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SpaceX working on fix for Starlink satellites so they don’t disrupt astronomy

204 points by woliveirajr 7y ago

Spare_account 7y ago
My first thought was that they should paint them with Vantablack, but then I wondered if that might be too dark? Do they need to aim for a specific reflectivity or just aim for the lowest possible value?
- wongarsu 7y ago
  I think the lowest possible reflectivity is desirable. Space isn't perfectly black but very close to it. Any reflectivity means you sometimes reflect something very bright like the sun and sometimes nothing, so you have the wrong brightness no matter what you do. Black dots are at least fairly unambiguous.
- MojoDwarf 7y ago
  I was thinking about this also but wonder if it would collect too much heat while in direct sun light.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  That is often considered, but the light is absorbed and turns into heat. Where does that heat go? It would fry the electronics with no way to get rid of it.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    You could use some mechanisms to convert and dissipate the heat, though that doesn't come for free. Though the atmospheric pressure at that altitude is pretty low, you might be able to rig up some sort of peltier cooler setup to dissipate heat. Alternately if you can convert enough of the heat to electricity some other way, you could convert the heat back to light using LEDs or something and only turn on the ones facing away from earth, perhaps? Plenty of other orbital devices have to deal with heat so I'm sure this is something that has existing solutions.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      Peltier coolers won't do anything but draw power and create more heat you have to dissipate, they're not magic you have to remove the heat from the hot side too which means you need radiators for them too plus more than you'd need originally because peltier coolers are quite inefficient. Same thing with the LED idea converting that heat into electricity requires some heat differential which requires... a radiator.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      > Alternately if you can convert enough of the heat to electricity some other way Thermodynamics says "lolnope", I'm afraid. You need a temperature differential to convert heat to power.
- the8472 7y ago
  reflectivity/aborbtion is more than a percentage value. it's also a hemispherical distribution. if you glued retroreflectors to the surface most of the light would go back in the direction of the sun and thus never hit the surface. Those are probably too costly or bulk for satellites. If specular reflections are the problem they might just apply a more diffuse coating.
topologistics 7y ago
>“No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” That is absolutely ridiculous. The Iridium satellites were decommissioned recently and it was a big deal because, for the longest time, you had to check for "iridium flares" if you were using any type of sensitive equipment. Basically, the entire class of iridium satellites was highly reflective and they tended to create shooting star type phenomena, sometimes really really bright, bright enough to be seen during the daytime! Maybe she didn't think of it, but to say the astronomy comunity didn't think of it is just blatantly absurd on its face. On another note, I miss spotting iridium flares and I'm looking forward to a new class of satellites being added into my weekly observations.
- readams 7y ago
  They announced their plans years ago. The astronomy community could have raised concerns then. The fact that they didn't would indicate nobody connected the dots.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    > The fact that they didn't would indicate nobody connected the dots. Or that nobody knew who/where to contact someone to raise their concerns. A lot of people will think that if I just had this thought, then it must be pretty obvious so that others will have the same thought as well. No need for further action. Others will just not feel the need to spend their time/effort trying to look up the complaints department. Others might not even feel like it is their place to say anything.
    - cobookman 7y ago
      It’s not that hard to get in contact. If you cared you could LinkedIn message a SpaceX employee. Tweet at Elon Musk. Connected with nyt or other media who’d love to run such a story. ...etc
      - cobookman 7y ago
mentos 7y ago
Not a valid solution but I thought maybe SpaceX could launch a bunch of telescope satellites that could be used by hobbyists.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  SpaceX directly profits from space enthusiasm, and having their in-house satellite team design such satellites (during downtime, as practice or testbed, etc) and launch them using unused capacity on existing launches would be way cheaper than anything NASA could do. It's not as absurd as it seems at first glance. Not a good replacement for a proper solution, but a nice idea for something they could do in any case.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    Could you imagine the enthusiasm from amateur astronomers, kids in school, etc where they could schedule time on a space based telescope? Sure, they won't be anywhere close to Hubble, but even a 6"-12" mirror in ~0% atmosphere would be very cool. And if it were a true constellation, you could schedule time on a satellite in the night time part of the sky during normal daytime class room time rather than trying to take a class field trip to a typical astronomy facility. You would also eliminate the most frustrating thing about astronomy: cloudy skies. And you'd also be able to see parts of the sky that you wouldn't normally based on location, ie Northern/Southern hemisphere.
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      Yeah there’s a ton of other engineering skills you could teach in parallel. It really isn’t that crazy of an idea. If SpaceX is putting them in orbit on excess capacity from scheduled flights I’d hope they’d give away the time for free. Or they could invent their own market here for scheduling time.
- chr1 7y ago
  Why is it not a valid solution? It is actually a much better solution than using small low quality telescopes. If starlink is successful in a few years launching satellites will become cheap enough to allow us to launch multiple telescopes better than hubble, and we'll have equivalent of google earth with high quality images of night sky. Combined with VR why would anyone even want to use telescopes? (Maybe people who have personal memories linked to telescopes, like watching night sky with parents, but then even their children would prefer to use the VR version instead).
wongarsu 7y ago
