“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2607/

by Breadmaker • 18 days ago

190 310 18 days ago

michelb2• 18 days ago

Worrying for sure. But I doubt the current USA, along with Israel and Russia are going to be bothered about this. Everyone is launching satellites and other gear into orbit for war.

SubiculumCode4• 18 days ago

Or defense.

sylos• 18 days ago

Defense is just a polite term for war.

gordonhart2• 18 days ago

Interesting that your list omits China considering they have firm plans to launch ~41k satellites for government/commercial constellations plus ITU filings for >200k proposed satellites.

michelb2• 18 days ago

Thanks, they definitely also belong on that list.

johnnyApplePRNG• 18 days ago

They're already itching to throw space-lasers into orbit. [0]

I wish I was joking.

[0] https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900854

cog-flex• 18 days ago

The most moral lasers in the world.

tapland• 18 days ago

Ugh the part about Munich is depressing. Finding a dark clear sky spot is one of the worlds greatest joys and most awesome experiences.

zoilism• 18 days ago

For the first time in human history, the generations living now have been systematically robbed of their ancestral right to witness the night sky and its jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring magnificence.

qntmfred2• 18 days ago

you can still go outside at night and look up. get a grip.

sajithdilshan4• 17 days ago

Cry me a river

BenjiWiebe• 17 days ago

Did you know that if you stay up a bit later* than twilight, the satellites disappear?

*The later you stay up the more disappear, until the middle of the night. But they're most obvious shortly after dark.

xadhominemx2• 18 days ago

I am a science and astronomy fan, but I am sorry, in this case progress is more important. If we regret our decision, the LEOs will fall out of the sky by themselves in a few years and it will be ok.

croes11• 18 days ago

A few years is a large knowledge gap if an asteroid is on its way to us.

Not to mention that’s not how it works. We regret burning so much fossil fuel but those who make huge profits from it prevent as much change as they can.

You can bet Amazon and SpaceX will do the same no matter how the rest of us regrets it

edelbitter2• 18 days ago

Some scientific endeavors can be paused and maybe later relaunched, if funding has not dried up and temporarily-worthless machinery has not been left to rot.

But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.

Legend24404• 18 days ago

the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth

I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.

Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.

xadhominemx2• 18 days ago

Is that sort of research unavoidably impaired by a more crowded night sky? Or do we just have to spend more to collect the same quality of data from more or better terrestrial observatories?

anabab• 18 days ago

The year is 2026. Surely the orbits of all the satellites are known well enough, and optics are modelled well enough for telescopes to know which few pixels to ignore at any given moment?

ACCount37• 17 days ago

This is why we have things like NEO Surveyor planned: space-based space rock detection.

That "particularly space-enthusiastic company" is a big part of why we're in a decent place for orbital defense right now. SpaceX has a lot of launchers, and a steady enough launch cadence that they can put a payload up there really fast, if there is a reason to hurry. Before, there was a very real risk of having to wait months just to get a launcher lined up - now, that's not nearly as much of a problem.

SilverElfin2• 18 days ago

China’s constellations are going to orbits that will take hundreds of years to return to earth and could make launching much harder if there is a collision. As far as I know only SpaceX has satellites in low orbits that frequently need propulsion to push back up, and fall back within 5 years.

bpodgursky• 18 days ago

OK and we aren't going to stop China from doing it. They do what they want. So there's nothing to fuss about.

This article mentions SpaceX 7 times and China once incidentally, they want to nag SpaceX into doing things that don't matter when China's launches do matter and nobody is going to nag them into decelerating.

SiempreViernes• 17 days ago

Fun fact: SpaceX has packed some segments of LEO so densely they surpassed the local Kessler syndrome density. In other words, even if the debris deorbits by itself in LEO, you can still cram enough sats in an orbit that just a single impact leads to follow on impacts fast enough to get a runaway chain reaction.

https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

Can you define what progress is being made by creating more space junk?

sokoloff2• 17 days ago

Do you ever use GPS (for navigation or time sync)? Do you ever use Starlink? Do you make use of weather forecasts? Or fly on an airliner that uses any of those three? Watch a televised program from the other side of the planet?

expedition322• 18 days ago

What progress? Having a dozen separate satellite networks that all do the same thing?

