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I was about to make a snarky comment about starlink. It's getting harder to take a shot of the sky without one of those pesky floaties.
by keyle 2y ago
I was about to make a snarky comment about starlink. It's getting harder to take a shot of the sky without one of those pesky floaties.
- delichon 2y agoDebris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. The Starlink constellation is at around 350 km and below.
- forgot-im-old 2y ago[flagged]
- delichon 2y agoYou are right, it looks like I got a mistaken number from the Reddit (who could have predicted that). It says here that earlier this year Starlink was seeking permission to go lower. I wonder how that went. https://universemagazine.com/en/below-the-iss-orbit-starlink-satellites-will-descend-closer-to-earth/ https://universemagazine.com/en/below-the-iss-orbit-starlink...
- samegene321 2y ago[flagged]
- jajko 2y agoDon't look for cold sense in mr musk's adventures, just look at whole twitter saga. He is a overgrown child with brilliant mind but very little control of his emotions (on top or other real mental issues under variable control). My almost-5 year old son has in some aspects more emotional maturity than him. Doesn't mean that stuff ain't truth of course, but his recent conservative alignment has deeply personal reasons too.
- kidme5 2y ago[flagged]
- kidme5 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hggigg 2y agoYeah this. I was 50 miles from civilisation in some mountains in central Asia last year trying to do astrophotography and I had to edit out the flying space trash after!
- fooker 2y agoIf you needed rescuing from there, or if a nearby village was affected by a natural disaster, this flying space trash is what's saving lives. It makes sense for the vast majority of people to prefer that against the slight inconvenience in editing out satellite tracks faced by a tiny tiny community of ground bases astrophotographers.
- samegene321 2y agoLow orbit satellites are unnecessary for emergency/comm. Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper, but LEO constellations are now subsidized by the military industrial complex (there is other value to be low).
- jjtheblunt 2y agoAren’t you overlooking constraints on transmit power for mobile transmitters being better served my low earth orbit than higher orbits?
- Jtsummers 2y agoThey're also overlooking the actual prices of GEO satellites versus LEO. LEO is much cheaper than GEO, there's a reason DOD and others are moving towards it and it's not that it's a fad. GEO has a few specific benefits but cost is not one of them.
- jjtheblunt 2y agogreat point; agreed
- 2y ago
- BurningFrog 2y agoThey low orbit satellites are only visible while they're in sunlight near sunrise/sunset.
- forgot-im-old 2y ago[flagged]
- FooBarBizBazz 2y agoI read that those things' orbits degrade in like five years tops. So at steady state, for a constellation of size N, you need to launch N/5 of them each year, with the attendant fuel burn. Seems like that kind of pollution is a bigger long term worry than the short-lived junk? On the other hand, until it does fall down, I suppose it's a risk to anyone who wants to launch up through it.
- smegger001 2y agoThey are like the size of a coach and the distance between them is is about 550km or 342 miles aproximatly one Washington state wide, avoiding hitting them shouldn't be that hard. You would have to try to hit them. Space is big.