SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/spacex-wants-to-launch-100000-more-starlink-satellites/

by CrankyBear • 12 days ago

319 1121 12 days ago

soooo good that they'll burn up one day and this nonsense can finally end.

investors provide infinite capital to nonsense projects so that the showman can create an endless show that will attract new nonsense capital.

sorry but already in rural morocco they have 200 mbit internet for 20 bucks a month. Yes there are some 6 wheeled vehicles roaming the planet that might really benefit from these 100k satellites. but for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!

ThrowawayTestr10• 12 days ago

Starlink was funded internally by SpaceX. What investors are you talking about?

wmf6• 12 days ago

SpaceX's money came from outside investors.

formvoltron4• 12 days ago

those who buy & sell stocks & options & provide exit liquidity.

1234letshaveatw2• 12 days ago

imagine thinking you speak for the 99.9% lol

StuMarkSez• 12 days ago

"...we're good." ? It seems that you are excluding all of the actual users onboard with Starlink tech. I'm one. I had choices and Starlink was a welcome addition to the short list.

In a short time, Starlink proved to be that disruptive "invention" that changed everything. There are already millions of users. Nobody is forced to use Starlink. Yet here we are.

Whether there are investors or not, a positive cashflow and the millions of users prove that Starlink is not just valid to our society at large, but wildly so. My opinion is that it is almost as disruptive as cell phones when they became affordable.

Current number of paid subscriptions: 12 million +. So, actual users is many times that, if subscribers generally represent multiple users per account. Think "Household". And then, if one extrapolates users under institutional, municipal, state or military, the numbers are astronomically increased. Just, individuals walking around inside a Dollar General store...

formvoltron4• 12 days ago

curious where you live that starlink is the best option.

cortesoft5• 12 days ago

for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!

Well Starlink has 12 million subscribers, which is already more than 0.1% of the population, so clearly you are incorrect that 99.9% of people don't want it...

formvoltron4• 12 days ago

12 million / 8.3 billion => 0.0014 something. so.. 0.1% turns out to be correct. honestly i made the number up and accidentally nailed it

ck22• 12 days ago

no, just no

make them pre-pay a multi-trillion cleanup and cancer fund for all the toxic waste, not just the launches but pollution burning up in the atmosphere

* https://satellitemap.space/

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

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787042

usui3• 12 days ago

You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies because people are replying about the launch volume. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?

ceejayoz4• 12 days ago

How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

"Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years."

(And most of the other providers don't plan for theirs to burn up within a few years. Giant disposable LEO constellations are new.)

ck22• 12 days ago

we cannot have private trillionaires milking "privatize the profits and social the costs"

no more, it has to end immediately

they aren't just silo-ing their wealth, they are leveraging against societies, funding far-right violent politics against society

even the evil Koch-brothers have cancer wings in hospitals around the country, Musk doesn't give a dime to charity, just his own foundation which he controls to only do what he wants to manipulate

pre-pay costs to society before damaging society

sailingparrot• 12 days ago

How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

You are clearly not grasping the magnitude change in how many satellites we used to launch vs how many we are launching nowadays.

In 2026, we are putting 10x as many objects in space as we did just 8 years ago, with Starlink being the bulk of it: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-....

Starlink has 12.5k satellites in space and looking to ramp up massively, the biggest "multi-decade incumbent", oneweb, has 5% as many, about 600.

rdiddly2• 12 days ago

We want incumbent multi-decade culprits to also pay appropriately.

Alpha30317• 12 days ago

Would be nice for oil and gas companies to pay for all the emissions say, starting when they found out about it and decided to lie to the public. Maybe also bring charges against the PR firms they used since given those same PR firms worked for the tobacco industry clearly they won't stop until there are consequences.

Unrealistic, I know, but one can dream.

ThrowawayTestr10• 12 days ago

Do you have any proof that starlink satellites are worse than the tons of space debris that enter the atmosphere every day?

tzs2• 12 days ago

The satellites aren't worse. It is the rockets that are worse. On the way up they emit various things into the stratosphere, which is about the worst place you can emit stuff when it comes to affecting the atmosphere.