This ain't progress it is an indictment of man's stupidity.

isthatafact3• 18 days ago

Science is progress. Putting mirrors in space in order to provide sunlight at night seems more like willful destruction than progress.

Dig1t2• 17 days ago

Connectivity for the entire globe does more for progress. Millions of people have access to the wealth of human knowledge that wouldn’t otherwise have it (Africa, rural people around the world).

Additionally, what we lose in visibility from earth we will more than gain in visibility from space telescopes, which will be funded by profits provided by LEO satellites.

Any way you slice it, it’s a massive net increase in scientific progress and quality of life for many millions of people.

rcpt• 18 days ago

Why are they bright? Do they have big lights flashing or is it reflection

0-_-02• 18 days ago

And what are they reflecting when they are in Earth's shadow?

croes11• 18 days ago

They aren’t in the Earth’s shadow at the start of the night

For the SpaceX satellite mega-constellation, he found that dozens of trails would appear in each image taken two hours into the night with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory in Chile

Not to mention the satellites of Reflect Orbital whose sole purpose is reflecting sun light into night areas

layer8• 18 days ago

There are a lot of night-time light sources on Earth to reflect.

pwg• 18 days ago

Likely because, in space, reflective items don't heat up as much from sunlight as would a dark, energy absorbing, material. Shedding heat in space is a difficult enough endeavor already without also painting your satellite black so it reflects less light (and thereby absorbs more heat).

Legend24404• 18 days ago

This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?

Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?

Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.

croes11• 18 days ago

They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way.

The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement

Legend24404• 18 days ago

No they don't. It's more of an issue for long-exposure galaxies and nebula.

And asteroids are an extremely rare threat in the first place. It's literally a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.

JumpCrisscross20• 18 days ago

They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way

Source?

dgellow• 18 days ago

How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?

How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance

m4rtink8• 18 days ago

Setting a limit on a number of satellites seems rather arbitrary and not very effective to actually achieve a specific result.

throwthrowuknow• 18 days ago

Let’s set a limit on the number of houses that can be built while we’re at it.

PowerElectronix• 18 days ago

Who sets it, then? The people that can make money out of the satellites or use their services or the people that want clean skies?

And how do you enforce it? It's not like you can just go up there an repo the satellites.

earth-tattoo2• 18 days ago

A limit that India and China are totally going to ignore?

lstodd5• 17 days ago

That's like saying "how about we set a limit on horses in 1899 to limit horse shit on streets".

Answer was: automobile.

brookst4• 17 days ago

And who decides which satellites are approved? Is there a quota per country? Per capita? If a country declines to participate, do we count their satellites?

Centralized control from a benevolent dictator sounds great as a first approximation but rarely survives diving into the details.

0-_-02• 18 days ago

If we can launch 1M satellites, how many telescopes can we launch?

croes11• 18 days ago

Who is we? Certainly not amateur astronomers who made important discoveries with their telescopes

monocasa• 18 days ago

If the cost to orbit does get low enough as is the assumption in this article, I would be shocked if we didn't start to see amateur space based telescopes.

SapporoChris2• 18 days ago

Agreed, I think the entire issue can be resolved with more telescopes in orbit.

I can understand European Southern Observatory (ESO) being concerned about becoming obsolete, but is the astronomy community as a whole concerned about the issue?

I understand there's currently around 722 observatories (some defunct, some are in orbit) based on this source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observato...

But perhaps there are others I am unaware of.

Quoted: Hainaut explains that "satellites, illuminated by the Sun, are much brighter than distant galaxies. When a satellite crosses what we observe, it makes a bright streak on our image, zapping whatever is behind it."

It sounds like this only affects visible light telescopes.

defrost2• 18 days ago

sounds like this only affects visible light telescopes.

Nope - it's also an issue with radio telescopes, and radio arrays such as SKA

The Starlink constellation is leaking radio interference in bands it pinky promised it wouldn't and the issue got worse with successive generations despite assurances it would be addressed.

Such leakage isn't, of course, limited to dawn / dusk - it's ever present and ongoing.

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

What about ground based telescopes and interferometers which enable observations with much much larger baseline?

