A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
https://news.ubc.ca/2026/03/a-million-new-spacex-satellites-will-destroy-the-night-sky-for-everyone-on-earth/Open linkView original on lemmus.org981
Comments220https://news.ubc.ca/2026/03/a-million-new-spacex-satellites-will-destroy-the-night-sky-for-everyone-on-earth/Open linkView original on lemmus.org
It's so infuriating... I occasionally do astrophotography and it's getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere... Fuck Musk.
I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.
Now I can't look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.
You can actually see some in broad daylight. I was shocked one day looking up and seeing one (white dot in the picture, verified with sat tracking app).
This photo is AI!
Yikes. This was not a serious comment. I thought that’d be obvious because… it’s literally blue sky with a white dot.
Poe's Law strikes again:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Adding a
/swould help convey that intent a little more. And if you're going for the "Got ya!" satire effect, you could always hide it in a spoiler.How so lol?
For the uneducated, what do these look like and can you see them in areas with light pollution?
Yes. They are technically reflected sunlight, so they are as bright as the sun, just very small. It makes sense you can see them during sunlight, since they are reflections of sunlight. You will typically only see them on the side of the sky opposite the sun, but the exact angle depends on the location and orientation of the satellite and the surface that is actually doing the reflection.
Generally speaking, they are dots that fade in somewhat gradually, moving at a consistent pace (typically slower than a shooting star, but faster than an airplane at cruising altitude) in a straight line direction for awhile at full brightness, then fading away.
To me, they look exactly like all the other stars in the sky, except they move, a bit slower than a plane, and they don't blink.
If you look towards the horizon with the sun, a little before sunrise or after sunset, you'll probably be able to see flashes of them as they catch the light.
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn't have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.
Did you miss this part? You're arguing over something I didn't claim, and didn't say.
But since you brought it up, SpaceX received nearly $1 billion in subsidies from the FCC in 2020 to support rural customers. That money is what I'm talking about. It wasn't for ships. It was to connect rural customers because it would otherwise not be profitable for large ISPs to serve them. This billion should have gone to supporting county PUDs, not a rich nazi fuck's company. It should have stayed with the public.
Unless you're saying that the billion from taxpayers should have been given to him to support ships in international waters?
As a bonus, fiber doesn't lose capacity just because it gets cloudy. Try using Starlink when a cumulonimbus cloud is overhead.
I don't think you've ever used Starlink if you think clouds make it fail.
...you do realize it started in Seattle, right?
Seattle typically doesn't get hail core cumulonimbus (supercells). Plus, I'm not saying that it completely fails with just cloudy weather alone. Note that I said capacity, which is absolutely affected by moderate to heavy cloud cover or not being able to see the sky. Diminished capacity doesn't mean it fails, it means that it's slower, higher latency, and less reliable. In extreme cases involving hail storms (like I mentioned), it can and does fail - you can see this in the storm chaser streaming circles. Their streams cut out completely at times, if the satellites are between the storm and their antenna.
I am simply bringing up an edge case since the person who originally replied brought up ships when I was talking about rural fiber.
My point is still that SpaceX shouldn't have gotten FCC subsidies when a more reliable, cheaper (especially in the long run since we're talking about LEO), higher bandwidth, lower latency option exists. PUDs should have gotten all of that cash, not a different, large ISP owned by a billionaire.
An added bonus to fiber: it doesn't ruin ground based astronomy.
Yeah, fair. Where fiber can be run fiber should be run.
Just scarred from all the times where we spend x billion to expand fiber, it doesn't happen, somehow nobody gets held accountable.
I mean damn, at least Starlink is providing a service
That's because historically, major ISPs have been given the grants (including Starlink) instead of PUDs. Public fiber is entirely different, it's managed and installed like a public utility, not a service to be capitalized on. This is why I've been so focused on saying that SpaceX should never have been given $1 billion dollars. It shouldn't have been given to any non public organization.