It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.

(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).

Noaidi3• 12 days ago

So let's add more???

ls6122• 12 days ago

The amount of matter which enters Earth's atmosphere from non-manmade sources is far higher than any conceivable amount of space junk today.

ceejayoz4• 12 days ago

But a significantly different makeup than plain old rock dust.

consumer45112• 12 days ago

When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.

While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.

ThrowawayTestr10• 12 days ago

People in rural parts of America where ISPs don't want to expand into.

adventured• 12 days ago

They seem to be expanding even across rural America. These days it's fairly common for small and medium size towns to have access to 500mbps-1gbps for $50-$90 per month, and essentially all small cities and above.

Reddit is overflowing with threads where people are getting AT&T to give them 1gbps for $30-$35 per month. Comcast has repeatedly offered me 1gbps for ~$50/m for five years locked-in. I have no practical use for it.

The US has more broadband than it knows what to do with at this point. Somebody needs to figure out a mass public use for home 1gbps+.

swingandamiss3• 12 days ago

I have fiber (I can get up to 300 Gbps at my home in the Seattle area, but I got opted for the 2Gbps) and I have Starlink as backup/failover. I previously used my mobile service for that but learned the hard way that when there's a large internet outage in the area, as it did when we had a bad storm, so does mobile service, either power loss or it can't support the influx of everyone using their phone internet. So now I have starlink as a backup. It's a very small portable unit that I can also take when camping. It's a great service. Also it's powering a lot of airlines now, it's fast and reliable to the point I can watch youtube and tiktok on my flights.

consumer45112• 12 days ago

That was my thinking as well here in EU farmland. I would use it as a backup. I really wanted to have an excuse to use the cool af Starlink tech. However, after half a decade the fiber has gone down 3 times, and I just shared my iPhone's LTE as a hotspot in 2 cases, and in the third I did yard work for 20 minutes.

MostlyStable• 12 days ago

300Gbps? Is that typo? Unless you are connecting to some very particular infrastructure on the other one, nothing you could possibly connect to could use it, and you would need gear that would be somewhat high end even for server grade.

(I know you said you didn't select that option, but just the idea that it's even offered to residential units is mind blowing).

varispeed• 12 days ago

It's good to have option in case your own government turns rogue.

ravetcofx• 12 days ago

Option being Starlink run by the rouge fascist billionaire who tries to use it to manipulate global wars?

usui3• 12 days ago

Recently I flew on a long-distance (so at least a dozen hours of flight time) low-budget airline that had 60 Mbps download/12 Mbps upload and it specifically called out SpaceX Starlink for being able to provide this for free. A video call went smoothly. There was connectivity from takeoff to landing with no interruption in between. This was the best airline experience I've had yet.

consumer45112• 12 days ago

OK, so for this, Starlink is AMAZING! In-flight Starlink is undeniable.

The first time I experienced it, I could not believe what was happening. I messaged my nerd friends with screenshots of https://speed.cloudflare.com/

Also, their required zero-friction UX is the shiznit.

Then, I fell asleep as I finally had theoretical time off.

basisword• 12 days ago

And this is exactly why we don't need internet on planes.

sixtyj• 12 days ago

I’ve read so many posts from both CEOs and programmers about their higher in-flight productivity thanks to be offline.

deaton3• 12 days ago

I flew Delta about 6 months ago and they had something similar, also for free, but they use Viasat. I think most of the big airlines were moving this way anyway to be honest, Starlink just has a good opportunity for advertising.

xutopia• 12 days ago

I have a really good friend who used Starlink for his cottage in Canada and as soon as there was broadband he switched away. Starlink was unreliable and slow compared to what he has now.

In my country today the people who use it the most are in northern cities that don't even have roads going to them.

qup• 12 days ago

I have it, I live in a very rural place.

I've had to reset the router 3 or 4 times in two years. I don't suffer outages even in thunderstorms.

It may be slow compared to fiber or something, but it's the fastest steam game downloads I've ever had personally (no big city life).

