Should We Embrace – Or Sue – The Moving Lights In The Night Sky?
Toward a greater good: TMT & Starlink, Pamela Gay, Medium
“We have a choice to either deny people the internet to make it easier for people to do ground-based astronomy, in the process denying them educational, financial, and other opportunities. Alternatively, we can slow the progress of astronomy, and build into our observing plans the need to linger longer on targets to make sure we get satellite free images, while at the same time allowing Starlink and other satellite constellations to grant global access to the internet you are using to read these words. Yes, they sky will be full of satellites, but which is the greater good?”
Concerns about ground based astronomical observations: A step to Safeguard the Astronomical Sky, arXiv
“Also, as it turns out, according to the Outer Space Treaty and its progeny, there are no private companies operating in outer space, but only governments can operate in outer space. And the legal process is that the state government, this time the USA government, is legally responsible for all objects sent into outer space that launch from USA borders. That means, that it is the USA government that is responsible for the harm caused by its corporation, Starlink, sending objects into orbit that cause harm. So under this international law, any country that suffers harm by Starlink can sue the United States government in the International Court of Justice in the Hague. … So it is essential that a government, like Chile, Italy or France, sues the USA in the International Court of Justice.”
Keith’s note: Of course if the lawyers decide that SpaceX satellites are illegal it follows that all satellites can be declared illegal since a substantial number can be seen with the naked eye. Airplanes can also ruin one’s view of the sky so they’d certainly be subject to legal bans as well. And streetlights, the biggest offenders of all when it comes to ruining the night sky, would also be subject to legal action – globally. As Pamela Gay notes in her article “I can’t think of any western child who is taken out and taught the darkest skies are our cultural heritage, and if the skies are sacred and need protected, why is it so hard to pass lighting ordinances?”
There is a strange confluence here. Astronomers who would deny humanity the chance to place their scientific instruments atop high mountains to study the splendor of the universe for the benefit of all would also deny billions of their fellow humans access to the same global communications capabilities that the developed world has so as to share in that knowledge. In both cases the developed world’s elite astronomers (via lawyers) want to deny access by people in the developing world to the nature of the universe around them and the benefits of a planetary scale civilization. That is not a good thing to aspire to. It is also immensely ironic when you consider that we in the developed world have ruined our own night skies and use our global information access for p0rn, online shopping, and cat videos.
And by the way – there is some inaccuracy in the arguments about Starlink i.e. which populations it will serve. To be certain the developing world will reap the greatest benefit . But there are vast rural swaths of developed nations such as the U.S, Canada, Australia and other nations where there is no quality Internet access. Starlink will bring these people into the global community as well.
Pamela’s piece is worth reading. It is certain to annoy people – on both sides of these issues. That’s good. Maybe some people will start to work to overcome the obstacles poised by telescopes and satellites instead of deciding that they are insurmountable hurdles that can only be fought over in court.
For what its worth, below are instances of two people from the developed world interacting with people in less developed areas where the skies are dark – and filled with satellites. Both Pamela and I are reminding everyone that the choice to become a planetary-scale civilization with aspirations of becoming a space-faring civilization requires hard choices and new ways of looking at the universe around us as our increasing presence and influence changes the things that we see.
More below
My Star Trek Episode at Everest, Keith Cowing
“Away Team Encounters In The Khumbu
One night in April 2009, as I trekked through the Khumbu region toward Everest, I stayed in Dingboche (elevation 14,470 feet) at the aforementioned Hotel Arizona. I went outside to call my wife on the Iridium satphone. It was impossibly dark with a sky full of stars unlike any I had ever seen. I was just mesmerized. It was so dark that I literally walked right into a small yak that was wandering around the Hotel Arizona.
At one point my Sherpa Tashi came out. Tashi asked me why I was looking up at the sky. He had seen satellite phones before, so he knew what they did. I explained to him that it was hard to get a signal for more than a few minutes due to the high peaks surrounding us. So, I waited to see if I could spot an Iridium satellite (easy to do) and then dialed my wife. I knew I’d lose the call as soon as the satellite passed behind a mountain – but having the satellite in sight allowed me to parse my conversation.
Tashi is a very smart guy. But he was a bit perplexed about my satellite spotting. So I taught him how to do it and explained the different types of satellites and their orbits. Like his neighbors, Tashi had always assumed that all of the moving lights in the night sky were airplanes. When I told him that they were satellites lit by sunlight he asked how they could be lit by the sun at night. I asked him why some mountain peaks were still visible well after the sun goes down or glow before the sun rises. He answered matter of factly that this was because the mountains were very high. I then asked him to imagine a mountain 100 km tall – where satellites are – and said that this is why they were still visible. Having had the experience of 12 Everest summits under his belt and gazing out over vast expanses, Tashi immediately got the concept. Several days later I saw him teaching and explaining my satellite hunting tricks to several other Sherpas.
To this day I get a shiver from this – it was a very Star Trek moment – teaching someone what the “lights in the sky” were – with a piece of the Moon in my pocket on my way to meet a space traveller. Tashi was very psyched about that. But this was not my only Star Trek moment in Nepal.”
Toward a greater good: TMT & Starlink, Pamela Gay, Medium
“Our shared sky
I have been looking sky ward my entire life. I still remember where I was the first time I say a satellite pass overhead. It was the summer of ’89 and I was part of a People-to-People science exchange to the Soviet Union. I was the second youngest of 20 some odd high school students who were there to study astronomy and take place in random recreational activities. That night, a group of us were camping not too far from a glacier in the Caucus mountains, and because being a teenager is hard, I’d left the tent I shared with a bunch of others and sat on a rock. The sky was the darkest I’d ever seen — we were hours drive from even a village — and as I sat their contemplating the things a 15 year old girl contemplates, I saw a tiny speck of light moving in a way I’d never seen. As I stared, I realised it could only be one thing — a satellite. That dot of light made me feel less alone and filled me with awe.”
The lawsuits would be just for PR as there are no real options legally to enforce rulings by the International Court if the U.S. government doesn’t agree to follow it’s decision. So all it will do is make astronomers look elitist and indifferent to the needs/desires of others, just as was the case with Mt. Graham and the TMT. Really do they want to create that type of negative image for their field?
Rather than threatening lawsuits astronomers should instead start planning not lawsuits but how to start building inexpensive observatories in space or on the Moon using Falcon Heavy and Starship launch systems.
Or looking for Earth-based solutions. I know it adds to readout noise, but the higher-end amateurs (and some professionals I know) have gotten very good results from “lucky imaging”. That’s taking many, many, short exposures (as in tens per second) and then summing together the best, where atmospheric distortion was minimal. For satellites, they wouldn’t even need to toss out whole images. Just the few pixels per image containing the pesky satellite. That might not be a perfect solution, but I’m not hearing about astronomers looking for solutions; just complaining and debating about exactly how terrible the mega-constellations are/will be.
With respect, I believe you’re missing the principal objections of the astronomical community, which centers on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), an 8.3-m telescope with a 3.2 Gpixel detector array which will image the entire sky visible form the southern hemisphere every three nights.
The issue there is not with adaptive optics (which usually add frequent imaging in order provide only the best wavefront imaging), but with detecting and tracking objets, including very faint objects, which are changing from night to night. I don’t know what apparent magnitude range the Starlink satellites will have but I pretty certain the limiting magnitude of the VCRO is going to be well below what that’s going to be.