It will be interesting how they solve it without causing thermal issues. Just absorbing all light won't work, the energy has to go somewhere and the only viable way to loose it is through radiation (not much air around even in these low orbits). Maybe the satellites will be black on the earth-facing side and radiate heat on the other side? My impression from the article is that they launch one coated satellite just to see if the coating helps at all, and how bad the thermal issues get, so SpaceX is still in the early stages of solving this. But if they keep up with launching 60 satellites every 2-3 weeks for the next months they have to make progress fast.
- Fronzie 7y ago
  Diffuse reflection might help as well. A sphere and a cube have very different maximum reflection values.
dylan604 7y ago
“No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” I really have trouble believing that nobody mentioned adding thousands of satellites would go unnoticed. It is damn near impossible to take any image of the night sky without having a satellite streak through the frame. I have plenty of images with multiple satellites visible at the same time. In wide angle timelapse sequences, they are just small dots that move against the natural movement of the stars. In longer lenses/telescopes, they appear as long straight lines totally ruining the image. The first time I heard about thousands more of lower altitude satellites, my first thought was about this very thing. We had already had the discussions from the giant disco ball that was launched. It was planned to be short lived, but it caused quite the stir. Saying people at SpaceX didn't think about it is one thing, but to claim nobody in the astronomy community didn't is hard to take. Maybe they didn't have any way to voice those thoughts in a way that SpaceX could hear.
- XorNot 7y ago
  I think the issue is more that no one has previously been launching constellations of literally thousands of satellites. It's just not a thing that seemed like it would actually happen. I can very much imagine that it didn't get a lot of attention until they actually started going up.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Yes, it might be that the astronomer community didn't expect Starlink to actually happen. A lot of people still haven't learned that SpaceX isn't just hyping things up.
    - buboard 7y ago
      it remains an experiment; if the network test proves useful, they ll have to mitigate this issue somehow. perhaps also make the satellites smaller
      - mlindner 7y ago
vasili111 7y ago
Also do not forget that SpaceX is not the only company that wants to launch low orbit satelites. I do not think it is possible to find any other real solution other then to move telescopes to space.
- Tomte 7y ago
  Sure there is another solution: we ban them, or at least highly regulate them. The idea that private companies can just do whatever, and there's nothing we can do is just so cliché HN.
  - quantdev 7y ago
    The idea that the ascent of humanity into the stars and the potentially incredible understanding of the universe we could gain would be stopped by 2019 regulations because amateur astronomers are short-sighted is just so cliche HN.
    - Tomte 7y ago
      Well, the professional astronomers using large telescopes on Earth are the ones deepening our understanding of the universe. Not the greedy entrepreneurs littering the sky with Internet access satellites.
      - SEJeff 7y ago
        I think you mean, "The greedy engineers that want to use said satellites to pay for a Manned Mars mission and make us a multi-planetary species."
        Tomte 7y ago
        Funny, the officially stated purpose is "Internet access". There is some handwaving towards "maybe it could do more".
        7y ago
close04 7y ago
> “No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” This implies the community was asked or involved in such a discussion and no objections were raised, which is unlikely. Whenever some "armchair specialist" commented about Musk's plans to put people on Mars and the challenges with the radiation, the magnetic field, the etc. the answer was always "Do you think a room full of scientists haven't thought about that?". Well there you have it, straight from the source: sometimes they (claim they) do not think about "that". Question everything, worst case someone already thought of that.
- ChrisClark 7y ago
  Yeah, that's why Musk always asks people to come to him if they have a better idea. Even in large groups, or maybe especially in large groups, things can be overlooked. He recently said in a video that if anyone can convince him an aerospike is better than their solution, he wants to know.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    There is a cultural risk involved though - we don't know how comfortable SpaceX employees feel raising objections given how aggressive Musk has been against concerns in the past (see the somewhat credible reports that Musk angrily rejected yellow safety markings on equipment based on personal taste: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-getting-hurt-because-elon-musk-hates-yellow.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-getting...) I've heard similar reports from former Tesla employees. They found it stressful working with him in many cases (his brilliance/openness to feedback aside) which could impact this a lot.
    - _ph_ 7y ago
      The reports about the yellow markings are not credible. Just look at photos taken at the freemont car plant: https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tesla-tour.png https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tesla-t... Plenty of yellow lines in those.
  - 7y ago
acd 7y ago
Good that is is being fixed! Regarding "The astronomy community didn’t think of it" I think just because we have public spaces does not mean one can do whatever one wants with them. 1) There has been disturbances in the past of radio astronomy spectrum from communication equipment, this limits our ability to learn and observe space. 2) There will be visual disturbances if we launch of satellite constellation for visual astronomy 3) There will be space junk when these satellites run out of service.
trump2028 7y ago
I'm more worried about astrology. So many satellites of the same nature so close, perhaps we will need to factor this in the birth charts from now on ?
dang 7y ago
All: since people feel passionately about this, if you comment in this thread please make sure you're doing so thoughtfully and following the guidelines. Avoid flamebait, don't fuel flamewar, and definitely don't do personal attacks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kerng 7y ago
Isn't it obvious that this will happen? It's like taking a picture of nature and having airplane evidence in it, or take a picture of a city or even countryside and there are cars in it. I'm sure the same was said about cars and planes. It will be weird and things will drastically change - but so have things the last 2000+ years.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  You can easily get yourself between cars and whatever natural thing you're trying to observe on the rare cases that what you're trying to study is anywhere near cars. The only way to do the same for Starlink is to launch multi-million dollar+ space telescope.