But reliability has been almost 100%

brianwawok3• 12 days ago

Unreliable usually means not a clear signal? May have needed to adjust the install.

kortilla7• 12 days ago

He probably had it pointed at trees. It was super reliable for me when I worked from a rural location in Maine for a couple of months.

m4635• 12 days ago

I wonder if that was at the beginning. They've been quietly launching so many satellites over time.

wmf6• 12 days ago

Many places have incompetent government that can't/won't build proper infrastructure. For example, the US has allocated around $50B for rural broadband and almost nothing has been built.

s1artibartfast2• 12 days ago

1 billion of that rural broadband funds was allocated to SpaceX, but the Biden administration revoked it in 2020. I wonder which has connected more rural Americans

CrankyBear• 12 days ago

There are many places, even in the US, where your only alternative is--believe it or not--dial-up modems. Others had painfully slow--1 Mbps up, 5 Mbps down--Internet.

therobots927• 12 days ago

24/7 high fidelity radar of the entire earth’s surface. Probably used by NRO’s sentient system and similar classified skynet projects

rzerowan• 12 days ago

Eeh even ther its a stretch , when people talk about Africa - they should really specify where exactly. PLaces like SouthAfrica [1] already have a robust Fiber network with accelerated buildout of FTTH. Ditto for most of Eastern Africa countries which have FTTH to most of the major cities and subururbs with accelerated buildouts ongoing. Unless its a conflict area most regions are getting wired up pretty fast to enhancce business connectivity - the speeds and bandwith for starlink make noe economic sense once a developing pop are factored in.The only major push for many countries approvals is basically strong armed and shaken down by the US admin on behalf of Musk[2].

[1]https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollo...

[2]https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-fa...

inemesitaffia35• 11 days ago

Still no 100% coverage and export promotion is part of Foreign Affairs work.

lowkey_2• 12 days ago

Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.

Having lived in Central America, imagine all the workers that are laying the internet cables going back at night and digging them up to sell. A government that, 50% of the time, won't actually build anything when given the funding, and usually can't get the funding anyways. Plus, in some parts, weather can result in internet going out and, given the government, staying out for quite a while.

It's a fair point that those in poorer places will have less money, but for instance, Mexico's Starlink pricing is pretty standard, it's like 50-100 EUR per month. They pay it anyways because they need it, and because it's the best option.

Starlink is a great decentralization for anyone living under corrupt dysfunctional governments, where they can't rely on that centralized system.

wolvoleo4• 12 days ago

Who digs up fibres to sell? It's worthless material. Copper yes but nobody lays that anymore. If it even has to be metal it's usually mostly aluminium.

arpinum• 12 days ago

Starlink is popular in rural England. Trenching fibre to farmland isn't economical and poor DSL is often the only other option.

joe_mamba• 12 days ago

Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.

Except there's rich parts like Germany or Austria where internet infra is poorly run due to monopolistic telco capture and regulations keeping infra upgrades costs high, and so have slower and more expensive internet than Starlink in some areas. Poorer nations of EU often have faster internet than the richer ones so poverty is not a reason.

So Starlink is definitely still relevant. I've seen several small/medium businesses here in Austria that have a starlink terminal as a backup.

khurs• 12 days ago

I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.

https://www.spacex.com/starshield

jampa• 12 days ago

When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.

Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.

I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.

But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.

palmotea• 12 days ago

But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.

There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.

0xffff22• 12 days ago

Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.

Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

tormeh• 12 days ago

There are areas where the bureaucratic hurdles to changing anything and the incentives for changing anything work out to nothing ever changing. I assume in 20 years most of Berlin is still going to have 50mbit/s max. I hear residents of New York have completely given up and are using 5G modems because putting up new cables just isn't practical. On the other hand, these cities do have a significant minority of flats with gigabit internet, so if you care you can pick a modern building with modern cabling. Maybe the segment who both live in old apartments and also are willing to pay for fast internet is too small to bother with.

leptons2• 12 days ago

Not just cruise ships, but practically every boat with a bed in it. People sailing on small boats all around the world have starlink now. It's kind of a game changer in a lot of ways for small boats.

roysting5• 12 days ago

As with the data centers, starlink is not actually what people think it is. There’s a military purpose underlying its public front

ghoul2• 12 days ago

India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many 'truly remote' locations.