The Observatory will produce one a Petabyte of image data (200K images) per year, and obviously has data pipeline software in place to deal with various transients (aircraft, &c.), but scrubbing every image for the potential presence of thousands of transients, and remove their effects on difference images, will be a non-negligible computing task. I want to know if Starlink is going to pay for the development, testing, hardware procurement, and electrical power to run that additional software.
“I want to know if Starlink is going to pay for the development, testing, hardware procurement, and electrical power to run that additional software.”
That is silly .. are astronomers going to pay the billions without internet for loss of educational, and business opportunities because they are denying them internet access?
“[E]ducational, and business opportunities” You mean streaming video, online games, cat videos, and p*rn? Certainly, Internet access opens business and educational opportunities, and discussions like this one, as well as garden of misinformation (dezinformatsiya) in social media, but it is neither an unalloyed good nor purely evil. The best argument for universal Internet access is the equalization of opportunity, but how many areas without broadband access today will be able to afford high-speed access via satellite? What do the ground terminals cost, what will monthly access cost — even if the price is driven down by competition from Amazon’s Project Kuiper? I have never seen even guesstimates of those costs, but I think it is telling that Mr. Musk has been thinking in terms of Starlink revenues paying for the development, manufacture, and operations of numerous Starship launches.
And no astronomer is “denying” anyone Internet access, but one segment of the research community has been damaged, to a cost extent I don’t know how to estimate well, though it seems to me they would be able to bring suit for damages if the cost were serious enough.
I spent 6 weeks in rural Nepal in 2009 – with a BGAN unit strapped to my back. I saw what actual Nepalis did with their limited Internet and cellphone access – they used it for commerce and for their children’s education. Western biases abound in these arguments when it comes to cost. No one sells U.S. style internet service there. They use locally produced phones with open source software and they charge rates that people can actually afford with government subsidies. I saw people who made a living shaping rocks for buildings with tools they used with their bare hands taking tea breaks and using their old recycled cellphones to call people.
So what is driving the demand for additional bandwidth there, if any? And how much do you think it would cost, even sliced and diced a the one or two ground unit per village level? Or do we have to wait for Mssrs. Musk and Bezos to determine that?
I just have the opinion that the sooner our planet becomes inter connected and the whole planet can choose to talk about a grumpy cat video, the better we will be as a species. Equal access to knowledge at the speed of light.
Tell that to people in Kashmir, most of whom are still cut off from Internet access for the last five months, or to the people of China, locked behind the seat Firewall, or the people of Iran, or…. The Internet is a great idea that came up against the insistence of some states that their governments should control their citizens’ access to uncomfortable ideas from abroad.
Which again points up the value of Starlink. I suspect that just like a lot of folks in Iran have illegal satellite dishes and subscriptions to satellite TV you will see the same for Starlink. Not part of their business model, but one of the predictable consequences of it.
It is not that they have been damaged by someone who should be paying attention to them. It is that they *assumed* their environment would not change, and failed to plan for changes that have been physically possible for decades. These changes would have happened long before 2001, if the political community had not found zero political profit in them. They *failed* to plan well enough.
Would you say that failure was as large as Iridium’s, the only constellation in existence before Starlink?
Larger.
Iridium was planned on:
1.) The willingness of the administration in 1989 to allow substantive pad priority for launches placing their sats in orbit. The 1993-2000 administration utterly reversed such priority requests, causing steep delays in getting the birds launched.
2.) The 1989 administration’s willingness to stand with Iridium in negotiations with foreign governments’ telephone monopolies. The 1993-2000 administration not only reversed that, but added its own regulatory barriers beyond what had been promised previously.
Which together caused:
3.) Long delays in getting Iridium to orbit so that ground-based cell-phone providers could eat their market, while Iridium sat waiting for pad priority.
By contrast, the planners for large telescopes merely had to believe that the market could do what it usually does to increase productivity by large factors, and they could calculate that at some point these constellations would multiply. Of course, a belief that 1993-2000 attitudes were the *norm* has been the downfall of many academically inspired projects. But that is simply another example of bad planning.
Yes, it is no different than someone who buys a condo with a view of the sea and then gets mad because someone builds a new structure that blocks it. They could fight it during the permit process, but once it’s built they are out of luck.
Or, say, someone who fishes in a stream, and then gets mad because someone is dumping mine tailings?
So far, I’ve only seen astronomers showing the worst, most alarmist images of this. They leave out the fact that it’s only a problem near the horizon and a few hours from sunrise/sunset, that SpaceX is trying to mitigate the problem, that it might be solvable with additional scheduling or data processing, etc.
I’d really like to see an unbiased assessment of the issue. Following your analogy, can someone who fishes in a stream reasonably complain if someone else’s dog urinates in the same stream?
I’m not sure when the analogy fades away. Certainly one dog or person won’t make a different; 100 dogs is different, which gets closer to the point: diminution of a shared and non-renewable resource is the heart of much environmental thinking.
You’ve been arguing that the satellites’ effect is minimal and impacts astronomers in limited ways (this is how I understand your point). I’d say: so what? How much environmental degradation is acceptable? Answer: ‘None’ is the starting point.
Upstream degradation of rivers and streams is just plain wrong.
I don’t think “none” is a good starting point, since I don’t think it’s every possible to do anything without having _some_ impact. I don’t want to make “do nothing” the starting point.
But I’m not really saying the impact on astronomers (or people who simply like a starry night) will minimal. I’m saying the claims about how bad it will be seem exaggerated. To detour into politics, I think this, like many issues, is something only a small number of people care about (on both sides of the debate.) In a democracy, that means it’s going to be decided by the advocates convincing or failing to people who don’t have a stake in the matter. I’m trying to push back on the claims, and make sure that advocacy has a factual basis rather than being based purely on rhetoric.
Why? It is not the fault of SpaceX that astronomers didn’t take LEO Constellations into consideration when they designed it.
I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. LSST has been on the planning boards since the 2001 Astronomy and Astrophysics decadal survey, and Starlink was cooked up when, exactly?
Starlink was not the first large LEO communications constellation proposed, it is merely the first one being rolled out. Proposals for other Large LEO communications constellations dated to the 1990’s. Teledesic for example proposed a constellation of around 1,000 LEO communication satellites.
It’s incredible to think they never considered any of them would be built given the need for global Internet access in remote areas.
Unfortunately, Thomas, it’s not incredible, …it’s just enormously predictable as an academic behavior. The academic hierarchies that guide such large projects are used to ignoring everyone but the government (and the few large donors) that fund their projects, …and their paychecks.
Since government wasn’t doing such things in 2001, it was of no concern to the academic planners. In short not only was their planning horizon too short, it was decidely too narrow. Now academia wants their baliwik protected from change.
Teledesic failed by 2002. The NSF funded the (then) LSST project in 2014, though privately funded work had begun before that. When and what were those other proposed constellations, and how realistic were any of them?
The fact that the only one in progress, and the only other one likely to get off the ground, are funded by entrepreneurs with massive egos as well as deep pockets, may have meant that after the failure of Iridium ($4B in the hole), no one but the US government, which bailed out Iridium and found a fire sale buyer, took constellations (regardless of numbers and orbital altitude) seriously for twenty years. Proof that you knew better will be a cancelled check for your investment in one or more of them.
OneWeb was announced in 2014, Starlink was announced in 2015, so plenty of time for LSST team to work them into the designs.
