8 ms·

The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and r

by mapt 2y ago

The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and raising their satellite count because of debris and cell size concerns... And now the rest of the world is trying to catch up in a sort of arms race, and not taking any care about debris concerns. The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit them to launch fewer satellites. SpaceX are going to end up well under 500km (orbital lifespan: a decade) before things are finished, and they switched to very low orbit staging with SEP spiral out to reach final orbit a ways back. China's newest constellation Thousand Sails is at an altitude of 800km (orbital lifespan: thousands of years), with a thousand satellites in the works over the next year or so and 14,000 planned, and they're launching them using chemical upper stages designed to explode into a thousand pieces at the target altitude. This is sufficient for Kessler Syndrome all on its own, without counting interactions with anything else up there. A catastropic debris cascade at 800km percolates down to lower altitudes over time and impacts. We need viable treaties limiting development beyond 400 or 500km and we need them ten years ago. I don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament. You can have as many satellites as you want, a million uncoordinated bodies, at 400km because direct collision potential scales with (satellite count / orbital lifespan) ^2 . At 1000km, satellites decay so slowly we are already too crowded; we have already overused the space. We are speed-running the end of the space age and we are doing it to save a small number of dollars and to avoid a small amount of diplomacy. This is not something we get a do-over on. There is no practical way to collect ton-scale debris at present, no way to track kilogram-scale debris, no practical way to shield pressure vessels against gram-scale debris, and even milligram-scale debris can hit with the force of a bullet. After collisions start occurring at a rapid clip, the mass of potential impactors quickly forms a long tailed lognormal distribution that denies us space for centuries.

