy.
Your implication that astronomers would rather have astronomy than have economic development ignores all of this.
One most likely user of the Starlink Constellation will be the DoD and the spooks.
Taking out a few LEO photo recon satellites is one thing. However taking out a few thousand Starlink satellites is almost impossible since they probably will have real time avoidance capability in the future.
When it comes to a conflict of interest between the DoD & the spooks versus the Astronomers. My bet is not with the Astronomers.
Yes and no. What you describe is true of any large LEO constellation, both for national security interests and light pollution. But I don’t think the No Such Agency would want to ride along with Starlink. They’re more likely to fly their own, huge LEO constellation.
Was thinking more along the lines of almost unlimited bandwidth and low latency of the Starlink Constellation as communication support for whatever space architecture the DoD and the spooks will wind up with in future.
The spooks might just ask SpaceX to inserted a few special Starlink sats with sensor package into their flight manifest. Using the rest of the Constellation to masked the observation sats.
“given that we don’t allow obtrusive space advertising”
Where did that come from? I don’t think there are any laws on the books about obtrusive space advertising. As far as I know, it’s been suggested, but never done (or even attempted) and never prohibited.
From here.
“However, the US doesn’t own space”: This is a good point, good luck getting any rule enforced when Russia and China will just do whatever they want. What this op-ed is calling is basically ceding the entire LEO to foreign countries.
I don’t see how space advertising would be cost effective anyway. You would have to coordinate a whole bunch of satellites to fly in formation to form an image or spell out something. Yes it’s possible but besides the cost of the satellites it would use up a lot of fuel to maintain that formation for any length of time. And the few minutes of visibility would only occur a few days per month at what is to most people a completely random time. So then what do you do have a radio ad that says “okay everybody in Kansas City go outside at 7:05 pm tonight and you will see the Starbucks logo”. It would be a novelty at first but I guarantee after the first couple of times no one is going to run outside to see it. Of course some people might see it randomly, but most people are so oblivious to the sky I doubt if they would notice.
If the novelty of it identified the company, you might be able to advertise. For example, a geostationary satellite with a big, articulated mirror. From the ground it would be a bright star blinking off and on. Maybe in Morse code, although that’s a bit obscure these days. It would be noticed, people would pull out their phones, do a search for what that light in the sky was, and get directed to the company’s web page. But that would only work the first time someone did that. And it might generate more negative than positive publicity.
“valuable dark night skies”
How do you estimate this value?
If we judge by how much the US spends on astronomy, then the NSF astronomy budget is about $250M/year. Compare this with estimates of $50B/year for revenue from a full Starlink buildout. If those numbers are real, society values the product from Starlink much more than it values astronomy.
As for personal preference for dark skies: people seem not to move based on this, or even avoid outdoor lighting. I doubt you could estimate a very high value for it for the average person.
Well said.
This sounds like an excellent opportunity for the astronomy community to get with the program and start pushing to move their field offworld. There’s an infinite universe of dark skies out there for the taking.
It is prohibitively expensive, even assuming greatly reduced launch costs.
Extremely technically difficult as well. The Extremely Large Telescope being built in Chile has a 39.2 meter diameter. Even with folding, I doubt you could fit a 39.2 meter mirror space telescope into a Starship Super Heavy payload fairing.
There’re funded NASA NIAC proposal to build “A Kilometer Space Telescope (KST) will provide over three times the diameter and ten times the collecting area of the Arecibo groundbased radio telescope with diffraction-limited performance at optical, infrared, and millimeter wavelengths.”, just because past space telescopes are expensive doesn’t mean the future ones will be.
Sorry, I actually build space telescopes for a living, and that’s just nonsense.
Well you’d better tell NASA they’re being conned then
And I’ll amend that to: I build space telescopes for NASA. NIAC also funds studies into warp drive. No one seriously believes those concept studies will come to fruition in, say, less than 100 years. I don’t even know how to parse the statement mixing a radio telescope with optical and infrared. One could be charitable and assume they are talking about interferometry, which is a development branch that got killed off more than a decade ago with the death of SIM-LITE/SIM and TPF-I. And part of that was due to the sheer cost involved. You might just as well say astronomers shouldn’t worry because it will be possible to just fly there and look at it.
