>As time goes by the opportunities for astronomy will grow larger than what is lost I want to be fair to both sides here, as I sort of side mentioned at the en

>As time goes by the opportunities for astronomy will grow larger than what is lost I want to be fair to both sides here, as I sort of side mentioned at the end of my post I think it'd be perfectly reasonable not to take this as a given which will happen by itself. A lot of places have long had mechanisms like universal service funds, or other ways to effectively recognize that sometimes even extreme broad societal goods might create concentrated losers and that when the good is high it's also reasonable to help ameliorate that a bit. SpaceX making access to space enormously cheaper, higher mass, and higher cadence will absolutely open up incredible new opportunities for astronomy, but that doesn't mean said opportunities will be easy to take advantage of, astronomers have had to lobby and work hard for their existing installations and funding over the decades. And some of it even is also legacy from Cold War or boom times and they could very understandably fear that losing value in existing instruments will not necessarily then get an automatic replacement with new better ones in the current environment right? But the answer there isn't to lobby to hobble Starlink (or other constellations) somehow which is likely not happening at this point anyway, but rather to quantify what's needed, form solid plans, and figure out a reasonable all around way to pay for it. Maybe governments start taking that into account directly as part of local licensing. Maybe a 0.5% (or reasonable) "replacement space instruments" fee could be added to megaconstellation services to go into a dedicated fund that will get to work planning and building Starship class instruments. Maybe SpaceX agrees to some number of launches for astronomy per year at-cost. Maybe some combo or things I'm not thinking of at all, I won't pretend to have given this massive thought. Working to reduce albedo, emissions and so on are all good anyway, but I do think existing terrestrial instruments (some more than others) will face a degraded environment. I also think that's extremely worth it, but that's no reason to be dismissive. But I think the broad public conversation I've seen so far hasn't done a great job of engaging with this which risks the worst of both worlds, where existing interests do manage to slow things up without really helping themselves much in the end and simultaneously poison the water so that everyone is left worse off than might have happened.