autoexecbat 2y ago
> upper stages designed to explode into a thousand pieces at the target altitude By this do you mean at the 800km altitude?
- mapt 2y ago
  Yes. In a lot of historical spaceflight programs, the stage used in the upper atmosphere stayed with you to the final orbit, and was detached at low speed there. This saved you from having to design your satellite with significant onboard propulsion. Some of the upper stages were able to vent remaining propellants or pressurants, some were allowed to heat up until the pressure vessel exploded. Suffice it to say this is not sustainable for megaconstellations in thousand years orbits. The responsible thing to do with that kind of scale involves reliable, redundant, prompt de-orbit of upper stages, and ideally for high-thrust, high-mass, high-engineering-margin-of-error atmospheric upper stages never to make it that far into the mission.
bamboozled 2y ago
One way is for the the US to be more politically stable again (some how). Every country with an army will want its own star link now for trust reasons.
- mapt 2y ago
  For how long? Because this thing is happening right now, it's happening fast, and it's happening without any effort to fight against the trend. If your answer is "let's revisit this in 2050", then it isn't an answer.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Yeah well it means a lot of satellites are going to end up in space then.
  - immibis 2y ago
    And it will continue to happen and nothing can be done about it. Except global nuclear war, I suppose. That's not off the table.
- nradov 2y ago
  The US is politically stable already (by historical and international standards), and has been since 1865. If you ignore the rhetoric and focus on actions there has been very little substantiative difference in foreign policy across the last 7 presidential administrations.
  - dangerwill 2y ago
    The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability. What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability? As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell out our industrial capacity to China and now the movement to try to reverse that have occurred in this time frame. This is just as important as our endless wars in the middle east, imo. I don't disagree totally but I felt the need to put some nuance here.
leptons 2y ago
>I don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament. You can have as many satellites as you want, a million uncoordinated bodies, at 400km because direct collision potential scales with (satellite count / orbital lifespan) ^2 . At 1000km, satellites decay so slowly we are already too crowded; we have already overused the space. We are speed-running the end of the space age and we are doing it to save a small number of dollars and to avoid a small amount of diplomacy. This sounds like the most first-world-problem ever. It realistically affects practically nobody alive, nor would it ever. Most people will live and die on the planet's surface and never visit space, nor do they need to. There aren't too many space-based services that are really necessary to life on earth. Nobody really needs internet in the middle of nowhere. Sure, it's nice to have, but that's a first world problem that few people have.
- nwiswell 2y ago
  > It realistically affects practically nobody alive Do people in the Global South not use GPS or consume weather forecasts?
  - leptons 2y ago
    Sure, GPS is nice to have, but we lived without it for many centuries before it, it's also a "first-world-problem" if it goes down. GPS is also notoriously susceptible to ground-based jamming. And because of that there's also other ways to track position. Weather forecasts are nice to have, but often wrong. My original comment was framed more towards space travel.
    - minetest2048 2y ago
      The thing is that GPS doesn't just do positioning. If we lost GPS then we can just look at road signs (hopefully). GPS also provides time synchronization to a lot of very important telecom infrastructure. To prevent 4G base stations and digital TV transmitters from interfering with each other, their transmit reference clock frequency need to be disciplined to within 50 ppb and their time need to be synchronized to less then 1 us. No GPS means no 4G and no digital TV. And technology leapfrog effect means that third world countries will be significantly affected, as they jumped directly to mobile phone: https://www.cio.com/article/194000/what-does-technology-leapfrogging-really-mean-for-africa.html https://www.cio.com/article/194000/what-does-technology-leap... . And countries are moving toward digital TV from analog TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition because they want to free up the spectrum for cellular network. This is bad. The transmitter towers aren't moving anywhere soon, so the obvious solution is to move them to fiber timing network. Wired is always more reliable then wireless anyway, ask Linus Tech Tips. Only China understands this though: https://www.gpsworld.com/china-finishing-high-precision-ground-based-timing-system-a-worry-for-the-united-states/ https://www.gpsworld.com/china-finishing-high-precision-grou... and https://cpl.iphy.ac.cn/article/10.1088/0256-307X/41/6/064202 https://cpl.iphy.ac.cn/article/10.1088/0256-307X/41/6/064202 . EU is moving toward that: https://www.gpsworld.com/europe-moving-toward-a-timing-backbone-and-looking-for-input/ https://www.gpsworld.com/europe-moving-toward-a-timing-backb... . US is hopeless
ryankshaw 2y ago
Is Kessler syndrome the Great Filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)? As in, is it the thing that makes it so no one else has broken out of their planet to come visit us? I could totally see it being the case that as soon as a civilization gets good enough at putting stuff into space, they start putting a lot of stuff into space and then things start crashing into each other to the point that they can’t ever launch any more things into space and become stuck. Trapped by the artifacts of their own progress
- ljsprague 2y ago
  I would guess that it would still be possible to send things beyond earth's orbit with only a low probability of collision with debris but perhaps I'm wrong.
  - to11mtm 2y ago
    "Low" is tough to say until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow. Protection would require a lot of complexity and cost due to the need for shielding and the delta-v to move it up there.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow You look at which satellites poofed and then figure out the maximum extent their debris could have drifted.
      - mapt 2y ago
        That works a little bit when we're talking about one satellite poofing in a year based on a collision with another satellite, and not at all when we're talking about thousands of events a year, many of which are satellite-debris collisions too small to track (you only get one orbital vector), or between pieces of debris. Every collision generates hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of debris, only the largest of which are trackable.
perihelions 2y ago