That’s true, but I believe space telescopes don’t have to be as large as ground ones to get the same results. In particular, ground observations suffer from the presence of airglow, so they have to collect more light for the same SNR.
Do you want to give them 10-100x more money to send their telescopes off world then?
Nope. But what I mean by ‘get with the program’ is for them to start thinking about how to use crashing launch costs + advanced technology to start moving outward. Not every space telescope has to be the Hubble.
They already do that. It’ll costs TONS more, on par with the numbers I gave you.
That’s if the astronomers keep doing things in the same way. If I had a dedicated, orbital telescope, I might be able to live without a large mirror. Stars perpendicular to the orbital plane, or even vaguely close to perpendicular, are always in view. With a dedicated telescope, I could integrate on them for a solid year if I wanted to. Compare that to about ten hours (if I’m lucky) using a ground-based telescope. In terms of signal, that means I could get the same results with a mirror which is thirty times smaller. And I could be observing in the UV. And, well, lots of things. A new observing platform simply calls for new observing strategies. If you try to shoe horn the old approach into the new platform, yes, it will be inefficient and expensive. But that’s a failure of the user, not the new platform.
What in the world are you talking about? I am an astronomer, and what you’re saying makes absolutely no sense for a space telescope.
Well, I’m also an astronomer, and I happen to know that I can either use a big mirror or a long integration time. If I have a dedicated telescope, which can literally point at a given target for a year, that’s a very long exposure. And, for a spacecraft in a low Earth orbit, you can do that if the target is perpendicular to the orbital plane. The HST documentation calls this the Continuous Viewing Zone (CVZ) and there is a special box to check when you write a proposal to use this. Outside the CVZ, you’re limited to a bit under half an orbit and multiple exposures, not a very, very long point and stare.
A full year is probably an exaggeration, but we’re talking about what you could do with a small telescope as a hosted payload on one of those Starllink satellites. Actually, what you could do if there were hundreds of the planned 12,000 with small telescopes as hosted payloads. That allows the possibility of allocating one telescope to each observer for a year, as opposed to the usual practice of allocating a few nights per year on a big, ground-based telescope. And that would allow very, very long exposures looking in the CVZ. If I did it correctly, eight hours on a 10-meter telescope and one full year of integration on a 0.33-meter telescope give the same sensitivity.
I’m not saying that’s the most efficient use of that sort of small, hosted payloads. I’m saying you’d have to think a bit differently about how you could use them. That’s probably why you were confused. My suggestion is a big departure from usual practices. But it would probably take a big departure from usual practices. That’s also been the case with other sorts of small satellite constellations. For people used to the big, monolithic stand-alone missions, some of the really good ideas don’t make sense at first.
Yes, if Elon Musk used the same mass production philosophy for space telescopes as he is using for the Starlink he could build hundreds of them. A Falcon Heavy or Starship could put them in a different orbit, perhaps L4 or L5, where they would be able to last for many years. A comsat or two could provide a boosted relay to Earth.
With mass production there would be numerous spares available so you wouldn’t need to design them to be 99.99% reliable. If there are hundreds a few dozen failing wouldn’t be an issue. Imagine if every astronomer, along with grad students and serious amateurs, had their own space telescope to used how and when they needed…
I wouldn’t want SpaceX building my space telescopes. That’s a relatively specialized job. But , yes, mass production would be a key element for a large number of small space telescopes. And, yes, you’d need a relay if they weren’t in a low Earth orbit, and reliability would be from the constellation not extreme care for each, individual telescope.
Who’s paying for the ground support for all that? These things don’t actually run themselves. The launch cost is a vanishingly small percentage of the lifecycle cost of most space telescopes today – we already baseline SpaceX as a launch provider. JWST is obviously an absurdly costly example, but most things even at the 1-meter level are clearing a billion dollars to build. Just acquiring the required pointing control system is very costly. Don’t get me started on downlink. The telecom costs are incredibly high to actually bring the data back down. And once you move to somewhere good (like L2) it gets crazy.