I don't know what a fcc is but if it helps us having good internet I'm all for it. I work on ships and I've used starlink on ships in storms and all kinds of bad weather including finding the antenna covered in ice and snow. It's fantastic. Our old geostationary communication system fails as soon as a passing bird looks at it.
The FCC is the Federal Communication Commission for the US. They're a US federal agency meant to do domestic policy in anything telecom and radio.
The intent of the subsidies was not for ships or international communication. It was meant for rural US properties. That's why it should have been allocated to PUDs (public utility district). It would have been more useful for the people paying the taxes to give broadband subsidies.
Shipping companies can pay their own way - they're corporations and can afford it. The subsides should not have gone to SpaceX.
Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn't matter for download.
it's such a game changer when you're actually using it. night and day, completely different experience.
also, GEO is in many regards more at risk for Kessler syndrome because stuff up there doesn't deorbit
You know capitalism has reached peak efficiency when instead of laying some cables or even build a few more cell towers we decide to litter the atmosphere with satellites instead
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you'll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
Edit: they also serve air traffic where ground service isnt available.
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
I mean I don't specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 down/up with latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren't reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some (I vaguely recall something like 40-60% have met it?), so it's not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
Edit: I think my 40-60 number is also about a year old, so its probably a little higher now.
LEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.
Any way to help them do that?
No way that’s cheaper or easier than waiting
At least not legally
Who enforces space law?
My mind was on the more practical idea of intervening on the ground.
But basically no-one, since it's largely based on international law which is toothless.
Exactly
I'm wondering from a pure academic standpoint here honest. Like What about a laser?
Lmao I wish. Satellites and their components have to be “hardened” to survive extreme temperatures and radiation in space. There’s probably nothing on it you could disable with any laser you could buy. Plus there’s the matter of targeting them.
Destroying these satellites with lasers poses a similar problem to what happens when you light zombies on fire: the satellites are held in space by their momentum and the reduced atmosphere vs Earth's gravity. If you break the satellites into pieces via laser, then now you have uncontrolled and unpredictable space junk to deal with. Some of the pieces might return sooner, but what was once a concern is now a problem. Just like how a zombie at your door is very concerning, a zombie on fire at your door is an immediate problem.
Now, what could be interesting would be sending up another satellite that sprays black paint on the sun-facing side of other satellites. The energy absorbed and then exhausted could propel it towards Earth sooner. Maybe? I dunno, I'm just a simple country Fartographer, your honor.
No, it would run out of black paint. Give it a robot arm with scissors or something to cut the power lines on the Starlinks. (And also push them out of orbit? Maybe exchange energy with some sort of maneuver to stay in orbit longer?)
Why would we cut the power before deorbiting them? But if you wanna be more aggressive like that, then how about a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the satellite like a bully to ants?
"No officer, I did not 'run into their car...' I improved their gas mileage by exchanging energy."
Now with lasers you buy perhaps, what about with the lasers you build?
In the future where Federal Authority is concentrated on robbing and stealing elsewhere, I cannot imagine a high energy beam could not take these motherfuckers out.
If you have the capability to build a laser that can focus enough energy, from the ground through the atmosphere, with enough precision to lock on to an LEO constellation member long enough to disable it, you’d probably already either be captured, or working for DoD.
Also: great, you exploded it before reentry. Now we have a hundred thousand smaller, lighter fragments skipping off the atmosphere, disbursing randomly, and spinning around like hypersonic chaff bullets for actual worthwhile spacecraft and satellites to fly through, twinkling in infrared like a billion new streaky sparkles on those telescopes. It takes a lot longer for all that bullshit to rain down, and it pollutes just the same. Tell me, who were you fighting for again and why?
This is like when the humans blacken the sky in the Matrix to defeat the machines. Yeah it wrecked the earth, but is also didn’t defeat them and they just found something else to exploit.
I mean I was trying to Broach a theoretical, completely academic, discussion about what could or could not take these satellites out.