Why would any of the US' adversaries agree to that? We have SpaceX, and they do not; lowering the altitude of megaconstellations is asymmetrically far more costly for them then it is for us. Stopping China's (highly strategic, military) satellite constellations isn't a "small amount of diplomacy". It's an impossibility. (It's even their declared planning that deliberate Kessler cascades are on the table [0]—to try to ground this discussion in diplomatic reality). [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/china-military-needs-defence-against-potential-starlink-threat https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/chin... ("China military must be able to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites if they threaten national security: scientists")
- maxglute 2y ago
  I think OP is suggesting US concede to sharing 500km orbits that SpaceX has disproportionately squatted rights to, since current international law is first come first serve. Where concede is to rejigger international law to increase density of 500km so others wouldn't have to go higher, i.e. PRC mega constellations going ~800 because ~500 mostly taken. Or in ops suggestion, free for all. This is more costly for US since it saves entrants from going extra 300km, but imo proximity also greatly enhances chance for friction... i.e. if everyone chilling around same plane, and it's going to get magnitude more croweded, expect a lot more overt/hidden space war assets there to trigger kessler.
  - perihelions 2y ago
    No; rather, that commenter's argument was "The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit them to launch fewer satellites." Higher altitude => wider coverage => fewer satellites
    - maxglute 2y ago
      We're talking about megaconstellations for communications, you want lower for latency, stronger signal (denser/less distance for beamforming) for better data through put -> less satellites for more coverage, and costs is cheaper since less energy. Realistically starlink has combination of 340km-1200km satellites working together, but the critical point is SpaceX reserved a lot of the sub 500km orbit slots with ITU (UN agency who manages orbits), so PRC competitors have no space real estate to try to throw up another mega constellation that can mimic spaceX economics due to location, location, location. Hence PRC registering Thousand Sails at 800km, Guowang at 500km-1200km orbits, etc, which according to OP is exponentially bad for Kessler (I have no idea). So either ITU opens much more 400km slots, or all the megaconstellations going forward going to satuate >500km LEO. Part of the reason PRC rushed to announce their megaconstellations before they even had reusable was to reserve the next closest available orbit slots that they can.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament We need to start by understanding it. I'm having trouble finding this paper right now. But to date, all calculations have shown that Kessler syndrome as a generalised phenomenon is incredibly hard to trigger. Even intentionally. Especially in LEO. (Intentionally triggering it is of interest for strategic ASAT denial.) > the mass of potential impactors quickly forms a long tailed lognormal distribution that denies us space for centuries No, it denies certain orbits. (Again, barring some new orbital dynamic haven been discovered by this paper.)
- mapt 2y ago
  If 800km impacts go asymptotic, it pollutes 700km and 900km orbits by virtue of having a distribution of resulting debris velocity vectors, and as drag pulls down all the resulting debris over the next thousand years, the 800km debris becomes circular 700km debris, and then circular 600km debris, and then circular 500km debris.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > as drag pulls down all the resulting debris over the next thousand years, the 800km debris becomes circular 700km debris, and then circular 600km debris, and then circular 500km debris Circularisation isn’t the unexpected part. Sphericalisation is. One requires orbits to desync. The other requires plane changes.
    - wbl 2y ago
      There is percession of the perigee.
    - mapt 2y ago
      Even in a purely planar distribution, nodal precession still occurs slowly. It doesn't even need to be factored in, though, if different planes are colliding with each other and energetically generating a spectrum of new orbital vectors (many less than circular) from impact. This effect colludes with altitude drop from orbital decay and the tendency to circularize orbits by perigee drag, to make it so that higher orbit debris percolate into lower orbits over time.
immibis 2y ago
We are currently in a low-trust, selfish world where all hope of collaboration has gone out of the window, so we are on an unchangeable trajectory towards things like Kessler Syndrome and climate hell.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Humanity is a failed species. The engineers were right to send the xenomorphs.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > Kessler Syndrome and climate hell Both of which demonstrate that our species is much better at understanding how to scale madness and destruction than how to scale sustainable activity.
aaron695 2y ago
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PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> We need viable treaties limiting development beyond 400 or 500km and we need them ten years ago. Basically every other interest on earth is going to see this as the west exploiting space then pulling the ladder up after them. It's the same reason why hoping developing countries will stop using coal is ridiculous. We need to foot the bill to clean up after ourselves or people will just ignore us and do what they see they need to do regardless.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Yeah unless all the orbits under 500 km are also annulled and put up for negotiation too, most countries would never accept it. And even then the negotiation process will take decades so that means no LEO satellites available for anyone for several decades.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    > all the orbits under 500 km are also annulled and put up for negotiation Unnecessary. There's plenty of space (no pun intended) to operate at those altitudes, even with existing and planned satellite constellations. The real issue is regulatory, not technical. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199498
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      An HN user’s opinion doesn’t matter in the context of how countries decide in international diplomacy…? How does this make sense? Other countries could clearly decide however they like, because they don’t need to come to the negotiating table.
      - schiffern 2y ago
        It's not my opinion. The ITU permitting system described in my link is the (negotiated) international system that exists today. If you're suggesting it might be re-negotiated to allow latecomers to build constellations below 500 km, then we agree. However your idea of "annulling" permits already given out isn't necessary, or politically feasible, or even desirable. "Annulling" is just one HN user's jealous destruction fantasy.
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by mapt 2y ago

