Sky train in a common orbit
May 26, 2019 11:02 AM   Subscribe

An astronomers spots dozens of satellites orbiting in a row. Two days ago SpaceX launched sixty Starlink satellites into Earth orbit. Astronomer Marco Langbroek (Twitter) caught them soaring overhead in Europe.

Langbroek also whipped up a web tool for determining when the Starlink series passes over different cities. Space.com has more.

Some thought they might be UFOs.

Bonus: photos of Starlink stacked together, ready to be orbited.

StarLink previously.
posted by doctornemo (54 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
These things are going to permanently change the night sky for much of the planet. The ones we are looking at now are 62 satellites out of an initial constellation of 1600.

From Cees Bassa on Twitter, with analysis and graphs:
This is the impact of a ~1600 satellite @SpaceX #Starlink constellation for a location at latitude 52 degrees. At any time, about 84 satellites would be above the horizon. During twilight and the entire summer, up to 15 of those visible (sunlit and above 30 degree altitude).
And it doesn't stop there. They want to launch twelve thousand.
posted by automatronic at 11:16 AM on May 26, 2019 [12 favorites]


The best part is when the actual thing hey want to solve isn't solved and we're stuck with a ruined night time sky because oh hey Musk wants to be cool.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 11:22 AM on May 26, 2019 [19 favorites]


I was in the process of working up a post on this topic from a completely different framing -- the proposed Starlink constellation may cause irreparable damage to ground-based astronomy, including to the NSF's largest investment in astronomy. Astronomers are still frantically running calculations of just how bad this whole thing can be, and that doesn't even get into the aspects of colonialism dripping off of this project.
posted by miguelcervantes at 11:25 AM on May 26, 2019 [18 favorites]


And there's always a few laggards bringing up the rear...
posted by jim in austin at 11:33 AM on May 26, 2019


You do realize that the only way to take down a space-based internet post-Singularity is by intentionally triggering an orbital cascade?
posted by heatherlogan at 11:36 AM on May 26, 2019


Some thought they might be UFOs.
They definitively were UFOs: if somebody thought that they were UFOs then they presumably didn't know what they were. So they were... unidentified!
posted by avapoet at 11:45 AM on May 26, 2019 [10 favorites]


I don’t think I’m a fan of this. Would love more info on how this will affect astronomy.
posted by greermahoney at 11:50 AM on May 26, 2019


I feel like there should be a world vote for shit like this before it's allowed to happen.
posted by TheRedArmy at 11:55 AM on May 26, 2019 [9 favorites]


Give me a break. Being able to see a few new twinkles on a perfectly clear night, low on the horizon, does not “ruin the night sky”. Cities and light pollution do that, and if you live near one, you’ll never catch a glimpse of these satellites. And I t’s the height of first world privilege to complain about the “ruined night sky” from a city with a high priced monopoly cable low speed internet, to deny the rural rest of the world internet access without handing off huge subsidies, granting permanent easements and stringing ugly lines and poles everywhere. Satellite internet is the obvious low-latency future and the only reason it hasn’t happened yet is launch cost.

On preview : The astronomy impact is NOT visual, but radio frequency. Here’s a serious discussion of the impact, which also mentions OneWeb and other attempts, which are in various bands. The FCC has final say here. Personally I think the solution is self-contained - the low launch costs that make a constellation feasible (less than $100 million) will allow astronomers to get above the atmosphere and all the constellations and get better results (the LSST construction cost alone is over $200M). Ironically, the placement of the LSST was largely constrained by site access to existing cable for network access.
posted by radagast at 11:59 AM on May 26, 2019 [13 favorites]


I saw this last night on a camping trip!! We were sitting around the fire as it passed silently overhead. It felt like a shared hallucination. We all went to bed and when we returned to cell coverage this morning started furiously googling to see which city was under alien attack.
posted by q*ben at 11:59 AM on May 26, 2019 [10 favorites]


Isn't there some kind of uproar about 5G affecting astronomy as well, something about the water vapour spectrum or? I feel like there have been some very bad ideas lately.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:00 PM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


UFO is an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object that has been redefined by the Mulders among us to mean Suspected Alien Flight Craft. I, for one would prefer to use the acronym SAFC, with CAFC for Confirmed Alien Flight Craft, of which there are none. Anything identified as launched by Elon Musk and Company would be CCFC, for Confirmed Commercial Flight Craft, also applicable to Blimps with advertising on their sides and weather balloons launched by AccuWeather. For Musk's Crafts, the second C could also stand for Crackpot, or we could substitute a S for Supervillain.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:00 PM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]




I probably would have seen this if the skies were clear that night, I've been doing quite a lot of satellite watching lately.