Just because Teldesic failed doesn’t mean the idea wasn’t good, just that that business model didn’t close at the time. It’s not Elon Minsk’s fault that you had so little understanding of the need for satellite telecommunications.
Just going by the data: two attempts before Starlink, both failures, one colossal. Hopefully, Mr. Musk’s and Mr. Bezos’s efforts will do much better.
But you should look at your comments: space always good, anything else always bad. It’s possible to be passionately involved in the success of the exploration and commercial exploitation of space without eating every disk of dog food.
Again, I’m not convinced based on the comparison to planetary missions I’ve been involved in. During design reviews, projects get asked about all sorts of unlikely events. Things like, “What if there is a 9th magnitude earthquake in southern California right before orbital insertion? If it takes out your operations facility at JPL _and_ the Deep Space Network antennas at Goldstone, what would you do?”
Just because the first company to try to build a mega-constellation went broke, there were lots of others talking about it. Iridium did actually their satellites up, which is all that matters to astronomy. The fact that their business plan and marketing were junk didn’t make the Iridium flashes go away. So the idea that, at some point in the future, there could be a mega-constellation for the observatory to deal with is something they should have considered.
(Oh, and something like the earthquake thing did happen to the Juno mission. The 2009 L’Aquila earthquake literally brought the roof down on the communications and gravity science hardware ASI was in the process of building.)
“What if there is a 9th magnitude earthquake in southern California right before orbital insertion?”
An interesting insight, Dr. C. Question: Would a question like that be asked by science-reviewers, or MBA-reviewers?
Usually engineers, or people who have had hands on experience with spacecraft operations. An MBA probably wouldn’t think that way, and my scientific colleagues who do theory and data analysis wouldn’t either.
The correct answer, by the way, is that the project has a backup operations center (Denver is a common location, since many of these spacecraft are built by Lockheed-Martin.) And that all the critical commands are going up a week in advance, with backup communications opportunities schedules, allowing you to use the DSN sites at Madrid or Canberra. But the real point of the question is to see if you’ve thought of unlikely possibilities and how to deal with them, not necessarily to find out how you would deal with them.
“[T]here were lots of others talking about it.”
Talk is proverbially cheap, and worth listening to for every penny it’s worth. I can’t imagine why anyone in any line of business would ever listen to people who keep talking but never do anything.
Starlink was announced in 2015. Do you know of any previous news about it?
The Iridium constellation was up before there were any firm plans for the Rubin observatory. During development of the observatory, it would have been wise _and_ reasonable for someone to ask, “what if someone orbits something similar but worse?” That wouldn’t have been a ludicrous or absurd question. Someone had launched Iridium and there were proposals for other constellations.
Dr. Matula! Your comments are sometimes so… exasperating, and entertaining!… that half the time I can’t tell if you are, as they say, pulling our collective legs!
LMAO.
But keep it up.
I wouldn’t call the Rubin Observatory the principal concern of astronomers. It’s been cited as one of the telescopes which will be most heavily affected. But to me, “principal concern” implies, “well if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t really mind.” That isn’t what I’ve been hearing in the press or at conferences.
But astronomical observatories do have to deal with lots of artificial, environmental issues. One reason observatories are built in remote places is to avoid light pollution from cities. Despite the added cost. The Rubin Observatory has or is developing that software to remove artificial transients. They did it at their own expense, rather than asking the airlines to pay, and they did it instead of asking the Chilean government to reroute air traffic. So why expect SpaceX to pay for modifying, improving and giving that existing software way more CPU time? (Which, by the way, probably costs less than developing and testing it in the first place.)
If you can’t see the difference, I don’t know if I can explain it. But here goes: the aircraft, meteorites, and so on expected in the design phase are removed from the data by algorithms designed and paid for during the design phase (now long past). Mr. Musk’s overweening desire to make a buck off poor countries’ and rural areas’ demand (TBD?) for broadband Internet in order to pay for his dream of sending thousands of “colonists” to Mars at a time when we have no good idea how to sustain human life on the surface or even in the first few meters under the surface of the planet has introduced a totally new, unexpected, and far, far more intrusive contamination of the data.
Astronomers and the data scientists who work with them are clever people, so I’m pretty confident that some solution, partial or nearly complete, will be developed. The cost of development of that solution and the operating costs are unknown, and were never budgeted for. Should the American taxpayer have to pay up for those costs (though the NSF), or should Mr Musk and SpaceX Starlink, who introduced the nuisance, be responsible. I believe that’s a fairly standard basis for a suit in tort law, assuming the plaintiff can prove that the defendant has a legal duty to act in a particular way. Since I don’t even play a lawyer on TV, I don’t know if there are liability provisions in a permit to launch payloads from a US government-owned facility. But if a launch vehicle dumped its payload on a populated area, for instance, you’d think there would be some liability.
The cost of developing software to handle satellite trails is the cost of doing business (which in this case is ground based astronomy), I don’t see how you can charge that to satellite owners. LSST team already spent money developing algorithms to handle existing satellites, isn’t taxpayers already paying for these? I don’t see how you can change this just for Starlink.
Besides, the astronomers do not own the sky, the sky is a shared resource that can be used by anyone, astronomers do not have priority over satellites, so legally I don’t see any sort of argument can be made for SpaceX to pay for the cost. SpaceX themselves are spending additional money to reduce the albedo of the satellites, who’s paying for that? Clearly not the astronomers, who are demanding this to be done, SpaceX will just treat it as part of doing the business. So both sides have to spend some money, and since neither have priority over the resource, I think each should be paying for their own costs, which is what is happening.
Or to use an analogy, let’s say you are used to drive to work on a public road that has very little traffic, so you feel pretty good since you can drive very fast without hindrance. Then came company X, who put a lot of buses for the poor on the road, which slowed down traffic, and makes you unhappy since you now have to spend more time on the road. Company X certainly introduced nuisance for you, can you sue company X for the additional time you took to work? I don’t see how.
Of course if a bus hit your car then it would a different matter, this would be the equivalent of your “launch vehicle dumped its payload on a populated area” example. The latter is already covered by existing law, but there’s no law that says you have priority on the road over buses.
“I don’t see how you can charge that to satellite owners. “
My conclusion, too, at least initially. However, anyone polluting is expected to clean it up nowadays. It’s true that there’s a lot of ambiguity; but the fairness of it is appealing; clean up your mess.
It isn’t quite that clearcut. Cars, for example, do pollute. And no law that I’m aware of requires drivers to clear that up. There are laws on how much a car can pollute, but not to the point of zero-emissions (yet.) And one of my personal gripes is motorcycles and noise pollution. So it’s about a balance between competing needs and desires, the magnitude of the problem and the cost of doing something about it.
In the case of the mega-constellations, we don’t have any laws that even call the light from satellites “pollution.” We might need some legislation on the subject. But I’d expect them to be based on actual numbers on the impact this has to observatories, some public sense (surveys?) of the esthetic impact, and some assessment of the social and economic benefits. And the laws might take the form of a maximum brightness of the satellites (which SpaceX is already working on) or a tax with the revenue dedicated to whatever needs to be done to mitigate the impact.
I wonder what there is to learn from this:
Here in Florida, regulations governing lights along the beach are quite strict; lighting confuses baby turtles. The rules are obeyed; who doesn’t love baby turtles?
There is which is why all commercial launches in the U.S. required a license from the FAA AST and insurance.
