We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionable value. In 100 years will the sky at night just be a massive grid of dots moving across the sky?<p>Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.<p>Edit: Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials. Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms (Making the case for wood satellites).
Hank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help fund orbital cleanup and internalize the externality of polluting orbital shells. It's an idea that deserves more discourse IMO.<p>Here is the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos</a>
Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it.<p>Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
One of the arguments Hank makes in the video is that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of useful LEO shells, which crowds out future competitors or users of that orbit (i.e. you can't put more satellites into the orbit without risking collisions, especially satellites that aren't part of the existing constellation), and that the natural consequence of not regulating orbital space in some way would be to lock in the first movers in an orbital shell as the only organizations that have access to that orbit.
The natural consequence then seems like the competitor might as well launch into that orbit anyway and destroy Starlink?
I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX.<p>The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.<p>We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.<p>So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
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Nobody is arguing that space isn't big. The argument is space is big but dynamic, and launching enough stuff up there means that over a sufficiently long time horizon, you will have a collision between uncontrolled objects. This is not a theoretical concern, it has already happened [1].<p>Collision risk is significantly reduced by having maneuverable spacecraft with good conjunction prediction systems in place. But fundamentally, nothing is perfect and accidents can and do happen - you set a maneuver threshold based on an expected collision probability, but it's an engineering tradeoff: "spend the fuel to maneuver out of the way of everything, no matter how remote, or accept a small collision risk?"<p>And of course, when you are launching thousands of satellites, you <i>will</i> have a few failures that will become unmaneuverable hazards. Just the way it goes, you can't realistically engineer your way to perfect reliability.<p>So sorry, I have to reject your claims that it's "utter bullshit." Space debris risk is a well studied field, so much so that satellite insurance companies are starting to fold those calculations into insurance premiums. So yeah, it's real, and it deserves more than a pithy dismissal.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision</a>
Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about.<p>Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.
Risk is theoretical, that is; a) never demostrated, b) most probably overblown c) any methods of mitigation were never even given a chance to develop.<p>All in all you people take the precautionary principle so far as to cripple your own progress in fundamental stuff like spaceflight but at the same time see no reason to apply it in social stuff like that survelliance camera affair or the net-id. And also fervently believe in modern version of snake oil that is "AI".<p>This is hypocrisy at the base level and a sign that we have a civilization crisis akin to one that of ~7th century AD.
Okay buddy, that was a Gish gallop if I've ever seen one.<p>The risk is real. The math isn't complicated, you could stand up a basic debris simulation in a few hours with numpy from first principles. And we also know it's real because it's <i>actually happened</i> multiple times now: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision</a><p>This is a real thing that satellite operators worry about <i>all the time</i>. Conjunction analysis and risk modeling leading to a go/no-go decision is something that real satellite operations centres do <i>daily</i>.<p>I don't know if an LVT is the answer, but we do need to figure out <i>some</i> way to make operators consider space sustainability efforts, especially if they are launching systems with such density that they make subsequent operation in those shells significantly riskier.
If they always got the decay correct, we wouldn't have confirmed debris impact on the ground. It would be destroyed long before it reached.<p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-fiery-display-spacex-debris-landed-washington-farm-180977494/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-fiery-displa...</a>
That satellite's orbit very clearly did decay, though. The problem in that instance is the descent wasn't controlled, but that's a different kind of failure than the one this thread is worried about (i.e. satellites lingering for many years without active collision avoidance).
Lead by example, my guy, I don’t know what side of the argument you’re even on
insightful like your crude, substanceless objection?
If you don't leave junk it won't cost you much. I really don't see this as gatekeeping.<p>> one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.<p>That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.<p>If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.
Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep radio by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap communication. I'm sure RCA and the others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it.<p>(RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)
Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.
I really don’t see how making people pay for their externalities is “gatekeeping”.<p>If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative.<p>The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.
The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities".<p>They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.<p>CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.<p>Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.<p>Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.<p>All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.<p>Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that <i>this</i> time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
> CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes<p>All the?<p>We <i>barely</i> regulate CO2 at all.<p>If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.<p>And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
> All the?<p>All the.<p>> We barely regulate CO2 at all.<p>Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.<p>> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.<p>Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!<p>> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.<p>And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.
Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time?<p>It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
> Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights.<p>This reads like a parody of libertarians.
> People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights.<p>Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.
I mean, presumably, the tax would apply per-spacecraft with a price adjustment for orbit lifetime and how busy a particular orbit is, so a small constellation of 5-10 short lived microsatellites wouldn't have a huge entry barrier.
Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government.<p>If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?
How else are the entrenched interests who control most of what happens on Earth to guarantee their continued dominance off world? And yes, it’s exactly like the creep of taxation, copyright police[1], and censorship into the Internet when they realized people were going there in part to avoid those.<p>[1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.
And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine.<p>I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself.<p>Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.
And how did the Dutch collect the toll and who received the tax benefits for it?<p>I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
You wish to take up a specific space, and with the right to use it come obligations.<p>There was no tax or toll to consider.<p>People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor.<p>My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent.<p>All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align.