No, you are thinking of spacecraft which are too big to fail. Making sure a spacecraft will work for it’s designed lifetime, with 99% confidence, drives up costs by orders of magnitude. Similarly, operations costs are driven up by making sure you don’t miss command the spacecraft. (E.g. triple checking everything even if it’s a cut and paste repetition of something you’ve done before.) For pointing control, check out the commercial products not the high end items poeple like LMA want to sell you. And for telecom, just put an antenna on your roof. For LEO spacecraft, that’s not only been done, it’s turned out to be a better option. (E.g. CubeSats where a link from a ham radio guy up in the mountains outperformed a professional station in a less radio quiet location.)
So instead of hundreds/thousands of cheap ground telescopes, you want to replace each of them with space telescopes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars that can’t look everywhere and can’t reasonably be serviced… That’s simply not practical.
Where do you live? I’m talking about a small satellite, and where I live, they cost less than a house. Without any of the suggested mass production or still to be flown launch vehicles, the sort of space telescope I mentioned would cost less than a million dollars. I can walk down the street to Blue Canyon Technologies and buy a very nice 6U CubeSat bus for about $300,000. Walking down the street in the opposite direction takes me to a couple of University of Colorado labs who build excellent UV instruments for spacecraft and could easily build me a 10 or 20 cm aperture one for a quarter of a million. Add a ride share launch on one of Rocket Lab’s Electrons, and the bill is still under a million dollars. For reference, when I said “down the street” I meant it literally. That’s from 55th and Arapahoe, in Boulder, Colorado, and the median cost of a house around there is about $800,000. As I said, that’s more than a spaceship. So where does your hundred million dollar estimate come from?
No, you can’t actually do that. Among other things, during your year-long integration you have a spacecraft that is rapidly aging. If it’s in low orbit (like HST), it’s being degraded by radiation, really badly. And you need to maintain the costly ground-support for that year-long integration. There’s a reason missions work the way they do – we do this exact cost-benefit analysis all the time. There are so many things that go into spacecraft engineering that the end users never see or appreciate that it’s ridiculous.
Well, let’s see. Satellites don’t rapidly degrade over the course of one year. That’s absurd. Kepler, for example, managed nine years before the reaction wheels died and several years more with limited capability. And, when it comes to operations, I spent over a decade running observation planning and integration for one for the Cassini mission’s discipline working groups. (Making me a leading TWT…) I’m very familiar with the cost of operating a spacecraft and you are very wrong about it. If scientists dictate requirements without thinking about how the spacecraft actually works, they can create a huge, expensive problem for the people who have to operate the spacecraft. With a little thought and understanding of the engineering, you can easily cut operations costs by a couple orders of magnitude. And what I suggested, a very long point and stare, is probably the easiest thing you could ask a spacecraft to do.
I totally disagree. And yes, I also spent well over a decade in the operations group (including observation planning and spacecraft and instrument maintenance) for everyone’s favorite infrared space observatory, and it’s a wholly different beast to run an active space observatory than a mission with a long cruise phase. I also worked on it’s design and software systems. We were about as cheap as it gets, and we ran over $10M a year while supporting a single instrument, which is a tiny fraction of what an observatory like HST costs. Before that I worked on any number of other astrophysics missions. As for longevity – well, have you looked at any of the CCD instruments on HST and looked at the CTE degradation from radiation? HST rarely ran more than five years without needing major repairs. Or we can talk about the degradation of the pointing systems and reaction wheel and gyro failures. You can’t bank that much money on doing one thing for a year this way, with failure looming. This is a major difference in the way the astrophysics great observatories work vs planetary missions. The latter (and Kepler as well) are basically PI-driven, I dare say, one-trick ponies. They are created for a purpose. Kepler basically did the same thing all the time, with a specific mission goal, with a handful of smaller projects added afterwards. You can’t satisfy the demands of the astronomy community that way – it’s way too diverse. The great observatories literally handle hundreds of programs per year each cutting across dozens of sub-fields, and even then they are oversubscribed in good years by a factor of 3 and on bad years by a factor of 10. So to actually meet the community demand if you wanted to move ground-based astronomy into space, you would need to introduce the equivalent of many dozens of flagship-class missions. Forget the money, there wouldn’t even be the bandwidth to bring that much data down.