But your argument is more along the lines of somebody who buys a condo with a view of the ocean and has someone blocks it with a new building.
In the case of that condo, there are some places where the local zoning laws might allow a lawsuit. But if the city government had approved the project, that would settle the matter. Well, probably. The city government itself might be sued if they hadn’t followed their own rules (e.g. notifying people of the plan, having a period for public comment, etc.)
I think that’s analogous. There are no laws identifying light pollution from satellites as a nuisance, so the lawsuit is on shaky grounds from the start. SpaceX can point to approval from the appropriate regulatory agencies, including them checking off the box for “no environmental impact.” So I think they’re on safe ground. On the other hand, there has been talk about suing the government, on grounds acted improperly by saying there would be no environmental impact. I don’t think that’s going to fly, but I can see the courts hearing such a case.
This is settled law. Land uses and building heights are established and available to buyers in advance. No chance of a win.
Anyway, equating a piece of privately owned soil with the universally-shared sky just won’t wash.
Actually, I see that as poor planning. Of the four planetary missions I’ve been involved in ever spacecraft had some major problem after launch. That’s what budget reserves are for, and it is poor planning to spend them down to zero by the end of the design phase.
In any case, you seem to be pretty vitriolic about this mega-constellation being private and for profit. Would you feel differently if it were a non-profit collaboration between countries with remote areas needing better internet connections? That’s not a crazy idea. Improving internet coverage in northern Canada was in the Liberal Party’s manifesto during last year’s election. Would you be as upset about the harm to astronomy and insist that Canada should pay for the extra software development?
Groundbased observatories, even ambitious and colossally expensive ones such as VCRO, are on so much more constrained budgets than major NASA’s or ESA’s (the two agencies with which I’m familiar) missions that they can afford only so much contingency planning. I don’t know what sort of contingency VCRO carried through what NASA would call B/C/D, but it had to have been less than the 30% or so that appears to be standard for major space missions now.
It’s not altogether amiss to compare VCRO, the number one priority groundbased project in the 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics decadal surgery, with JWST, which had the same top billing was for space missions in the 2001 survey. As of 2-3 years ago, at least, VCRO was (barely) within budget, while JWST has blown through every cost and schedule estimate in its long, difficult development history. I don’t believe VCRO compares with JWST in terms of the number of not-ready-for-primetime technologies that could and did drive cost and schedule, but they are both aspirational missions that appear to promise breakthrough science…. and VCRO is about 18 times less expensive, mostly because it’s on the ground.
The comparison to spacecraft may be stretching it. But the idea of having some budget reserves is universal. It’s just when it’s my own, personal bank account, I call it saving up some money for a rainy day. If someone can do that and doesn’t, and then runs into an unexpected problem, I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy.
But how much money are we actually talking about? The NSF’s 2018 budget lists a $473.0 million cost for the entire observatory. I don’t think modifying existing software would be more than a percent of that. If fact, I suspect it would be within the scope of a thesis for a graduate student, and that’s quite cheap. Or, if even that is more than the observatory can afford, you could always ask Mr. Bezos to make a donation. It would be pocket change for him and a nice addition to the one-upmanship war he and Mr. Musk are in.
I’m also not sure if CPU time is a real concern. Yes, about 200,000 images per year, at 3.2 gigapixels per image, is a whole lot of data. But let’s put that in perspective. It’s the equivalent of a 1000 x 1000 x 3000 integer array processed once every two and a half minutes. I put it in those terms, because that’s about the size of the arrays used in some plasma physics simulations I’m familiar with. And those require seconds to do dozens of calculations per cell, running on under 1024 cores. I can’t see that as a challenge for a major observatory. Especially not since they are planning on much more extensive, routine processing of the same data.
Just so I understand your point, Mr. Sun: Are you drawing some sort of comparison between the anticipated sky condition after all of the birds are aloft (and a condition not fully understood, I would add), and perhaps a Superfund Site here on earth? To the extent that clean-up becomes a taxpayer problem?
It’s an apt comparison in some ways; like air, streams, and oceans, the sky is a shared resource, and ought to be subject to laws protecting sky quality to all of us.
It would seem to me that satellites are very predictable in their orbits, and therefore, you should be able to calculate with a high probability when one will pass into the field-of-view; furthermore, the satellite transients will have relatively high frequency signal components when compared those from distant observations; ergo, the interference from the satellites could be compensated for using some straight-forward DSP (much like removing regular and predictable…i.e. non-random…higher-frequency background noise from music or other lower-frequency data signals).
It’s not quite that simple. One of the advertised Starlink capabilities is autonomous maneuvering to avoid orbital debris. So the orbits aren’t completely predictable. Certainly not to the few pixel level in a major telescope. Of course, SpaceX would know almost immediately, and I could imagine a web site updated on a minute-by-minute basis. But it is extra infrastructure.
Yes…SpaceX needs to know the exact position and orbit of every satellite in the constellation in near real time, so that data could be provided to feed any compensation algorithms.
In fact…after a discussion with another engineer here…SpaceX (as a good corporate citizen) could provide a box with built-in GPS that would take a data feed directly from the Starlink constellation with the necessary data and then it could output the compensation information. This would preserve any SpaceX proprietary data content.
ok. Can’t software easily detect an object that is very fast moving and in a straight line?
I should think so. The size of the data set is impressive. It sounds like they’re talking about averaging 20-odd, 3 gigapixel images per day. I really think this is a solvable problem. It seems (at least to me) like a fair number of astronomers would rather solve it by saying “don’t do that” than by finding a technical solution.
I don’t know how strong a case they’d have, but it would be smart to sue anyways to raise public attention towards the issue and provide a stronger prod on the mega-constellation companies to try and mitigate the light pollution.
I feel like this is a bigger risk than fans of StarLink realize. Other countries can just straight up make it illegal for StarLink to contract to sell broadband in their territory in they want to, so if their citizens decide they’re pissed about the night sky being changed forever without their input they can take that route.
Moreover, StarLink and the mega-constellations are not the only way to hook up the unconnected parts of the world to the internet. We already have fiber-optic cables all over the place, and cellular internet service just gets better and better.
Or they could use that as an excuse to prevent their citizens from having unrestricted and uncensored access to the Internet. And that of course is the appeal of Starlink, the inability of nations to block or censor the Internet as is the case when cables or towers are used.
“We already have fiber-optic cables all over the place, and cellular internet service just gets better and better.” Simply not true. Most of the world as well as huge rural parts of the US, Australia, etc. are under-served or not served by the internet. By all means let us try to mitigate interference with ground observatories by satellites, but Keith Cowing is absolutely right to ask about the greater good and correctly say we should face hard choices in moving ahead.
Yes, Starlink needs authorization from each country to provide service in that country, but I bet the countries and their citizens care much more about internet access than some lights in the sky that they couldn’t even see unless in absolute darkness. Australia is already authorizing Starlink and other constellations.
And no, mega-constellations are not the only way to connect the world, but it’s the most environmentally friendly way, and investors are betting it’s the cheapest way. If optical fiber is cheaper, than mega-constellations wouldn’t be able to make a profit and the satellites will be de-orbited. On the other hand, if mega-constellations survives and thrives, then it would have proven they’re more economically feasible than laying down optical fiber everywhere. So it’s all self-regulatory by the market.
