 I did a calculation yesterday that made me want to scream. If you look at the *current* density of satellites in 1km altitude bins in Low Earth Orbit, and assume they are travelling at circular velocities (generally true), then Starlink satellites pass within <1km of each other EVERY 30 SECONDS. At Starlink altitudes, everything is travelling at 7 km/second, so <1 km close approaches are terrifyingly close. Every 30 seconds. WHY. 48 comments
 ...and they could have high speed internet anyway via cables, wireless ground links etc.  @FediThing @pettter @sundogplanets Not to mention 'mesh-nets' which may soon become a real thing.  @FediThing @pettter @sundogplanets not really, even in the US decades of corruption still leave huge areas of the country with no ISP available outside of dialup or sat. (prestarlink hughesnet was the major provider with their $150/m <1mbit service). There's still large areas that don't have even basic DSL yet, it's taken so long cell and sat are the norm in many areas. Step 1 if you want cables in the US is to break up verizon/at&t who were paid but never actually rolled out the infrastructure. Why do they have to be in such a dense orbit? Why do they need 42,000 of them?! They are launching more into this same super dense orbit and we're supposed to just trust that their "autonomous collision avoidance system" will be good enough to keep going at higher and higher densities? There's an opportunity for error about every 30 seconds. One small mistake and we're in Kessler Syndrome, no more LEO satellites for decades.  @sundogplanets Also just the orbital decay leading to however many of them burning up in the atmophere daily is going to completely destroy the ozone layer in a couple of years/decades. So that's nice also. "Oh don't worry, SpaceX has amazing engineers! They know what they're doing!" Well yes, they're amazing. But they definitely make giant mistakes. Like... you know... dropping hundreds of pounds of debris from a "fully demisable" spacecraft by my house. Whoopsie. SpaceX, please don't whoopsie us into Kessler Syndrome.  @sundogplanets And SpaceX is just the first to scale up to this massive a constellation. Isn't this going to be even more of a mess when (failing) satellites from different constellations tumble through each other? I wonder if with so many objects it's even possible to coordinate being operators?   @sundogplanets 0.03% of the population. While most people are going to have better options. And even those in remote areas are going to have better options... And not at a cost that is amazingly accessible, so the "revolutionary" doesn't stick. And I doubt would stay low once there's a captive audience to gouge... Oh, wait, I think I know why this thing exists.  @Rhodium103 @sundogplanets Itβs also the only part of SpaceX or really any of Muskβs companies thatβs on track to turn a profit, and theyβre probably going to fuck that up, too. At the risk of running afoul of the part of the engineer's code of ethics that says "no disparaging other engineers or the profession", and while pointing to the part about holding the safety of the public paramount in our designs, I'll just say: There's more to being an "amazing engineer" than delivering "value" for your employer's shareholders. I got asked to speak to a Very Important group of people about the many terrible environmental consequences of satellite megaconstellations (collisions, atmospheric pollution, ground casualty risks) and I was wavering because it's a really really long trip and it has to be in-person (I guess because Very Important people can't Zoom or something...) Anyway. This calculation made my decision for me. I'm going to yell at the most important people I can, hopefully it will help. (More details later)  @sundogplanets ain't there a military purpose behind such a crazy satellite density? Oof way too many replies for me to go through here, and while some are hilarious, some of them are really frustrating (yes, I know how orbits work, and I'm pretty darn good at math). Signing off for a bit to focus on some other ways to teach people about the terrifyingly bad situation in orbit.  @sundogplanets @sundogplanets I know people who work at the Starlink factory. Theyβre injured constantly. The place is a poorly run mess. The whole thing needs to be shut down. Only good news is theyβre years behind schedule on the 42,000 number and unlikely to catch up  @sundogplanets Well, the threat of an ablation cascade plus the gradual destruction of Earth's ozone layer caused by these pointless megaconstellations gives us two options: either we can push our lawmakers to regulate this crap out of existence, or we're going to issue the saltiest TOLD YOU SO when things inevitably go wrong. @Legit_Spaghetti @sundogplanets Are there any existing regulations/treaties about this? @FediThing @Legit_Spaghetti @sundogplanets  We should also note that there is no real need for this whole project. There are alternatives to provide internet access to remote communities, including (much fewer) satellites in high orbits. @loko @sundogplanets One <1km pass every 30s is for the whole globe and the whole constellation of thousands of satellites, the density at any given place is still one per several hundreds kilometers or more.  @sundogplanets I would think that one tiny asteroid or piece of space junk hitting a single satellite, could cause a GIANT mass destruction of hundreds of not thousands of others, like dominos falling! @GoatsLive Yeah, that's exactly what I'm worried about. But SpaceX is apparently not worried about this... @sundogplanets Time will tell I guess, let's just hope it doesn't cause any human fatalities!  @GoatsLive Asteroids and micrometeoroids are not the problem here - that collision risk goes linearly with the number of objects in low orbit. The collision risk between objects in low orbit goes quadratically with the number of objects, making a collisional cascade possible. As @sundogplanets has explained many many times. @michael_w_busch Thanks, but she was able to answer for herself. I'm a nuclear physicist myself, but was keeping it simple for others reading the thread.  @sundogplanets There's basically no LEO commercial market, and space X is viable only as a pork barrel for the US DoD. Not bad, but not attractive enough to get billions from VCs. So to create that market, a BS use was drawn up (a worse in every way internet connection than fibre) requiring insane numbers of launches, which musk pays to himself, to have nice growth numbers.  @sundogplanets well, greed, coupled with a lack of knowledge and teeth by regulators, if you're asking  @sundogplanets Circular orbits should probably be reserved for scientific research vehicles and vehicles transferring to higher orbits or other gravwells. Commercial vehicle spam can go into highly inclined and highly eccentric orbits. @log That definitely doesn't help, because higher e orbits will cross through the circular orbits, at higher velocities. @sundogplanets But they'll spend less time near Earth. Most of the orbit will be slower and further away.  To give some people an idea of that speed, a .50 BMG bullet travels at 978 meters/second, 7 times slower.  @sundogplanets why is that terrifying? Even worst case scenario and they all collide with each other being a LEO all that debris will just come down to earth in a few years anyway. But that happening is extremely unlikely.  There are no satellites at 1km altitude: Satellites do not orbit below 160 km because they are affected by atmospheric drag. The lowest orbiting satellite is the Japanese satellite Tsubame, orbited at an altitude of 167.4 km π€ |
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@sundogplanets Because dipshits want to have uninterrupted, high-speed, low-latency internet at all times rather than working on software that do not need that.