India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.

vessenes2• 12 days ago

You’ve clearly never lived in the US! Big place, not a lot of fiber.

dfee• 12 days ago

i live a few miles west of core Palo Alto (technically, still in Palo Alto); Starlink is my only real choice for broadband, and it's great.

Sparkle-san• 12 days ago

I feel like no-earth orbit is always going to beat out low-earth orbit in the long-term. I live an area that the USDA classifies as rural and I now have multiple fiber options, including municipal. This isn't to say that Starlink doesn't have its place and I only see it becoming more niche over time and facing more competition in the LEO segment.

deaton3• 12 days ago

I live in what is probably the first place to get these things in the world, but it feels like fiber is being built at an extremely rapid pace. Just in the past couple of years it seems like Google and AT&T fiber went from being a relatively confined thing to being available everywhere in the city, and everywhere outside, and at my friend's ranch 100 miles in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere.

gwbas1c• 12 days ago

It's very popular in rural US where running wired broadband is cost prohibitive.

There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.

Freedumbs• 12 days ago

Right the areas that companies took money to roll out high speed internet to, then just kept the money and called DSL high speed or just did nothing. The government should keep giving companies money and investing in them. It's brilliant.

derektank• 12 days ago

Exactly. Central Europe is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet outside of Asia. High population density makes fiber more economical, and low population density, the inverse. As other la have pointed out, India actually has very deep fiber penetration exactly for this reason. The Americas, by contrast, are largely devoid of people which makes the economics of any networking infrastructure harder

out_of_protocol• 12 days ago

There's a lot of places without fiber, e.g. all the ships/jets etc. there's a lot of low-density areas, there's islands with no internet or VERY expensive internet

kibwen2• 12 days ago

Ships and jets are different segments from residential. Planes are definitely a textbook use case for satellite internet, but just like airlines are in a race-to-the-bottom for everything from in-flight snacks to legroom, they're not going to spring for premier high-quality internet service, they're just going to scrape by with the bare minimum. The market potential is not spectacularly impressive. Meanwhile, for residential services, rural areas continue to shrink, the people remaining in rural areas tend to be poorer, and the rural areas where rich people live have fiber, because the rich people can pay for it. Satellite internet will remain a crucial service for certain rural populations, but it's not going to take over the world, and it's not going to justify an order of magnitude more launches. Let's stop beating around the bush: the bull case for both Starlink and SpaceX is that the US military sees them as indispensible military assets, the former for global logistics, and the latter for the rapid weaponization of space.

m4635• 12 days ago

one difference is that fiber isn't mobile.

Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.

Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.

spwa42• 12 days ago

The price difference for mobile satellite service is rather substantial though.

tyjen• 12 days ago

There's many isolated communities abroad that benefit from this coverage. Plus, when I begin my solo sailing adventure, I intend to use Starlink as my primary method to maintain contact, of course with traditional methods serving as backup.

tasty_freeze• 12 days ago

The sailing-around-the-world (and similar) market is obviously miniscule. The isolated communities probably tend to be on the less affluent part of the world, so it doesn't seem to justify a 100x expansion.

bergie• 12 days ago

Starlink has worked great for us so far from Europe to Polynesia. Prices keep going up, so would be nice if the service had actual competition.

The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.

And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.

Lomlioto15• 12 days ago

This is great right? Lets pollute our sky for 8 Billion people that tyjen can send a whatsapp message to people while sailing.

Awesome!

game_the0ry• 12 days ago

Elon is probably setting sup the infra for space data centers.

mooktakim3• 12 days ago

The obvious is the cost of deploying. You don't need to dig to add cable. Full country coverage. Worldwide customers.

consumer45112• 12 days ago

I agree with that, but it's great for a greenfield project/area. Say, Mars or very high and low latitudes, or ships/airplanes.

However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizens' data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.