  - kerng 7y ago
    But in that case you have to travel to a remote location (most likely using a car or plane ironically). Hence, is it so far fetched that if you want to explore space in future you will do it from a different vantage point? Like via a satellite, or maybe in 50 years you go to a space station or the moon directly to do so. With tech it has always been this way- it's nothing new.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      The costs are orders of magnitudes more than simply travelling to study nature where it is and will continue to be hugely expensive for a long long time.
      - kerng 7y ago
        I'm sure people said that about cars, trains and the steam engine also.
cbanek 7y ago
(I'm not speaking for any of my current or past employers, just for myself, and how I've seen this play out. One employer being a telescope impacted by Starlink, and the other being SpaceX, I want both sides to succeed.) First, astronomers know that satellites can disrupt observations. They've known for a while, and have had to deal with things like flares from Irridium satellites, which were probably when these problems were first taken seriously. (It was a design defect where shiny panels would reflect the sun in a very efficient way). Astronomers use all sorts of image processing, because satellites aren't the only noise in the picture. The CCDs have to be kept cryogenically cool, and there's all sorts of electrical noise as well. There's not a lot of photons being collected in the grand scheme of things, so dealing with the noise floor is a real problem. There are all sorts of ways for removing tracks. And don't forget weather! Now, that being said, even I was confused why this would cause a problem. The satellites are in low earth orbit, so low that they won't be able to reflect the sunlight, since they are in earth's shadow. Only during twilight and dawn will satellites be in the right position to reflect the sunlight back to the ground off of some panel. Now, these are not prime observing hours for many people, since it is still not as dark as it could be. So most people point into the darkest parts of the sky (up) rather than at parts where there is still twilight (like nearer the horizon). But for some types of observations, like near earth asteroids, you want to point into the evening sky to look for them, since that is one of the places you want to look, and the sky conditions should be good enough. In these pictures you'll get streaks of light as the satellites pass through. Even if there is no light reflecting, these satellites could occlude a distant star or galaxy momentarily. You wouldn't see a streak as much as the light would go away and come back. This would affect how bright you see the star, since over the time of the exposure (let's say 30 seconds) you'll collect less light while something is blocking the light. This can also make it a bit more tricky to look at variable stars, where the light gets stronger and dimmer naturally. I would say that astronomers definitely knew about these problems, since they have to deal with all sorts of similar problems, but the pitch didn't get fevered until people saw the first set of Starlink satellites and just how bright they were. SpaceX moves a lot faster than astronomy. As for SpaceX not thinking about the astronomical implications of Starlink, I could believe that. I think most of them were more concerned with if it is possible rather than the implications of doing it. As much as I would think the two fields would know more about each other, I find they are very different and run in different circles it seems (launch vehicle industry vs astronomers), so I could easily see not much cross pollination between the two. For example, there were lots of NASA astronauts and air force people visiting SpaceX, but I don't remember one astronomer (not that I met everyone).
pcunite 7y ago
We want to make sure we do the right thing to make sure little kids can look through their telescope Before the end of next year, there is going to be 12,000 of these units above our Earth. One must certainly hope.
- portillo 7y ago
  I would bet that there will be no more than 1,200 (if they raise the money needed to launch and manufacture that many). And I would also bet that even in an 8 year time-horizon, they will not launch 12,000 satellites for Starlink because simply, there will be no market for so much capacity. In my opinion, we are heading towards an Iridium, Teledesic, Globalstar 2.0 scenario.
phkahler 7y ago
On the plus side, Starship will be able to launch more and bigger space telescopes for lower prices, to places beyond the Starlink constellation. That doesnt help ground based observations though.
rrss 7y ago
Last time this was in the news, there was another discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20095462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20095462. User 'twtw asked the following, with no responses: > Why didn't the IAU petition the FCC during the comment period for SpaceX's application? Seems sorta weird to wait for the first launch to express concerns when the application was submitted to the FCC many months ago (and I think I recall an earlier version years ago). I think this is an interesting question. There are a number of commenters criticizing SpaceX's claim that "no one thought of this." I'd be interested in their response to this question. If so many people knew it was going to be a problem, why not raise those concerns to the organization tasked with regulating this stuff?
buboard 7y ago
On the other hand we could use all this reflectivity ( and a ton more! Adding space sails on each of those) to cool the earth
antognini 7y ago
As an astronomer once upon a time I follow a number of my former colleagues on Twitter and pretty regularly see them posting images that have been ruined by Starlink. Here is one from just 12 hours ago: https://twitter.com/MassiveStarGuy/status/1203588958313205760 https://twitter.com/MassiveStarGuy/status/120358895831320576... This is going to have a bigger impact on the more expensive observations that require long-duration exposures.
- justin66 7y ago
  This definitely wasn't ruined (it's amateur video) but if anyone wants to see Starlink photobombing an astronomer, this amateur video of a recent meteor shower is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHI8Z5qpd6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHI8Z5qpd6I (an astronomer friend thought I'd be able to identify the satellite amongst all the meteors, which was sweet... I think it's a bit after the 2 minute mark)
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    Is it the one making a line starting from the bottom left corner, or the thing that makes a very short bright streak at 2:08?