As for this ruining night sky viewing, well, that ship sailed maybe a decade ago or even more. There's so many satellites up there already it's kind of ridiculous. A couple of weeks ago I lost count at something like 30-40 visible tracks, including at least one paired constellation and a couple that looked like they might have been paired trains on identical polar orbit tracks.

As someone who does night sky astrolandscape photography, I'm kind of on the fence about this. It's actually not very common that I get unwanted, unplanned satellite tracks showing up in long exposures (think 20 minutes or greater) and it's frankly much more likely that a high altitude jetliner will ruin the shot, because the blinking and multicolored lighs leave a very obvious streak in a long exposure.

You really have to get your eyes adjusted to dark sky viewing, and then you need a good, dark, moonless sky and then you need the sun just going down so there's still plenty of light up at LEO altitudes, and THEN the satellites need to have large, reflective solar panels that have a good angle to reflect that light down at a viewer.

And then, then you'll start to be able to see small satellites. So this isn't really going to ruin the night sky for naked eye or optical viewing - at least, any, and in most places on the planet satellites are only visible for an hour or two after sunset and before dawn.

And as someone who lives out in the countryside, well, I kind of actually want Starlink internet service. I would love to basically have WiMax style access from wherever I want out here. Right now I have to put my phone up on a high shelf or even a pole to get good LTE coverage to hotspot from. I run out of LTE speed bandwidth usually about half way through the month, then I get to look at the internet through about a 100kBs connection for the rest of the month unless I want to go 20 miles into town.


Now if they start flying satellites in dot matrix display constellations for corporate logos like "Drink Coke!" I'm going to be upset. I know there's that Japanese company working on artificial aurora and I'm way more worried about that than I am Starlink.
posted by loquacious at 12:19 PM on May 26, 2019 [12 favorites]


"If SpaceX launches all 12,000, they will outnumber stars visible to the naked eye."

I was born after Sputnik, so I've always seen satellites in the sky, but this seems like some kind of threshhold. I wonder if I'll live to see robotically installed advertising on the moon, ploughed into the maria of the moon.
posted by the Real Dan at 12:21 PM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


Also, how crazy hard sci fi is that SpaceX launch and satellite deployment video? Super crazy.

Watching that satellite stack after the faring was jettisoned was just super fascinating to me, like "What the heck am I even looking at!?" because it sure looked a whole lot like a Kubrick set piece from 2001, like the greebling and bone-like structures on the long spine of their spacecraft.

And then they just shove the whole stack off to... peel apart like flower petals, or seeds on a pod? So weird and cool looking.
posted by loquacious at 12:25 PM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


I wonder what affect this might have on migratory birds and other animals which use the night sky for orientation and navigation.
And I wonder whether anyone at SpaceX even considered that in their calculations.
posted by cheshyre at 12:37 PM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


"If SpaceX launches all 12,000, they will outnumber stars visible to the naked eye."

This seems like this is a super weird conflated quote, because you won't be able to see all 12,000 of them at any given time.

I am assuming that they're saying the average person in a city can't see that many stars visible to the naked eye, and therefore the total number of deployed - not visible - satellites exceeds that number or metric.

Because I can promise you I can see waaaay more than 12,000 stars in my night sky on a good clear night. Pick any few arcs or degrees of viewing angle on the galactic core and there's more stars than I can count just in that tiny segment because they're thick like glitter, and that's before I even look through a scope or binoculars.


To anyone who is upset about this ruining the night sky, I have some questions I'd like you to ask yourself - I'm not really looking for answers, here, this is a thought experiment.

Do you live in the city?

When was the last time you actually saw the deep, dark night sky?

Do you get this upset about street lights and light pollution or leaving your own porch light on?

Have you done any lobbying or activism to reduce street lighting, light pollution from billboards and more?

Have you tried proposing any dark-sky nights for your town or city, in which the city shuts off the lights at least once a month to let people view the sky

Are you a member of any astronomy groups or clubs?

Because I get upset about these things way more than satellites. I get super personally upset when neighbors leave floodlights or outdoor lights running all night, which, thankfully, isn't often. And when I've lived in larger cities and urban centers, the night sky basically no longer exists.

And I can see Seattle's light pollution very strongly from here. It washes out the night sky every damn night in that direction, rain or shine.

When I lived in the LA area I could see the city glow from, oh, 300 miles out in the desert, and then you're surrounded by glow and pollution from LA, Las Vegas, Phoenix and the increasingly developed high desert.
posted by loquacious at 12:39 PM on May 26, 2019 [16 favorites]


Because I can promise you I can see waaaay more than 12,000 stars in my night sky on a good clear night.