Good ole brute force is the best method, though, as you said, targeting is a huge problem. Basically you need a low Earth orbit shotgun.
Kessler syndrome though.
Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I suppose I need to study it a little more to make it stick.
Do they have those at Walmart?
i remember some startup tried to build a slingshot to shoot satellites into orbit with something like a bit catapult. that was 5 years ago, haven't heard of them since.
Probably. I imagine you could probably get one at a gun show in Texas
How rare are these materials that are sending to space? Literally sending rare metals out of our planet. Even if they fall back down to earth. Is it even possible or viable money wise to recover them?
Nope, not viable at all. A lot of it is straight up atomized on reentry especially for the smaller devices. Some of it is rare and some is not. The wet dream of these billionaires is they will be the first to figure out space mining and then manufacture. That’s why Elon musk has spacex and the boring company. Then raw resources like precious metals become infinite over night. Hopefully capitalism dies before that happens so we can all enjoy that.
It starts with ass and ends with ass in nation.
Ha ha, yes, took me a half hour.
Polluting atmosphere doing so.
That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them
Which is also nothing compared to a slew of other pollution sources
Which is also nothing compared to the general entropy of the universe.
Definitely true. But not very relevant.
Don't count on it. These things don't just zip along in their orbits. LEO is crowded. They have to maneuver to avoid collisions... a lot.
If Starlink or any other mega-constellation company loses control of their satellites for any reason, there could be collisions. A recent study (Note: PDF) suggests that a sufficiently powerful CME could cause a runaway Kessler Syndrome in as little as 2.8 days if the loss of control lasts that long.
And the orbits of that debris would still decay within a decade in LEO.
even less for Starlink
What's your point? We would have a LEO like a minefield for 10 years.
I mean with proper regulation or would be slightly better. If they can maneuver to avoid collisions they can likes deorbit themselves at a quicker pace.
The main issue is if ever they went under someone would buy it, or try to buy it, at a discount. So they likely wouldn't go away even if Star link went under.
Eh, i'm not so sure. I just did a quick doodle.
My opinion is that when a collision happens, it's probably very unlikely for each fragment to actually stay on a stable orbit around Earth. Chances are high that it gains a lot of energy and the orbit is significantly distorted. Now, if an orbit is already very close to Earth, that means that any distortion will make it not fit tightly around Earth anymore, instead will make it go elliptic and therefore on trajectory of collision with Earth. The only way a fragment would not do that is if it's accelerated perfectly sideways, in which case it would continue to circle around Earth for 10 years before deorbiting due to atmospheric friction. So, the cascading is a bit limited.
I don't think you are familiar with orbital mechanics. A collision would barely disturb an orbit.
then are the fragments dangerous?
Definitely.
The fragments are dangerous to other things in low earth orbit. They will burn up before they hit the ground here. So really it might be for the best because I would rather see a world where every single satellite is destroyed at this point.
I expect that we will get in orbit refueling to extend their life once you get a good nuclear and solar panel power tug with an electric thruster that can deliver fuel, they're in a similar orbit if you just do that.
Especially with the number of them it’s probably cheaper to just put up new satellites. LEO sats are designed to be temporary.
Cheaper and easier to upgrade the constellation to newer and faster tech. If you have backwards compatibility, you just start launching v2 and v1 will eventually just burn up, and hopefully finish just in time for v3 to start launching so you only have to be compatible with n-1 versions.
sooo then this isn't a problem if they all burn out eventually? hehe i'm just being pedantic of course
There’s reasonable hope at least that this is a problem that will solve itself, and unfortunately we have bigger problems to worry about.
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
If we get that we'll also definitely get a Moon Banksy.
... 'Bansky goes to Space' ...
That would make for quite a story.
That's where you draw the line?
(Also, say hi to your chickens for me)
Well, at least we'll always have Sinatra.
theoretically
The Moon is a few 1000s of times more distant than LEO.
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they're certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn't mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren't environmental disasters anymore.
