You must log in or register to comment.
Starlink is ruining law enforcement here in South America already. Drug cartels and people on illegal activities acting in Amazon rainforest are getting increasingly creative at turning their starlink devices on, then off, then on again at different points. Also, such devices switch hands rather quickly - and international borders sometimes - in order to avoid tracking.
I’m confused because band pass filters exist. Can they not add a filter to eliminate the frequencies that starlink uses?
Also, the starlink satellites use phased array antennas, guess that wasn’t a great idea either.
That works great unless you’re specifically looking for results in those frequencies.
It’s the equivalent of trying to look for a red laser pointer dot on a wall and some jackass put red floodlights in front of you aimed at the wall.
Is it weird I agree these are terrible and yet also hope this spurs the end of ground based observation in favor of a larger orbital presence?
We could and should be doing both ground and orbital radio telescope observations. One really interesting idea I’ve seen floated is to put one on the far-side of the moon; it’d be shielded from all our radio emissions but, of course, it would be somewhat suspectable to interference from the sun for weeks at a time.
What I’ve never understood about Starlink is how it’s better than existing satellite internet beamed from geosynchronous craft… like, geosync is crowded (especially over North America and Europe), but it’s not so crowded we couldn’t put a couple more transponders up there. Objects in geosync rarely have the astronomical side effects that Starlink is apparently causing. It would even solve the Starlink issue of having to have an expense af receiver with active tracking… just nail up a stationary ku-band dish that doesn’t need to move ever. This is already solved technology.
The problem with geosynchronous orbit is that you need to be at a high altitude to maintain it. That increases the packet round trip time to a receiver on the ground. Starlink satellites orbit low enough to give a theoretical 20ms ping. A geostationary satellite would be at best 500ms. It’s fine for some tasks but lousy for applications that need low latency, like video calling.
In the past 6 months, Starlink satellites made 50,000 collision avoidance maneuvers. They now maneuver 275 times a day to avoid crashing into other space objects.
They use an on board AI to calculate the positions, but each time they course-correct, it throws off forecasting accuracy for several days. So a collision isn’t an if, it’s a when, and suddenly we’re in Kessler Syndrome territory. Or maybe enough people will eventually wake up and realize Musk was an actual idiot all along.
But until then, great, low pings for video calls. Hurray.
This is completely factually inaccurate. 2 minutes on Google will help you learn but seeing as how you’ve been spewing crap all over this thread I don’t think it’s worth my time to even bother helping you understand.
Can you debunk it for the rest of us?
Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.
They would fall to earth in pieces? Is that an alright thing?
Fuckin space garbage is what it is.
Yes it was impressive that they landed a rocket again once, but the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone. It should’ve been a stepping stone for better technology, but instead they’re just mining money. Privately owned space engineering is a disgrace to humanity.
Space engineering used to unite even the worst opponents as with the international space station, but now those institutions are underfunded, while billionaire space-musk can shoot his loads into the atmosphere without any regard to the rest of the worlds population living inside said sphere.
Tax the asshole already.
I was excited about starlink when it was announced, but already it’s way too expensive, already bows to actual totalitarians and isn’t affordable on the ocean and not available in remote places without a license.
And with more satellite constellations planned by amazon and others, it seems the kessler syndrome is just a question of time.
It’s extremely affordable on the ocean. What are you talking about?
Just until recently satellite internet was really expensive. Like only large corporations could afford it. And the bandwidth was shit. Also it was barely available in the deep northern and southern hemisphere. Sure it’s considered expensive for the regular kayaking dude. But it’s insanely more available than ever before.
The dudes an asshole. But don’t invent arguments.
already bows to actual totalitarians
Care to elaborate?
Turkey and Russia. It’s clear that profit seeking corporations would bow, but then Elon screams bloody murder when reactionary forces in Brazil manipulating social media get censored.
I feel like that explanation is missing a verb or something.
To bow, or bow down or kneel for. But I’m not going to google that for you haha. The basic problem is that starlink theoretically has immense power so it becomes a political tool. He bows to those ones but not to legitimate democratic interests.
Especially once starlink and others can make landline based internet connections obsolete by pricing them out - which they are not currently doing though, but it seems only a matter of time with competition. Basically we could get to a situation where there are only like 2 or 3 internet provider practically controlling internet globally.
They won’t be able to price landline based connections out as long as they have to replace their satellites every 5 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re running at a loss currently.
When I searched “Elon bows to Turkey” I got this story about Twitter censoring some tweets during the Turkish election… Is that what you’re talking about?
On the Kessler point, Starlink birds fly at an altitude where they will deorbit in 4-8 years if they go dead, so that particular orbit will always be fairly clean, and if a Kessler event does happen, the debris will deorbit in a reasonable length of time.
Where will they go after they deorbit? Do we get em back?
They burn up on re-entry, at least they’re supposed to.
This. I wish I had more than one up vote I could give for this comment.
If we had the money, there’s no legal repercussions to going up there and deorbiting the satellites right? Maybe install a defense platform to shoot down any more from spacex, oneweb or whoever else tries putting them up.
If we had the money
If you had that kind of money, you could just build extensive ground-based fiber and radio networks that invalidate Starlink.
there’s no legal repercussions to going up there and deorbiting the satellites right?
Lmao, what would ever make you think deliberately destroying communication infrastructure would be legal?
Maybe install a defense platform to shoot down any more from spacex, oneweb or whoever else tries putting them up.
If you’re talking about shooting satellites out of orbit from the ground, you don’t understand how orbital spaceflight works. If you’re talking about putting weapons in space, that’s a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.
Also, blowing up satellites just creates clusters of space junk we can’t get rid of, so it’s a non-starter.