    - justin66 7y ago
      I assume it's the brightest one, yeah.
  - woliveirajr 7y ago
    Aside note: I didn't imagine one could see / film that much meteors during the night in some city. If I remember correctly, I saw 2 or 3 my whole life, and was driving at some road.
    - justin66 7y ago
      I know you can see the Leonids in San Francisco, at least if you're not standing directly under a streetlight. Some years are brighter than others. A lot of it is making note of when to go outside and look.
clon 7y ago
> “No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” It seems probable that this is one of the things that can be ruled out. I find it inconceivable that none of the thousands of brilliant heads in SpaceX never thought of this. - They spoke, but were not heard - They never felt like speaking
coretx 7y ago
SpaceX sabotaging earth based astronomy sounds like yet another business trying to create a market/demand for itself. Herefore I bet my ass they'll do just too little to fix things and just enough in order to not be prosecuted.
ErikCorry 7y ago
I'm not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but isn't this fixable with mirrors and angles? For a satellite in LEO most of the light is coming from the sun and a much smaller amount is coming from earthshine and perhaps the moon. If your solar panels are on an articulated arm it should be possible to place them so they reflect the light upwards and the satellite's body is in the shadow of the panels. Now the only light on the satellite (and the back of the panels) will be the earthshine, and you can perhaps combat that by painting the satellite black. If it's always in the shadow of the solar panels then heating shouldn't be a problem, right? As I say I'm not an expert and there are probably multiple reasons this won't work.
notatoad 7y ago
Hoping i can get an answer here from somebody who actually knows, and not just a spacex fanboy or hater: what's the actual scope of the problem here? Shotwell's response and other comments i've seen seem to imply starlink satellites are primarily impacting amateur astronomy ("kids looking through telescopes") and that scientific research is performing post-processing to the recorded images which can mostly eliminate the effects of the starlink satellites. Is that accurate, or is this also impeding telescopes at the big observatories?
- joshvm 7y ago
  Shotwell's comment is extremely patronising under the circumstances. This doesn't affect kids looking through telescopes at all. If it's bright enough to see through an amateur telescope, it's bright enough to ruin a precision observation from a real instrument. A large part of the outcry is lack of tact from Spacex. Satellites in images is not new and has caused astronomers problems for a while. It's not common, but most people in the field know someone it's happened to.So now the issue is there will be an order of magnitude objects in space. Any kind of time series where you observe brightness over time would be affected by a satellite impinging the field. Spectroscopic measurements would also be affected. Astronomers use incredibly sensitive instruments looking for very faint objects - if a bright object is in the field of view, it can saturate the detector and ruin the image. For context some measurements, like imaging exoplanets, are so precise that you have to block the light from the (already faint) target star to see what's around it. In reality it's amateurs that can compensate with post processing. Professional astronomers are likely to just trash the data and try again. Then there are upcoming survey instruments like the LSST which take very wide angle images (I expect they already have some mitigation strategy becuase of other spacecraft). That said, the smaller your field of view, the lower the chance of a satellite impinging. One solution could be a mechanical shutter which could be activated when a satellite is about to impinge the field, or triggered by a database of satellite ephemirides.
chmaynard 7y ago
Here's a novel idea for a fix: admit that Starlink is flawed, shut down the project, and come up with another way to make money.
- avocado4 7y ago
  This has already been tried by Luddites in 19th century, not a new idea.
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
LEO just got a lot cheaper. Get ready for humans to fill this space with shit since it's economical.
stevespang 7y ago
Do you really think that coating will last in the high radiation environment of outer space ?
tehjoker 7y ago
I don't understand why SpaceX is allowed to make this decision nearly unilaterally. This is so similar to how the modern tech companies treat data extraction: they find something unregulated and push until they get pushback. This should have a been a worldwide consultation.
jsjohnst 7y ago
Since there are folks here in the field, does anyone know what the feasibility of building something similar to the VLA, but with thousands of smaller satellites? If doable, seems potentially possible to cover a lot more sky at once with less terrestrial interference. No idea if this is practical or not.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  There's a number of problems w/ doing interferometry in space, which vary a bit depending on the frequencies you're working with— Thermal: Parts of the detectors need to be very cold. Depending on what you're doing you may have to cool parts of the satellite down to 5 kelvin (-450°F) or even lower. You need to use a cryocooler than won't vibrate too much and impact your measurements. Power: Each VLA antenna uses about 18kW just for cooling. That's a lot of juice— back of the envelope math says you need a lot of solar panels for that. An area smaller than a football field but bigger than a tennis court. It's manageable if you're only building a few of these, but less practical if you want to build 64 or even thousands. Positioning: Most proposals for space based interferometry didn't actually consist of individual satellites. They're typically one big satellite with telescopes sticking out on different arms. If they're free-flying, it gets a lot harder to know the precise relative positions of the different receivers.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    > Each VLA antenna uses about 18kW just for cooling. That’s likely at minimum partially proportional to the size of each VLA antenna, no? Each VLA antenna is larger than any antenna ever put in space I believe. > If they're free-flying, it gets a lot harder to know the precise relative positions of the different receivers. That’s exactly what I thought would be one of the biggest challenges, but wasn’t sure if we’d solved that problem or not yet.
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      True that 18kW isn't a totally fair comparison. On one hand it's easier to cool because you don't have to worry about the air warming you up. OTOH it's harder because sunlight is way stronger once you get out of the atmosphere.