It's either data centres in space or giant mirrors to reflect sunlight.
Presumably his engineers have explained this to him but he didn't listen
To cool the iss they're exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
For real. Thermal regulation of spacecraft is a problem that current, non-data center, satellites are struggling with and increasing the load by orders of magnitude isn’t going to make things easier. You can easily calculate the area needed for radiative heat transfer for a perfect radiator and you quickly end up with some gargantuan panels. Perfect radiators are also perfect absorbers, so the whole system goes to shit if the panel isn’t facing deep space.
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It's called Starlink. It's already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware in a single satellite.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it's already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That's all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Edit: so his power argument is mostly fine. Different components do dissipate different amounts of heat at the same power. Antennae will not run as hot as GPUs, the fact they radiate power by design helps here. However, even if you could use all a v2 satellite's power generation for compute, you need 35 sattelites per MW of compute. So at the lowest estimate 35000 for a GW data centre. For 2024 data centre capacity (47 GW computed from 415 TWh used) you need around 1.6 million sattelites. Now you need to network a vast cloud to get reasonable inter GPU performance.
The required orbit would probably mean a whole strip of earth gets insane light pollution, due to the reflectivity of so many sattelites jammed into the narrow orbit. Note that each satellite is about as bright as a star visible to the naked eye.
Edit edit: The lifetime of a data centre GPU is around 1-2 years for serious uptime. The sattelites are meant to have a 5 year lifetime.
Which is why Musk had proposed putting into orbit a million plus sats
Right, but that's just for present compute capacity in the most optimistic scenario. Neglecting anything realistic, and the fact that starlink cooling isn't actually sufficient (the sattelites have low power downtime to cool). On top of that the GPUs still die faster than the sattelites and you can't just walk over and replace them in the rack. Let alone the end of ground-based astronomy or light pollution.
It's already sufficent to cool 20kw of compute.
When starship goes up it'll be crazy cost effective to throw them up in orbit and do compute there then to waste the time, money and power on earth
Billionaires don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we've all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
We're just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There's not that many of them.
I don't see the beginning of anything to rein in the power they get from just being overrich assholes.
Ironically, the only countries on Earth that control tightly (some of) their billionaires are Russia and China. I rememer Vietnam also executed one for tax fraud. Something for which they are barely slapped on their hand in western countries.
I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can't believe I'm saying this: Maybe we've gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
I was thinking more like Climate Change and Infrastructure and whatnot and suchlike.
That’s great, but that comes from funding those things, not shutting down a different industry. It’d be better to shut down non-productive industries like bombing brown kids in the Middle East.
This isn't really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they're passionate about, IMO they'll be more motivated to research their field of choice
*fund them
Why is it always 100x more on useless destruction and military? And yeah i know the sad answer already.
By work I meant study, not necessarily being employed by a company if that's what you meant
True, that is how we got unit 731.
SpaceX has developed laundry list of new technology to enable Starlink and other endeavors. It's silly to discount that as worthless.
If your scientific discovery disproportionately benefits a few billionaires then it's worse than worthless.
AND makes life far worse for literally the entire planet.
Imagine unilaterally deciding that increasing your already obscene fortune is more important than every living creature that will ever exist in the future having a sky to enjoy, ever again. To these people, human joy is not something worth preserving.
Dude is so cartoonishly evil that it hurts
To these people, human joy is an indulgence for the weak.
You know how over-exaggerated cartoonish villains will talk about how love and caring make you weak? Basically that.
That's because he's an ogre who has to pay women to be artificially inseminated because, they won't go anywhere near him, and his weener won't work anyhow, due to botched enlargement surgery.
Just repellant.
lol just so you know a "laundry list" is a list of bad things.
And no, rockets that can put stuff into orbit where around even before Mama Musk shat out lil Mech-Hitler.
Not like these ones. I'm almost tired of having this discussion y'all are blinded by hatred.