Meanwhile, the free speech absolutist is focused on breaking up the ~5.4% of the globe, (EU) where Starlink is legal.

dmix• 12 days ago

I have a friend who lives 1.5hrs outside Toronto and needs Starlink because ISPs don’t offer anything useful. Same with a family member with a house even closer to Toronto. These aren’t far off North Ontario rural houses and there’s tons of people living up there.

jordanb4• 12 days ago

This was always the sour economics of satellite internet.

Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.

Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.

So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.

Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.

Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.

Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.

JumpinJack_Cash6• 11 days ago

Space Bears have been saying this forever.

fragmede5• 12 days ago

But would that have happened that way if Starlink hadn't come about?

bastawhiz• 12 days ago

Same. I bought a cabin, which had the equivalent of pretty good DSL. I got starlink and immediately cancelled it when 2gbps fiber arrived 9mo later. Fiber is rolling out faster than a lot of people think.

brianwawok3• 12 days ago

Would fiber have come so fast without starlink as a threat though

steve_adams_862• 12 days ago

Here along the BC Coast, the organization I work for has an expansive sensor network. Weather stations, CTDs, custom equipment in watersheds, research facilities with all kinds of equipment to monitor, and so on. There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast. We used to use satellite internet, and getting data off of our main hubs (everything is relayed to the hubs by radio) was very slow and precarious. Since starlink it's a breeze. We will finally be able to get video feeds off of some of the stations; a totally untenable concept before.

rurp• 12 days ago

Sure, and that's great, but this is an extremely small niche case right? No one is denying that there are some cases where Starlink is amazing, but niche products don't usually command a $1T value.

consumer45112• 12 days ago

There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast.

I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)

onlypassingthru2• 12 days ago

Elon turning off Russian access to Starlink by whitelisting only authorized terminals in the region was a turning point for Ukraine's success. The conflict has proven that modern warfare depends on Starlink and its mimics.

rush86999• 12 days ago

China has a huge microwave to destroy any kind of Starlink over its head.

mighty_plant• 12 days ago

Some day before invading Taiwan China and Russia will try to take them all down: https://archive.is/AMIxX

SequoiaHope• 12 days ago

Not all of us live in places with EU funding. I worked at a rural farm in California and the EU refused to fund our network infrastructure. We had few reliable options, and Starlink turned out to be the best.

servo_sausage2• 12 days ago

Its also a pricing thing; in Australia our nationalised provider keeps getting more expensive, starlink is now getting cost-competitive.

sen• 12 days ago

Stop using Telstra then. There’s an abundance of NBN resellers who sell better packages for cheaper than Telstra. At this point Telstra is just for old people who don’t want to change the services they’ve always been with.

Baeocystin2• 12 days ago

I live in the suburbs in the bay area in California, and starlink offers a significantly better quality of service than charter spectrum cable service, which is my only other option. Considering the current state of our government, I don't see things improving anytime soon.

mullingitover2• 12 days ago

Crazy, I didn't realize starlink is in the gigabit range for bandwidth? And how are they getting past the speed of light wall on their latency?

kevinkeller• 12 days ago

I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network

In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...

See India in this 5G global coverage map: https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026

The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).

deadbabe2• 12 days ago

Automated cargo ships. Traveling to automated ports.

thatxliner• 12 days ago

Starlink is currently partnering with United Airlines for Wi-Fi coverage, so that's one thing.

oceanplexian• 12 days ago

Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs.

And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.

Recurecur4• 12 days ago

We’ll how that prediction turns out…

My informed opinion says that you are wildly wrong.

(Also don’t forget the Starlink related military contracts that SpaceX has.)

darth_avocado3• 12 days ago

The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small

People vastly overestimate the purchasing power in places like India. Most of the purchasing power is concentrated in the top 1% of the population and most of that 1% lives in urban areas with fiber connectivity. The bottom 90% don’t even make $1K/person/year. Even a $10/month subscription (1/5th of what it costs right now) would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.

stevep98• 12 days ago

Global cellular operator revenue is approx $1T. They have put their toe in the water with direct-to-cellular support for starlink, and have bought spectrum to improve this. I'm sure they basically want to offer cellular to everyone in the world and get a good chunk of that $1T. Maybe they want 20% of it? Sounds crazy, but China Mobile, Verizon, and Deutsche Telecom each have 10%. Sounds it's not so wild that they can grab a big chunk, especially if they can find new customers that are not already connected.