Science would disagree with you.
posted by asterix at 12:42 PM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


seanmpuckett, you might be talking about this.

It’s a good thing we don’t see radio frequency radiation because as a people we don’t seem to have any problem with polluting the crap out of that spectrum.
posted by q*ben at 1:34 PM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


The astronomy impact is NOT visual, but radio frequency

Nope, it will affect optical / IR observations as well. There are multiple threads blowing up on twitter about this, and there's a lot of uncertainties about how things will eventually shake out, but one of the big threads is coming from Doug Ellison.
posted by miguelcervantes at 1:36 PM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


If some sort of consortium of nations that had a vested interest in getting high speed internet to their citizens had done this, I'd be on board with the hand wringing done in this thread. In reality though, a capitalist in the most capitalist country in the world did this, and most likely for the most capitalist reasons around. I for one fucking minute don't think Musk did this out of the kindness of his heart.

Remember when the Zuck went to India to "spread the wealth" by giving them all (crippled, facebook adjacent) internet access, and they roundly kicked him the fuck out? Well, nobody was given a say in this one.

Remember, a big shining testament to Musk's ego is already fucking up space, and that was just a vanity project. He literally shot a sports car into space, for shits and giggles.
posted by FireballForever at 2:15 PM on May 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


We went to the country to see them. Waited in a field for 20 minutes to let our eyes rest in the darkness. There was not a spot of light around us, nothing but stars. When the satellites finally appeared, I couldn't see them if I looked straight at them. Only a thin smudge. Then they started to blink, one after another, probably reflecting sunlight with their solar panels, and only them I was able to see them clearly, just for a short while.

It was amazing.
posted by hat_eater at 2:18 PM on May 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


These are LEO satellites, which means they stay up there for a few years before burning up. Both launching and operating them requires government approval. If people decide any problems outweigh the benefits, continued regulatory approval can be withdrawn and everything goes back to the way it was.

On the other hand, they might end being as valuable to people as GPS is.

Let's find out.
posted by anonymisc at 2:45 PM on May 26, 2019 [11 favorites]


I wonder what affect this might have on migratory birds and other animals which use the night sky for orientation and navigation.

Yes, some migratory birds can use the stars for navigation, but they do so in conjunction with other cues (like the earth's magnetic field), and experiments with planetariums show that they can cope with entire constellations being missing. Which makes sense, because otherwise they would be hopelessly lost on nights with a few clouds in the sky.

Remember, these satellites will only be visible for brief windows after sunset and before sunrise. It's not really plausible that a few extra points of light for a few minutes at a time are capable of causing significant problems for migratory animals, and if they were, that ship would have sailed decades ago with the advent of air travel.
posted by teraflop at 3:29 PM on May 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


Yeah there's some really confused and needlessly aggressive argumentation going on about this whole thing (not here, mostly on Twitter, which I should expect because Twitter is a cesspool, but I digress).

People seem to be confusing the visible light impact—which is very, very minimal, and certainly won't "ruin the night sky" or anything close to it—with the impact on radioastronomy. I have a suspicion that some people who know better are intentionally conflating the two things in order to whip up emotional opposition, taking claims from astronomers who are involved in a bureaucratic fight over spectrum, and linking it to the much more vicious fight over Dark Skies and light pollution.

Even a bunch of satellites orbiting overhead are never going to create the sort of light pollution that one asshole neighbor with landscaping lights burning 24/7 is going to. And solving that latter problem is a pretty straightforward one, comparatively. (I mean, there's the direct method of a BB gun, not that I'm advocating it or anything.)

There is a big fight going on about what portions of the RF spectrum are going to be reserved for radioastronomy vs. used for other things. As one can imagine, the Trump Administration's FCC doesn't seem to give much of a shit about radioastronomy; they'd much rather auction off the entire spectrum to their cronies in industry. This is also the basis for the breathless "5G is going to KILL YOUR CHILDREN because it might affect weather radar and thus hurricane predictions"—it's meteorologists trying to make an overly-wrought case for reserving spectrum for weather radar.

Anyway, I don't really even get why the Starlink satellites are likely to be a problem; they use the Ku and Ka bands, which have been used by satellite downlinks for decades. And the older satellite systems, some of which were in geosync, basically saturated entire continents with their downlink signals. (Those pizzabox television dishes are Ka band, mostly.) So a switch to LEO constellations each of which has a much smaller ground footprint seems like a wash.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:40 PM on May 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


There's three companies that look like front-runners in the internet-access large-LEO-constellation business right now: SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat. SpaceX was first with a largish launch so they get to be the lightning rod, and everyone's in a panic about their enormous constellation because Musk likes to run his mouth about unrealistically big plans; the other two companies are talking about a few hundred sats (maybe low thousands if things go well), which seems a more likely constellation size than Musk's 12,000(!) OneWeb had their first launch in February; dunno how visible those 6 are though, they're a little smaller than Starlink's, which are themselves only mag 4 to 5 at the brightest.

