8 ms·

Mitigation is going to be the name of the game. Whether they like it or not, low earth orbit (LEO) is becoming a very busy place and it's not just SpaceX launch

Mitigation is going to be the name of the game. Whether they like it or not, low earth orbit (LEO) is becoming a very busy place and it's not just SpaceX launching lots of little satellites there. The Chinese are very busy launching their own satellites into LEO. And there are other companies and countries doing or considering the same. Spacex and Star link get most of the attention; but the Chinese are doing a decent job to keep up with them in number of launches. And there are a growing number of companies with LEO launch capability. Mitigation might have to involve some sacrifices. I don't see how policy is going to be able to mitigate much here. And of course the Chinese are under no obligation to listen to US policy makers. They might have their own debates domestically around this topic and they might be reasonable about the topic internationally even. But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. A more practical approach might be accepting that earth based observations are inevitably going to suffer a bit as the number of satellites grows from thousands to tens of thousands and eventually well beyond that. Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. That's already happening of course. And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth. Unless of course the thing under observation is on a collision course with us.

squigz 1y ago
Why do we have to launch tens of thousands or even more satellites?
- mlindner 1y ago
  "We" don't have to launch anything at all. SpaceX needs to launch enough satellites to satisfy customer demand for their constellation. In general the trend actually is that SpaceX is launching fewer but larger satellites (initially they were doing 60 satellites per launch, but they made them larger and now launch 24-28 satellites depending on the orbit inclination.
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  This internet fad seems to be hanging around and bandwidth is probably linear in satellite count.
- jocaal 1y ago
  Why do we need radio telescopes. Satellite communications are infinitely more useful for people on earth than some research papers about things light-years away
  - voxlax 1y ago
    Yes, but if it hadn't been for the efforts of visionary scientists at NASA trying to reach the stars, there would be no means of putting those satellites into orbit.
    - brookst 1y ago
      This is the but I don’t see the relevance. Is there an argument / position there or just an observation?
      - flufluflufluffy 1y ago
        The point is basic science (e.g. radio astronomy) is, if not necessary, then highly desirable, because it can lead to unimaginable advancements in humanity (or in a country’s technological and military capabilities if that’s how you think).
        brookst 1y ago
        Sure, and industry is also valuable and contributes to progress. I don’t think it’s useful to say one must always take priority over the other regardless of specifics.
        flufluflufluffy 1y ago
        I don’t think that’s useful either and nobody said that.
  - kevindamm 1y ago
    Ironically, those satellites would not be able to communicate effectively without the understanding of relativity that was obtained by looking at things light-years away.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  There is no royal "we" that "has to" do anything. There's just groups of people and countries making use of a shared resource, LEO. Your underlying question as to why some of those are launching satellites is much easier. They are apparently quite useful for things like communication, providing internet, etc. And people are willing to pay for that kind of stuff. It's not more complicated than that.
- XorNot 1y ago
  If you think the internet is a big deal, you haven't run into how happy the military is to have high bandwidth low-latency communications anywhere on the planet. Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down. With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  If we had a trusted powerful peacekeeper with a track record then we wouldn't need to. But now that masks are off everybody is busy launching dual purpose sats and whoever launches the least can literally get nuked from orbit if they don't do whatever the guy with more sats wants. Then whoever has the most sats will say "that's it guys, LEO is full and you need our approval to launch more" and if someone raises a stink you guessed it, they can get nuked from orbit
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    There are no kinetic NOR nuclear orbital strike capabilities for anyone right now, nor is anyone really working on it either, because it just makes zero sense (primarily because suborbital launches achieve the exact same outcome for a tiny fraction of the cost).
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? Also redundancy if all your subs, silos, and bomber bases got hit first by their satellites. It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough. It seems really optimistic to think they haven't all already done this.
      - myrmidon 1y ago
        > Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? Improved first strike capability is worthless íf it isn't crippling, and "devastating enough" first strike capability from orbit is completely unaffordable, and impossible to build up unobserved. Being in orbit is a hindrance more than anything, really, because maintenance becomes ruinously expensive, everything is trivially observable for all your adversaries and you have to align the orbit with your target beforehand, too (which, again, everyone can observe). > It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough. Enough for what? Threatening to nuke some satellites? Because anything else you can do easier, cheaper and on a larger scale from the ground. Why would you bother with nuclear warheads in space when you can just build/maintain like 10 ICBM silos for the same cost?