First full flow staged combustion engine, dramatically lower launch prices than competitors (cheaper for the government and has enabled more interesting things to go to space), dramatically more access (SpaceX flies multiple times a week!), booster recovery & rocket reuse.
And again I know everyone really is blinded by their seething rage but starship is going to change the whole landscape again.
You can hate the man as much as you want, I'm not saying I don't. But you discredit yourself by not knowing what SpaceX is actually doing.
I mean, we still wouldn't have US access to space without SpaceX (Boeing fiasco...).
Not gonna happen. Not with the effective altruist cult running things.
I don't think you are using altruist right, or I am missing some sarcasm here.
A lot of the ultra wealthy espouse a nonsense philosophy called "Effective Altruism", which asserts a kind of utilitarian "most good for the most people" ethic, but in such a way that one can basically justify any action as being, eventually, for the most good ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Including being good to hypothetical, unlikely trillions that may live someday if we colonize Mars.
I've been really passionate about space. My bday is on the anniversary of the moon landing, and my one aunt has always reminded me of the fact. My great grandfather worked for NASA and my aunt gave me his stargazing binoculars that his brother gave him when he got hired at NASA. That part of my family instilled a huge love of science in me, esp space stuff. I wanna go to space more than anything, but I don't have the brains or constitution to be an astronaut. So I just daydream, stargaze, and write poems about the cosmos.
maybe just for this one guy you know
Believe it or not, you can do two things at once. Some people are interested in space, some in geology. That's fine.
i just tried to chew gum and walk and my personal injury attorney would like to know your address (they think you're cute)
Kinda missing the point there.
Which is?
Every day, these guys make our life worse and destroy what we love.
Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?
i am angry at the idea. want to share angers?
you know those water balloon slingshots?
A drone buzzing around the top of the rocket might do it.
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Don't fall for the clickbait reporting here. Musk has a history of making comically exaggerated claims. There won't be a million satellites just like there wasn't a 4000 km/h train, self-driving tunnel network, intercontinental rocket transport or Mars colony.
But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.
There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.
And I'm not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I'm jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).
If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn't really matter).
The problem is that we offloaded "world leadership" to a bunch of ultra-rich sociopaths who only care about their own profit maximization. And they then made actual profit obsolete, since the only product they produce now is hype in the service of inflationary speculative assets. From a planetary perspective it looks like the human species is committing suicide.
Humanity is a self - resolving virus on this planet. Give it time and we'll all be dead due to our own stupidity and nature will get back to where it should be.
Of all the permanent and irreparable things big corporations are doing to our world, I struggle to really put this high up. Yeah it sucks, but it provides a useful service and they naturally degrade. If anything Im more worried about all the pollution from them burning up in the atmosphere. If they stop launching them, the sky will be clear within the deccade.
Literally nearly ever claim and promise from Elmo has been a lie so far, no idea why anyone believes this conman
He literally is a billionaire because he lies. Literally.
He is incompetent as fuck, he's a drug junkie, yet still there are so many people who look up to this shit stain
God, you sound like me. We should start a religion. CHURCH OF THE ANTI-ELMO.
It's still infuriating that he could theoretically make the WALL-E earth a reality
They did a previous study on what 65,000 satellites would look like and that was pretty bleak. Also this bit:
Thats a large chunk of Europe.
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
I thought they couldn't take the sky from me!
We haven't even finished burning the sky and boiling the sea!
And serenity is nowhere to be found.
This is how the night sky looks right now:
It's crazy to think that all this will be privately owned by ultra rich techno-fascists that are beyond any democratic control.
You know what they aren't beyond?
lmao I'm on PC and that gif takes up the entire screen in my notifications. Beautiful.
As much as I love the elegance of guillotines though, I do believe that we should use something a little more emblematic of the American working class... and which permits a feet-first approach:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Elon Musk is a plague upon the human condition. Our best hope in the US, right now, is that a Starship launch goes horribly right and hits the White House during a cabinet meeting with Elmo as a a guest. Burn it black...pave over it and start over. Preferably after a mandatory prison-raping of all billionaires, especially those who loved Epstein. Fuck em all...let god sort em out.