autoexecbat 2y ago

> upper stages designed to explode into a thousand pieces at the target altitude By this do you mean at the 800km altitude?

mapt 2y ago
Yes. In a lot of historical spaceflight programs, the stage used in the upper atmosphere stayed with you to the final orbit, and was detached at low speed there. This saved you from having to design your satellite with significant onboard propulsion. Some of the upper stages were able to vent remaining propellants or pressurants, some were allowed to heat up until the pressure vessel exploded. Suffice it to say this is not sustainable for megaconstellations in thousand years orbits. The responsible thing to do with that kind of scale involves reliable, redundant, prompt de-orbit of upper stages, and ideally for high-thrust, high-mass, high-engineering-margin-of-error atmospheric upper stages never to make it that far into the mission.

bamboozled 2y ago

One way is for the the US to be more politically stable again (some how). Every country with an army will want its own star link now for trust reasons.

mapt 2y ago
For how long? Because this thing is happening right now, it's happening fast, and it's happening without any effort to fight against the trend. If your answer is "let's revisit this in 2050", then it isn't an answer.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Yeah well it means a lot of satellites are going to end up in space then.
- immibis 2y ago
  And it will continue to happen and nothing can be done about it. Except global nuclear war, I suppose. That's not off the table.
nradov 2y ago
The US is politically stable already (by historical and international standards), and has been since 1865. If you ignore the rhetoric and focus on actions there has been very little substantiative difference in foreign policy across the last 7 presidential administrations.
- dangerwill 2y ago
  The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability. What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability? As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell out our industrial capacity to China and now the movement to try to reverse that have occurred in this time frame. This is just as important as our endless wars in the middle east, imo. I don't disagree totally but I felt the need to put some nuance here.

leptons 2y ago

>I don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament. You can have as many satellites as you want, a million uncoordinated bodies, at 400km because direct collision potential scales with (satellite count / orbital lifespan) ^2 . At 1000km, satellites decay so slowly we are already too crowded; we have already overused the space. We are speed-running the end of the space age and we are doing it to save a small number of dollars and to avoid a small amount of diplomacy. This sounds like the most first-world-problem ever. It realistically affects practically nobody alive, nor would it ever. Most people will live and die on the planet's surface and never visit space, nor do they need to. There aren't too many space-based services that are really necessary to life on earth. Nobody really needs internet in the middle of nowhere. Sure, it's nice to have, but that's a first world problem that few people have.