Now, new modern ground-based facilities are starting to scrape the billion dollar mark, which is beginning to place them into space mission territory. I have literally engaged in multiple discussions with people over, given those budgets and the low cost of SpaceX launches, whether we wouldn’t be better off starting to move to private space missions when it is pretty much always better to observe from space. But the answer is a big no. There is no funding model at the university level capable of handling the kind of risk involved with projects of this size.
The thing is, I wasn’t talking about “great observatories” or “flagship” missions, nor “funding… capable of handling the kind of risk involved with projects of this size.” I’m speculating about what you could do with hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of small satellites. Something on the level of a large CubeSat (say 6U) or an ESPA-class spacecraft. That is affordable, no single one would have to satisfy the entire astronomical community, you’d be using lots of common software and hardware, so the non-recurring costs would be well amortized, and the risks are mitigated by the number of spacecraft. A 20% failure rate would be fine; just launch more of them. A 20% risk to a single, monolithic mission is a risk of complete failure, so lots of money goes into mitigating those risks. Which, by the way, makes those big missions few and far between, and that prompts more spending to mitigate risks.
As far as Cassini goes, it wasn’t a long cruise and a short flyby. We were actively operating and observing for essentially all of thirteen years. We didn’t even have nice, quanta of observing time, like the way HST time is allocated by orbits. The reaction wheels made it to the end of the mission, although we did have to learn about minimizing wear and tear. I work with instruments that use MCPs, not CCDs, but no one had any problems with gradually degraded sensitivity (we did have to bump up the voltage on a couple of MCPs, and you do have to do calibrations, but that’s normal and expected.)
Agree – and Elon Musk has hinted at the possibility of configuring a portion of the Starlink constellation with optical telescopes able to be used by the general public – a mini Hubble with paid access. Even a small telescope – say a 10″ Cassegrain in orbit would easily outperform a larger ground-based instrument available to the amateur astronomer. Now think about a thousand such telescopes available for rent.
Also, the problem is being overblown – when the satellites are in Earth’s shadow, they won’t be visible from the ground. The only reason they are visible is if their solar panels are in sunlight. See https://www.youtube.com/wat…
That sounds like fantasy until he actually does something concrete.
And because these satellites are in orbit, they would be visible for an hour or two in both the evening and the morning during astronomical observing hours.
There’s probably a sensible middle ground to minimize the impacts of constellations. Ground-based astronomers should consider developing a set of requirements (albedo as a function of altitude, etc.) for constellations to follow in this regard. It’s possible that many may follow it voluntarily. I’ll bet that the cost impact to implement a reasonable set of requirements might be minimal.
That could be a very good approach, and I believe it’s been successful in the past. I remember a conversation about light pollution with someone who observes at Lick Observatory. He told me that trying to get the people in San Jose to turn off the lights just didn’t work. Asking them to make specific changes in how the street lights worked (e.g. shining the light down, not up) got a much warmer reception. I suspect the same thing will be true of these huge LEO constellations. Astronomers trying to say no, period, end of sentence, will simply be ignored. Astronomers asking for well-justified and specific requirements will have a much better chance.
We’ve had very good sucess here in Florida in taming lighting near the beach in order to favor sea turtles. Folks get into it, and commnunities pass the requisite laws.
I know that astronomy and turtles are different- one doesnt normally eat an astronomer, as a point of departure. Still, properly framed it’s amazing what can happen.
On the other hand, all over Florida a group of knuckleheads from the “Seems Like” School of Philosophy have managed to completely screw up the maanner in which fertilier is used. Lesson again: framing and presentation are critical.
“dare to offer the same level of Internet access developed nations have to everyone else on the planet”
This is just categorically not true. The cost to access Starlink, and other similar constellations, will be well beyond the means of most people in developing countries.