Space-based and ground-based telescopes are complementary to each other. You can't replace one out for the other.

manoDev2• 18 days ago

Should it be possible to coordinate orbits to create permanent clear spots on the sky where observatories are? A LEO no flight zone of sorts.

stouset3• 18 days ago

It’s not just about where the observatories are. It’s where they want to point to. Good luck figuring out which part of the night sky isn’t important for astronomy.

manoDev2• 18 days ago

I understand that, but I would expect distant LEO satellites to appear close to the horizon, such that a relatively small aperture in the orbits would allow for a large cone of clear sky near the ground.

arjie• 18 days ago

These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves to these desires to hold the status quo. Anti-energy, anti-housing, anti-industry and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to live and have chosen to spend their life in leisure.

But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet[0] so that the Europeans can use one specific method of looking at the stars, I don't find that convincing. In time, as we expand, space-based observation will become fairly feasible for everyone. And the satellites we have will decay to the Earth should we fail to keep them up there.

We will build Earth orbital structures and swarms, and we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms, and we will go to the stars, and it will be better for humanity as a whole.

0: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/02/...

isatty• 18 days ago

Well, if you build too many satellites in the swarms, at some point you will lose the ability to see or go to the stars.

m4rtink8• 18 days ago

Unless you literally make Earth be indoors like in the Blame manga megastructure, any realistic satellite or debris swarm will either be in low orbit and will relatively soon burn up or in high orbit & spread over such a big area that with well planned trajectory it will not cause you any further issues.

gordonhart2• 18 days ago

In related news, earlier this year Chile cancelled plans for a gigawatt-scale solar/wind powered hydrogen production plant nearby the ESO facility in the Atacama desert after light pollution complaints from European scientists.

umpalumpaaa• 18 days ago

And swarms

snovv_crash3• 18 days ago

Maybe a fair allocation of sattelites would be proportional to the number of citizens with voting rights in the country. Maybe with some modifier about how impactful that voting can actually be (eg. citizen initiatives vs. just electing representatives from a preselected pool).

rockemsockem• 18 days ago

Starlink satellites can provide anyone with Internet.

JuniperMesos• 18 days ago

As a California resident I really don't like the idea of a legal framework that encourages more citizen initiatives. They would be used to try to prevent building more housing.

JumpCrisscross20• 18 days ago

a fair allocation

Who is doing this allocation? Who is going to tell Pyongyang, Beijing or Moscow they can’t launch anymore?

Normal_gaussian2• 18 days ago

I think that "Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet" is something you've just made up; the article you link talks about African people turning to Starlink because of local infrastructure issues, and the original article notes that the current satellite count is currently around 14k satellites. 100k is more than enough satellites to provide high-speed satellite internet globally.

The article makes mention of specific endeavours, like the night-time mirror satellites, which are particularly disruptive to astronomy, and the general risks of high numbers of satellites.

The ability to do Earth based astronomy is something that is of value to all the peoples of Earth, and is mainly funded by the western nations because of their current position as the people with more money.

JumpCrisscross20• 18 days ago

The article doesn’t consider that in a world with a million satellites in orbit, launching space-based telescopes—including into deep space—becomes an order of magnitude cheaper.

rcxdude• 18 days ago

Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.

ck22• 18 days ago

note that including dead things in orbit

(that we currently have no way to remove)

is actually 32,000 not just 14,000

what we need is the investment for "space roombas" that go around bumping things out of orbit that are dead or did not de-orbit properly

the problem is all that atmospheric burnup creates a lot of toxic pollution

* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...

toasty228• 18 days ago

But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans

When the average African live like the average American we'll be truly fucked, probably even before that. We should raise the bottom for sure but we definitely need to cure the degeneracy of the top too

Technosolutionism is a cult. We either put the caps on ourself or nature will hard cap us anyways, in a much harsher way.

tekne3• 18 days ago

I'll wear the dunce hat if I have to, but I don't want to be an animal. I am one, now, but I don't have to be one. I refuse to be limited by what is "naturally" possible -- my nature is to be a being with a mind, and so the only limit I must respect is the raw laws of physics, whatever they are.

And physics lets me get a lot further than "8 billion Americans."

piloto_ciego8• 18 days ago

As a literal leftist by any reasonable metric, the recent trend towards “I wish it was 1995” and “AI is the worst” and “tech sucks now” from people I agree with on many other points frustrates me to no end.

“You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?”

“The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!”

Like, I thought we were for piracy, and against capital colonizing the space of creative ideas? But I guess what a lot of people were fond of was feeling important.