nwiswell 2y ago
> It realistically affects practically nobody alive Do people in the Global South not use GPS or consume weather forecasts?
- leptons 2y ago
  Sure, GPS is nice to have, but we lived without it for many centuries before it, it's also a "first-world-problem" if it goes down. GPS is also notoriously susceptible to ground-based jamming. And because of that there's also other ways to track position. Weather forecasts are nice to have, but often wrong. My original comment was framed more towards space travel.
  - minetest2048 2y ago
    The thing is that GPS doesn't just do positioning. If we lost GPS then we can just look at road signs (hopefully). GPS also provides time synchronization to a lot of very important telecom infrastructure. To prevent 4G base stations and digital TV transmitters from interfering with each other, their transmit reference clock frequency need to be disciplined to within 50 ppb and their time need to be synchronized to less then 1 us. No GPS means no 4G and no digital TV. And technology leapfrog effect means that third world countries will be significantly affected, as they jumped directly to mobile phone: https://www.cio.com/article/194000/what-does-technology-leapfrogging-really-mean-for-africa.html https://www.cio.com/article/194000/what-does-technology-leap... . And countries are moving toward digital TV from analog TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition because they want to free up the spectrum for cellular network. This is bad. The transmitter towers aren't moving anywhere soon, so the obvious solution is to move them to fiber timing network. Wired is always more reliable then wireless anyway, ask Linus Tech Tips. Only China understands this though: https://www.gpsworld.com/china-finishing-high-precision-ground-based-timing-system-a-worry-for-the-united-states/ https://www.gpsworld.com/china-finishing-high-precision-grou... and https://cpl.iphy.ac.cn/article/10.1088/0256-307X/41/6/064202 https://cpl.iphy.ac.cn/article/10.1088/0256-307X/41/6/064202 . EU is moving toward that: https://www.gpsworld.com/europe-moving-toward-a-timing-backbone-and-looking-for-input/ https://www.gpsworld.com/europe-moving-toward-a-timing-backb... . US is hopeless

ryankshaw 2y ago

Is Kessler syndrome the Great Filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)? As in, is it the thing that makes it so no one else has broken out of their planet to come visit us? I could totally see it being the case that as soon as a civilization gets good enough at putting stuff into space, they start putting a lot of stuff into space and then things start crashing into each other to the point that they can’t ever launch any more things into space and become stuck. Trapped by the artifacts of their own progress

ljsprague 2y ago
I would guess that it would still be possible to send things beyond earth's orbit with only a low probability of collision with debris but perhaps I'm wrong.
- to11mtm 2y ago
  "Low" is tough to say until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow. Protection would require a lot of complexity and cost due to the need for shielding and the delta-v to move it up there.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > until someone does some proper sort of 'true mapping' of space debris in the range somehow You look at which satellites poofed and then figure out the maximum extent their debris could have drifted.
    - mapt 2y ago
      That works a little bit when we're talking about one satellite poofing in a year based on a collision with another satellite, and not at all when we're talking about thousands of events a year, many of which are satellite-debris collisions too small to track (you only get one orbital vector), or between pieces of debris. Every collision generates hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of debris, only the largest of which are trackable.

perihelions 2y ago

Why would any of the US' adversaries agree to that? We have SpaceX, and they do not; lowering the altitude of megaconstellations is asymmetrically far more costly for them then it is for us. Stopping China's (highly strategic, military) satellite constellations isn't a "small amount of diplomacy". It's an impossibility. (It's even their declared planning that deliberate Kessler cascades are on the table [0]—to try to ground this discussion in diplomatic reality). [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/china-military-needs-defence-against-potential-starlink-threat https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/chin... ("China military must be able to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites if they threaten national security: scientists")