And there are others ways to expand access to the internet that don’t involve the end of Earth-based astronomy. I really don’t think you appreciate what is going to happen. There are actual professional astronomers that are raising serious concerns and those concerns aren’t “oh no, we’ll have to make some minor changes to how we work” but rather “this will be the end of not only professional earth-based astronomy, but also amateur astronomy as a whole.” This is something that will impact literally every person on the planet. And it was approved without any meaningful consultations with people in developing countries that you claim these systems are really meant to help. It is colonialism 2.0.
I’m sorry but do you have a copy of the pricing plan for Starlink access? Check back when you do.
Do you? No, so why are you claiming they will provide affordable access to people in developing countries? Musk says it will, but has not presented any plan. Will he be setting up new ISPs in those countries? Working with existing ones? Unless you think individuals in those countries can easily afford to pay the several hundred dollars it will cost for an antenna to access Starlink, he’ll need to work with existing ISPs or setup his own.
Right now, it sure looks like Starlink is more for people in developed countries. Just another ISP option for them, basically. There is zero evidence that this an altruistic humanitarian gesture for people currently without high-speed internet access, as its defenders are claiming. This is a corporation out to make a profit. Period. Even if they have to destroy the night sky for billions of people to do it.
You have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to priorities in the Third World. Read this http://spaceref.com/explora… I currently support several projects in Nepal.
The antenna to access Starlink will cost somewhere around $100-300 USD. At least that is the goal. Cost to access per month? No one knows for sure yet, but I have seen under $50 USD per month suggested as the lowest estimate. Can the average Nepalese citizen afford that?
1. where did you get the pricing? Or are you just making this up? 2. Again you have never been to Nepal so it would not occur to you that one link can be connected to a WiFi router with repeaters so that many people can access it. Have you ever set up a portable satellite unit at 17,600 feet and the enabled WiFi that reaches across many acres? I have. Easy.
Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/St…
And here is the man himself saying the antenna will cost $200 (at least that is the hope) and it won’t be available right away:
https://www.businessinsider…
And, yes, I do realize that WiFi routers and repeaters are things that exist, Keith. Again, Starlink has not announced any plans for how people in developing countries will access their service. Despite that being a big talking point and justification for it, there has been nothing announced. If that really is one of the Starlink’s goals, they must have some idea, right? I don’t see how it is unreasonable to ask what their plan actually is, assuming they have one.
You said Again, Starlink has not announced any plans for how people in developing countries will access their service. yet you pummel Starlink for being too expensive for people in developing countries. You are trolling now. Time to move on.
I agree. SpaceX could price Starlink cheaper in developing countries because what else are the satellites going to be doing as they pass over those areas? Just like airlines sell unused seats cheaper the closer a flight gets to takeoff, Starlink could provide a different pricing model for different areas of the globe.
Project loon antennas installed on houses have not been expensive and allowed internet access post disasters.
Actually, the real professional astronomers have said nothing of the sort. They have very specifically said that they are worried but haven’t done any detailed estimates of how bad the problem could be. I have not seen a single statement from an organized group of astronomer (e.g. the IAU) saying “this will be the end of not only professional earth-based astronomy, but also amateur astronomy as a whole.” They have said it could be bad and they are worried, but nothing nearly as alarmist as you have described.
They’ve been professionally silent for an obvious reason: too little data.
Oh, no. Astronomers are fine with talking at length when they have little or no data. Dark mater and dark energy, for example, are all about things we have no data on. We infer their existence from other, indirect measurements and theory, and speculate at length on what that unobserved something can be.
What astronomers (and most scientists) don’t like to do is look incompetent or lazy. It isn’t all that hard to take the satellites, their orbits, the frequencies at which they will broadcast, etc. and estimate how it will or will not affect Earth-based astronomy. It isn’t hard, but it would take some time and effort, especially if you want to cover all sorts of different astronomical observations. It looks like no one has done that yet, and that means no one wants to be specific and get caught not having done their homework.