And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.

I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.

enaaem• 12 days ago

Additionally, India is currently banning starlink for national security reasons.

JumpinJack_Cash6• 11 days ago

Space Bears have been saying this for quite a while, we live in megalopolis which already are covered very efficiently and we are only becoming more urban. Of course their voice was drowned because rockets are essentially giant penises piercing the atmosphere and hence the intersection of nerds getting excited for the sake of technical prowness and rich guys who don't get laid who seem to be nowadays at the helm of the intelligentia didn't want to hear none of that.

On top of that add the reusability stunt streamed in 4k making them extrapolate a not well defined pivotal leap for ROI....and there you have it , it's the Apollo sinkhole all over again with money being lit on fire an essentially no quality of life ROI for society.

At least the Apollo mission got us the ability to deliver nukes to Moscow in 30 minutes or less. This will be a total sinkhole.

All the while we are held hostage by a Nation with consumption rates which are a thenth of ours and we still have the audacity to reject nuclear fission because it's "dangerous"

layla5alive• 11 days ago

Starlink is going to be panopticon surveillance satellites long term - I hope I'm wrong.

anukin• 12 days ago

India has one of the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. In fact you can get an extremely fast download atop Himalayan mountains in comparison to remote USA

givemeethekeys• 12 days ago

In much of the US, internet companies run a racket. While there are often multiple providers to choose from, if you want reliable service at good speeds, you end up with two, or if you're really lucky, three options. One of those options is Starlink.

afavour4• 12 days ago

In NYC we’re often only wired for one provider. 5G home internet was a big deal in finally opening up that competition.

xenospn• 12 days ago

You’d be surprised how poor broadband Internet coverage is outside of major metropolitan areas in the United States. Some places are simply off-grid, or have to rely on dial up. All you have to do is drive an hour out and there’s no more Internet.

kortilla7• 12 days ago

You are in a dense population. A large chunk of the world (and many people even in the US) are in low density environments where fiber rollouts are too expensive.

blooalien4• 12 days ago

where fiber rollouts are too expensive

Or in cities where fiber gets blocked by cable providers bribing corrupt local officials.

roysting5• 12 days ago

You’re not dumb. It has come up in extremely sophisticated valuations of SpaceX pre-IPO, if I recall off the top of my head, the only business that actually had any value, StarLink, assumes an irrational TAM.

DoesntMatter22• 12 days ago

I live not to far from NYC and I think it’s fantastic. Comcast was charging me 75 a month and Starlink charges me 40 for the same service which is generally excellent

anonzzzies• 12 days ago

I am also in rural EU and have 1 house that has fiber, and another, 10 minute drive away has nothing, not even cell signal and it won't get anything any time soon. Starlink is basically the only option.

Salgat2• 12 days ago

Starlink is a problem that solves itself. If enough fiber rolls out that there's no more customers, they'll scale back satellites (since they only last 3-5 years).

magicalist• 12 days ago

Not if you're a publicly traded company and that's a major part of your revenue.

sashank_1509• 12 days ago

Surely funding cell towers in Africa / India is cheaper and easier to maintain than 100k satellites in space.

wmf6• 12 days ago

It's not but it's all so tiresome to explain why. Also, those (hypothetical) towers have no ROI because they only serve poor people. Starlink covers the entire world so parts of the world can subsidize service to other parts.

slashdev• 12 days ago

It works on planes, ships, and in remote areas with no coverage. I live in Canada where the whole of Europe would fit many times over, nothing else would work in the remote areas at that scale. My parents live in Panama and use starlink to get reliable high speed internet at the beach. Even when the power goes out, their solar panels keep the internet online.

Mikhail_Edoshin• 12 days ago

This is a military tech.

afavour4• 12 days ago

I think that while Starlink is a technical innovation its primary benefit is as a political innovation: it lets you sidestep a lot of politics.

Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.

dtagames11• 12 days ago

If we can get internet from the sky, it's hard to justify digging up the earth with cables for the same thing.