One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation.<p>Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.
What happened if you didn't pay?
Ok but that's not what I asked... You're just saying "we should have some system that benefits everyone". Ok sure that sounds nice, but you compared it to a specific framework with an off-hand "we've solved this so long ago" type of comment. Surely if it's so simple and straightforward and the Dutch "already figured it out" you'd have at least some idea of a proposal or implementation details.<p>How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?
The EU is collecting CO2 taxes (indirectly by giving permits out). That's a good comparison. There're tolls in the making for imports.
How many individual people were involved in collective dike maintenance, so we know the model scales? 100 million? 200 million?
Not to mention that this bias is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thanks to all the ideologues that get elected to government by insiting that government can't work, surprise, surprise, government doesn't work.
My new startup, SPECTRE.<p>It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me.<p>Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.
The video discusses this directly.
Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years
But that's the problem. The debris disperse whatever heavy metals and compounds into the atmosphere. Removing the debris and taking it somewhere, even just landing them protected in a heat shield, could reduce those vaporizing particles, if those are going to be a problem.
Eh... no, not really. At low altitudes (<500 km), sure, but much above 600 km you are starting to look at decades for a passive deorbit depending on solar cycle and ballistic coefficient.
What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.
Not at all, it can be handled via international treaty. Frequency allocations for civilian satellites are <i>already</i> handled this way, a UN body (the ITU Radiocommunication bureau in Geneva) acts as a neutral party that handles satellite spectrum coordination between UN member states.<p>The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons.<p>Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund.<p>Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.
Also, the number of countries with practical space launch capability is very small. US / China agreement isn't trivial, but if you can get them agreeing to ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India, NZ etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)
US can enforce US satellites, no?
Provided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely<p>Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
Maybe but if so, it would mean that US spontaneously would go against one of their main strategic interests for the planet ?
Doesn't makes too much sense.<p>It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels.<p>It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US.<p>Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about.<p>Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes.<p>CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend.<p>But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence.<p>I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.
CFCs were solved because we found new chemicals that were more profitable than CFCs. Global warming may eventually be solved because renewable electricity is (already) more profitable than fossil electricity (but only when it's working, which is the major sticking point). In neither case did thinking about the bad things that would happen if we continued along a path actually stop us continuing along that path. It was always about profit.
US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.
Lots of cynical replies here unfortunately, but that proposal is similar to other ones that seek protection for various other natural commons. John Michael Greer discusses a bunch of this in <i>Wealth of Nature</i> [1], basically arguing that merely taxing "externalities" like pollution is insufficient, you need to see the true primary economies that generate the fundamental value of nature as being those that operate without human involvement at all, and also incorporate awareness of the different cycle lengths: a pollinator garden can establish in just a season or two, a forest takes decades, replenishing an aquifer takes centuries to millenia, and putting minerals and oil in the ground, millions of years.<p>Any human activity which degrades, disrupts, one of these cycles, or consumes an output from it needs to compensate the rest of us accordingly.<p>Now obviously governance is the tricky piece. The two obvious ones are to give the money back to the taxpayers or put it in a sovereign wealth fund to be invested on their behalf, since at the end of the day, the commons should be the equal entitlement of all citizens.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-of-nature" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-o...</a>
Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?
Difficult to tax something you don’t have jurisdiction over.
> orbit value tax<p>How about No?
> Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials.<p>Is this a huge concern? According to NASA [1], about 44 metric tons of meteors and meteorites enter the atmosphere daily, or about 16,000 tons annually, or about 35 million pounds. Of which 5000 tons is estimated to reach the ground. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial-dust-fall-earth-each-year" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial...</a>
LEO satellites are the size of a car and are spaced apart by the size of a state. They also all are in slowly decaying orbits and will fall out of the sky on their own accord in 10 years or less (they are designed with intentional structural weak points to break apart and burn up on entry). The concerns you have are valid and very real, and shared by the people designing these things.
In practice the lower cost of access to space had made it viable to star requiring people to at least deorbit their upper stages, something that was long a no-go, with the excuse being that the extra fuel and redundancy would eat too much into the payload mass.<p>Nowadays it is generally frowned upon if you leave upper stages in orbit or if your satellite fragment spontaneously. There are of course exceptions (like some chinese launches leaving massive core stages in orbit that ten randomly fall back a couple months later) but AFAIK the situations seems to be actually improving due to the added robustness, that was only made possible by cheaper access to space.
I asked Claude to visualize 1M proposed SpaceX satellites in the night sky: <a href="https://static.tomaskafka.com/prototypes/1m-starlinks/" rel="nofollow">https://static.tomaskafka.com/prototypes/1m-starlinks/</a>
This is on a similar scale to complaining about there being too many tennis balls on the surface of the earth.<p>Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
I feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves".<p>Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.
Except everything in orbit is also moving at those same speeds, so the relative speed difference between any two objects is orders of magnitude smaller than that. (Of course, yes, there's outlier cases where that's not as true, but those are the rare exceptions to the rule; the constellations being discussed don't fall into the outlier cases).