I for one fucking minute don't think Musk did this out of the kindness of his heart.
Right. He's doing it to fund his Mars rocket, if you were looking for a vanity project...
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 3:52 PM on May 26, 2019


People seem to be confusing the visible light impact—which is very, very minimal, and certainly won't "ruin the night sky" or anything close to it

I mean, this guy is a professional astronomer and says (in the linked tweet) "If SpaceX launches all 12,000, they will outnumber stars visible to the naked eye." Maybe he's one of the people you're referring to who "knows better", but at least at first blush I'm inclined to take what he says seriously if not dispositively.
posted by asterix at 3:57 PM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


These are in LEO, so for most of the planet they will only be visible for a while after sundown, before they pass into earth's shadow. Far enough North, they will be visible all night in summer. Looks like maybe around Scotland is the dividing line. But, the orbits also seem to avoid the higher latitudes.
posted by joeyh at 4:09 PM on May 26, 2019


"If SpaceX launches all 12,000, they will outnumber stars visible to the naked eye."
Technically correct (the best kind of correct) but that doesn't mean that if you look up at night you'll see more satellites than stars, since a much bigger percentage of visible stars are above the horizon at any given time.

I found his more recent tweet pretty concerning though:
"The Starlink satellites just passed directly overhead. They were glinting, some as bright as Polaris..."
So I guess mag 4 to 5 is wrong...
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 4:23 PM on May 26, 2019


This is also the basis for the breathless "5G is going to KILL YOUR CHILDREN because it might affect weather radar and thus hurricane predictions"—it's meteorologists trying to make an overly-wrought case for reserving spectrum for weather radar.

The NOAA is asking for emission limits to prevent bleedover into the existing reserved spectrum band for water vapor, not additional reserved spectrum.
If I have to decide who to trust about the modeling, choosing between NOAA, the US Navy, and NASA, versus just the FCC, I know which side I'm going to go with.
posted by zamboni at 5:36 PM on May 26, 2019 [3 favorites]


> If SpaceX launches all 12,000, they will outnumber stars visible to the naked eye.

Yeah that's the kind of maybe-mendacious statements I'm talking about. It's technically correct, because 12,000 satellites is more than the number of stars visible to the naked eye from a point on the earth at any time. Okay, so point to him here. BUT THIS IS A TOTALLY IRRELEVANT FACTOID. He might as well point out that the number of satellites in the constellation is about the same as one-and-one-third times as long as The Great Wall of China measured in kilometers, or the number of rain gardens Washington State University would like to see built in Puget Sound.

Because you cannot ever see all 12,000 satellites from any point on the ground. I mean, think about it: they surround the earth. The number of them above the horizon at any given time is far smaller than the total constellation; it's reportedly about ~85 as the constellation gets built out.

And of those, you will only ever be able to actually see the small fraction that are near the horizon, as they catch the light and reflect it down to earth. If you look up, note that you can't see any satellites most of the time. (Well, except the moon, which is technically a "satellite".) The only time when they are visible is when they are—due to their altitude—still getting light from the sun while the point of observation is in darkness. This is how you get satellite flare.

Satellite flares are not new. On a clear night you can go out and see the flare from the Iridium constellation—"satellite flare" is the generic term for what I first heard described as "Iridium flare", because they were the first satellites that made it really easy and reliable to spot. There has been no catastrophic effect to astronomy as far as I've ever heard. (If anything it's made some aspects of astronomy and space science much more accessible to the public. The idea that you can go out and see satellites is pretty neat.)

But the number of satellites visible due to flare is only ever going to be a small fraction of the ones visible above the horizon (and very low orbit satellites tend to flare for less time than higher-orbit ones... think of how long the sun is visible reflecting off a mountain peak vs. a small hill, if you're in a valley below), and the ones visible above the horizon are a small fraction of the ones in the constellation in total.

I am entirely unconvinced that the visible-light reflections are a threat to astronomy, and certainly someone who says something as bald-facedly stupid as saying they'll outnumber the stars in the sky, has very little credibility. This is the sort of overwrought, high-emotion / low-information argumentation that I was referring to earlier; the most charitable explanation I can come up with is that it's a product of people losing their heads over the battle over RF spectrum. Or they're just weasels who don't mind misguiding the public if it happens to help their particular pet issue.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:02 PM on May 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


Because you cannot ever see all 12,000 satellites from any point on the ground.