204 points by woliveirajr 7y ago

My first thought was that they should paint them with Vantablack, but then I wondered if that might be too dark? Do they need to aim for a specific reflectivity or just aim for the lowest possible value?

wongarsu 7y ago
I think the lowest possible reflectivity is desirable. Space isn't perfectly black but very close to it. Any reflectivity means you sometimes reflect something very bright like the sun and sometimes nothing, so you have the wrong brightness no matter what you do. Black dots are at least fairly unambiguous.
MojoDwarf 7y ago
I was thinking about this also but wonder if it would collect too much heat while in direct sun light.
SEJeff 7y ago
That is often considered, but the light is absorbed and turns into heat. Where does that heat go? It would fry the electronics with no way to get rid of it.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  You could use some mechanisms to convert and dissipate the heat, though that doesn't come for free. Though the atmospheric pressure at that altitude is pretty low, you might be able to rig up some sort of peltier cooler setup to dissipate heat. Alternately if you can convert enough of the heat to electricity some other way, you could convert the heat back to light using LEDs or something and only turn on the ones facing away from earth, perhaps? Plenty of other orbital devices have to deal with heat so I'm sure this is something that has existing solutions.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Peltier coolers won't do anything but draw power and create more heat you have to dissipate, they're not magic you have to remove the heat from the hot side too which means you need radiators for them too plus more than you'd need originally because peltier coolers are quite inefficient. Same thing with the LED idea converting that heat into electricity requires some heat differential which requires... a radiator.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    > Alternately if you can convert enough of the heat to electricity some other way Thermodynamics says "lolnope", I'm afraid. You need a temperature differential to convert heat to power.
the8472 7y ago
reflectivity/aborbtion is more than a percentage value. it's also a hemispherical distribution. if you glued retroreflectors to the surface most of the light would go back in the direction of the sun and thus never hit the surface. Those are probably too costly or bulk for satellites. If specular reflections are the problem they might just apply a more diffuse coating.

topologistics 7y ago

>“No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” That is absolutely ridiculous. The Iridium satellites were decommissioned recently and it was a big deal because, for the longest time, you had to check for "iridium flares" if you were using any type of sensitive equipment. Basically, the entire class of iridium satellites was highly reflective and they tended to create shooting star type phenomena, sometimes really really bright, bright enough to be seen during the daytime! Maybe she didn't think of it, but to say the astronomy comunity didn't think of it is just blatantly absurd on its face. On another note, I miss spotting iridium flares and I'm looking forward to a new class of satellites being added into my weekly observations.

readams 7y ago
They announced their plans years ago. The astronomy community could have raised concerns then. The fact that they didn't would indicate nobody connected the dots.
- dylan604 7y ago
  > The fact that they didn't would indicate nobody connected the dots. Or that nobody knew who/where to contact someone to raise their concerns. A lot of people will think that if I just had this thought, then it must be pretty obvious so that others will have the same thought as well. No need for further action. Others will just not feel the need to spend their time/effort trying to look up the complaints department. Others might not even feel like it is their place to say anything.
  - cobookman 7y ago
    It’s not that hard to get in contact. If you cared you could LinkedIn message a SpaceX employee. Tweet at Elon Musk. Connected with nyt or other media who’d love to run such a story. ...etc
    - cobookman 7y ago

mentos 7y ago

Not a valid solution but I thought maybe SpaceX could launch a bunch of telescope satellites that could be used by hobbyists.

wongarsu 7y ago
SpaceX directly profits from space enthusiasm, and having their in-house satellite team design such satellites (during downtime, as practice or testbed, etc) and launch them using unused capacity on existing launches would be way cheaper than anything NASA could do. It's not as absurd as it seems at first glance. Not a good replacement for a proper solution, but a nice idea for something they could do in any case.
- dylan604 7y ago
  Could you imagine the enthusiasm from amateur astronomers, kids in school, etc where they could schedule time on a space based telescope? Sure, they won't be anywhere close to Hubble, but even a 6"-12" mirror in ~0% atmosphere would be very cool. And if it were a true constellation, you could schedule time on a satellite in the night time part of the sky during normal daytime class room time rather than trying to take a class field trip to a typical astronomy facility. You would also eliminate the most frustrating thing about astronomy: cloudy skies. And you'd also be able to see parts of the sky that you wouldn't normally based on location, ie Northern/Southern hemisphere.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    Yeah there’s a ton of other engineering skills you could teach in parallel. It really isn’t that crazy of an idea. If SpaceX is putting them in orbit on excess capacity from scheduled flights I’d hope they’d give away the time for free. Or they could invent their own market here for scheduling time.
chr1 7y ago
Why is it not a valid solution? It is actually a much better solution than using small low quality telescopes. If starlink is successful in a few years launching satellites will become cheap enough to allow us to launch multiple telescopes better than hubble, and we'll have equivalent of google earth with high quality images of night sky. Combined with VR why would anyone even want to use telescopes? (Maybe people who have personal memories linked to telescopes, like watching night sky with parents, but then even their children would prefer to use the VR version instead).

wongarsu 7y ago

It will be interesting how they solve it without causing thermal issues. Just absorbing all light won't work, the energy has to go somewhere and the only viable way to loose it is through radiation (not much air around even in these low orbits). Maybe the satellites will be black on the earth-facing side and radiate heat on the other side? My impression from the article is that they launch one coated satellite just to see if the coating helps at all, and how bad the thermal issues get, so SpaceX is still in the early stages of solving this. But if they keep up with launching 60 satellites every 2-3 weeks for the next months they have to make progress fast.

