Elon Musk intends to block out the night sky forever - Space-X? More like S̶p̶a̶c̶e̶

[3119967d0c]

SpaceX has launched a tiny fraction- 240 from 40,000+- of the amount of satellites it intends to launch as part of Elon Musk's stated goal of bringing streaming furry porn to every inch of the Earth.

These are already ruining astronomical observations.

In the predawn hours of November 18, 2019, Northwestern University astronomer Cliff Johnson noticed a huge swarm of unfamiliar objects streaking across the sky.

That night, Johnson was surveying the Magellanic Clouds — two very dim dwarf galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way galaxy — with the telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. These galaxies are teaching scientists how stars form, and what happens when two galaxies pass near one another. Johnson was watching them remotely, through a webcam at Fermilab outside of Chicago. “All of a sudden,” he says, “we just start seeing these streaks come across the webcam view. I’ve never seen anything like that.”...

It didn’t take Johnson and his colleagues long to figure out whose satellites they were: A week earlier, Elon Musk’s SpaceX had launched 60 small satellites into low Earth orbit. Johnson’s colleague, astronomer Clarae Martínez-Vázquez, who was also working that night, vented her frustration on Twitter....

Clara Martínez-Vázquez on Twitter

“Wow!! I am in shock!! The huge amount of Starlink satellites crossed our skies tonight at @cerrotololo. Our DECam exposure was heavily affected by 19 of them! The train of Starlink satellites lasted for over 5 minutes!! Rather depressing… This is not cool!”

twitter.com

In the near future, there could be 50,000 or more small satellites encircling the Earth, and for purposes other than delivering internet. Could some company arrange bright satellites in the sky to spell out the name of a popular soda? Maybe. There’s no global ban on space advertising...

In the long run, this could diminish our view of the universe, create more space debris, and, potentially, deprive humanity of an unblemished view of the night sky. It’s not that the 19 Starlink satellites ruined the entire night of observations, Johnson says. “The fear is that this is going to become the new normal. If we’re really talking about many thousands to tens of thousands of satellites ... that is no longer a small deal.”

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/1/7/21003272/space-x-starlink-astronomy-light-pollution
https://archive.md/tzBpQ

Watch nothing be done about this problem.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Cheap fast internet worldwide or some nerds staring at the sky while pretending like they're doing something important... hm, that's a hard choice.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

And no one's putting a stop to this madman why?

 

[Niggernerd]

Hopefully his satelites fly into space forces space space

 

[3119967d0c]

Cheap fast internet worldwide or some nerds staring at the sky while pretending like they're doing something important... hm, that's a hard choice.

Yes, clearly completely altering the natural environment for the worse is a small price to pay so the Congolese can browse PornHub at 1080p.

 

[BONE_Buddy]

I know many of you guys have a hate-boner for Elon Musk, but really mother fuckers.

You are complaining about something that will be less visible than the old Iridium satellites, you know, the ones that you could watch streak across the night sky with your naked eye? Nobody complained about that, because it wasn't a fucking problem.

Seriously, these things are going to be 2' by 2' at an over 210 mile orbital distance. If you could actually see those things with your naked eyes then you are either a lier or a freak. And guess what, because these things are so small and comparatively low, they are planned to last in orbit at a max of 5 years with most lasting 2 before they are designed to burn up in the atmosphere, instead of just being put into a graveyard orbit like so much else.

So, go ahead and hate Musk for his gay ass Tesla and his le-smart reddit cocksuckers, but don't be this exceptional. Especially not over something which could actually be useful for those of us outside of the big cities.

 

[3119967d0c]

I know many of you guys have a hate-boner for Elon Musk, but really mother fuckers.

You are complaining about something that will be less visible than the old Iridium satellites, you know, the ones that you could watch streak across the night sky with your naked eye? Nobody complained about that, because it wasn't a fucking problem.

Seriously, these things are going to be 2' by 2' at an over 210 mile orbital distance. If you could actually see those things with your naked eyes then you are either a lier or a freak. And guess what, because these things are so small and comparatively low, they are planned to last in orbit at a max of 5 years with most lasting 2 before they are designed to burn up in the atmosphere, instead of just being put into a graveyard orbit like so much else.

I got no problem with Tesla. These will be visible to the naked eye.

Astronomers have done the calculations, and say many of these satellites will be visible to the naked eye, particularly in the time after sunset and before sunrise, when they’ll most strongly catch the glare of the sun.

When there are 50,000 satellites in the sky, “you’ll see the sky crawling,” says Tony Tyson, a University of California Davis astronomer and physicist. “Every square degree will have something crawling in it.”

 

[Fannyscum]

They only travel in a train after being released from launch - They eventually propel themselves into separate orbits. SpaceX are also working on upgrades to the satellites to make them less visible.
People also need to consider that in the future there are going to be many more larger objects in constant orbit around the earth as we become an inter-planetary species.