FWIW, I don't read him as saying you'll be able to see all 12K satellites at once or from a given point on the ground. In fact, later in the thread he specifically says
As a quick check, I just modeled 12,000 copies of the typical orbits of Starlink satellites launched this week. At midsummer midnight in Seattle, I estimate about 500 of them will both be above the horizon and directly illuminated by the sun.
posted by asterix at 6:17 PM on May 26, 2019


Yeah that's the kind of maybe-mendacious statements I'm talking about. It's technically correct, because 12,000 satellites is more than the number of stars visible to the naked eye from a point on the earth at any time.

It's also more than the numbers of stars visible to the naked eye. Anywhere. Period.

The relative brightness of a star is measured in apparent magnitude, something which goes back to the Ancient Greeks. Have a read of the wikipedia article for the gory details, but the lower the number, the brighter the star.
The Sun is -27, the full moon is -13, an Iridium flare is -9, Sirius is -1. The faintest stars visible to the naked eye under optimal conditions is generally accepted to be +6.5.

How many stars are +6.5 or brighter? They're listed in the Bright Star Catalogue.
The catalog contains 9,110 objects, of which 9,095 are stars, 11 are novae or supernovae,[1] and 4 are non-stellar objects; the non-stellar objects are the globular clusters 47 Tucanae (designated HR 95) and NGC 2808 (HR 3671), and the open clusters NGC 2281 (HR 2496) and Messier 67 (HR 3515).
12000 - 9095 = 2905.

certainly someone who says something as bald-facedly stupid as saying they'll outnumber the stars in the sky, has very little credibility.
posted by zamboni at 7:12 PM on May 26, 2019 [6 favorites]


I'm seeing a lot of comments in various forums (including here) that seem to assume that a casual interest in astronomy and space science equates to an ability to deduce and pronounce upon the impact of the Starlink satellites.

Well, I have an MSc in satellite communications engineering, I used to teach orbit theory to trainee satellite mission controllers, and I've had a pretty serious interest in astronomy (and been an amateur astronomer) since the age of about 5. I've spent a fair bit of the last couple of days reading the various analyses of the impact of Starlink and whilst there are obviously exaggerated 'the sky is falling' ones, my semi-professional view is that the assessments that this will have a significant affect on amateur and professional astronomy, and a noticeable impact on the night sky, are more credible than the ones that minimise these consequences.

Also, a data point: I stood on our roof patio at just past midnight last night, a mile from the centre of the UK's second biggest city, and clearly saw the Starlink train go almost right overhead. It passed close to Arcturus, and very close to Zeta Boötis, which was about the same brightness as most of the satellites. Now Zeta Boötis is magnitude 4, so that gives an idea of how bright a Starlink satellite can be, at midnight, right overhead.

Yes, I'm at latitude 52.5 north, and in much of the world closer to the equator the visibility of the Starlink satellites will be more constrained to periods around twilight. But it won't be for minutes after sunset or before sunrise, and it won't be whilst they are low on the horizon.
posted by Major Clanger at 12:55 AM on May 27, 2019 [11 favorites]


Ah, there's my discrepancy. They get dimmer once their panels are aligned.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 4:43 AM on May 27, 2019


One of our favourite things to do up at our cottage near Sudbury is to sit out on the dock on nice nights and watch the stars and count shooting stars. Since my grandfather built the place, satellites have gone from non-existent, to rare and exciting sightings, to now being one of the most common things in the sky. They started outnumbering shooting stars about 10 or 15 years ago. From personal observation I can say that satellites are visible well after midnight on summer nights at that northerly latitude.

This pisses me off. This is a visual pollution of an ancient, shared, common heritage for commercial profit. Unlike light pollution there is no-where on Earth you can go to escape this. One american company decided to launch this crap and fill the sky, and now the entire world has to look at it.

Capitalist space imperialism.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:28 AM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


It's also more than the numbers of stars visible to the naked eye. Anywhere. Period.

I will accept this and walk back my statements and assertions about this.

Anyway, my stance is really "well, the sky is already pretty ruined and that horse is out of the barn."

I realized I was basing my statements entirely on my personal experiences, including the fact my eyes or general perspective when sky watching may be slightly above average. On reflection I'm realizing that I'll point out satellites I can clearly see but people watching with me can't resolve them even if I point them out with a laser.

When I look at the galactic core I see, sense or otherwise percieve billions of stars, not just clouds of dust, and I'm realizing a whole lot of that is all in my head and just being able to internally visualize it in high detail despite my astigmatism and rapidly aging eyes.