Fronzie 7y ago
Diffuse reflection might help as well. A sphere and a cube have very different maximum reflection values.

dylan604 7y ago

“No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” I really have trouble believing that nobody mentioned adding thousands of satellites would go unnoticed. It is damn near impossible to take any image of the night sky without having a satellite streak through the frame. I have plenty of images with multiple satellites visible at the same time. In wide angle timelapse sequences, they are just small dots that move against the natural movement of the stars. In longer lenses/telescopes, they appear as long straight lines totally ruining the image. The first time I heard about thousands more of lower altitude satellites, my first thought was about this very thing. We had already had the discussions from the giant disco ball that was launched. It was planned to be short lived, but it caused quite the stir. Saying people at SpaceX didn't think about it is one thing, but to claim nobody in the astronomy community didn't is hard to take. Maybe they didn't have any way to voice those thoughts in a way that SpaceX could hear.

XorNot 7y ago
I think the issue is more that no one has previously been launching constellations of literally thousands of satellites. It's just not a thing that seemed like it would actually happen. I can very much imagine that it didn't get a lot of attention until they actually started going up.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Yes, it might be that the astronomer community didn't expect Starlink to actually happen. A lot of people still haven't learned that SpaceX isn't just hyping things up.
  - buboard 7y ago
    it remains an experiment; if the network test proves useful, they ll have to mitigate this issue somehow. perhaps also make the satellites smaller
    - mlindner 7y ago

vasili111 7y ago

Also do not forget that SpaceX is not the only company that wants to launch low orbit satelites. I do not think it is possible to find any other real solution other then to move telescopes to space.

Tomte 7y ago
Sure there is another solution: we ban them, or at least highly regulate them. The idea that private companies can just do whatever, and there's nothing we can do is just so cliché HN.
- quantdev 7y ago
  The idea that the ascent of humanity into the stars and the potentially incredible understanding of the universe we could gain would be stopped by 2019 regulations because amateur astronomers are short-sighted is just so cliche HN.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    Well, the professional astronomers using large telescopes on Earth are the ones deepening our understanding of the universe. Not the greedy entrepreneurs littering the sky with Internet access satellites.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      I think you mean, "The greedy engineers that want to use said satellites to pay for a Manned Mars mission and make us a multi-planetary species."
      - Tomte 7y ago
        Funny, the officially stated purpose is "Internet access". There is some handwaving towards "maybe it could do more".
        7y ago

close04 7y ago

> “No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” This implies the community was asked or involved in such a discussion and no objections were raised, which is unlikely. Whenever some "armchair specialist" commented about Musk's plans to put people on Mars and the challenges with the radiation, the magnetic field, the etc. the answer was always "Do you think a room full of scientists haven't thought about that?". Well there you have it, straight from the source: sometimes they (claim they) do not think about "that". Question everything, worst case someone already thought of that.

ChrisClark 7y ago
Yeah, that's why Musk always asks people to come to him if they have a better idea. Even in large groups, or maybe especially in large groups, things can be overlooked. He recently said in a video that if anyone can convince him an aerospike is better than their solution, he wants to know.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  There is a cultural risk involved though - we don't know how comfortable SpaceX employees feel raising objections given how aggressive Musk has been against concerns in the past (see the somewhat credible reports that Musk angrily rejected yellow safety markings on equipment based on personal taste: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-getting-hurt-because-elon-musk-hates-yellow.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-getting...) I've heard similar reports from former Tesla employees. They found it stressful working with him in many cases (his brilliance/openness to feedback aside) which could impact this a lot.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    The reports about the yellow markings are not credible. Just look at photos taken at the freemont car plant: https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tesla-tour.png https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tesla-t... Plenty of yellow lines in those.
- 7y ago

acd 7y ago

Good that is is being fixed! Regarding "The astronomy community didn’t think of it" I think just because we have public spaces does not mean one can do whatever one wants with them. 1) There has been disturbances in the past of radio astronomy spectrum from communication equipment, this limits our ability to learn and observe space. 2) There will be visual disturbances if we launch of satellite constellation for visual astronomy 3) There will be space junk when these satellites run out of service.

trump2028 7y ago

I'm more worried about astrology. So many satellites of the same nature so close, perhaps we will need to factor this in the birth charts from now on ?

dang 7y ago

All: since people feel passionately about this, if you comment in this thread please make sure you're doing so thoughtfully and following the guidelines. Avoid flamebait, don't fuel flamewar, and definitely don't do personal attacks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kerng 7y ago

Isn't it obvious that this will happen? It's like taking a picture of nature and having airplane evidence in it, or take a picture of a city or even countryside and there are cars in it. I'm sure the same was said about cars and planes. It will be weird and things will drastically change - but so have things the last 2000+ years.