Just need the Kessler syndrome to put a stop to it all.
Does that apply to LEO? Seems to be self clearing in the medium term
It has always applied to LEO. Scifi media transformed it into the idea of "nothing will ever be able to leave the planet ever again" but the original studies that the phrase originated from included LEO. Despite the fact that there is enough atmosphere that a lot of the debris would experience sufficient drag for their orbits to decay within several years, not decades or millenia, it would still have huge impacts.
Yes it does because parts of LEO have such low air resistance that the junk will stay up there for a very long time. However, I think part of how the Starlink satellites work is being so low that they do deorbit pretty quickly.
I was like wtf does this have to do with law enforcement 🤦🤦🤦
Doesn't make visibility better!
There are roughly 15,000 total at the moment ? I wonder what that will do to animals and insects lives.
is already so bad. i do astro timelapses and it's all you see anymore. they stand out so much now, if the quantity gets 100x'd it'll be a nightmare.
it will blot out the stars...
There aren’t many animals or insects in low-earth orbit though, thankfully.
Yeah but they use the light to navigate too. They use this planet too.
I think local illumination is probably going to be more of a problem than reflected light of a satellite.
Beetles have been shown to rely on the milky way for navigation.
exactly nothing as most animals and insects can't even see the stars; their sense of vision isn't good enough for that.
Beetles have been shown to use the milky way for navigation.
everything the tech bros touch, dies
Literally the plot of Horizon
He never respected his fellow man, why start now?
Now we just need to invent the Wall-E bot... We're getting so close!
Maybe it's time to crowdsource a satellite killing satellite.
If this actually happens, I will dedicate my life to getting the funding to create a laser weapon that can shoot them out of the sky from Earth.
Then we'll play Space Invaders for keeps.
Won't they just become space debris and remain in orbit?
They'd last as debris for about 5 years before falling. Atmospheric drag among other things causes orbital decay that cause them to eventually fall to earth without adjustments.
The unfortunate thing about debris falling from space is that it could hit you or me and we could get killed.
They're too small and fast for that. They burn up in the atmosphere.
Larger space debris on a different trajectory can, but not LEO communication satellites.
Well there's still chances it wouldn't burn fast enough...
You're not wrong. They're designed to burn up completely but there have already been failures and documented cases of 2.5kg pieces hitting the ground. The FAA predicts at current trajectories we're looking at about 1 person hit every 2 years by stray debris. And it's only going to get worse the more they launch.
List of Starlink and Starshield Launches - Wikipedia
~10,000 Satellites currently orbiting right now, and that's just Starlink.
Check out the list of launches under "Falcon 9 Launches > Starlink Launches." It's every other day now (sometimes consecutive days) that they launch another rocket, and each payload is carrying 20 to 60 satellites.
Starlink is 2/3rds of all satellites. They add 5-6 per day, lose one per day.
If you assume each one is only starlink and they always send the max and no losses, it would take 90 years to get 1 million.
Now I'm curious. Can a satellite fly over a country without permission? I know that an aircraft can't. How far up from the Earth's surface does sovereignity end?
However high they can shoot
There are international rules though i'm not sure either, if 50 Km or less or more.
Don’t get mad. Think of the shareholders.
Down with the space clankers
Their CIDR ranges are also fucking ripe with hacked devices and criminals. 98% of connections from their 153./8 are all fucking bots.
What 153./8? You mean the allocated 153.66.0.0/15? But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised, they probably don't care about abuse reports and it's more difficult to pinpoint a specific customer due to CGNAT.
At least they provide a nice list of ranges you could block.
erp, glitch in memory. Yeah we pull that and use our own strike system.
Rather than just run some fucking cable like we already have for the grid. It’s determined that we should put a bunch of future space junk into our atmosphere. Even more frustrating is that we can’t recover anything from them, all the resources being wasted on something we can’t even recycle.
