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I think that "Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet" is something you've just made up; the article you link talks about African peopl

I think that "Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet" is something you've just made up; the article you link talks about African people turning to Starlink because of local infrastructure issues, and the original article notes that the current satellite count is currently around 14k satellites. 100k is more than enough satellites to provide high-speed satellite internet globally. The article makes mention of specific endeavours, like the night-time mirror satellites, which are particularly disruptive to astronomy, and the general risks of high numbers of satellites. The ability to do Earth based astronomy is something that is of value to all the peoples of Earth, and is mainly funded by the western nations because of their current position as the people with more money.

rcxdude 3mo ago
Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.
- IncreasePosts 3mo ago
  Ground based infrastructure is much easier to justify in densely populated areas. So, dense areas get ground infra, and the dispersed rural population can get satellite infra
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  > it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, I also suspect that to be the case but in order to be more objective I wonder. What's the theoretical maximum bandwidth per square meter (or other unit area) that it can deliver?
  - unusualmonkey 3mo ago
    Starlink is useful, but people often confuse coverage with capacity density. The rough hierarchy is: fixed fiber/cable > Wi-Fi > cellular > LEO satellite > traditional GEO satellite. Starlink is a huge improvement over old satellite internet, but it is still fundamentally a satellite system, not dense terrestrial infrastructure. As a rough illustration, suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles and has 6 Gbps of usable downlink. At New York City density, that footprint contains about 1.85 million people. That works out to roughly 3 kbps per person. For comparison, network planners typically budget on the order of Mbps per person to comfortably support peak demand in dense urban environments. You can improve that with more satellites, more beams, more spectrum, and better hardware. But even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. Additionally, this all adds cost... that isn't needed for the vast majority of time or space that the sattelites will be over. If the sattelites orbiting over New York also orbit over the Sahara Desert - every $ spent improving NY capacity is also improving the Sahara... but with no return. The reason fiber, cable, Wi-Fi, and cellular work so well in cities is spatial reuse. Capacity can be reused block by block, building by building, apartment by apartment, tower by tower, and access point by access point. A beam from hundreds of kilometers overhead covers a much larger area. So Starlink is excellent for rural areas, ships, aircraft, remote sites, disaster recovery, and backup connectivity. But it is not a replacement for terrestrial broadband in dense cities. It solves coverage much better than it solves urban capacity.
    - fc417fc802 3mo ago
      > suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles Is that the actual figure though? > even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. TBF even that would be quite useful for lots of things seeing as it's faster than the DSL service I once had. However agreed that it isn't going to replace fiber service and overbuilding to such an extent for outliers would be absurd. Still, that's quite decent considering it's an estimate of a near worst case scenario.
      - unusualmonkey 3mo ago
        [flagged]
- ethin 3mo ago
  Starlink is already over-congested and physics says that it is not possible to scale it up to serve 100000000 subscribers let alone 5-6 billion or more. We would need some kind of physics breakthrough for that to scale properly, and I'm not even sure if physically it would even be possible to do that no matter what you threw at it. Starlink isn't magic as a lot of people seem to think it is.
JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
The article doesn’t consider that in a world with a million satellites in orbit, launching space-based telescopes—including into deep space—becomes an order of magnitude cheaper.
- acdha 3mo ago
  Does it? My understanding was that it’s less helpful for anything which isn’t in low-earth orbit because the commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads Commercial satellites are getting bigger and heavier. Launch that can put big and heavy in LEO can put big and slightly less heavy higher up. Add to that things like in-orbit propellant transfer and there is a good chance astronomy sees a golden age in the coming decades (in countries with space access). I’m not dismissing the problem. Just this analysis as meriting any conclusions. It’s a start. But it’s only part of a full model of how these changes would affect astronomy.
    - Teever 3mo ago
      I get where you're coming from but we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs that take advantage of the Falcon launch paradigm of cheap and reliable launches. Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added. Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
      - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
        > we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs We’re only starting to truly mass manufacture satellites. A world with millions of satellites means one with lots of satellite production and design economies of scale. (Same for all manner of sensors and optics.) > as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly. And if Starship never works out, we probably don’t see millions of satellites. It’s a fundamentally tied problem, which is why I say the analysis is incomplete.
ck2 3mo ago
note that including dead things in orbit (that we currently have no way to remove) is actually 32,000 not just 14,000 what we need is the investment for "space roombas" that go around bumping things out of orbit that are dead or did not de-orbit properly the problem is all that atmospheric burnup creates a lot of toxic pollution * https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellites-pollution/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > we currently have no way to remove Nature takes care of this for us in LEO. I’ve seen no serious plans to put millions of anything anywhere else.

rcxdude 3mo ago

Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.