 

[BONE_Buddy]

I got no problem with Tesla. These will be visible to the naked eye.

So, let's ban airline travel at night. Those aircraft have to have running lights in order to fly.

And no, they will not be visible to the human eye. The glare from a very specific angle, during a very particular time of day, may be.

Again, did you have problems with the iridium flares? This is the same thing. If you don't know what that was, then you won't notice this.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

The 20th century saw people like Sagan, Hawking, and Einstein.

In Clown World there's Elon Musk.

[honk honk]

 

[Feline Supremacist]

Like we need more space junk for the purpose of bringing porn and Amazon to some remote African village. It reminds me of WALL-E with the whales in their recliners and their mindless chatting stopping only to consume and eat.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

The future of astronomy is going to be space based anyway, not earth bound. This is progress.

The 20th century saw people like Sagan, Hawking, and Einstein.

In Clown World there's Elon Musk.

[honk honk]

Sagan was ultimately just a talking head that did nothing useful.

 

[Exorbital Columnations]

Better internet access means more access to education for poor nations, which may actually have a positive effect on the benighted people in those locales. I know that in the developed world we fuck around on the internet all day, but people who actually need the information might use it for more than looking up hentai and posting memes.

I'm all for it.

completely altering the natural environment

The natural environment being the vacuum (or near vacuum) of space? Somehow I don't think putting some tin boxes up there is going to hurt the ecosystem.

 

[Jack O'Neill]

I know many of you guys have a hate-boner for Elon Musk, but really mother fuckers.

It's kinda funny actually. At least he's getting off his ass and actually doing something, unlike us idiots who spend most of our time whining and laughing at people who are no longer funny.

 

[Marco Fucko]

If Elon Musk turns into world monarch in the future I'd be pretty okay with that.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

And no one's putting a stop to this madman why?

He's got a lot of connections with the pedophile elite through x.com and paypal. There was a lot of shady stuff going on in the early Internet.

 

[Un Platano]

First of all, it's hard to see why it's such a problem when they don't directly show its effects, so here's what everyone's actually complaining about with these things.

That's pretty bad, but if you don't give a shit you can say you're perfectly content knowing everything we currently know about the universe and will never need to study anything any more. I can't argue against someone who chooses ignorance. The actual problem with the proposed Starlink program that no one ever talks about is traffic. Forget light pollution, this is the actual problem with why this proposition is utterly ridiculous and should not be done.

Starlink satellites are designed to orbit earth at a low altitude of 350km. Adding this to the 6378 km radius of the earth means that the Starlink satellites are all present in a spherical shell around the earth with a surface area of 5.69x10^14 square meters. If we assume that the 40000 satellites are evenly distributed across this surface, then each satellite covers an area of 1.4x10^10 square meters across the surface. These areas will be close to circular, so we can calculate the radius of that circle as 67.3 km. This is a huge problem.

Why? Because that means that any time you go to a 350 km altitude, there is a satellite no more than 67 km away. That might sound like a long ways away, but the problem is orbital velocity. At a 350 km altitude, those satellites are travelling with a tangential velocity of 353 km per second. Meaning, if you sit at that altitude for one second, 5 of those satellites will pass you. And that's only the satellites. There's lots of other junk that ends up in orbit as well such as earlier stagings and fairings. Add another hundred thousand or so objects and it just gets worse. The risk of collision in this scenario is simply too dangerous. It's nothing like a motor collision, and in fact the odds of you crashing your car next time you drive are much higher than a collision in this scenario. The problem is that when things in orbit collide, they don't go away. The fragments of a single collision will be orbiting Earth forever in potentially unknown orientations and will further increase the odds of collision in the future. The end result of this is the theoretical condition known as Kessler syndrome, in which there are so many fragments from collision that it becomes impossible to send anything up.

As of yet Kessler syndrome is an object of pure speculation, but it's not something to dismiss as a scifi fantasy. It's a legitimate concern in a scenario like this. It means that any time anyone wants to put anything in space, they're rolling the dice. SpaceX say that their satellites are equipped with "collision avoidance systems" that will keep it from being an issue, but they haven't said a damn thing about what those systems are and how they work (or don't work, as the case may be).

 

[אΩ+1]

This reminds me of something.
Yes.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Yes, clearly completely altering the natural environment for the worse is a small price to pay so the Congolese can browse PornHub at 1080p.

Porn matters

 

[Pargon]

If I can still launch myself into the sun when I've finally had enough of this landfill of a planet without my escape craft crashing into something then I don't give a shit.

Also if astronomers can't tell the difference between a star and a man-made object then they're not worth the paper their degrees are printed on and should find other work.