So when I gripe about that this assertion that 12,000 satellites is number larger than all the visible stars, I'm thinking "What are you talking about. That "star" right there is actually a galaxy of a billion or trillion stars, and it itself is a +6.5 or brighter magnitude BSC object! And look, there's another galaxy right next to it! How are you not seeing or perceiving the billions upon billions of stars?"

The other part I'm realizing is that my reaction to seeing satellites is basically just "Oh, cooool!" and not a negative reaction at all. I'm actually bummed I didn't get to spot the closely clustered Skytrain group right after launch, and I'm still hoping I'll see some part of it, or the next one.

It's kind of contradiction or dichotomy in me considering how pro-nature and anti-corporate I basically am, but I think I would be ok with seeing a full on orbital ring platform up there in the night sky. Or larger scale space habitats.

Just imagine one of those after sunset. Imagine being able to watch ships dock on an impossible thread hanging across the whole sky like a bridge without an end? How would the Earth's shadow play across it as the sun rose and fell? What would it look like against the dark, night sky, perhaps a black stripe across a full moon? Could you see lights from inside the structure? Imagine taking an elevator up one of the supports, stepping out into a structure with more square footage in it than many countries have square miles of land? Could you walk around the entire ring and circumnavigate the globe under your own power, without a space suit or craft?

For better or worse we're destined for space, and this is going to include satellites. Lots of satellites.


And the Starlink project is also very technically interesting. If they pull this off it's a global network that is going to feasibly faster than terrestrial fiber optics for inter-continental traffic, because the satellites are a massive optical mesh network. I'm not sure if people are really grasping this part, because it's actually pretty genius and transformative.

If this works - and it should - they'll have about a 1/3rd net speed and latency advantage from point to point due to the difference of speed of light in a medium (glass fiber) as opposed to the high vacuum of LEO.

Starlink is more than simply global wireless internet for the masses. It's actually a pretty audacious project to attempt to replace terrestrial telcos entirely, or at least eat significant portions of their lunch.

All at fractions of the price of running terrestrial undersea and underground fiber, without the inherent costs of right of way and risk geopolitical instability and routing around it.

To try to do this sort of end run Hail Mary football pass by launching huge swarms/stacks of smaller, lower cost and rather technically advanced flat pack origami robot satellites with full on miniaturized ion thrusters?

Holy shit that's some pretty heavy sci fi futurist stuff right there, right here and now. Sure, Musk is probably using it as one more financial and economic colonialist stepping stone to get to Mars or whatever. Sure, he's an annoying anarcho-capitalist libertarian dude-bro. If I get to pick super villains, I'll take him over Batshit Bezos.

And the launch barely made the news cycle before it lit up the sky with 60 satellites at once, because SpaceX launches are starting to be that mundane, apparently.

If this happened back in the Reagan era 1980s it would have been a national holiday. People would have gone totally bonkers over it. You could have printed t-shirts and earned a down payment on a nice house in like a week.
posted by loquacious at 12:12 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]


Starlink may end up being annoying, though I suspect some minor design changes could reduce the impact, much like Iridium's new satellites don't flare like the old ones did.

The FCC's decision to allow terrestrial 5G networks so close to the water vapor emission frequency will have serious impacts on all of us in our daily lives. It's not a "maybe this will make astronomy a bit harder from ground-based telescopes" thing. It's a "this will definitely have a significant negative impact on our ability to forecast weather at the very least" thing.
posted by wierdo at 12:31 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


If some sort of consortium of nations that had a vested interest in getting high speed internet to their citizens had done this, I'd be on board with the hand wringing done in this thread. In reality though, a capitalist in the most capitalist country in the world did this, and most likely for the most capitalist reasons around. I for one fucking minute don't think Musk did this out of the kindness of his heart.

There's bad news for you. The only reason anything ever got sent into space is for the most capitalist reasons around: there was big money in it.

Now, every nation on the planet could hold hands, sing "We Are the World", and declare a space program for All The Best Reasons, but it won't get an inch off the ground without some very big money going to some very rich people who have the very big resources and wherewithal to make it happen. And you'd get to make your contribution, probably whether you like it or not.

I go camping out in the So CA desert a few times a year. Mostly to look at the stars. 12,000 satellites are not likely to make any significant sky pollution. And may or may not be noticeable. What I will see, are a few dozen aircraft, often too high to hear, but visible regardless. It's not really that bad a thing. It doesn't lessen my experience.
posted by 2N2222 at 12:36 PM on May 27, 2019


The only reason anything ever got sent into space is for the most capitalist reasons around
That's a pretty wide net to cast around capitalism if you're including Nazis bombing London, and the USSR launching Gagarin.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


Starlink is more than simply global wireless internet for the masses.