IncreasePosts 3mo ago
Ground based infrastructure is much easier to justify in densely populated areas. So, dense areas get ground infra, and the dispersed rural population can get satellite infra
fc417fc802 3mo ago
> it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, I also suspect that to be the case but in order to be more objective I wonder. What's the theoretical maximum bandwidth per square meter (or other unit area) that it can deliver?
- unusualmonkey 3mo ago
  Starlink is useful, but people often confuse coverage with capacity density. The rough hierarchy is: fixed fiber/cable > Wi-Fi > cellular > LEO satellite > traditional GEO satellite. Starlink is a huge improvement over old satellite internet, but it is still fundamentally a satellite system, not dense terrestrial infrastructure. As a rough illustration, suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles and has 6 Gbps of usable downlink. At New York City density, that footprint contains about 1.85 million people. That works out to roughly 3 kbps per person. For comparison, network planners typically budget on the order of Mbps per person to comfortably support peak demand in dense urban environments. You can improve that with more satellites, more beams, more spectrum, and better hardware. But even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. Additionally, this all adds cost... that isn't needed for the vast majority of time or space that the sattelites will be over. If the sattelites orbiting over New York also orbit over the Sahara Desert - every $ spent improving NY capacity is also improving the Sahara... but with no return. The reason fiber, cable, Wi-Fi, and cellular work so well in cities is spatial reuse. Capacity can be reused block by block, building by building, apartment by apartment, tower by tower, and access point by access point. A beam from hundreds of kilometers overhead covers a much larger area. So Starlink is excellent for rural areas, ships, aircraft, remote sites, disaster recovery, and backup connectivity. But it is not a replacement for terrestrial broadband in dense cities. It solves coverage much better than it solves urban capacity.
  - fc417fc802 3mo ago
    > suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles Is that the actual figure though? > even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. TBF even that would be quite useful for lots of things seeing as it's faster than the DSL service I once had. However agreed that it isn't going to replace fiber service and overbuilding to such an extent for outliers would be absurd. Still, that's quite decent considering it's an estimate of a near worst case scenario.
    - unusualmonkey 3mo ago
      [flagged]
ethin 3mo ago
Starlink is already over-congested and physics says that it is not possible to scale it up to serve 100000000 subscribers let alone 5-6 billion or more. We would need some kind of physics breakthrough for that to scale properly, and I'm not even sure if physically it would even be possible to do that no matter what you threw at it. Starlink isn't magic as a lot of people seem to think it is.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

The article doesn’t consider that in a world with a million satellites in orbit, launching space-based telescopes—including into deep space—becomes an order of magnitude cheaper.

acdha 3mo ago
Does it? My understanding was that it’s less helpful for anything which isn’t in low-earth orbit because the commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads Commercial satellites are getting bigger and heavier. Launch that can put big and heavy in LEO can put big and slightly less heavy higher up. Add to that things like in-orbit propellant transfer and there is a good chance astronomy sees a golden age in the coming decades (in countries with space access). I’m not dismissing the problem. Just this analysis as meriting any conclusions. It’s a start. But it’s only part of a full model of how these changes would affect astronomy.
  - Teever 3mo ago
    I get where you're coming from but we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs that take advantage of the Falcon launch paradigm of cheap and reliable launches. Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added. Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
    - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs We’re only starting to truly mass manufacture satellites. A world with millions of satellites means one with lots of satellite production and design economies of scale. (Same for all manner of sensors and optics.) > as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly. And if Starship never works out, we probably don’t see millions of satellites. It’s a fundamentally tied problem, which is why I say the analysis is incomplete.

ck2 3mo ago

note that including dead things in orbit (that we currently have no way to remove) is actually 32,000 not just 14,000 what we need is the investment for "space roombas" that go around bumping things out of orbit that are dead or did not de-orbit properly the problem is all that atmospheric burnup creates a lot of toxic pollution * https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellites-pollution/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> we currently have no way to remove Nature takes care of this for us in LEO. I’ve seen no serious plans to put millions of anything anywhere else.