AngryData2• 18 days ago

The problem is people don't see the near future as a Star Trek utopia, they see it going more towards a dystopian landscape with handfuls of extremely wealthy elite dictating how they can live their life.

piperswe• 18 days ago

If politics were trending left I’d agree with you, but as-is the bourgeoisie are the only ones that will get any upside from modern tech.

tsunagatta• 18 days ago

AI is not going to give us a star trek utopia, AI is an attempt by the bourgeoise to alienate the average person from the capital that has previously always come free with their human life. AI promises a feudalist future where there is no capital that isn't owned by the ruling class. Its power is not democratized, it is concentrated in the hands of those building the data centers. That is why I'm against the data centers. I feel like all leftists should be.

hack13122• 18 days ago

“if we get this right” is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.

matthewdgreen2• 18 days ago

Even Star Trek admits that there are horrible events that lie between our world and the utopia.

tadfisher2• 18 days ago

In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War.

What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.

It is not hard to see things from this perspective when a significant portion of writing is becoming obvious slop, and your liberal friends are having a hard time getting hired or landing writing deals or selling artwork. I would feel less important too; I'm already feeling this way when I review a PR with obvious LLM-generated descriptions and comments that reference the prompt.

Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art. The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.

afpx• 18 days ago

In 1990 I hoped my grandkids would be able to join starfleet. After watching most of the gains go to the worst, I just hope they can escape the borg.

ben_w16• 18 days ago

Mm. I know a (US) Green party campaigner who is a self-described communist (I forget which variety), who has yet to realise the contradiction between her love of trade unions and support of the environment when it presents itself in support of the famous UK coal miner's strikes.

jdub• 18 days ago

You reckon large language models run by this mob of billionaire boot-licking dweebs will lead to a Star Trek style utopia? Come on.

pshirshov• 18 days ago

we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms,

Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.

SidewaysView• 18 days ago

Hear, hear! Promote this man!

Shut these ridiculous baboons out of society. Take their TESCREAL libertarian nonsense with them.

happytoexplain• 18 days ago

This is unrealistic, uncharitable, and tribalistic.

kibwen• 18 days ago

These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves to these desires to hold the status quo. Anti-energy, anti-housing, anti-industry and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to live and have chosen to spend their life in leisure.

This kind of attitude has for millenia been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those without empathy or foresight tend to attach themselves to these initiatives to obliterate our shared human heritage to satisfy their own ridiculous misconception of progress. Anti-intellectual, anti-curious, anti-social and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to give a damn about what it means to live a good life and have chosen to spend their life in self-satisfied ignorance.

JBorrow• 18 days ago

Moving all of astronomy to space based observations is entirely incompatible with the way that instruments are funded, built, and deployed. It is only valid for a set of highly specific and well funded observatories that take decades to get off the ground and can never be updated, improved, or modified to search new scientific directions.

Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?

JumpCrisscross20• 18 days ago

Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?

Why is littering our landscape with cell towers and power and fiber lines inherently better than putting this stuff in space?

matthewdgreen2• 18 days ago

I didn't understand what these satellites were really like until I visited Zion National Park two weeks ago. Zion is an International Dark Sky park, and so I was really looking forward to seeing the stars. Instead we sat outside and watched dozens and dozens of fast-moving stars zip around on all sorts of trajectories. I'm not saying it ruined the experience (I'm not an astronomer, and it was kind of fun.) But it really brought home how fundamentally we've changed the sky. I also hope we're able to lay enough fiber in developing countries that this many satellites don't need to stay up there forever.

verdverm4• 18 days ago

What time were you there? My understanding is that around dawn/dusk, the angles cause reflection, but for most of the time they are not visible.

Also, what about planes? Those also cause similar light streaks. Another understanding I currently hold is that there is already a method for removing these artifacts

phainopepla2• 18 days ago

I had the same experience visit Mojave National Preserve. It was very distracting while trying to stargaze. I had to stay up late to see the night sky I remember

pfisch• 18 days ago

How can anyone see what is happening in Ukraine and not realize the future is not just 1 starlink, but also a Chinese one and a Europe at a minimum. Probably many other countries will make sure to have at least a regional one as well though.

qntmfred2• 18 days ago

for reference https://x.com/Jeremyrand101/status/1981564984154005876

I frequently hang out in my driveway in the early evenings shooting basketball and listening to podcasts. I'll see easily several dozen satellites over the course of the hour or two that I typically stay out there. and I don't even live out in the country or anything. I think mostly people are just not aware (yet?) of how rapidly the number of satellites have grown in the last couple years.

api• 18 days ago

“Anti” is a kind of super-meme that took over discourse in a lot of spheres, especially anywhere near academia, starting in the 1970s.

