I mean, I kind of care about having the common wonder of the night sky stolen from every culture on the planet, but what do I know. If it doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet it must not have been of value to any of them, right?
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And it has genuine applications like ensuring even the most remote places have access to the Internet, which I care a great deal about - my work with Wikipedia Zero (before Net Neutrality canned it) showed pretty conclusively how the developing world can benefit from universal access to information - even just Wikipedia (as per the abovementioned initiative) had a huge impact on the communities it was enabled in.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to get there as long as it can be turned off on a whim and fail to prioritize coverage outside of the US.
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Yeah, it’s a shame, but it’s going to happen regardless. If Starlink doesn’t do it, someone else will. Other organizations will regardless - the EU, Russia, and China AND the USA are planning additional constellations. It’s a problem that needs to be tackled, but it’s not one you can directly hang on SpaceX.
There should absolutely be rules about how much light they’re allowed to reflect, and rules about traffic control in LEO, but blaming Musk for isn’t solving the problem.
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Just bringing civilization to the world! /s
Or we could do something else that isn’t so fucking malignant to the world, maybe? Just a thought.
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Sure. We could feed everyone, house everyone, and connect everyone with fibre optic cable. Lots of things we could do.
It comes down to cost vs benefit. Are LEO satellite internet constellations worth the cost of more difficult ground-based astronomy and lights moving across the sky in non-light-polluted areas? Is it worth a few more tons of metals and silicates burning up in the upper atmosphere as they age out? Do we get enough benefit to justify burning the methalox to launch Starship, or the kerelox to launch Falcons?
I would say yes. The cost to build out the Starlink constellation is much cheaper to maintain and less environmentally destructive than it would cost to run wire to every Canadian rural community in the north. It’s a fantastically expensive infrastructure to maintain compared to the constellation. It connects planes, ships, and far-flung northern installations in a way that’s a bargain.
Musk can be an asshole and Starlink can be a good thing on balance. These can both be true.
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I really don’t believe that the only way to get universal internet is to destroy our view of the rest of the universe or LEO.
I’m not a tech guy, as you know, but I do know that we seem to be willing to destroy space just as much as we’ve done to our planet. These aren’t neutral choices here, they absolutely have consequences and we really should be thinking these things through with the people (like yourself) who help to make the internet run. That’s not Musk. He’s basically in it to amass even greater wealthy. Whatever he actually says, he doesn’t care about the damage that he does to our planet or the our immediate space.
Yes, we SHOULD do that, and we can do that… but hey, why do that when we can ensure some guy in rural alaska has access to porn…
It comes down to putting people first, not the profits of elon musk. Or it should.
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sorry about your shitty internet in the north, but thats some statement which is -in my opinion- baffling in its ignorance about the problems a mass-constellation of 40,000 satellites would mean.
e/ but you really had me at “Cheap launch costs will enable mass-production of cheap telescopes” is just…its mindblowing in its almost absurd quality. telescopes for space cant be “cheap”, because they have to be made to survive space!
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because this motherfucker musk started this whole shit! 
I highly doubt that; full constellation means at least 100-200 launches per year for maintenance alone. all while the risk of a dead orbit looms. and for how many customers worldwide? can you show serious numbers with correlation to other solutions without using numbers coming from spacex? and that “less environmentally destructive” than landbased fiber? I dont buy that, sorry.
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Saying things are going to be ruined anyway hardly makes the people who jump at the chance any more endearing. And if Starlink were really such a positive bringing internet to the world, you wouldn’t see the same work repeated like that. Nobody would run five different sets of telephone lines to a remote community.
But this isn’t about helping people with infrastructure, it’s about rushing to be the one to profit off them, consequences be damned. When you say “cost vs benefit” you’re leaving out that the benefits and costs are not going to the same people.
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I admit that Charlie’s solution to one intimidation does have appeal when we’re discussing Starlink. Obviously the Department of Agriculture needs more funding!
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I think it’s more about strategic infrastructure. Same reason we have multiple GPS networks. Russia doesn’t want to be locked out of a US-owned GPS network, nor the EU.
LEO constellations have been planned since forever. The key difference is that SpaceX brought launch costs down so much, they became cheaper to put up. Reusable rockets are arguably a “steam engine time” thing, it would have happened eventually. As so many people are wont to point out, Musk didn’t invent cheap rockets. At most he’s the money guy.
That’s the world we live in, alas. If someone can make a buck chopping down a forest, it’s going to happen. At least LEO satellites aren’t going to hurt the ecology much. There’s an aesthetic argument, and a few extra tons of heavy metal burning up in the atmosphere probably ain’t great (but on the scale of “stuff burning up in the atmosphere” it’s probably not a big deal, except for the composition being different from the usual kilotons of rock).
The cost of putting up a constellation and the benefits are worth considering, is all, and I think people are letting their personal distaste for Musk blind themselves to the benefits and overstate the costs.
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That’s the world we create when we stupidly accept that rich assholes should be able to help themselves to whatever they want, because money is the only good we value. And now we’re at the point where the whole ecosystem we depend on is coming apart at the seams because of it. But it’s never been inevitable, it’s all whether we choose to let them or not.
For the record, the plans to have the night sky – and all the orbital space, that’s not infinite – stolen from us for one of his half-baked vanity projects were one of the reasons I started hating Musk, not the other way around.
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Then Canada can scrape together some filthy lucre to subsidize a for-profit corporation.
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how many people will it actually “benefit” at the cost for everyone else?
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Greed, in other words.
Acting like the current status quo is somehow immutable is to be complicit.
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had to check the numbers again; the launch-cost of the “reusable” falcon9 increased once again and stands currently at $67ml per launch. so, that would be between 6-12 billion per year for maintenance only. and that would be cheaper than to run wire to every Canadian rural community in the north? really?
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Alternately he is smart and not accepting treatment for major issues because there is only a dismaying 99.97% chance that a psychologist could help him. [Disdains that the time remaining for effective treatment may be in excess of a month. Reminds self that an appropriate and public workshop of final Elon words may take more than a minute.]
[MD comes out from the Whackjob Isolation Suite.] [Dr. Meg Smythe:] I’m Dr. Megalodonthus Smoot-Yiffserionge. Dr. Musk’s Neck Doctor. This man has no neck. Also he is dead. He said nothing at the end. All we have is this king-size check-positive wallet full of 2 TB microSD cards to know him by. Plus a memory stick. Guess that’s who still uses memory sticks. [A gash of red appears in the wallet.] Oh! Lots of little envelopes! I guess we know how this goes.
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$900M paychecks versus $130M paychecks that don’t recur as much, I dunno, I think the COOs of anything around Elon should be very. busy. people. Making contractual checkpoints, checking men with Elon-shaped CyberBodies into the same hotel level as Elon’s, getting those customer satisfaction things running across Canada without wasting disease happening and stuff.
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It comes down to who benefits the in the real world. A poor family gets to eat vs much more well off people get to watch tv in their $300,000 motor home.
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