Is it? Fiber-optic cable can be recycled. Mega-constellation satellites in LEO have to be regularly launched up on rockets (which emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases), and they de-orbit every few years. You have to treat them all as disposable.
And fiber-optic cables have to be buried in trenches built by construction equipment or laid over the sea floor by ships. They also have to be manufactured and transported to the construction site. Care to compare the C02 from those sources with a rocket launch?
You don’t have to treat them as disposable. They’re designed to be refreshed every few years because Moore’s law says you get at 2 fold increase in performance every 2 years, so it’s a good idea to refresh the hardware every few years since the new hardware gives a lot better performance. So the emissions are not generated for nothing, they’re generated in exchange for higher performance.
Now try to do the same with optical fiber, can you imagine the work needed to refresh your entire optical fiber network every 5 years?
What if starlink adds a deep space facing camera how much better science would a constellation of those cameras be compared to largest ground based visible telescope that these could block?
That would be a tiny telescope. And a telescope’s requirements for its orbital platform are nothing like those for Starlink satellites. Better to build dedicated satellites adopting the “mass production” aspect of Starlink. With Falcon Heavy launch prices being what they are, launch cost is reasonable for a telescope that could be lofted well above the orbits of most satellites, IMHO.
I was just thinking you could do like the very large array does where it uses the combined view of multiple antennas to mimic a larger telescope (as big as the furthest distance between two of it’s antennas)
The problem (or the challenge) is that you need to know the positions of the antennas to a fraction of a wavelength. Or do some sort of beam splitting and mixing. Those things work on the ground, where the antennas don’t move relative to each other and their locations can be surveyed to high precision. I know people who think they can do radio astronomy from a constellation of CubeSats, but that’s about as far as the state of the art goes.
Starlink operates at or above 24Ghz, which has a wavelength of 1.25cm, or about 0.5″.
I had no idea that such accuracy was possible or even necessary.
It’s possible. It would take work, but it’s possible. However, I wasn’t talking about what the StarLink satellites need to do (or can do, almost certainly.) That’s the requirement for combining the signals from multiple, StarLink-sized satellites and turning them into a multi-antenna radio telescope. To just use the StarLink satellites doesn’t require anything like that precision.
That’s possible with radio because you can record both amplitude and phase with an antenna and wavelengths are large compared to the precision that the relative positions of the nodes can be measured with.
Optical interferometry would require beaming light from the various nodes to be combined at a single sensor, which alone makes it far more difficult, and also requires keeping the nodes positioned to within tens of nanometers. You’re not making a optical interferometer smallsat swarm with anything resembling current technology.
And with vehicles capable of cheaply lifting large payloads, you have less reason to try. That’s the kind of thing you do if you’re limited to tiny payloads and launch costs high enough to justify the additional cost and complexity of interferometry.
I’m not so sure you can’t do it with a cubesat (or a small sat, or especially a Starlink sized sat) – GRAIL measured changes of 1 micron between the two satellites using a Ka-band link. ST7 (a LISA pathfinder for mmWave gravity wave sensing) controlled the position between two objects with RMS error of 2nm using laser interferometers and micronewton thrusters. Considering visible light is 500nm, that’s pretty good.
I can’t find the exact number, but GRACE-FO (the next generation version of GRACE and GRAIL) has demonstrated optical ranging between the two spacecraft. I think it ended up being an order of magnitude better than GRACE and GRAIL. But I still think multi-spacecraft, optical interferometry is going to need some serious time and money to develop.
LISA Pathfinder cost over $400 million dollars. The issue isn’t that it can’t be done, it’s that it’s an adaptation to high launch costs and low payload capacities. You aren’t going to inflict the costs and difficulties of an optical interferometer swarm on yourself if you can just launch a single bigger satellite.
SunRISE is a mission that does radio interferometry with 6 spacecraft in a super-GEO orbit to image the Sun. Hopefully launching in 2023. That will be a pathfinder for bigger arrays, more precision, etc.
I like SunRISE, and maybe I can talk them to spend a little time looking at Jupiter and Saturn… But it only goes up to 25 MHz. That’s 10 meter and longer wavelengths. One meter position knowledge is probably enough, and they found a nice trick to use GPS for that (previously it was believed GPS could not be used from an orbit above the GPS satellites.) And, at 25 MHz, sending down full phase information doesn’t require insane data rates. All the difficulties scale with frequency, and SunRISE is pushing the state of the art.
SunRISE will send all the data down, pre-correlation, so looking at Jupiter is easy – in fact, it’s a calibration target. If Earth-Jupiter is 90 degrees from Earth-Sun, then you’ll be in the null of the dipoles, but otherwise, you’ll see Jupiter just fine. There’s plans for student projects along those lines.
You can use GNSS from the “other side” of the Earth – the path length is 3x longer so the signal is down 10dB, but it still works. Fortunately, also, the GNSS satellites have sidelobes that are higher than the “required minimum level”.
There are people proposing using GNSS at the Moon, with gain antennas pointing at Earth to get adequate signal levels. The geometry is kind of horrible, but it would work, at least in the Earth-Moon axis. The “cross range” measurement wouldn’t be great.
You really want your telescopes well above the Earth. Having a planet blocking half of the sky is annoying, and having which half it blocks move all over as the satellite orbits is even worse. But JPL has recently flown a CubeSat and demonstrated enough pointing stability for exoplanet transit studies. So that’s not a problem. Now, if you could get the communications and navigation up to doing interferometry, that would really make up for the individual telescopes being small. That’s very challenging, but it might just be a better investment than sinking a few billion on a 6.5 meter telescope with an origami sunshade.
To equal the collecting area of the 8.3-m diameter VCRO would require a ~ 11 cm diameter telescope on each of the ~ 6000 satellites able to point at the same hemisphere of the sky (and designed to be orbiting by the mid 2020s); that is, half of the 12,000 meant to be in orbit by then. Not tiny, but probably not enough mass to affect the number of satellites per launch effectively.
The more serious challenge would be to reproduce the 0.7 arc sec expected median (seeing limited) spatial resolution of the VCRO. Then the simple-minded resolution limit in the blue/long-wave UV (VCRO goes down to 320 nm) would require a ~ 20 cm diameter objective. Maybe not all that easy to accommodate on a 1.1 x 0.7 x 0.7 m satellite, but the SpaceX folks are clever. I’d be more concerned about cleanliness and the economics of producing 12000 telescopes and detectors of that quality to meet an aggressive launch schedule.
Why no just build it on the Moon? Solves two problems, a purpose for the Moon Village and avoiding Starlink.
$$ (many many of them). Developing a totally new, robotic deployment system or putting it all on human rated cargo vessels would be cost prohibitive compared with doing it on earth.
What makes you think the Moon won’t be orbited by lots of bright spacecraft? And at lower orbits perhaps (since there’s no atmosphere). It’s bad enough that there’s a potential radio frequency interference (RFI) issue from orbiters with proposed farside radio telescopes.
The number is likely to be far less simply due to less demand. As for farside radio telescopes, do you really think that humanity will let astronomers monopolize half a world for the benefit of a few scientists? Sorry, but the day when astronomer/priests could forbid the peasants from certain holy areas like mountain tops ended centuries ago.
Ironic really, modern astronomers ignored the beliefs that indigenous astronomer/priests elites had that certain mountains should be off limits so they could commune with the heavens and built their observatories there anyway are now whining because society is going to ignore their arguments that certain areas should be off limits for their elite benefit.