If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. Paul Erlich would be a close second with The Population Bomb.

Here’s a great podcast on the latter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI

This stuff sounds right because obviously you can’t have infinite growth in population or resource use on a finite planet. That means it won’t happen. The question is “how will it not happen?” The answer right now looks like “as people get wealthier they have fewer kids.” There are other possible answers like dematerialization of the economy which is also a thing.

Before the 70s this stuff would have been called far right and identified with ideologies like authoritarian eugenics and fascism. The 70s is when a lot of “volkisch” proto-fascist and crypto-fascist ideas got a lefty hippie makeover. The other big one is the idea that “natural” is inherently good.

I finally see this stuff getting some challenge from all across the political spectrum, even from the left. In previous decades you only ever saw it get challenged from the right or from what were once called libertarians.

solid_fuel• 18 days ago

These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing.

I don't think blocking the view of the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing", actually. Your attitude reminds me of the Victorians, who saw their coal-smoke filled skies as a sign of virtuous progress.

More reasonable minds prevailed, in the end, and now most people have a more balanced view - with the understanding that progress and industry must be balanced with the ecosystem we live in and depend upon for life.

tekne3• 18 days ago

Controversial opinion: at the time, it was.

To be able to live well now with much less of that may not have been possible without the sacrifices that came before.

ajam15072• 17 days ago

I don't think viewing the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing"

hombre_fatal• 18 days ago

This is a good point.

A similar thread that links your examples together is how we all want to be the last person up the ladder. The last person to move into some neighborhood or into the last apartment complex. Or into a country. The last person to have internet access. Now we want to freeze how it is. Everyone after us threatens our experience.

An American with access to good internet for decades is annoyed that their stargazing session isn't what it used to be now that the city is growing and creating more light or that other people are getting to tech up.

bluegatty• 18 days ago

Rubbish. Its 99% of the time people trying to make money and that's it.

As though Africans aren't interested in the stars, or climate change, or that they can't figure out fibre optics is borderline racist.

Europe - and soon the rest of us - are facing massive heat waves that are likely driven by climate change, it's a real problem.

That's 'actual science'.

By all means, build what you like, but you don't get to dump your externalizations on everyone else. There is no 'We' in your projects, you don't speak for us.

browningstreet• 18 days ago

The "let builders and capitalists do anything because the future will be better for it" isn't a technically considered position. It's a tautology.

reaperducer2• 18 days ago

These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing.

I am a human being. I flourish when I can see the planets and stars.

The utopia you describe sounds more like technological fetishism that benefits a select few, not the entirety of humanity.

garbagewoman3• 18 days ago

Can you expand more on your plans to give Africans more access to high speed internet?

holoduke• 18 days ago

ah and guess what. only western US / European countries are allowed to have them. The rest are called shadow fleet satellites.

ChrisArchitect• 18 days ago

Title is: One million satellites and mirrors in space pose grave threat to the night sky

SilverElfin2• 18 days ago

It’s a public space. No one should be able to just take it over for free. We aren’t being compensated for the pollution of our skies. And also, higher orbits require much longer for debris to fall back and burn up.

tiahura• 18 days ago

99.99% of the world would rather watch a train of Starlink satellites than some star they couldn't see anyway. Not to mention the satellites' other benefits.

khazhoux• 18 days ago

No, only 3.7%

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

Is this thread being astroturfed by bots from big tech? Some absolutely obtuse comments.

protortyp• 18 days ago

Of course this comes from a European organisation.

earthnail• 18 days ago

I really wanted to downvote this because I hate the constant EU bashing, but I just have to agree.

So we can’t see the stars from Munich anymore? Yes, that’s depressing, but we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we? Because all the buildings that have been build, all the streets and trains, also make it hard to see the stars.

More light is one of the things progress has always brought, and eventually we will just have to accept that we started building in the sky, too.

