A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky

https://theconversation.com/a-million-new-spacex-satellites-will-destroy-the-night-sky-for-everyone-on-earth-277938

by 01-_- • 4 months ago

51 34 4 months ago

theconversation.com

clonedhuman• 4 months ago

Billionaires are eating everything.

konschubert5• 4 months ago

Orbital data centers are a dumb idea. Put a solar farm in the desert and add some batteries? That’s cheaper.

So I wouldn’t be too worried about this, the economics of this won’t pan out.

cyanydeez2• 4 months ago

Datacenters need cooling. Cooling always externalizes heat go the environment. The places you want centers are cold and water available.

Neither space or typical deaert.

konschubert5• 4 months ago

Still easier to cool in the desert than in space

lostlogin• 4 months ago

A desert isn’t necessarily hot.

cheald• 4 months ago

It's actually very easy to cool in deserts, because low humidity makes it very easy to move heat into the ambient air. You have to contend against ambient temperatures, but that's what insulation is for. The other big things you need for datacenters are reliable power and a low probability of infrastructure-disrupting natural disasters.

smackeyacky3• 4 months ago

The world seems to have become an abstract plaything for these billionaires why would they give a damn about practicality. This idiot shot a car into space for no good reason.

konschubert5• 4 months ago

He can blow his money on 1 million satellites that will all decay back into the atmosphere within a few years

d1sxeyes2• 4 months ago

Not completely 'no good reason'—they needed to test the ability to send heavy payloads, it's great marketing for SpaceX (who intend to make money by having people pay them to put things in space for them) and brand awareness for Tesla.

schiffern2• 4 months ago

With today's very high orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that the desert is cheaper.

With very low orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that space would become cheaper. Solar panels have no atmosphere/night/seasons and are always pointed at the Sun, no cover glass for hail, no 24h battery either. Radiators are 1/10th the area of PV which is very doable.

The question is, where exactly is the tipping point between those two extremes, and will Starship reach that? Opinions on this naturally bifurcate depending on one's feelings about Elon Musk.

I wouldn't be too worried because SpaceX engineers put a great deal of effort into reflection mitigation, including developing a space-rated mirror able to have an RF signal fire transparently through it.[1] The strategy is to bounce all the sunlight away from Earth, which makes satellites darker than even (hypothetically) covering a satellite in Vantablack.

[1] https://youtu.be/MNc5yCYth5E?t=1717

konschubert5• 4 months ago

I don’t want to be foolishly dismissive, but I just don’t see how launch costs could be small enough to compensate for the huge overhead of putting things into space and maintaining things in space as opposed to literally any other place on earth.

I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to tell us that this is economical to show the numbers

effed3• 4 months ago

Proposals like this has more to do with Finance (spaceX quotation / funding / shares values) than real applications. But is anyway a risky very bad idea.

hkpack• 4 months ago

One of the most profound feelings I had was being in the middle of nowhere at night and looking at the sky.

Majority of people my generation are able to experience what once was very common only few times in their lifetime due to light pollution.

It feels dreadful to realize that even that experience will be taken away forever.

Caius-Cosades• 4 months ago

Yeah, okay, you throw million satellites up there to satiate your greed and hubris. Now what? We are already past the Kessler syndrome's hypothetical tipping point when it comes to exospheric orbit saturation. Are these million satellites in exospheric orbit going to make matters better for mankind or worse?

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky

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