I think more that there should be:
a) some regulation on spurious emissions from satellites (there aren’t any now) that are reasonable and implementable – perhaps a limit on “reflectivity” that is comparable to current state of the art would be reasonable
b) some sort of clearinghouse mechanism for satellite position information at a sufficient accuracy (post processed perhaps) – there might have to be some process to protect sensitive levels of precision – much as is done for some spacecraft and aircraft today. In any case it doesn’t have to be real-time.
c) telescope designers (whether radio or optical) will have to adjust to take this kind of thing into account.
The days when you could make a big “photon bucket” and assume there’s no external emitters are at least a century ago.
To be realistic, there are much bigger spectrum allocation issues in space to deal with.
Light pollution on the Moon might be a problem eventually. But that’s just a continuation of a problem astronomers have been dealing with for over a century. The original major observatories like Greenwich and Paris became nonviable as cities grew around them. The Paris Observatory opened a campus at Meudon, half way between Paris and Versailles. That’s now surrounded by suburbs. The University of California build on the Lick observatory on Mount Hamilton, before San Jose was just a small town.
Now we’ve got observatories on a remote mountain in Chile, above serious desert, and there having problems with the mega-constellations. Even low Earth orbit isn’t considered a very desirable location for space telescopes, with L2 or a slow drift on a solar orbit being preferred. Astronomers keep moving to more and more remote locations to stay away from things which mess up the seeing. And people keep moving in and settling those remote locations. And the astronomers have to move further out. Why should the far side of the Moon be any different?
As you note, those spacecraft are roughly a meter on a side (ESPA-class) not CubeSats. Why make the calculation for 11-cm mirrors? For a 50-cm primary, that’s a more manageable 275 satellites to get the same collecting area as a 8.3 meter telescope.
Without getting into any accommodation issues, for space science hardware (especially something that’s never been built before) extensive NASA costing experience says it doesn’t matter if you’ve built similar instruments of different sizes before, and the cost goes as something more than the third power of the mass. So more, smaller is probably cheaper than fewer, larger.
That said, wouldn’t put it past Mr. Musk to build faster, better, cheaper than NASA.
That extensive NASA costing experience has been proven to be very inaccurate in many cases. Parametric cost analysis is based on tons of bad assumptions. That includes scaling from past spacecraft (which means you will always do things in the same way and never learn from experience) and guessing about which parameters matter (which opens the door to lots of false correlations.)
YMMV, but any time I was in a group that claimed we could do it faster and cheaper, the costing folks tried just smiling and being polite but eventually the laughing started. And they were right, every time.
I suspect (and correct me if I’m wrong) that most of the people involved had experience with past NASA projects and spacecraft. Maybe not the ones making claims about doing it faster and cheaper, but the ones those people depended on to make it happen. That’s an institutional culture issue. The parametric modes assume you’re going to develop the next spacecraft the same way you did the last one. And if the same people are doing the work and instinctively stick to doing it the same way, that’s not a bad assumption.
I can say increasing payload mass should reduce cost, since you don’t have to optimize the hardware as much. But if I do that, and double the mass, a whole lot of scientists involved would try to double the capabilities of their instruments and optimize to the level they are used to. Unless someone senior is watching out for that, and stomps on that sort of behavior like a bug, it will end up costing more, not less.
That’s also one reason why the “new space” companies are doing things which make the cost models explode. They aren’t doing things in the same way. By virtue of hiring new people who aren’t used to doing things in a particular way and really making a fresh start, they really aren’t doing things the same old way.
SpaceX has shown that building rockets need not be done at the rate of pre-industrial craft industry, so I don’t doubt he could do the same for optics. If not, the current AFRL project for building mirrors in orbit could build them, and much larger as well.
The instrument cost model (NICM) has cost going roughly as the cube root of mass, not as the cube.
But see fcrary’s comment about model validity.
Sorry! My mistake.
C. 2015, the model for “planetary” optical systems was:
Total Instrument B/C/D Cost = 1,208 * TotalMass^0.43 * TotalMaxPwr^0.50 ,
with slightly different exponents for earth orbiting, microwave, &c. instruments.
For “optics” subsystems, the model was simply:
1,509 * OpticsMass^0.54
And naturally, as it was NASA, that was the cost for building one or two instruments, not hundreds or thousands.
Suggesting (if I had faith in those models) that a 50 cm mirror would cost about 12 times as much as a 11 cm one, and have 21 times the collecting area.
It depends. Last time Keith raised this issue, I commented strongly against interfering with science. Many pointed out that the impact could likely be entirely mitigated. Some objected when I compared ‘orbital pollution’ to any other sort of stream or air or other pollution.
And that’s what it is, folks: pollution. When fishery stocks are near depletion and the Feds step in to let them rebuild, many make the inexplicable argument that the government is interfering with a way of life. We have a similar situation here.
And I’d make a longer-term and far more esoteric argument here: keep in mind that our knowledge of the Universe we inhabit is limited at best; any non-baryonic matter is simply a big question mark in every credible theory; we have so little understanding of it that the best name so far is ‘dark matter’.
We nibble at the truth; COBE, for instance, established that the Universe was not only expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating (and there’s a really great example where ‘seems like’ is just wrong; indeed a case can be made from COBE (and, later, WMAP and Planck) that the Universal homogeneity, a basic tenet of physics, is an important path for future research.
Nobody knows what will come of basic research. But serious improvements in, for instance, spacecraft propulsion, will come from new ideas, new concepts, new understandings about how this wacky place is put together. All of this depends on prioritizing observation.
Or not: perhaps painting them black resolves the issue.
Note COBE and its successors are all space observatories. The long term solution to this lights in the sky problem would be moving all Earth based observatories to space, which can be partially funded by profits and use technologies from LEO constellation.
The indigenous people view the observatories astronomers have built at Kitt Peak, Mt, Graham and in Hawaii as “pollution”. They could care less about the discoveries of astronomers. I guess it depends on your perspective.
The notion of filing lawsuits against SpaceX and the other constellation launchers is tantamount to closing the barn door after horses ran off. A little late, dontcha think ? Seriously . Astronomers have been working around and thru all manner and number of satellites for over 60 years , and by their nature are used to dealing with Really Big Numbers. Anyone in the astronomy community who did not see the StarLinks coming was simply not paying attention.
Reminds me of the native Hawiians who are suddenly protesting the construction of the 14th telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea as being unacceptable. Thirteen is OK ( only 11 are active but they’re all still up there ) , but somehow 14 is too many ?
Sheesh.
Actually, it’s a bit worse. Read the part about:
“according to the Outer Space Treaty and its progeny, there are no private companies operating in outer space, but only governments can operate in outer space… the USA government that is responsible for the harm caused by its corporation, Starlink.”
I suppose the good side is that this is such a misreading of the Outer Space Treaty that the World Court is bound to choke on it. The bad side is some people seem to serious believe commercial space does not and should not exist, and other people are listening to them. Another astronomer, quoted in another article, said his preference would be not having any satellites up there at all, but that was a fight the community lost in 1957.
Ethan Siegel even compared SpaceX to [Deleted] and criticized the AAS for even talking to them. Some of these guys see the skies as their holy ground and themselves as the priesthood divinely appointed to guard it and mediate access to the ignorant masses. Or at least, they see an opportunity to gain some measure of power in wildly exaggerating the issue and whipping up some good righteous furor among those who don’t understand the issue.