- literalAardvark 1y ago
  As others have said, because it's a key military capability. Humanity is what humanity is, not what we wish it'd be, so key military capabilities need to be developed or you get razed by the guy who did develop them. Doubly so now that we've rediscovered that culture is much more resilient than we'd thought, and that different people want Earth to look in different ways. Do we all wish we'd stop ecological collapse instead? Yeah. But it's not going to happen so it's irrelevant.
- sneak 1y ago
  Because the speed of light is slow and orbital mechanics can’t be changed. To have internet everywhere you need to either accept bad latency (300-500ms round trip) or have closer satellites, which means they’re moving faster, which means you need more of them.
- wang_li 1y ago
  You should also ask why do we have to do this particular research? Both parties are impacting this particular band of the spectrum. One by excluding others and the other by radiating in those frequencies.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Excluding others only in a way that is not dissimilar to you locking your doors/windows to exclude others from freely entering your house. Yes, some of the premiere radio observatories have radio transmission exclusion zones around them, but they are also typically away from that exclusion zone impacting as few as possible. Starlink on the other hand is not attempting to do anything of the sort. It would be interesting of Starlink could respect a geofence kind of idea so that they stop broadcasting when over certain areas, especially since they do this over geopolitically exclusion zones.
aragilar 1y ago
A bit, it's 5 orders of magnitude over the required SNR?! From the article: "The authors estimate a lower limit of 93 Jy per beam in the frequency averaged images containing Starlink emission. Considering just 1 mJy of radio frequency interference could mess up an EoR power spectrum integration, this could severely affect SKA-Low EoR science."
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  > the required SNR Require by who and on what authority? My point here was not to contest that but make the point that the cat is out of the bag and that it is indeed impacting SKA-Low EoR science and the people involved with that have to deal with that. Getting the cat a little bit back in the bag via policy and other means is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success.
  - 1dom 1y ago
    This makes me want to say "is nothing sacred?!" I get your point from a pragmatic: this is the world we live in, work with it, not against it. I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world. I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".
    - rickdeckard 1y ago
      > I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue". I fully agree, and that's IMO the core-issue here: This strong-arm approach of just forcing the problem to be solved in your favor by scaling as fast as possible and then pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course, insisting that the other side should be pragmatic about this. I don't remember this was a working strategy in the past (imagine a car-company just accelerating sales of a faulty car to scale THEIR issue and avoid having to do a recall), but nowadays it could even be turned into a geopolitical topic...
perihelions 1y ago
> "The Chinese are very busy launching their own satellites into LEO." The Chinese (correctly) view these satellite constellations as a key military capability, and have gone all-in on creating their own version. (I mean, I don't see how that's even debatable at this point—having seen the influence of Starlink in Ukraine. Future conflicts will only amplify the gap between the haves and have-nots). They haven't yet launched a large number (~120); they don't now have the launch volume for large-scale satellite constellations. Their race is to first catch up in launch capability. They have dozen private startups—heavily subsidized and favored by the state—in the race to build a viable, reusable launcher comparable to Falcon 9, that they would then use to launch Starlink-like constellations at the same cadence. Some starting points: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-racing-to-catch-up-to-spacex-74b02a95 https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra... ( https://archive.is/Ukmoa https://archive.is/Ukmoa ) ("China’s Own Elon Musks Are Racing to Catch Up to SpaceX / Private sector takes bigger role in building reusable rockets, advancing Beijing’s goal of independence from Western technology") https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/starlink-spacex-musk-china-satellites.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/st... ("This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX / It’s looking unlikely. Here’s why")
velox 1y ago
> Including astronomy related hardware Can't feasibly do VLBI or other radio astronomy at useful scale in space even if launches were free. Look up the scale of SKA or the EHT.
- galangalalgol 1y ago
  Geosynchronous satellites could give us even longer baselines couldn't they? Or even at l4 and l5. They don't get shielded by the earth like l2, but the station keeping would be easier. That would be a massive baseline
  - velox 1y ago
    Baselines are one thing, you need a huge collecting area to get useful sensitivity, which there is barely budget for to build on earth, let alone in space
- perihelions 1y ago