Please show where an astronomer said Starlink will be “the end of earth-based astronomy”, I’m pretty sure nobody said this. The op-ed is misleading people, it showed a similar quote about 100 years from now the sky will be full of light and make earth-based astronomy impossible, that has nothing to do with Starlink, that’s freaking 100 years in the future!
https://twitter.com/astro_j…
Keith Cowing is absolutely right!
So after having over 4,000 satellites in orbit, this suddenly becomes a problem when Musk launches his Starlink which is in low earth orbit and will de-orbit with thrusters or with gravity if the thrusters fail? There are many alternatives for both radio and visual astronomy, some of which are already in place. The death of astronomy by Starlink is greatly exaggerated.
Try reading the article.
“Currently, some 200 to 400 satellites orbit about 373 miles above our heads, the same altitude for the Starlink constellation. That’s bad enough for astronomical data. And Musk would like to turn that 400 into about 12,000.”
Simply not true, you must include the inactive ones. Do your homework.
Most of those 4,000 satellites now in orbit are not in low earth orbit with inclinations above 50 deg and visible from the ground at night.
Or you can look at an actual attempt to make an astronomical observation through the StarLink constellation. This is a posting from the IAU.
https://www.iau.org/public/…
Yikes.
That was shortly after launch and before they started separating. raising their orbits, reorienting etc. Much dimmer now and getting dimmer.
Except the text under the image already said this is not how it looks after the constellation is in place, so stop trying to mislead people: “please note that the density of these satellites is significantly higher in the days after launch (as seen here) and also that the satellites will diminish in brightness as they reach their final orbital altitude.”
I wonder if The Washing Post is contributing in any way of obscuring the night sky by having it’s outside light on…. hhmmmmmmm……
For a more balanced view of how much disruption the Starlink constellation will have I suggest reading this:
https://www.skyandtelescope…
I am an amateur astronomer. I view from my backyard. I can’t afford to go to the poles or space for clear skies. The sky is polluted enough with the damn stupid LED street lights with overly high output.
With this so called internet access to all nations, especially those of under-develped nations (which should never be in today’s age), how much will a extremely poor family have to pay for internet? I don’t see it being free for anybody.
Spend that money in developing those countries to be self sufficient. That’s what a good stuart (a rich one at that) should do with their money.
Help the people of Earth, not become richer from them.
Get a life and sleep better at night.
“The sky is polluted enough with the damn stupid LED street lights with overly high output.”: So why don’t you tell the city to get a life and get rid of the street light? People think street lights are useful, so they’re keeping it despite it being a hinderance to astronomy, same goes for LEO constellations, and I dare say the constellations are much more useful than street light.
Unfortunately, you probably live in a country with a democratic government. I say unfortunately, because it means your opinions may not matter if a majority of the people disagree. Specifically, a majority of the people have (apparently) decided that LED street lights should be used to provide more light for the same power, not the same lighting for much less power. That means the majority really doesn’t care about being able to see the stars. If these huge LEO constellations end up being too faint to see with the naked eye, you will have an even harder time convincing a majority of the people to care more about that, than about low-latency, high speed internet from anywhere.
I believe Keith Cowing is basically 100% correct on his points. We can’t go back to the way things were centuries, nay decades ago. Since when did certain Op-ed folk start caring so much about the night sky, too? This Op-ed is just more Elon bashing.
We do not need to go back centuries, no one is saying that. But the enjoyment of a dark sky, like nature is a public commons and human right that we should preserve in perpetuity.
Every city in the US now has dark sky ordinances for this very reason. We discourage excessive lighting and up-pointed lighting. This is no different. Any satellite should have the same design requirements. We can be forward thinking and live in harmony with this planet at the same time. It’s not too much to ask.
Well, there is an straight forward solution to this. With the advent of street lights and other city-related light pollution, it is now an accepted fact that you have to go on a vacation to some remote place to really see the night sky. (The seeing in Death Valley, for example, is fantastic.) Well, if we let SpaceX do everything Mr. Musk wants and promises, a vacation to the Moon would affordable, and the seeing there would not be affected by big LEO satellite constellations.