We’re creating our own “Mini Kuiper Belt”. By the time we’re ready to make interplanetary space travel a practical thing (intriguing but doubtful given present circumstances and trajectory) there will be so much space shit that it’ll be as dangerous as trying to land a plane in the United States today!
Here are the numbers as of March 2026.
Who needs to track asteroids when everyone can have NzI-Link internet?
While this very well might fuck up land-based stuff looking at space, people are often overlooking what this would mean to stellar photography from space.
If they can truly launch these million data center sats profitably, that means starship works. That means payload to space is relatively cheap.
That means we could also send large quantities of large telescopes into space on the cheap, and avoid the crazy expensive cant fail telescopes because the cost to get them up there isnt prohibitive and a technical failure in the telescope isnt a disaster.
Things very well might change, but it will also open up possibilities in the same area.
Elon will not make it cheap. Falcon 9 prices keep rising. He's an exploiter and will enshitify his service once enough people are hooked on it.
Theoretically, even if we assume SpaceX is overshooting, that's an interesting thought:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
In practice? I'm more concerned about interest in funding astronomy in the first place.
That, and big fat telescopes are fundamentally expensive. And (at least for the optical variety) "swarming" them with a bunch of cheaper units isn't as effective as building a big one.
I'd love to be wrong though. There are some interesting papers on swarms of optical telescopes for a larger effective aperture, but I'm not qualified to assess them.
Oh, I wasn't thinking swarms the same way these million sats will be, I was thinking just using the whole payload diameter of around 9m for the lens/mirror (minus any housing) but they could potentially just buy the whole starship and be cheaper than past options and that is the housing.
James Webb cost billions because of it's complexity and launch costs, none of which is needed when there's 9meters to work with without any complexity at all.
If you wanted, you could make a super crazy expensive satellite that worked just like James Webb and have a massive mirror as well, but that's a bit different than my large quantity of cheaper telecopes in space. I wonder how big you could get the mirror if you did it James Webb style in starship.
Presumably 7x ~8m hexagons folded up?
That is a good point though. And if one were to design a "budget" 9m space telescope, they could amortize the R&D dramatically by launching the same design many times, perhaps with different sensors for different purposes? Amortization is why the Falcon Heavy and such are so cheap, and why the Space Shuttle and JWST are obscenely expensive.
Okay, you've sold me. I hope this does happen.
Ya, that would get costs down further if they were able to amortize it over a larger quantity.
We could also get them pretty far out with starship refuelling, but refuelling a starship back to full capacity to then go somewhere would raise the cost a lot. But imagine a 7x 8m folded hexagon one sent out into deep space. That would be super expensive though, we wouldn't get a lot of those haha.
This is all a massive big IF though. Starship being fully reusable like they think is still very far from a given, so none of this might come true in our lifetimes.
Yeah. I prefer the idea of a bunch of 9-meters unless they can really perfect a cheap folding mirror to mass produce.
A small upper stage, an ion drive or something could get them to deep space. It's not worth flying a whole Starship out there and burning more fuel to get it back; the return trip only makes sense for LEO.
It might be super cheap in the future to launch them but it will be into a field of fast moving garbage. The cost effectiveness of throwing more and more telescope up into space to try and get pictures before they get knocked out by the debris of the past will be a losing proposition.
Nah, everything at super low orbits like these constellations decay quite quickly. Even in cases of total loss of all satellites (eg Kessler Cascade), they would all reenter within a couple years.
You could relatively easily just put your space telescopes above that orbit and they’d be just fine.
Ok so they would orbit above the field of space junk, would they by any chance have to fly through that field of space garbage to get up to that higher orbit?
Generally no. The proposed orbit for these datacenter satellites (which is still a ridiculous idea for oodles of reasons) puts them all in sun synchronous orbit, leaving nigh infinite safe paths to send a space telescope up through.