  I'm not clear why not. The scale of the completed SKA-low (512*256 = 131,072 antennas, 1.8 meter lengths) is the same as that of Starlink itself. It's even less mass; the antenna parts alone, they are wire dipoles, they say they only weigh 1.6 kg each. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06708 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06708 Why can't humanity launch 2^17 small antennas into deep space, as a free-floating constellation?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - thicktarget 1y ago
    It's just nowhere near feasible. Each element would need power, orientation, precise positioning and a data link to the processing stations. For SKA low the raw data rate from all antennas is something like 2 Pb/s. Which is more than all of Starlink combined. Which is massively stepped down to 7 Tb/s by the central processor, a supercomputer with purpose built signal processing hardware. Then the next stage takes it to 100 Gb/s. You would likely have to transmit the data via radio links, which would defeat the purpose of going to space. When a radio telescope is built in space it will likely be on the Moon (or in orbit), designed for lower frequencies and much less ambitious than SKA low.
geraneum 1y ago
> But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. No kidding! If something is worthwhile, people should and sometimes do go to the trouble! Just roll over is not good advice here!
sneak 1y ago
> Spacex and Star link get most of the attention; but the Chinese are doing a decent job to keep up with them in number of launches. Nobody anywhere is anywhere near SpaceX’s launch cadence, reusable or non.
elcritch 1y ago
> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. That's already happening of course. Seems more effective for astronomers to embrace it. Perhaps by getting SpaceX to add a few dozen hundred satellites kitted out for radio astronomy. Link them together and it could be amazing for radio astronomy!
barbazoo 1y ago
> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. “We” as in the select few countries that have the launch capability and the space tech. Again a public good is being commoditized and being sold to the highest bidder.
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  This seems circular… since the lack of a worldwide authority, that can decide the value of X public good is worth more than zero, is the issue in the first place.
- Mathnerd314 1y ago
  I thought that was the whole idea of spectrum auctions.
  - blackguardx 1y ago
    The RF spectrum is a public good in the US and there are requirements placed on the winners of those auctions to demonstrate it provides some public benefit. A company can't just buy spectrum and sit on it, for example. They must use start to use it in a certain timeframe.
    - ggreer 1y ago
      The RF spectrum is a common good, not a public good. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. The RF spectrum is non-excludable (anyone can transmit on any frequency, given the right equipment) but rivalrous (transmitting on one frequency prevents others from using that frequency). Requiring the winner of a spectrum auction to use it is a way to prevent anti-competitive tactics (since the government is granting a monopoly to the winner). The goal is to incentivize productive use of limited resources, not necessarily to benefit everyone. In theory, the winner could use the spectrum for entirely internal purposes. Though in real world spectrum auctions, the government usually has stipulations such as requiring interoperability or using open standards. This reduces the value that the government captures, but likely increases the value that is created overall. Before spectrum auctions, the government simply mandated what frequency bands were used for what, and by whom. Getting access usually meant lobbying and back room deals. Sometimes the FCC used lotteries, which caused speculators to enter lotteries and then license access (basically capturing revenue that would have gone to the government had the spectrum been auctioned). In practice, auctions are the worst form of spectrum allocation, except for all the others.
uv-depression 1y ago
Ah, the techbro defence. "We already started doing it, so I guess you're just going to have to let us". > Whether they like it or not, A swarm of LEO satellites because in the current political climate it's easier to massively pollute orbits and prevent astronomy than do municipal internet is not, in fact, a law of nature; nor is it inevitable. > But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. Ah, a challenge! Let's all give up immediately; this could make some rich people a lot of money, after all! > Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. Would you like to pay for launching Vera C. Rubin (8.4m, nearly 20,000kg for just the camera and mirrors) into space? How about the TMT (30m, expected ~2.6 million kg)? Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing about astronomy. > And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth. Apparently fundamental physics is not very relevant to us here on Earth! This is one of the most small-minded statements I've ever read.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
How do the various LEO constellations mitigate band interference issues? Does the US/China have some agreement as to which bands their respective countries' companies will use?
butlike 1y ago
You just made me realize that the younger generation is never going to be able to reliably "wish upon a <shooting> star" ever again.
stronglikedan 1y ago
We're fucked once they have the ability to launch payloads that are too big and/or beefy to fully burn up on reentry.
saddat 1y ago
No , regulation. That’s what is necessary for cars, planes etc , otherwise the competition would lead to low emission cars . Plus the space debris creation , which is also unregulated , but threatening humanity - for profit
rlt 1y ago
> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. Honestly once Starship is operational SpaceX should subsidize launches of non-commercial astronomy hardware. Could build some goodwill to offset the negatives.