We should introduce a global agreement that commercial satellites must fall out of the sky within a few years to reduce debris. It should be an agreeable term since the debris hinders everyone doing business up there. Every nation is going to partially ignore it anyway, for military purposes for example. But that’s a different demand than a cap on the total number of satellites.

ShinyLeftPad3• 18 days ago

we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we

we aren't?

Bavarian Regulation on Light Pollution, Federal Nature Conservation Act, etc

Municipal lighting is regulated with light pollution in mind and allegedly you get fined over bright commercial lights at night

tick_tock_tick2• 18 days ago

Europe has given up on advancing anything and their only solutions to problems is regulations.

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

What advancement is being made exactly? SpaceX data centres to create more AI slop?

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

What exactly is the implication of saying this? This is not about over-regulation at all.

ck22• 18 days ago

too late

https://satellitemap.space

there are already several starlink competitors and even other countries planning to launch their own 1000-10,000 node networks

rho1382• 18 days ago

It upsets me that an establishment like ESO would grip on the “data centers in space” narrative given the absurd physics constraints.

fc417fc8026• 18 days ago

Should so many large institutions taking it seriously not give you pause? Cause you to consider that perhaps they're economically viable for a reason you're unaware of? Or even that you could have a misunderstanding about the physics?

patmorgan232• 18 days ago

"All the large institutions are doing it" has never resulted in disaster (see the dot com bubble and the great financial crisis).

It seems preposterous that building a data center and

launching it into space would be more practical than building a data center terrestrially. Every problem gets 10 to 100 times harder (Cooling, energy, how are you going to do maintenance on the thing, it's in space?)

The only thing that's easier is you don't have to do any local community engagement.

If a grid connection is the constraint on your project, building an islanded data center with a buttload of solar and batteries seems a lot more feasible than launching it into space. Then you have the option to build a grid connection later and monitize those resourcess.

rho1382• 13 days ago

It’s a knee jerk defense proposition that feeds the machine. No one gave a shit until iran launched drones at Amazon datacenters.

nablaxcroissant• 18 days ago

I'm not sure how exactly they are making these calculations but I just don't see it. Both Reflect and SpaceX are targeting SSO orbits where they are only reflecting for an hour or two at sunset. That isn't true of Starlink, but that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now, I don't see it getting much worse as the materials on it get refined to be less problematic.

More regulations would just have the result of cementing a monopoly for Spacex.

ben_w16• 18 days ago

All satellites in LEO only show up at close to sunset (and sunrise): When they're away from the terminator, they're either on the sun-side, and hence you can't see them for all the blue sky around them, or the night-side, in which case you can't see them because they're not lit by the sun because the Earth is in the way.

I'm still checking the maths on how bright a million satellites in a terminator-following SSO would be. I'm getting very big numbers. But then, the (vague and aspirational) suggestions I'm seeing right now for SpaceX are in the 120 kW range, which is huge, and lining up a million of those is enough for a contiguous ring just under 10 meters wide (how much under is "just under" depends both on how efficient the PV is and how high in LEO you go).

Regardless of if they're all in one orbit or spread over in multiple orbits at different shells that are all terminator-following SSO, from the ground you're getting a train of things with somewhat higher brightness than the ISS, with a fairly small apparent separation that (I tentatively think) becomes less than your eyes can resolve at at least one point in the sky (if there's say 50 shells, where those 50 get close to crossing).

mirashii• 18 days ago

that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now

A lot of astronomers disagree.

criddell• 17 days ago

And a lot of starlink customers agree.

How can this be resolved?

CodesInChaos• 18 days ago

How much CO2 does launching a million satellites produce? Is is significant compared to other sources of CO2?

verdverm4• 18 days ago

Compare it to air planes, which are already at a much more significant scale. Accounting for fuel type and combustion efficiency seems relevant.

I recall around SpaceX 100th landing, that a day of just transatlantic flights was more than everything SpaceX had done to that point

fc417fc8026• 18 days ago

Exactly, they don't matter when compared to general aviation or even just consumer shipping.

And in all cases, if you produce the fuel using renewables then the CO2 output is trivially brought near zero.

chhxdjsj• 18 days ago

Perhaps we have 100 years to spread consciousness to space before civilisation is devastated by demographic collapse or nuclear war or some horrible virus or islam.

99.9% of species that have existed on earth are already extinct. Climate change happens constantly over long periods. Our CO2 emissions will be background noise on a million year timescale.