Who needs the night sky when you can download the old night sky via satellite internet with gig speed downloads in vr? /s
Doubtful.
This is just a way for SpaceX to try further integrate itself into the spheres of government and public funding, and thus, make it easier to justify government bailouts.
Monty Burns approves.
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Why not vantablack them? I thought they were already sending prototypes up that aren’t reflective and avoid the light pollution problem.
The real issue is when other countries that don’t give a shit throw stuff up there and we can’t do much about it.
Dude, we are the country that doesn't give a shit and throws stuff up there and we can't do much about it. WE ARE.
I mean. We shouldn't probably. But can't is a pretty strong word for that. Non reflective paint is a great idea. Stealth satellites.
I think it's a waste of time to fight it.
Elon just has to ask daddy Trump and he will get anything necessary to get the autorisation.
I don't think the Astrophysicists will convince Trump obviously.
Maybe you can’t fight a rocket, but an autonomous taxi on the other hand…
An autonomous taxi can fight a rocket...?
They move the rockets on the highway and instead of a giant flatbed they bolt wheels on to the rocket. It would be really easy for a robot Tesla to merge into the side and total it.
I remember Europe saying the same thing around the 1930s lol
This conversation is a waste of time no matter how much of a nazi Elon is.
This is what the sky would be like in the majority of science fiction. If you want space exploration, there will be space infrastructure, and as time goes on that infrastructure will increase both in amount and size, not to mention the traffic to and from.
It is like complaining about the clutter of the marina while wanting to explore the ocean.
I’d almost understand where you’re coming from but most of us can’t afford a ship to explore, a slip in the marina, or even a property/room on the shore. For some of us, staring out at the ocean & capturing images from land is all we have. There’s gotta be a better way that doesn’t ruin it for the majority.
Well said.
I can’t afford a boat, but I benefit from the goods and food that they transport.
Nothing is being transported via constellation satellites that wasn’t already paid for by the American people (and then not delivered on).
Why would we want our infrastructure to be the most polluting expensive version (with shit latency BTW so you can’t selfhost), in control of basically one asshole billionaire who will gleefully censor whatever he feels like, after a critical mass of dependency has been reached?
Are you glad we put our communication into such a restrictive model under a monopoly that’s cozy with a fascist government?
Stop lying to yourself and others that this was “the most efficient outcome”.
NASA has tried to build their own rockets for i think 30(?) years. Like the space shuttle. The ship was expensive. Reusability never delivered on its promise to make things cheaper, instead it made them more complicated and more expensive when NASA tried. that was the public sector, it was attempted. Then SpaceX came and somehow managed to build rockets that were both reusable and cheaper than non-reusable rockets.
So yes, that's not an ideological adherence to capitalism or anything, just plain data, that SpaceX is simply more efficient than NASA was able to be. With building rockets i mean.
Orbital data enters aren’t happening. A million starlinks aren’t happening. And musk will eventually die. I’m only defending a reasonable size of constellation.
People want houses, that doesn't mean they want forests clear cut.
Similarly people want space exploration, that doesn't mean they want to speedrun Kessler syndrome.
The infrastructure isn't the only issue here. Its the fact that this is being done by a corporation owned by a nazi, with many other companies looking to compete. So instead of having one set of LEO satellites, we'll have several.
If this was actually used to benefit humanity the light pollution caused by this would be understandable and minimized. But this isn't being done in a sustainable way, or owned by the people.
And that's all before considering the detrement to the environment from these satellites constantly burning up in the upper atmosphere.
And with all that said, this isn't space exploration, and it isnt the type of space infrastructure that would aid exploration. Actual exploration doesn't need thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of these tiny satellites aimed only at Earth.
The people that are doing the actual space exploration aren't even effected by it!
Can we even get spaceships put if they are a million of those satellites on spaces?
Space is very big. A million is nothing in the grand scheme of things like launching at a specific point.
If all we pick up out of the ocean is flotsam from the marina we’ll get the wrong idea about what’s in the ocean.