maxglute 2y ago
I think OP is suggesting US concede to sharing 500km orbits that SpaceX has disproportionately squatted rights to, since current international law is first come first serve. Where concede is to rejigger international law to increase density of 500km so others wouldn't have to go higher, i.e. PRC mega constellations going ~800 because ~500 mostly taken. Or in ops suggestion, free for all. This is more costly for US since it saves entrants from going extra 300km, but imo proximity also greatly enhances chance for friction... i.e. if everyone chilling around same plane, and it's going to get magnitude more croweded, expect a lot more overt/hidden space war assets there to trigger kessler.
- perihelions 2y ago
  No; rather, that commenter's argument was "The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit them to launch fewer satellites." Higher altitude => wider coverage => fewer satellites
  - maxglute 2y ago
    We're talking about megaconstellations for communications, you want lower for latency, stronger signal (denser/less distance for beamforming) for better data through put -> less satellites for more coverage, and costs is cheaper since less energy. Realistically starlink has combination of 340km-1200km satellites working together, but the critical point is SpaceX reserved a lot of the sub 500km orbit slots with ITU (UN agency who manages orbits), so PRC competitors have no space real estate to try to throw up another mega constellation that can mimic spaceX economics due to location, location, location. Hence PRC registering Thousand Sails at 800km, Guowang at 500km-1200km orbits, etc, which according to OP is exponentially bad for Kessler (I have no idea). So either ITU opens much more 400km slots, or all the megaconstellations going forward going to satuate >500km LEO. Part of the reason PRC rushed to announce their megaconstellations before they even had reusable was to reserve the next closest available orbit slots that they can.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament We need to start by understanding it. I'm having trouble finding this paper right now. But to date, all calculations have shown that Kessler syndrome as a generalised phenomenon is incredibly hard to trigger. Even intentionally. Especially in LEO. (Intentionally triggering it is of interest for strategic ASAT denial.) > the mass of potential impactors quickly forms a long tailed lognormal distribution that denies us space for centuries No, it denies certain orbits. (Again, barring some new orbital dynamic haven been discovered by this paper.)

mapt 2y ago
If 800km impacts go asymptotic, it pollutes 700km and 900km orbits by virtue of having a distribution of resulting debris velocity vectors, and as drag pulls down all the resulting debris over the next thousand years, the 800km debris becomes circular 700km debris, and then circular 600km debris, and then circular 500km debris.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > as drag pulls down all the resulting debris over the next thousand years, the 800km debris becomes circular 700km debris, and then circular 600km debris, and then circular 500km debris Circularisation isn’t the unexpected part. Sphericalisation is. One requires orbits to desync. The other requires plane changes.
  - wbl 2y ago
    There is percession of the perigee.
  - mapt 2y ago
    Even in a purely planar distribution, nodal precession still occurs slowly. It doesn't even need to be factored in, though, if different planes are colliding with each other and energetically generating a spectrum of new orbital vectors (many less than circular) from impact. This effect colludes with altitude drop from orbital decay and the tendency to circularize orbits by perigee drag, to make it so that higher orbit debris percolate into lower orbits over time.

immibis 2y ago

We are currently in a low-trust, selfish world where all hope of collaboration has gone out of the window, so we are on an unchangeable trajectory towards things like Kessler Syndrome and climate hell.

shiroiushi 2y ago
Humanity is a failed species. The engineers were right to send the xenomorphs.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> Kessler Syndrome and climate hell Both of which demonstrate that our species is much better at understanding how to scale madness and destruction than how to scale sustainable activity.

aaron695 2y ago

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PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> We need viable treaties limiting development beyond 400 or 500km and we need them ten years ago. Basically every other interest on earth is going to see this as the west exploiting space then pulling the ladder up after them. It's the same reason why hoping developing countries will stop using coal is ridiculous. We need to foot the bill to clean up after ourselves or people will just ignore us and do what they see they need to do regardless.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Yeah unless all the orbits under 500 km are also annulled and put up for negotiation too, most countries would never accept it. And even then the negotiation process will take decades so that means no LEO satellites available for anyone for several decades.
- schiffern 2y ago
  > all the orbits under 500 km are also annulled and put up for negotiation Unnecessary. There's plenty of space (no pun intended) to operate at those altitudes, even with existing and planned satellite constellations. The real issue is regulatory, not technical. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199498
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    An HN user’s opinion doesn’t matter in the context of how countries decide in international diplomacy…? How does this make sense? Other countries could clearly decide however they like, because they don’t need to come to the negotiating table.
    - schiffern 2y ago
      It's not my opinion. The ITU permitting system described in my link is the (negotiated) international system that exists today. If you're suggesting it might be re-negotiated to allow latecomers to build constellations below 500 km, then we agree. However your idea of "annulling" permits already given out isn't necessary, or politically feasible, or even desirable. "Annulling" is just one HN user's jealous destruction fantasy.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]