Time to ignore the whingers and the NIMBYs and colonize the universe.

mrwaffle• 18 days ago

For a very imprecise visual, I like the site https://satellite.love

upofadown• 18 days ago

SpaceX plans to send one million more satellites into orbit, for space-based data centres, ...

I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...

Reflect Orbital, a US start-up, aims to launch a constellation of very large mirror-like satellites to provide sunlight at night, with reflected beams that span at least five kilometres on Earth's surface.

Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.

ggreer• 18 days ago

I can think of several practical uses. It would be very useful immediately after a disaster. Lighting up the night would make search & rescue much more effective. It would also allow for more solar power generation in an area, reducing pollution. Extra light at high latitudes in the winter would reduce seasonal depression.

Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.

chickensong• 18 days ago

Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?

No. Lighting up the night is an abomination. Reflect Orbital can go fuck themselves.

verzali• 18 days ago

It doesn't work out anyway. If you work out how much light these satellites can reflect it is practically nothing and certainly not economically viable. The company seems to be little more than a way to extract money from fools.

toss1• 18 days ago

>Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?

Hell NO!!

Ubiquitous on-the-ground lighting is already disrupting plant, animal, and insect life cycles.

Adding a blanketing sun reflector illuminating five-plus square kilometers at a time will obliterate critical signals to everything living there, and won't do any good for the humans.

And nevrermind the astronomy.

It is an abomination and nothing but a scheme by amoral people to separate other fools from their money.

garbagewoman3• 18 days ago

Mindblowing that people are actually ok with this

strangecasts• 18 days ago

I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...

I strongly suspect that what'll happen is SpaceX does launch satellites with onboard GPUs, so the SpaceX hypemen can go "the skeptics said it couldn't be done!" and take off before the actual, more crucial question of "does it make _financial_ sense?" is answered in the extreme negative

ben_w16• 18 days ago

Indeed. Even optimistic estimates say SpaceX have to launch about 370,000 tons to LEO before they get the costs down low enough to be worth launching them on pure financial grounds.

I suspect Musk reaches pension age before that happens.

brookst4• 17 days ago

Sure, but you think they’ll invest in a million of them?

chicken-stew• 17 days ago

I expect it to be more like servers that cache frequent content, to reduce the round trip delay.

nyankosensei• 18 days ago

There are many feasibility and safety issues associated with the Reflect Orbital plan. It doesn’t make as much sense as you might think. For instance, the satellites can only illuminate areas a relatively short time after local sunset. The Sun reflection could potentially damage an amateur astronomer’s eye if one of the satellites crosses their telescope’s field of view: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-powe...

GIFtheory• 17 days ago

SimCity 2000 solved this problem 26 years ago: just beam the power down as a tight microwave beam. Granted, things get messy when the beam accidentally sweeps across your city, but such is the cost of progress.

riazrizvi• 18 days ago

Yes okay, good luck with that. The strategic importance to nations is far too high, it just means astronomy will evolve to a thing where it's done from space. But if you want to be the region where you support these ideas and undermine your own political support for national self-interest then that's your choice. Europe is overrun by these professional class types with nice ideas that are misprioritized. It's like a land of people that behave like pets lacking practical self-sufficiency.

zer0energy• 18 days ago

I do not understand why the astronomers feel entitled to determine fair use of the sky. I feel like it's much easier and more reasonable to ask what the telescopes can do to mitigate the problem than to insist that others back off from use of the communal resource.

The great observatories are marvels of engineering - a focused effort on technical mitigations to the satellite problem would likely push the problem out for decades into the future.

Two possible paths forward: 1. inserting a shutter into the beam path while a satellite is transiting the field of view of the telescope, or 2. (somewhat worse from an SNR perspective) terminating an exposure right before it's corrupted by a transiting satellite and starting a new exposure once the satellite has passed.

I for one would much rather see effort put into advancing telescope design than blocking advances of our use of space!

ShinyLeftPad3• 18 days ago

maybe for example because thanks to them we have satellites in the first place?

I agree with this and I'm not an astronomer btw.

vova_hn22• 18 days ago

thanks to them we have satellites in the first place?