And what of the missed opportunity? Such an easily performed observation as spotting the Starlink trains after each launch could be a wonderful way to get people outside and looking at the skies, but these people are more interested in heaping condemnation on SpaceX.
It’s not exactly a misreading, is it? The issue is the liability convention applicability in this case. As that is what I presume they are bringing into play here. That, indeed, does vest liability with the launching nation. The two large in-orbit collisions we have had were both blue on blue. The other two were nanosats, little more than debris themselves. So we haven’t really tested it much. I would argue that straylight does not reach the threshold for the liability convention. Although it would be worth testing that as the number of nations active in astronomy probably surpasses the projected market for Starlink.
On that score. I never really understood the business case if it was just to go the last mile on internet.. i.e. bring all Africa, India,(underserved region of choice) on-line.
Then I read it was all about micro transactions and latentcy.. made more sense. Would pay for itself in quite a short time skimming fractions of pennies off billions of transactions.
He’s definitely talking about the liability clause, but I think it’s a misreading. It may be a subtle point, but it affects which courts can or would hear a case.
I see this as analogous to maritime regulations about a ship at sea dumping raw sewage into the water. That’s banned by the London treaty of 1972. But if a US based cruise line did so, people would sue the company operating the ship, not the US government. No one would be saying that “no private companies operating at sea, but only governments can operate sea” and no one would talk about the US owned cruise line.
In that case and in the case of the Outer Space Treaty, the government has a responsibility. But it’s accomplished through appropriate regulations. If someone says a Starlink spacecraft caused harm, they can sue in US federal courts. If the courts don’t hear the case, or the jury doesn’t think harm was done (or disagrees about the dollar figure claimed), then someone could appeal. Eventually, I guess that might end up with the US government in court in Den Haag. But I think that case would be about whether or not the US laws were inadequate to satisfy their treaty responsibility as much as the dollar value attached to a specific event.
Oh, and by the way, in cases like this, you can’t sue over future, potential harm. There is no precedent for injunctive relief. So it’s caused, past tense, hard.
” his preference would be not having any satellites up there at all”
The most selfish statement every made.
Maybe you’ve only seen coverage of the latest protests, but there have been protests of other telescopes at sacred sites in Hawai’i before.
I am long aware of those.
Same story for Kitt Peak outside Tucson.
Perhaps we should call them ” precedents “.
And for Dzil Nchaa Si An which was what Mt. Graham was called before it was named for Lt. Col James Graham, the U.S. Army astronomer in charge of the scientists that did the survey of the Gadsen Purchase. So in a sense astronomers took their sacred mountain twice.
Perhaps now that Mt. Denali has its original name restored Dzil Nchaa Si An and Loligam (Kitt Peak) will have their names restored to their original ones. At the very least the astronomical community could show some respect and rename the respective observatories to reflect the mountains culture heritage.
https://www.culturalsurviva…
The Fight for Dzil Nchaa Si An, Mt. Graham: Apaches and Astrophysical Development in Arizona
December 1995
I’ve seen images with a couple dozen people protesting. I’ve also read reports that they are not representative of the polynesian population of Hawai’i in general. I’d actually like to see a survey before I form an opinion on how seriously to take those protests.
Ask and you shall receive.
https://www.westhawaiitoday…
Public support for TMT drops sharply, according to a new Honolulu Star-Advertiser poll
By Kevin Dayton The Honolulu Star-Advertiser | Friday, September 27, 2019, 12:05 a.m.
“The Star-Advertiser poll found Hawaiians object most to the project, with 62% now saying they oppose construction of the TMT.”
This is a “tragedy of the commons” case. The reason we have national parks is to protect us against the kind of thinking displayed in here – some businessman promising that his polluting project is “for the greater good” – no, it is to make him money.
The argument that it is a good to connect the whole world seems to be accepted here without any inspection. How are you feeling about American democracy in the age of the internet? Even if connecting the world is an overall good, there are other ways to communicate – cell phones, fiber optics. I’ve travelled to villages where it takes days to get in, yet had internet access once there. And Iridium for emergencies. There is not a need for a LEO mega-constellation; it is just a desire. Sure, StarLink and the others will have a global footprint, but they will also produce a global pollution.
I agree that we need to, and will, become a more space-faring civilization. There is nothing, absolutely zero, that says that any particular new LEO mega-constellation is a requirement to achieve that goal. The argument that says polluting the commons is necessary for human “progress” is an old trick.
In this country, one is generally allowed freedom up until it impinges on the rights of others. Disrupting the night sky, a common heritage all people on the planet, does impinge. Who speaks for your grand-daughter who may never know a sparkling natural sky? Who speaks for the camper who will not even be able to pick out constellations amid the mess? Who speaks for the Earth? The businessmen.
I have lived in one of the poorest countries on Earth. So get in line. Luckily you do not get to decide whether people in such areas get to have the same luxuries that you enjoy. Suggest that you join in on the lawsuit.
Keith,
Judging from above, you spent 6 whole weeks in Nepal. In addition to extensive travel, In the 90’s I lived for almost 3 years in the rural parts of two extremely poor countries, and, almost certainly unlike you, not as a Westerner with Western conveniences like a computer, electricity, or plumbing. If six weeks in a tent with your gizmos is all you’ve got, you don’t have any basis to lecture me about developing nations.
The young people did, by and large, want our life style and, of course, it was not up to me to decide for them. How did you extract that from what I said? Strawman argument.
Get in line? What does that mean? It means get in line with your view. It is your website, so that’s your right. Just don’t then pretend you are fully open to other views, when expressed politely, or that you are engaged in open journalism.
Suggestion that I join the lawsuit: Fair enough although as I look into it and as someone else here pointed out, it would be difficult to establish that an individual has a (legal) right to a clear night sky. That isn’t in our laws, at least yet.
Feel better now? I should have added that I have been support various educational activities in Nepal that focus on science and technology since 2009.
As for electricity and plumbing – um no, they do not have plumbing at Everest Base Camp at 17,600 feet. Nor is there heating (-30F at night) or enough Oxygen. After a month there everyone is sick or recovering from being sick. Electricity comes from solar panels and is limited. And people are being killed by things like avalanches a few hundred meters from where you sleep. Hardly convenient. And yet people live nearby year round.
If you do not like NASAWatch then read another website.
We’re talking about adding, under ideal Starlink-spotting conditions, a few hundred moving points of light to a sky filled with several thousand. Most of those will even be close to the horizon, and likely behind a tree or building for most casual observers. Your portrayal of the consequences is a flat out lie.
Even unmodified, I believe the Starlink satellites are down to fifth magnitude by the time they are at their operational altitude (and not pointing the solar array in a funny direction to minimize atmospheric drag.) There are very few places where you can see down to below fifth magnitude, and I’m not sure how many people’s eyes are that good even with a very dark sky. And SpaceX is working to make those satellites even fainter. So just don’t understand how this is going to be the sort of disruption you mention. If you’re really worried about this sort of thing, it might be more productive to campaign against paved roads in our national parks.
Thanks for the more courteous of replies in here. If the satellites are all at 6th magnitude or below, and there is a means of enforcement as other have suggested, that would be acceptable against the point I raised, if not the astronomical community’s broader concern.
As for as the paved roads, that’s a quite good example. I dislike hiking near roads where I have to listen to the crotch-rockets roaring along. But they have a right to the road and I have the option to go deeper in where I don’t have to listen to it. When the entire sky is covered, it is like paving the entire park. There is no option. There is no sharing. Someone has claimed the entire commons for themselves.