Well yeah, the relative velocity is what matters, but not everything is moving in perfectly circular concentric shells either. You've got many different inclinations and eccentricities (and drag profiles) within what's broadly construed as "LEO". The relative velocity of the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision involving two satellites in LEO was over 11km/s.
Low earth orbit is actually not very big. And that’s what we’re talking about here.
LEO is about 2000km to 300km - at 50m shells, that’s about 34,000 times the surface of the Earth.<p>It is very, very, very big.
There is a legitimate concern with space junk hitting useful stuff or even manned spacecraft but I think space is big and the sky won't appear bright soon. Not all satellites are that reflective and they need to reflect the sun, they don't just glow visibly.
Isn't that kinda how we got the plastic pollution problem in the ocean?<p>At first, the ocean seems immense. So much so that dumping plastic and toxic chemicals makes no difference.<p>But then we humans are great at scaling things it seems, such that at some point ocean plastic pollution became a real problem.<p>I know that space is much much bigger than our oceans, but I wouldn't underestimate the ability of mankind to scale launches to the point where debris becomes a problem.
At present, I don't believe there are industry standards / codes mandating minimization of reflectivity. My understanding is that SpaceX has engineered for this from their own internal requirements and "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback). As we anticipate a major scale-up of LEO in the future, it follows that "cost pressures" may (mal)incentivize players to skip this concern.
A major plot point in the Red Dwarf books is about Coca-Cola sending a fleet of space ships out to blow up stars so they can spell "Enjoy Coca-Cola" in the sky.<p>One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
Oh great the NIMBYs are coming for space now.
> Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time.<p>That's not clear. There's no empirical evidence of it, and the computer models we have don't have definitive results.<p>Those alarms are not really proper.
Space is big and still very hard to get to. A kilogram of payload in orbit costs several times as much as a kilogram of silver on earth, even after SpaceX's aggressive scaling of capacity. No one's going to be spending that kind of money and effort carelessly. I was more worried about SpaceX becoming monopolistic, so I'm encouraged to see this deal.<p>Don't project your worries about pollution on Earth-- which is a much bigger problem!-- onto space industry which is at a much much earlier stage. The "burning-up" thing sounds extremely speculative, like you're looking around for reasons to dislike this. Space is exciting and inspiring-- and yes, that includes commercial uses, since realistically we couldn't afford to expand science or exploration in space much otherwise!
Satellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome
Not a grid of dots, a ring! <a href="https://earthsky.org/human-world/kessler-syndrome-colliding-satellites/" rel="nofollow">https://earthsky.org/human-world/kessler-syndrome-colliding-...</a><p>It's a tragedy of the commons situation. And given how well we are able to regulate those kind of situations globally, I'm rooting for the ring.
On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes</a>
I wish clearing out all the CO2 from the atmosphere became a meaningful contributor to global GNP.
Thanks for reminding me, I started watching this and forgot about it!
You are the equivalent person talking about apartment, app store, or website junk 10-20 years ago. and so, you going to invest or complain?
for what it's worth it would take the equivalent of launching 60 trillion cars into low earth orbit to blot out the sky
Wild that we already see “Kessler syndrome is a hoax” takes. I guess that should have been expected.
Aliens made first contact this week and told us to “knock it off.”
Isn't iridium already in orbit? So there would be no need for new launches due to this aquisition.
As long as we can launch a big trash ball to knock the other trash ball away...
Seems pretty negative and pessimistic.
It's already a massive grid of moving dots. You can see it from the ground in certain dark-enough areas, but in order to see it in space you have to get outside LEO, like Artemis did. They don't have lights but they are shiny and they catch the sun, making them easily visible from certain angles, which the Artemis photos illustrated.
>Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.<p>Normal satellites can already be hacked, they provide zero to no security at all.<p>We are already full of ADs, this will be just another hobby for people into hacking. Imagine it displaying a gigantic pe** haha<p>On a serious note, as everything standards, they are already interfering with observations. Wait until we can no longer tell if it is an atificial sattelite or some massive asteroid coming from the direction of the son.<p>Humans are dooming their own existence lmao
Dark night skies will probably be one of the main selling points for the off world colonies. I can see the Bladerunner-esque ads now.
A gigantic amount of stuff from space hits the atmosphere. Most not made by humans.
<a href="https://satellitemap.space" rel="nofollow">https://satellitemap.space</a>
Junk yes, but think of the new science and industry it will enable as well. Microgravity experiments, new space stations, space tourism, new types of manufacturing in space, asteroid mining. Any technology is a double edged sword, but the benefits surely outweigh the drawbacks here.
It’s already starting to be like that. If you get far enough out into the bush away from light pollution and watch the stars for a bit, you can see the grid of satellites orbiting. It’s kind of cool but also kind of depressing.
>but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms<p>The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"?<p>I find it extremely disheartening how much anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-progress sentiment I read about lately.
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Incredible how the first instinct is just to complain about progress these days. The degrowth mindset is really taking hold.<p>There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.