squigz 1y ago

Why do we have to launch tens of thousands or even more satellites?

mlindner 1y ago
"We" don't have to launch anything at all. SpaceX needs to launch enough satellites to satisfy customer demand for their constellation. In general the trend actually is that SpaceX is launching fewer but larger satellites (initially they were doing 60 satellites per launch, but they made them larger and now launch 24-28 satellites depending on the orbit inclination.
JonChesterfield 1y ago
This internet fad seems to be hanging around and bandwidth is probably linear in satellite count.
jocaal 1y ago
Why do we need radio telescopes. Satellite communications are infinitely more useful for people on earth than some research papers about things light-years away
- voxlax 1y ago
  Yes, but if it hadn't been for the efforts of visionary scientists at NASA trying to reach the stars, there would be no means of putting those satellites into orbit.
  - brookst 1y ago
    This is the but I don’t see the relevance. Is there an argument / position there or just an observation?
    - flufluflufluffy 1y ago
      The point is basic science (e.g. radio astronomy) is, if not necessary, then highly desirable, because it can lead to unimaginable advancements in humanity (or in a country’s technological and military capabilities if that’s how you think).
      - brookst 1y ago
        Sure, and industry is also valuable and contributes to progress. I don’t think it’s useful to say one must always take priority over the other regardless of specifics.
        flufluflufluffy 1y ago
        I don’t think that’s useful either and nobody said that.
- kevindamm 1y ago
  Ironically, those satellites would not be able to communicate effectively without the understanding of relativity that was obtained by looking at things light-years away.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
There is no royal "we" that "has to" do anything. There's just groups of people and countries making use of a shared resource, LEO. Your underlying question as to why some of those are launching satellites is much easier. They are apparently quite useful for things like communication, providing internet, etc. And people are willing to pay for that kind of stuff. It's not more complicated than that.
XorNot 1y ago
If you think the internet is a big deal, you haven't run into how happy the military is to have high bandwidth low-latency communications anywhere on the planet. Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down. With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP.
throwaway290 1y ago
If we had a trusted powerful peacekeeper with a track record then we wouldn't need to. But now that masks are off everybody is busy launching dual purpose sats and whoever launches the least can literally get nuked from orbit if they don't do whatever the guy with more sats wants. Then whoever has the most sats will say "that's it guys, LEO is full and you need our approval to launch more" and if someone raises a stink you guessed it, they can get nuked from orbit
- myrmidon 1y ago
  There are no kinetic NOR nuclear orbital strike capabilities for anyone right now, nor is anyone really working on it either, because it just makes zero sense (primarily because suborbital launches achieve the exact same outcome for a tiny fraction of the cost).
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? Also redundancy if all your subs, silos, and bomber bases got hit first by their satellites. It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough. It seems really optimistic to think they haven't all already done this.
    - myrmidon 1y ago
      > Wouldn't having them already up give a lot less warning in a first strike situation? Improved first strike capability is worthless íf it isn't crippling, and "devastating enough" first strike capability from orbit is completely unaffordable, and impossible to build up unobserved. Being in orbit is a hindrance more than anything, really, because maintenance becomes ruinously expensive, everything is trivially observable for all your adversaries and you have to align the orbit with your target beforehand, too (which, again, everyone can observe). > It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough. Enough for what? Threatening to nuke some satellites? Because anything else you can do easier, cheaper and on a larger scale from the ground. Why would you bother with nuclear warheads in space when you can just build/maintain like 10 ICBM silos for the same cost?
literalAardvark 1y ago
As others have said, because it's a key military capability. Humanity is what humanity is, not what we wish it'd be, so key military capabilities need to be developed or you get razed by the guy who did develop them. Doubly so now that we've rediscovered that culture is much more resilient than we'd thought, and that different people want Earth to look in different ways. Do we all wish we'd stop ecological collapse instead? Yeah. But it's not going to happen so it's irrelevant.
sneak 1y ago
Because the speed of light is slow and orbital mechanics can’t be changed. To have internet everywhere you need to either accept bad latency (300-500ms round trip) or have closer satellites, which means they’re moving faster, which means you need more of them.
wang_li 1y ago
You should also ask why do we have to do this particular research? Both parties are impacting this particular band of the spectrum. One by excluding others and the other by radiating in those frequencies.
- dylan604 1y ago
  Excluding others only in a way that is not dissimilar to you locking your doors/windows to exclude others from freely entering your house. Yes, some of the premiere radio observatories have radio transmission exclusion zones around them, but they are also typically away from that exclusion zone impacting as few as possible. Starlink on the other hand is not attempting to do anything of the sort. It would be interesting of Starlink could respect a geofence kind of idea so that they stop broadcasting when over certain areas, especially since they do this over geopolitically exclusion zones.