This is not for the masses. It is for those who can afford to pay.

Why should the americans get to decide what gets to fill the sky of the world?

Imperialism.

Sure, it may be cool sci-fi whatever, but all the advancements of other Empires of the past also seemed like super neat advancements at the time as they used their technology to take dominion of resources just because they wanted to.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


I'd expect the LSST to be among the least impacted astonomy instruments. It already has a stage in the data pipeline to excise cosmic rays, excising LEO satellite tracks at the same time should be fairly simple. And it will be using fairly short 30s exposures, so the amount of coverage lost to the tracks should be pretty minimal.
posted by mscibing at 1:22 PM on May 27, 2019


Hypocrites. They made SO much noise about junk in space when India tested shooting a satellite into a few hundred bits.
posted by hugbucket at 11:45 AM on May 28, 2019


Seems maybe Musk has backed off a bit from his initial bullheadedness.

They made SO much noise about junk in space when India tested shooting a satellite into a few hundred bits.
That's a different, more dangerous, problem. You know in advance that your (in this case, all-electric) satellites aren't going to be e.g. ISS crossers. You can't say that about a random shrapnel cloud.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:20 PM on May 28, 2019


Uh yeah, that's because you can't tell blown-up bits of satellite to de-orbit or change their orbits. Functioning satellites aren't "space junk" for a reason. Generally they are intentionally de-orbited (crashed) before they stop working specifically to prevent becoming a hazard to navigation.

Anyway, I don't really know what to do with the "space imperialism!" claims, but we've been flying jets over the world, at night, for decades. There are very few places where you can go and look up and not see the occasional oddly-moving star and then realize it's a jet. As far as I know, nobody has claimed that's "stratospheric imperialism!". It doesn't hold water to me.

Also, the same sets of treaties that enable a project like Starlink are also what keep countries from shooting down satellites the moment they go over their territory. Space is either something that everyone has access to, or it very quickly becomes a place that nobody has access to. There is no legal framework that's going to result in just the people you like (for basically any definition of "you" and "like") having access to a shared resource like space (or the oceans), and the system we have is designed to avoid a zero-sum land-grab, which—based on a great many historical examples—would probably result in some real space imperialism. International institutions and treaty agreements are incredibly fragile as-is; hell, if they hadn't been crafted at a time that, in retrospect, looks like the all-time high-water mark for internationalism and transnational cooperation (yes, with a solid dose of Mutually Assured Destruction, but that's a good motivator for cooperation), they probably wouldn't exist—I don't think we could pull them together today. TBH I am honestly surprised Musk or anyone else is doing it; putting that much infrastructure out there, within reach of so many countries' missiles... it's taking a bullish position on the future that I'm not sure I'd make. I'd be putting fiber in deep trenches and datacenters in bunkers, personally. I hope he's right and I'm wrong.

Because Starlink and similar services—it's not going to be the only one, any more than Iridium was—are capable of providing cellular-like telecom coverage to the entire planet, at a cost far lower than Iridium. That's incredible. Just in my life I've seen attitudes shift massively due to assumptions of cell coverage, and that's just in relatively suburban areas of the US. The effect in the developing world, where wireline services never reached, has been more significant.

When you can wander off anywhere, or get on a boat and sail in any direction you want, and be reasonably confident that you'll remain connected to the rest of the world, capable of leveraging our civilization's capabilities for weather protection, medical advice / medevac, and the harder-to-quantify benefits that just come with being able to reach anyone else you want, using only a small handheld device... that's a big deal.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:23 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


using only a small handheld device
Well, a pizza box sized one anyway. Maybe carphones will become a thing again.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 4:07 PM on May 28, 2019


I hadn't heard about them using phased array antennas on the receivers. That's an interesting choice; I wonder what's driving it. There's certainly no obvious reason why they can't talk directly to a handset. Iridium does it, as do two some systems with some slightly-chunkier phones. Wonder if it's just regulatory/political, so as not to scare up a lot of opposition from Iridium/InMarSat/Globalstar.

Could be a bandwidth-preservation thing, I guess? Have the ground stations do beam steering and aim directly at the intended satellite, rather than blasting signal through an omni at the entire horizon.

Anyway, this slide deck on Iridium is interesting if you are into this sort of thing. They have some nice graphics showing the distribution of traffic worldwide. Almost 30% is from international waters, where there's no cellular coverage and no real alternative to satellites (other than HF radio).
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:17 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


Pretty sure it's the bandwidth thing. Getting a gigabit through an omni would be fine if you don't mind painting every sat above the horizon, but that's going to run out of frequencies to hop to fast as you add customers, especially if some of them are aeroplanes.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 5:13 PM on May 28, 2019


Ok, field report time!