rtkwe 7y ago
You can easily get yourself between cars and whatever natural thing you're trying to observe on the rare cases that what you're trying to study is anywhere near cars. The only way to do the same for Starlink is to launch multi-million dollar+ space telescope.
- kerng 7y ago
  But in that case you have to travel to a remote location (most likely using a car or plane ironically). Hence, is it so far fetched that if you want to explore space in future you will do it from a different vantage point? Like via a satellite, or maybe in 50 years you go to a space station or the moon directly to do so. With tech it has always been this way- it's nothing new.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    The costs are orders of magnitudes more than simply travelling to study nature where it is and will continue to be hugely expensive for a long long time.
    - kerng 7y ago
      I'm sure people said that about cars, trains and the steam engine also.

cbanek 7y ago

(I'm not speaking for any of my current or past employers, just for myself, and how I've seen this play out. One employer being a telescope impacted by Starlink, and the other being SpaceX, I want both sides to succeed.) First, astronomers know that satellites can disrupt observations. They've known for a while, and have had to deal with things like flares from Irridium satellites, which were probably when these problems were first taken seriously. (It was a design defect where shiny panels would reflect the sun in a very efficient way). Astronomers use all sorts of image processing, because satellites aren't the only noise in the picture. The CCDs have to be kept cryogenically cool, and there's all sorts of electrical noise as well. There's not a lot of photons being collected in the grand scheme of things, so dealing with the noise floor is a real problem. There are all sorts of ways for removing tracks. And don't forget weather! Now, that being said, even I was confused why this would cause a problem. The satellites are in low earth orbit, so low that they won't be able to reflect the sunlight, since they are in earth's shadow. Only during twilight and dawn will satellites be in the right position to reflect the sunlight back to the ground off of some panel. Now, these are not prime observing hours for many people, since it is still not as dark as it could be. So most people point into the darkest parts of the sky (up) rather than at parts where there is still twilight (like nearer the horizon). But for some types of observations, like near earth asteroids, you want to point into the evening sky to look for them, since that is one of the places you want to look, and the sky conditions should be good enough. In these pictures you'll get streaks of light as the satellites pass through. Even if there is no light reflecting, these satellites could occlude a distant star or galaxy momentarily. You wouldn't see a streak as much as the light would go away and come back. This would affect how bright you see the star, since over the time of the exposure (let's say 30 seconds) you'll collect less light while something is blocking the light. This can also make it a bit more tricky to look at variable stars, where the light gets stronger and dimmer naturally. I would say that astronomers definitely knew about these problems, since they have to deal with all sorts of similar problems, but the pitch didn't get fevered until people saw the first set of Starlink satellites and just how bright they were. SpaceX moves a lot faster than astronomy. As for SpaceX not thinking about the astronomical implications of Starlink, I could believe that. I think most of them were more concerned with if it is possible rather than the implications of doing it. As much as I would think the two fields would know more about each other, I find they are very different and run in different circles it seems (launch vehicle industry vs astronomers), so I could easily see not much cross pollination between the two. For example, there were lots of NASA astronauts and air force people visiting SpaceX, but I don't remember one astronomer (not that I met everyone).

pcunite 7y ago

We want to make sure we do the right thing to make sure little kids can look through their telescope Before the end of next year, there is going to be 12,000 of these units above our Earth. One must certainly hope.

portillo 7y ago
I would bet that there will be no more than 1,200 (if they raise the money needed to launch and manufacture that many). And I would also bet that even in an 8 year time-horizon, they will not launch 12,000 satellites for Starlink because simply, there will be no market for so much capacity. In my opinion, we are heading towards an Iridium, Teledesic, Globalstar 2.0 scenario.

phkahler 7y ago

On the plus side, Starship will be able to launch more and bigger space telescopes for lower prices, to places beyond the Starlink constellation. That doesnt help ground based observations though.

rrss 7y ago

Last time this was in the news, there was another discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20095462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20095462. User 'twtw asked the following, with no responses: > Why didn't the IAU petition the FCC during the comment period for SpaceX's application? Seems sorta weird to wait for the first launch to express concerns when the application was submitted to the FCC many months ago (and I think I recall an earlier version years ago). I think this is an interesting question. There are a number of commenters criticizing SpaceX's claim that "no one thought of this." I'd be interested in their response to this question. If so many people knew it was going to be a problem, why not raise those concerns to the organization tasked with regulating this stuff?

buboard 7y ago

On the other hand we could use all this reflectivity ( and a ton more! Adding space sails on each of those) to cool the earth

antognini 7y ago

As an astronomer once upon a time I follow a number of my former colleagues on Twitter and pretty regularly see them posting images that have been ruined by Starlink. Here is one from just 12 hours ago: https://twitter.com/MassiveStarGuy/status/1203588958313205760 https://twitter.com/MassiveStarGuy/status/120358895831320576... This is going to have a bigger impact on the more expensive observations that require long-duration exposures.

justin66 7y ago
This definitely wasn't ruined (it's amateur video) but if anyone wants to see Starlink photobombing an astronomer, this amateur video of a recent meteor shower is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHI8Z5qpd6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHI8Z5qpd6I (an astronomer friend thought I'd be able to identify the satellite amongst all the meteors, which was sweet... I think it's a bit after the 2 minute mark)
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  Is it the one making a line starting from the bottom left corner, or the thing that makes a very short bright streak at 2:08?
  - justin66 7y ago
    I assume it's the brightest one, yeah.
- woliveirajr 7y ago
  Aside note: I didn't imagine one could see / film that much meteors during the night in some city. If I remember correctly, I saw 2 or 3 my whole life, and was driving at some road.
  - justin66 7y ago
    I know you can see the Leonids in San Francisco, at least if you're not standing directly under a streetlight. Some years are brighter than others. A lot of it is making note of when to go outside and look.

clon 7y ago

> “No one thought of this,” she said. “We didn’t think of it. The astronomy community didn’t think of it.” It seems probable that this is one of the things that can be ruled out. I find it inconceivable that none of the thousands of brilliant heads in SpaceX never thought of this. - They spoke, but were not heard - They never felt like speaking

coretx 7y ago

SpaceX sabotaging earth based astronomy sounds like yet another business trying to create a market/demand for itself. Herefore I bet my ass they'll do just too little to fix things and just enough in order to not be prosecuted.