aragilar 1y ago

A bit, it's 5 orders of magnitude over the required SNR?! From the article: "The authors estimate a lower limit of 93 Jy per beam in the frequency averaged images containing Starlink emission. Considering just 1 mJy of radio frequency interference could mess up an EoR power spectrum integration, this could severely affect SKA-Low EoR science."

jillesvangurp 1y ago
> the required SNR Require by who and on what authority? My point here was not to contest that but make the point that the cat is out of the bag and that it is indeed impacting SKA-Low EoR science and the people involved with that have to deal with that. Getting the cat a little bit back in the bag via policy and other means is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success.
- 1dom 1y ago
  This makes me want to say "is nothing sacred?!" I get your point from a pragmatic: this is the world we live in, work with it, not against it. I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world. I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".
  - rickdeckard 1y ago
    > I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue". I fully agree, and that's IMO the core-issue here: This strong-arm approach of just forcing the problem to be solved in your favor by scaling as fast as possible and then pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course, insisting that the other side should be pragmatic about this. I don't remember this was a working strategy in the past (imagine a car-company just accelerating sales of a faulty car to scale THEIR issue and avoid having to do a recall), but nowadays it could even be turned into a geopolitical topic...

perihelions 1y ago

> "The Chinese are very busy launching their own satellites into LEO." The Chinese (correctly) view these satellite constellations as a key military capability, and have gone all-in on creating their own version. (I mean, I don't see how that's even debatable at this point—having seen the influence of Starlink in Ukraine. Future conflicts will only amplify the gap between the haves and have-nots). They haven't yet launched a large number (~120); they don't now have the launch volume for large-scale satellite constellations. Their race is to first catch up in launch capability. They have dozen private startups—heavily subsidized and favored by the state—in the race to build a viable, reusable launcher comparable to Falcon 9, that they would then use to launch Starlink-like constellations at the same cadence. Some starting points: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-racing-to-catch-up-to-spacex-74b02a95 https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra... ( https://archive.is/Ukmoa https://archive.is/Ukmoa ) ("China’s Own Elon Musks Are Racing to Catch Up to SpaceX / Private sector takes bigger role in building reusable rockets, advancing Beijing’s goal of independence from Western technology") https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/starlink-spacex-musk-china-satellites.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/st... ("This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX / It’s looking unlikely. Here’s why")

velox 1y ago

> Including astronomy related hardware Can't feasibly do VLBI or other radio astronomy at useful scale in space even if launches were free. Look up the scale of SKA or the EHT.

galangalalgol 1y ago
Geosynchronous satellites could give us even longer baselines couldn't they? Or even at l4 and l5. They don't get shielded by the earth like l2, but the station keeping would be easier. That would be a massive baseline
- velox 1y ago
  Baselines are one thing, you need a huge collecting area to get useful sensitivity, which there is barely budget for to build on earth, let alone in space
perihelions 1y ago
I'm not clear why not. The scale of the completed SKA-low (512*256 = 131,072 antennas, 1.8 meter lengths) is the same as that of Starlink itself. It's even less mass; the antenna parts alone, they are wire dipoles, they say they only weigh 1.6 kg each. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06708 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06708 Why can't humanity launch 2^17 small antennas into deep space, as a free-floating constellation?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- thicktarget 1y ago
  It's just nowhere near feasible. Each element would need power, orientation, precise positioning and a data link to the processing stations. For SKA low the raw data rate from all antennas is something like 2 Pb/s. Which is more than all of Starlink combined. Which is massively stepped down to 7 Tb/s by the central processor, a supercomputer with purpose built signal processing hardware. Then the next stage takes it to 100 Gb/s. You would likely have to transmit the data via radio links, which would defeat the purpose of going to space. When a radio telescope is built in space it will likely be on the Moon (or in orbit), designed for lower frequencies and much less ambitious than SKA low.