I realize Space X "pollutes" space and astronomy is also important, but it's not more important than communications and information for people on earth.

m4635• 12 days ago

I think that's the idea of robust competition.

if the incumbent(s) don't invest in infrastructure (which can actually be cheap) and start losing customers at 3mb to starlink, they can justify the expenditure.

engineer_222• 12 days ago

My parents live in New York State, 8 miles from the main east-west transportation and data corridor. They still have no high speed wired internet options. No fiber, no cable, no DSL, and dialup ISP has been retired long ago. Their only option is satellite. This is in 4th most populous state in the US, and #1 highest GDP/capita. Internet across the United States does not have the penetration many think, the US is vast.

gucci-on-fleek• 12 days ago

In Europe, even rural areas tend to be fairly close to cities, whereas in North America, lots of farms are really remote. This map from NASA [0] should give you an idea of how remote some areas can be.

Now, 99% of these areas have electricity from the grid and analogue phone lines, so there's no reason why we couldn't also run fibre out to them, but for political reasons that's fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[0] https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/esd/eo/i...

kylehotchkiss• 12 days ago

India can lay some fiber. The secret is that every time a road gets repaved it gets dug up a week later so easy conduit pathway.

(Citation: lived in Gurugram for a few years where I witnessed the same 100ft of sidewalk get rebricked and torn up monthly at least 20 times)

abroadwin• 12 days ago

I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.

zitterbewegung• 12 days ago

In America for my lifetime I have never been able to get fiber and it’s because America is too large and I live in an affluent suburb.

smashed• 12 days ago

Lack of competition is the reason. Not the size of the country. Especially in a suburb.

rayiner10• 12 days ago

Fiber deployment is bottlenecked by Baumol's Cost Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. There's basically no productivity gains being made in how quickly skilled laborers can deploy fiber. Like everything else involving skilled labor, the price keeps going up.

SilverSlash• 12 days ago

One place where fiber cables cannot reach would be... way up in the air. Think about how many people fly each day and then remember how poor internet connectivity and speeds are at 40,000 ft.

So Starlink in flights seems like a perfect fit.

giancarlostoro• 12 days ago

People who live out in rural areas. Think farmers, or just people who love living out on their own lands, common enough in the US. I have a friend who lives off Starlink internet, it would cost way too much to get internet all the way to his property, not really worth it.

ssl-3• 12 days ago

I have a good friend who relies upon Starlink for connectivity for his home in southeastern Ohio (USA).

We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.

So far, Starlink is the win.

(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)

jandhdhshhh• 12 days ago

Most people hate Comcast’s and att duopoly so much that’s reason enough to get starlink. I just got it in ca and it works very well

anakaine• 12 days ago

Australian here. We generally have 1st world internet for most towns. The moment you are outside suburbia, speeds are embarrassingly slow. On my own farm, we dont even have power, or city water, and little to no mobile / cellular reception. We are like hundreds of thousands of other people with rural property here. I suspect the same is true in New Zealand, much of South America, Pacific Islands, Indian Ocean Islands, rural Canada, and often times rural USA.

quantummagic• 12 days ago

Everyone at sea, uses them now.

freakynit• 12 days ago

From India here:

With their current pricing, they can't compete with local vendors. These local vendors charge like $10/month for 100-200mbps (vendor/bundle dependent) speeds, with no data-capping. For just $5 extra, they also bundle 20+ OTT channels, including netflix and prime video (HD only).

And yes, fiber connections are everywhere here for past 5 years... and I'm from a very small town here.

olcarl755• 12 days ago

Family lives in Rio/Brazil. With the efforts from our government every year that passes, public safety becomes worse and suburban areas get more marginalized, it got to a point where the drug traffickers from my area start cutting the fibers and leaving letters on mailboxes saying that from now on, anyone who wanted internet had to get their illegal internet.