So I've been monitoring the orbital ephemeris and likely next viewing opportunities, and I had a chance to view the dispersing cloud or train last night with a really clear sky from a dark and relatively very northern location in the US.

And I think I saw parts of it? I barely saw a couple of very, very dim satellites in the projected path moving in the right direction with about the right spread and timing.

I didn't see anything resembling a train or even a cluster, and nothing at all that was brighter or even half as bright or a 16th as bright as a +6.5.

And hey, so yay this is a brag and presentation of space observation skills and personal if amateur steet cred, and I'm going on this rant to try to reassure people:

I'm likely more than just a casual satellite hunter at this point. I'm into this enough and skilled enough that not only is it routine for me to know when/where to look at the sky for a particular group of satellites but I have obsessed over the ephemeris and geodetic particulars with fine enough detail to attempt to place an ISS/Zarya pass against both the celestial night sky and a geographic structure while aiming for perfect symmetry between ISS/Zarya track, the structure and Polaris (and, frankly, completely missing) in one single camera exposure. Like this and this.

And as you can see I sure came real damn close to getting that curved concrete structure, the sky and the ISS/Zarya track to match and line up. On a slightly different pass from the same tripod position and camera inclination it would eventually match up perfectly, but because of how orbits can widely if not wildly vary, it might take a dozen attempt to get it just right and perfectly symmetrical between Polaris and the concrete artillery bunker structure.

It took many, many hours of homework and nerding out, visiting the site and getting some bearing and inclination measurements and cross-referenceing between like a dozen different websites to get all of that to line up, plus waiting about 6 months for weather, ISS and the night sky to all line up at the same time in a place where the sky is mostly overcast or raining all the time.

I might not be able to do the math of orbital mechanics but I'm skilled at observation and tracking and interpreting known data.

So, given all that let's assume I was looking in the right place at the right time. Let's assume I know how to let my eyes adjust to the dark. Let's assume I have a number of red night vision protecting flashlights, too, because I do.

I'm at a minimum 99.99% positive that I was looking in the right place and time under prime, best (or worst) case scenario conditions based on the projections I saw for my geographic location.

I'm pretty sure I saw a total of about 3 of the Starlink satellites in total with the naked eye. I saw about 4-5 other satellites on completely different tracks and inclinations in the same time frame.

Even better? I photographed the right area at the right place and time with a 25 minute exposure fully covering the projected pass.

The ones on the Starlink track don't even show up in the long exposure starfield, and this is prime summer northern latitude rural dark sky viewing environment. To my west and SW where the Starlink flyover was projected to pass is deep Olympic National Park and very dark sky.

In the photograph the stars show up great, there's a few shooting stars, and a couple of satellight flares from the from other satellites going basically the opposite perpendicular inclination to the Starlink pass.


I was completely underwhelmed. I was hoping for a shotgun-scatter track of 60 visible satellites booking it across the sky. I was hoping for a really cool photograph of that. It was a total non-event here.


As for the space imperialism, the RF pollution and radio astronomy and weather radar... well, sure. I can agree with that. I'm not addressing that here.

As far as naked eye night sky viewing is concerned, as far as I can tell this isn't going to be the thing to ruin that. Light pollution from cities and street lights is a vastly greater concern, and I really wish people would get more upset and active about that.

If only for having yearly lights out star watching parties. Make a regional or national holiday out of it. Turn out the lights. Give the police some patrol and community safety overtime. Make it a thing where people stay up late and have a party with their neighbors and see the sky once in a while, even from the heart of a city.
posted by loquacious at 7:04 PM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


If a city does the bare minimum of requiring all outdoor fixtures be of a full cutoff design or otherwise shielded from the sky, the lights don't have to all go off for people to have decent enough views of the night sky.

It's quite honestly infuriating that this has been a widely known thing for 15+ years at this point and a known thing since 1960 or earlier, yet all but a few cities have no regulation on light pollution whatsoever, even of the "keep your light from shining in your neighbor's windows" kind, and those that do don't really enforce it except upon complaint. The building inspectors whose job it is don't bother.

I suppose that's a big part of the reason I'm initially dismissive of people who complain about satellites or anything else ruining their night view. I find it hard to believe that it's really about what they are claiming it to be about given how little thought or effort is put into related issues that have been ongoing for our entire lives.
posted by wierdo at 6:24 AM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


Verge summary article
This story was updated to remove a line saying that SpaceX did not respond to a request for a comment. The company referred The Verge to Musk’s tweets.
posted by zamboni at 10:04 AM on May 30, 2019






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