Keith’s note: According to a Starlink tweet “Starlink is ideal for rural locations. Later this year @JohnDeere will begin equipping new and existing machines across the United States and Brazil with Starlink to help connect farmers with high-speed internet so they can fully leverage precision agriculture technologies”. Gee, how many people in America are engaged in farming? How often does NASA make specific efforts to engage with these communities which are often rural and somewhat isolated? Not very often. If NASA’s technology folks were actually paying attention to advances and applications of space technology with real world, everyday uses, they’d be thinking how this fits into the whole spinoff thing. Instead of focusing outreach on several zip codes they’d be seeking relevance to the rest of us – and not just U.S. taxpayers – but also to the rest the world where agriculture is the engine that feeds us all. FYI I touched upon similar issues recently in “Millions Of People Are Already Training To Fly Helicopters On Other Worlds. Has NASA Noticed? “ wherein the use of drones – along with satellite connected machinery – can offer great benefits to even small-scale farming operations – especially in rural/remote locations. And there is a clear overlap between their uses on farms and how we’ll be using them on other worlds. And yes, these are private companies doing this Starlink/tractor thing on their own dime. But this application of space technology is an emergent property – one that arises from of all of the technologies that NASA has nurtured and focused on for more than a half century – Starlink – Drones – GPS – remote sensing … You’d think someone at NASA would be chomping at the bit to make this connection. Guess again. Just sayin’.
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