What kind of astronomy knowledge is required to launch a satellite?

next_xibalba2• 18 days ago

Fortunately, no one owns space, so we don’t have to listen to these decels.

garbagewoman3• 18 days ago

For people that like to go outside on the other hand, its a real issue

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

That's an insane take. Do you actually understand what is being argued? It's an threat to ground based telescopes in the name of more slop-generating infrastructure.

next_xibalba2• 14 days ago

I think it is dead obvious to anyone willing to be honest that the value created by more satellites absolutely dwarfs the value of ground based telescopes.

imhoguy• 18 days ago

Wait for LEO EMPs in future conflicts.

Aaron_NW• 18 days ago

I'm building a weather app, so this hits close to home.

We talk about satellites as connectivity infrastructure, but I had not considered the impact to the night sky. I wonder if there are solutions like satellites posted further away around the moon with fewer relay satellites shared around the earth?

Georgelemental• 18 days ago

We should launch more orbital telescopes.

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

Sure but it doesn't we can replace ground-based oned with space telescopes. They don't make the same class of observations

scoofy• 18 days ago

Dumb question, can we put cameras on the backs of all these satellites, so they can record outside the atmosphere all the time?

kmaitreys11• 18 days ago

The issue at hand is with the ground based telescopes. We need both ground-based and space-based telescopes because with ground based telescopes you can create arrays and interferometers enabling a much larger baseline (in layman terms this means much higher angular resolution)

utopiah2• 18 days ago

I would be curious how impactful people here think SpaceX satellite fleet is.

Satellite communication is an impressive technical feet. In some very niche cases it is the only viable way.

In the vast majority of cases though it is terrible compared to laying down cables.

What LEO does is addressing a minuscule market. Sure you know a guy, or you might even has a dish on your van, and honestly that's cool. But that is also NOT normal. The van life or having Internet connectivity while crossing the Atlantic on a boat is NOT daily life for the vast VAST majority of people. Most people do 9 to 5 from one suburb to another part of a city. Not a tiny remote town, a city. Those cities are where people actually live and work for decades now already have electricity and in most cases telephony. We can use those.

I think when we have to make decisions that affect us all we have to step back. It is not anymore about a couple of sexy examples, it is about actual impact and actual usage.

This is the opposite of appropriate technology while spoiling a common good.

rightbyte2• 18 days ago

I'd say Starlink's main selling point is spying not utility for cell phone users.

utopiah2• 18 days ago

I don't see why would anybody accept that without a significant upside.

sajithdilshan4• 18 days ago

I’m shocked, an European agency wants to regulate how many satellites should orbit earth at a given time? Is regulation the only solution EU has for everything? Have they forgotten how to think a bit more creatively? Like developing algorithms to remove clutter added by satellites in observation data or even to deploy more space telescopes. Is that too much to ask?

notrealyme1233• 18 days ago

A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch over 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.”

I have a hard time fitting your response to the posted article.

sajithdilshan4• 18 days ago

A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch over 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.” According to the study, no more than 100 000 faint satellites, below naked eye visibility, should orbit Earth, to safeguard our ability to observe the night sky with modern telescopes

Maybe you should have read the next sentence as well.

metalman• 18 days ago

1- what night sky? do you mean the one that is so bright from electric lighting that the seagulls are now flying a night shift? 2- one of the taboo subjects is solar phenominon and what happens if everything in orbit looses guidance due to a local stellar event? do we get a ring? or lots of meteors

aristofun• 18 days ago

We don’t take our cities sound and light pollution seriously.

I bet it plays important role in all the anxiety and other popular health issues rising.

partomniscient• 17 days ago

I still remember thinking as a young person (now 50+) that it was stupid leaving all these lights on at night, particularly corporate logos on buildings.

I've moved out of the city and can see most of the stars still, although my eyesight is now failing and I can't see stars I used to...

We are becoming inwardly and selfishly focused as a species and disconnected to the world the alone the rest of the solar system/universe.

effed3• 17 days ago

This is not -progress-, is speculaton, at astronomical level, as 1M sat in orbit, only a very small part of humans will benefit (shareholders, but i doubt all), all the rest not even. We really need to surf web at Gb/s speed in the mid of nowhere?

tmach32• 17 days ago

I remember Bucky Fuller writing how seeing an airplane fly overhead used to be rare.

In my own childhood, seeing a satellite fly overhead used to be rare.

Now I see one every 2 minutes.

“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

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