No, they are just making better use of it, one that benefits more than a handful of individuals.
Whether there is a need for Starlink will be decided by customers, if they can get enough customers to keep the venture profitable, then there is a need. If they couldn’t find enough customers, this venture will be closed down and the satellites will be deoribted, everything will be back to normal. So the need for LEO constellations is irrelevant, if there’s no need then there won’t be “pollution”.
And you see how easy it is to reverse the so called “pollution” caused by LEO constellations at low LEO? You just de-orbit them, poof it’s gone. Now try to do that with all the trenches you dug for optic fiber or the cell towers you erected, not so easy is it? Anything we humans do can be perceived as “pollution”, this applies to laying down optical fiber or put up cell towers too. Except in case of LEO constellation, there’s no physical impact to Earth, and the effect is easily reversible, unlike Earth based solutions.
And no, LEO constellation is not required for us to become space-faring civilization, but they would be a big help, since for us to go to space, there has to be an economical need, otherwise our space effort is not sustainable. Communication via LEO constellation can be a major driver in our space activities, for example it would create an economical need for commercial heavy and super-heavy launch vehicles. So yes, having it would put us much closer to a space-faring civilization than not having it. Also common sense says if we became space-faring civilization, there will be a lot of bright lights in the sky: All the space stations, inter-planetary ships, factory satellites, solar power satellites. So it’s not self-consistent to complain about light “pollution” from LEO constellation while at the same time say you support us to become a space-faring civilization.
Yes, the US is all about rights, but which law gives you the right to have a sky without satellites? I don’t think there is such a law, since airlines fly at night all the time and they create much more lights in the sky than any satellite constellation. The sky is a common resource, just because you’re using it doesn’t mean others can’t use it at the same time, you don’t own the sky, nobody does.
Please proceed to pass a restrictive light pollution ordinance in your town. I had to drive my kids a couple of hours out of town to see the Milky Way. As far as I know, the “public” utilities are the ones making money from the excessive use of lighting at night. As has been covered elsewhere, most people no longer have a “sparkling night sky.” They do, however, hold up apps at star parties to see what should be there. Satellites? Yeah, most folks here will never see them. The problem here seems to be more about *who* is making money than the actual problem, since light pollution is already well out of control.
Yes, and the business leaders have created a pretty high standard of living in the last few hundred years. Folks living in sod huts with dirt floors hoping their food lasts until next planting season would gladly trade your beautiful night sky for the lifestyle most in the West have now. You aren’t able to eat stars.
Funny you should say that in this forum. If our species had evolved in a world without dark skies, would we ever have developed an interest in space exploration? Will there be sustained interest in continuing it in such a world?
Yes, dark skies served a purpose to inspire when we were living in sod huts struggling to survive and paid “taxes” to the temple priests, the astronomers of their day. But now we have evolved beyond that and see space as a frontier to development.
Although we are still using units of time which date back to ancient Babylonian astrology. Even the most extreme fans of metric units rarely use kiloseconds instead of hours.
Metric time has been tried at the end of the 18th century with the French Republican Calendar: Days with 10 hours, 100 minutes, 100 seconds
As I write this, it is 6h80m72s of the 9th day of the 14th décade of year CCXXVIII (228) which happens to be the month of Pluviôse, which is the 5th month, since the year starts with the autumnal equinox.
Even with extreme measures to convince the populace, it did not end well.
It isn’t an either/or situation.
There really is no governing body anywhere in the world that could tell SpaceX to stop launching their Starlink satellites. World Court? Get real. The U.S. government? It is interesting where SpaceX put their Boca Chica operations. Move the equipment 1 mile south and suddenly the U.S. government couldn’t tell them what to do.
I think it is all wasted effort. At the rate that SpaceX is launching satellites, they could have over a thousand satellites up by time the astronomy groups get themselves organized, figure out what court to use, and submit their first papers.
Yes, but Mexico is a member of the Moon Agreement, which is why commercial launch firms steer clear of the many potential Mexican locations for building spaceports.
Does the Moon Treaty have an exit clause? Most countries (including Mexico) wouldn’t mind exiting from a treaty if the price was right.
Yes, Article 20 allows a member nation to withdraw with a year’s notice.
Has anyone addressed the concern of all the space junk these constellations will create when satellites are no longer functional? Are there plans to de-orbit them at the end of their life?
Yes, SpaceX satellites are designed to be deorbited at the end of their service life when they are replaced by new ones. SpaceX has already tested the technology in the first batch launched.
Which begs the question of how well their untested collision-avoidance algorithms and hardware work.
What do you think the first batch was doing? Testing them.
Controlled deorbit has been tested. I believe they plan to do so well before the spacecraft die (the current practice with geostationary spacecraft is to keep using them well beyond their design life and until enough things break.) And they modified the planned orbits to give a shorter orbital decay time from atmospheric drag, just to cover the occasional one that dies before they can deorbit it. But I don’t think they’ve tested the collision avoidance capabilities yet. Those spacecraft are an evolving design.
Starlink’s automated collision-avoidance algorithms are already being used, they performed 21 collision-avoidance maneuvers using the algorithm as of last September, per this article: https://spacenews.com/bette…
“”We have a choice to either deny people the internet to make it easier for people to do ground-based astronomy, in the process denying them educational, financial, and other opportunities.””
It really is a simply choice. Expand opportunities for the billion without internet or start building more space based telescopes.
There really is no choice. The planet needs to be connected.
Not being able to see the stars, for kids and amateur astronomers, is a valid concern. So let’s mention the idea of CubeSat-sized, orbital, amateur telescopes. Say in the price range a junior high school astronomy club could afford by saving up for a year.
“Not being able to see the stars, for kids and amateur astronomers, “
Come on, lets keep this based on reality. Sats are not going blot out the night’s sky and all the stars in the galaxy.
Say, for the sake of the debate, you are now unable to see a star 800 million light years away versus a billion people now having educational knowledge of the stars through the internet . The choice is clear
You have to wonder about the complaints astronomers will have when cities start to light up the surface of the Moon.
Very few probably. Even today, the Moon isn’t a major target. And flight rules prevent most orbital telescopes from even pointing at it (don’t damage the detectors by pointing even close to something too bright.) By the time there are cities on the Moon, I suspect the astronomers won’t care and it will be the realm of field geologists.
Now that I think of it, there’s a much easier solution for the Rubin Observatory. Their plan is to do full sky surveys every three or four days. That telescope operates at visible and near IR wavelengths (going just a hair above 1000 nm), so thermal emission from a satellite isn’t an issue. Just reflected sunlight. If I did the geometry right, at 550 km, all StarLink satellites are out of sunlight when the sun is 46 deg. below the observatory’s horizon, and 36 deg. for those at 340 km. I assume they aren’t planning to observe before/after astronomical twilight (when the Sun is 18 deg. below the horizon.) That’s sort of how “astronomical twilight”) So I think that’s only costing them 60 to 70 minutes per night.
But during that half hour at the start of the night, the satellites on the eastern horizon would be in darkness and at the end of the night, the ones on the western horizon are in darkness. I know their scans of the sky are constrained (five seconds to turn and settle before images), but couldn’t they just schedule it to avoid observing near one horizon at the start of each night and the other horizon at the end of each night?