Starlink is ruining law enforcement here in South America already. Drug cartels and people on illegal activities acting in Amazon rainforest are getting increasingly creative at turning their starlink devices on, then off, then on again at different points. Also, such devices switch hands rather quickly - and international borders sometimes - in order to avoid tracking.
Alien 1: "I don't get it, we've been trying to contact them for ages now. You don't think they sacrificed their chance to join the interstellar community in order to have better phone reception or something, did they?"
Alien 2: "Well maybe if you didn't keep sticking probes up their asses, they'd be more communicative!"
Starlink satellites are like vampires. If we cut off the head of the original vampire they'll all die. I suggest launching Elon musk into the sun on one of his starships
Yes it was impressive that they landed a rocket again once, but the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone. It should've been a stepping stone for better technology, but instead they're just mining money. Privately owned space engineering is a disgrace to humanity.
Space engineering used to unite even the worst opponents as with the international space station, but now those institutions are underfunded, while billionaire space-musk can shoot his loads into the atmosphere without any regard to the rest of the worlds population living inside said sphere.
starlink wouldn't have a leg to stand on (in the US, can't speak for elsewhere) if isps were held to installing/maintaining/upgrading infrastructure that was already paid for by the federal government decades ago and then the isps just didn't do the work.
If it can interfere with large aperture ground telescopes.. it would be a shame if those ground telescopes grew transmitters and started interfering back.
Isn't Starlink also too expensive because you have to replace the satellites every 5 years? As in you'd have to sell to basically everybody on earth to be profitable. And they charge 50Euros a month, almost twice as much as I currently pay, and I'm satisfied with my current provider.
Disclaimer - I have a starlink terminal. I feel that the complaints should be made to the various governments that haven't mandated modern terrestrial technologies to those of us outside metro areas.
I live 14km/9m from a town with underground fibre optic. The best I can hope for is geo-synch satellite with data caps and latency around 600ms. I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it's quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.
So, Starlink found a need and filled it. Had governments filled the need instead, the problem wouldn't exist.
Don't worry, greed ensures that Kessler Syndrome will get them in the not too distant future. Sure hope you aren't reliant on GPS or other satellite services, but at least, for a shining moment, shareholders got some value. /s
Honestly astronomy from earth is notoriously difficult, for various reasons.
there's already a lot of light pollution, due to atmospheric light dispersion, so finding a good spot for telescopes is already difficult.
there's the issue that images become blurred, again because atmosphere.
We already have telescopes in space, why no re-use them with an additional camera?
Spaceflight is unstoppable at this point. I look at the colonization of Mars like a distillation process: we remove all of the restless assholes and billionaires from Earth, and they leave us and leave us the fuck alone. That's a good thing; We should support it.
And also how does space law work? If you launched a predator satellite that starts taking these out, again, launched from international waters, is that, like, illegal? Considering they're a private company?
Starlink, isn't that the planetwide wi-fi initiative? Do they need those emissions to function? Other than the fact that it's from a corporation, it seems to me that internet connectivity across the whole planet would be more valuable to humanity as a whole than clearer views of space on one invisible part of the spectrum (which they can still watch from space if it's that important.)
Though the competition between multiple corps trying to launch satellites doesn't seem good, and it'd be nice if some FOSS initiative and/or intergovernment collaboration were to step in and make it one set of satellites free for everyone.
If we had the money, there's no legal repercussions to going up there and deorbiting the satellites right? Maybe install a defense platform to shoot down any more from spacex, oneweb or whoever else tries putting them up.
Thats the plan - and nothing will be done because there is no law, no faith, only money.
Democrats are no better. They'll argue for women's or trans rights (when convenient) but even most of their "progressive voters still worship at the altar of Money and think to limit greed in any meaningful way is inherently sinful.