geraneum 1y ago

> But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. No kidding! If something is worthwhile, people should and sometimes do go to the trouble! Just roll over is not good advice here!

sneak 1y ago

> Spacex and Star link get most of the attention; but the Chinese are doing a decent job to keep up with them in number of launches. Nobody anywhere is anywhere near SpaceX’s launch cadence, reusable or non.

elcritch 1y ago

> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. That's already happening of course. Seems more effective for astronomers to embrace it. Perhaps by getting SpaceX to add a few dozen hundred satellites kitted out for radio astronomy. Link them together and it could be amazing for radio astronomy!

barbazoo 1y ago

> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. “We” as in the select few countries that have the launch capability and the space tech. Again a public good is being commoditized and being sold to the highest bidder.

MichaelZuo 1y ago
This seems circular… since the lack of a worldwide authority, that can decide the value of X public good is worth more than zero, is the issue in the first place.
Mathnerd314 1y ago
I thought that was the whole idea of spectrum auctions.
- blackguardx 1y ago
  The RF spectrum is a public good in the US and there are requirements placed on the winners of those auctions to demonstrate it provides some public benefit. A company can't just buy spectrum and sit on it, for example. They must use start to use it in a certain timeframe.
  - ggreer 1y ago
    The RF spectrum is a common good, not a public good. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. The RF spectrum is non-excludable (anyone can transmit on any frequency, given the right equipment) but rivalrous (transmitting on one frequency prevents others from using that frequency). Requiring the winner of a spectrum auction to use it is a way to prevent anti-competitive tactics (since the government is granting a monopoly to the winner). The goal is to incentivize productive use of limited resources, not necessarily to benefit everyone. In theory, the winner could use the spectrum for entirely internal purposes. Though in real world spectrum auctions, the government usually has stipulations such as requiring interoperability or using open standards. This reduces the value that the government captures, but likely increases the value that is created overall. Before spectrum auctions, the government simply mandated what frequency bands were used for what, and by whom. Getting access usually meant lobbying and back room deals. Sometimes the FCC used lotteries, which caused speculators to enter lotteries and then license access (basically capturing revenue that would have gone to the government had the spectrum been auctioned). In practice, auctions are the worst form of spectrum allocation, except for all the others.

uv-depression 1y ago

Ah, the techbro defence. "We already started doing it, so I guess you're just going to have to let us". > Whether they like it or not, A swarm of LEO satellites because in the current political climate it's easier to massively pollute orbits and prevent astronomy than do municipal internet is not, in fact, a law of nature; nor is it inevitable. > But building international consensus; or even enforcing what little there is on that front could be challenging. Ah, a challenge! Let's all give up immediately; this could make some rich people a lot of money, after all! > Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. Would you like to pay for launching Vera C. Rubin (8.4m, nearly 20,000kg for just the camera and mirrors) into space? How about the TMT (30m, expected ~2.6 million kg)? Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing about astronomy. > And otherwise, astronomy is very interesting and cool but mostly it concerns observations about things that are really really far away and not directly relevant to a lot of things on earth. Apparently fundamental physics is not very relevant to us here on Earth! This is one of the most small-minded statements I've ever read.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

How do the various LEO constellations mitigate band interference issues? Does the US/China have some agreement as to which bands their respective countries' companies will use?

butlike 1y ago

You just made me realize that the younger generation is never going to be able to reliably "wish upon a <shooting> star" ever again.

stronglikedan 1y ago

We're fucked once they have the ability to launch payloads that are too big and/or beefy to fully burn up on reentry.

saddat 1y ago

No , regulation. That’s what is necessary for cars, planes etc , otherwise the competition would lead to low emission cars . Plus the space debris creation , which is also unregulated , but threatening humanity - for profit

rlt 1y ago

> Luckily we now are able to launch stuff into orbit a lot cheaper. Including astronomy related hardware. Honestly once Starship is operational SpaceX should subsidize launches of non-commercial astronomy hardware. Could build some goodwill to offset the negatives.