I feel a lot of these comments are really failing to understand what constitutes “bright” and “faint” in modern astronomy. Objects you can see with your eyes are so bright they saturate the detectors (i.e. they effectively “peg the needle”) on pretty much everything. For example, a 1-meter telescope (which is tiny by professional standards) with a typical CCD will saturate around 10th magnitude, which is 100x fainter than anything you can see with your eyes. The majority of modern (extragalactic, anyway) astronomy is actually taking place between 20th and 25th magnitude, or fainter. That is 100 million times fainter than your eyes can see. I mean seriously, we are talking about counting photons per second here even on a 5-meter piece of glass. Saying you’ll paint the satellites black really won’t make any difference.
Current generations of rapid all-sky survey telescopes image the entire (night) sky every night to 20th magnitude. And we can see _all_ the satellites if they are at all illuminated. I’ll let you in on a secret – many of these have to go to laborious lengths to scrub satellite info out of their data under direction from the DoD.
The argument about light pollution is specious – no observatory currently in use is located near a major city; they are on incredibly remote sites. Satellites are different because you can’t escape them. It matters what orbit they are in; these satellites will be zipping around, as opposed to geostationary satellites which aren’t so bad. SpaceX is talking about increasing the number of non-geostationary satellites by close to a factor of 4. And if other companies jump on this bandwagon, we’re suddenly talking about an order of magnitude.
People have been talking about these LEO communications satellite constellations for decades, but they really haven’t panned out the way they had hoped, and the satellite constellations were much smaller (~100). To be honest, I think everyone who had even heard of the SpaceX plan assumed it was all hot air, so there wasn’t a concerted planned response.
“Saying you’ll paint the satellites black really won’t make any difference.”: It would make a difference to people who just want a dark sky when viewed with the naked eye.
“SpaceX is talking about increasing the number of non-geostationary satellites by close to a factor of 4. And if other companies jump on this bandwagon, we’re suddenly talking about an order of magnitude.”: So what exactly is the impact of an order of magnitude increase to astronomy? There is a big difference between an increase from 0.1% to 1% and an increase from 10% to 100%, I think in this case the impact is closer to the former than the latter. I have seen estimates that LSST will have 1 to 4 Starlink satellites in each image, which doesn’t seem excessive at all.
“To be honest, I think everyone who had even heard of the SpaceX plan assumed it was all hot air, so there wasn’t a concerted planned response.”: That’s hardly the fault of SpaceX.
Keith,
ROGER THAT. Right on target.
The reaction is, I believe, due to the plain fact that this is in no way comparable to the occasional aircraft or ISS overflight. And this negates the remote location of professional-class observatories, as well as the few and remote locations without light pollution that keeps us from seeing our ancestors’ view of the night sky — which is what spurred human beings to try to understand and then reach for the cosmos. I do not believe it has anything to do with Mr. Musk in particular.
And it should be noted that the constellation is/should be most visible during astronomical twilight, when professional equipment generally is not observing deep-sky objects. It will, however, effect how generations of humans view the night sky, for better or worse.
Well said, Keith. I couldn’t agree more.
There’s been a lot of reporting on the websat swarms causing atronomical light pollution since the much ballyhooed 60-sat StarLink launch by SpaceX
Few if any of the blizzard of news articles surrounding StarLink fail to mention that at least four other companies are planning to launch their own constellations. The total number of websats in orbit could be as high as 21,200 by my rough calculation. Not a typo : twenty one thousand plus.
To Wit:
• SpaceX StarLink – 2800 to 12,000 !!!
• OneWeb – 1600 ( 6 already in orbit )
• Amazon-Blue Origin “ Kuiper” – 3200
• Samsung – 4600
Not counting the 88 Iridium II satellites SpaceX deployed for iridium in recent years, or any of the other orbitting broadband providers sats.
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FYI , news media : I note for the discourse here that while the Washington Post published this op-ed about satellite clutter, their owner Jeff bezos is the one and same whose Blue Origin-Kuiper project intends to launch 3200 of its opwn websats. Just sayin’
And what are the odds that WaPo, owned by Jeff Bezos, is carrying his water to put hamstring competitors for his Kuiper megaconstellation? ?