ErikCorry 7y ago

I'm not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but isn't this fixable with mirrors and angles? For a satellite in LEO most of the light is coming from the sun and a much smaller amount is coming from earthshine and perhaps the moon. If your solar panels are on an articulated arm it should be possible to place them so they reflect the light upwards and the satellite's body is in the shadow of the panels. Now the only light on the satellite (and the back of the panels) will be the earthshine, and you can perhaps combat that by painting the satellite black. If it's always in the shadow of the solar panels then heating shouldn't be a problem, right? As I say I'm not an expert and there are probably multiple reasons this won't work.

notatoad 7y ago

Hoping i can get an answer here from somebody who actually knows, and not just a spacex fanboy or hater: what's the actual scope of the problem here? Shotwell's response and other comments i've seen seem to imply starlink satellites are primarily impacting amateur astronomy ("kids looking through telescopes") and that scientific research is performing post-processing to the recorded images which can mostly eliminate the effects of the starlink satellites. Is that accurate, or is this also impeding telescopes at the big observatories?

joshvm 7y ago
Shotwell's comment is extremely patronising under the circumstances. This doesn't affect kids looking through telescopes at all. If it's bright enough to see through an amateur telescope, it's bright enough to ruin a precision observation from a real instrument. A large part of the outcry is lack of tact from Spacex. Satellites in images is not new and has caused astronomers problems for a while. It's not common, but most people in the field know someone it's happened to.So now the issue is there will be an order of magnitude objects in space. Any kind of time series where you observe brightness over time would be affected by a satellite impinging the field. Spectroscopic measurements would also be affected. Astronomers use incredibly sensitive instruments looking for very faint objects - if a bright object is in the field of view, it can saturate the detector and ruin the image. For context some measurements, like imaging exoplanets, are so precise that you have to block the light from the (already faint) target star to see what's around it. In reality it's amateurs that can compensate with post processing. Professional astronomers are likely to just trash the data and try again. Then there are upcoming survey instruments like the LSST which take very wide angle images (I expect they already have some mitigation strategy becuase of other spacecraft). That said, the smaller your field of view, the lower the chance of a satellite impinging. One solution could be a mechanical shutter which could be activated when a satellite is about to impinge the field, or triggered by a database of satellite ephemirides.

chmaynard 7y ago

Here's a novel idea for a fix: admit that Starlink is flawed, shut down the project, and come up with another way to make money.

avocado4 7y ago
This has already been tried by Luddites in 19th century, not a new idea.

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

LEO just got a lot cheaper. Get ready for humans to fill this space with shit since it's economical.

stevespang 7y ago

Do you really think that coating will last in the high radiation environment of outer space ?

tehjoker 7y ago

I don't understand why SpaceX is allowed to make this decision nearly unilaterally. This is so similar to how the modern tech companies treat data extraction: they find something unregulated and push until they get pushback. This should have a been a worldwide consultation.

jsjohnst 7y ago

Since there are folks here in the field, does anyone know what the feasibility of building something similar to the VLA, but with thousands of smaller satellites? If doable, seems potentially possible to cover a lot more sky at once with less terrestrial interference. No idea if this is practical or not.

Rebelgecko 7y ago
There's a number of problems w/ doing interferometry in space, which vary a bit depending on the frequencies you're working with— Thermal: Parts of the detectors need to be very cold. Depending on what you're doing you may have to cool parts of the satellite down to 5 kelvin (-450°F) or even lower. You need to use a cryocooler than won't vibrate too much and impact your measurements. Power: Each VLA antenna uses about 18kW just for cooling. That's a lot of juice— back of the envelope math says you need a lot of solar panels for that. An area smaller than a football field but bigger than a tennis court. It's manageable if you're only building a few of these, but less practical if you want to build 64 or even thousands. Positioning: Most proposals for space based interferometry didn't actually consist of individual satellites. They're typically one big satellite with telescopes sticking out on different arms. If they're free-flying, it gets a lot harder to know the precise relative positions of the different receivers.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  > Each VLA antenna uses about 18kW just for cooling. That’s likely at minimum partially proportional to the size of each VLA antenna, no? Each VLA antenna is larger than any antenna ever put in space I believe. > If they're free-flying, it gets a lot harder to know the precise relative positions of the different receivers. That’s exactly what I thought would be one of the biggest challenges, but wasn’t sure if we’d solved that problem or not yet.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    True that 18kW isn't a totally fair comparison. On one hand it's easier to cool because you don't have to worry about the air warming you up. OTOH it's harder because sunlight is way stronger once you get out of the atmosphere.