Which meant shitty speeds and if you have a problem with billing/service you cannot complain to anyone. Their service would go down for days and there is nothing you can do besides rely on shitty 4G. When Starlink became available in Brazil this was the lifesaver for my family

consumer45112• 12 days ago

That is freaking amazing. I want to be clear that reusable first stage of Falcon 9 + Starlink is the coolest tech that I have ever seen. It was just that for me, the financials didn't work out.

HWR_14• 12 days ago

So the drug traffickers that cut the fiber have no problem with your Starlink dish outside your home, and don't break it and/or threaten you? If they care, that seems like an oversight they will soon correct once enough people start using it.

jorisboris• 12 days ago

Maybe it’s about the power to control the internet (and what is does and doesn’t serve) worldwide.

yieldcrv• 12 days ago

the next generation of satellites base stations that are currently going up remove the need for base stations

you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone

but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient

lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road

week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks

I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical

speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription

bigger satellites will bring that to everyone

biztos• 12 days ago

Here in rural USA, we were paying $150 for very slow DSL, and now we're paying about $50 for quite fast Starlink.

In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.

Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.

piloto_ciego2• 12 days ago

Here in Alaska it’s literally better than the cable internet (except apparently for gaming but I don’t really game), and $10/mo cheaper for a starlink roam.

At where we are building our cabin, it’s infinitely cheaper than the alternatives lol.

me551ah• 12 days ago

I don’t know why India is mentioned here.

I live in India and have used 1Gbps Fiber since almost 10 years and pay only 40$ for it. Internet access in India is quite cheap and fiber is quite easily available

crossroadsguy2• 12 days ago

I'd agree with the last part of your comment. Because at least India doesn't depend upon Starlink for broadband access. Even in remote regions, now that it has seen first hand what modern economic and tech blockade means (after struggling for decades with older sanctions including related to nuclear tests and thank goodness it did that), it really isn't very keen on Starlink and wants home-grown alternatives (which definitely will take time) and also is now indicating to multiple players that they are welcome (but within limits and regulations).

Musk isn't pushing Starlink for "upside" for the people or your "central EU", or Africa, or India, or the moon (let's just assume for the time being), Musk is hoping to saturate the market and remain the only player or only major player, and Musk wants that perceived dependency as a weapon, as a tool of control. I won't be shocked if Musk later lobbies for "ah, too many satellites up there already.. it'd be dangerous to send more… ". In fact I am counting on that.

where they have <.1% the money

That's another part where, again, I'd agree with the last part of your comment. That country has so many people that just from one region if enough rich people (and sadly with the great divide there are way too many), if they need it, it will outspend too many countries from Europe single-handedly when it comes to Starlink or satellite Internet access.

Having said that, these things are not this black and white… but I've tried at least one part, or rather a fraction of one part I'd say.

Satellite Internet is one of the best things I'd say but I'd bet my spare kidney that not in the hands of Musk and Musk is trying hard that he/Starlink becomes the almost single player, first mover etc etc.

wyager• 12 days ago

EU funding brought fiber to my farm area

Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well

plantain• 12 days ago

Subsidies make anything possible. Your grandkids will be paying for that fibre. Starlink is revolutionary for long last-mile links that will never be economic.

consensus12• 12 days ago

I suspect what is going on is just a matter of relative density. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "central EU," but just guessing from a map I get Romania as the least population dense country that I would think of as Central Europe at 83 / km3. That is more than double the US pop density and if it were a US state only 15 out of 50 would be more dense. So then taking the least population dense region of the least dense country I get Tulcea with 23 / km3. That's 66% of the density of the US (37) which would come in at 34 / 50 if it were a US state.

So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.

So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.

dyauspitr• 12 days ago

India? It has the world’s cheapest data rates and nearly 90% of the population have 5G coverage. They don’t need this.

miyuru• 12 days ago

I am from Sri Lanka, which is a large island.

We have a smaller number of ISPs due to the cost of submarine cables, and ISP prices were high due to profit-seeking. After Starlink came, the incumbent ISPs started to offer unlimited packages for the first time.

Also, Starlink is good as a backup connection for rural areas too.

drysine2• 12 days ago

the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

Which together have four times more people than the EU. Needs of the many outweigh, you know

hiAndrewQuinn• 12 days ago

It's closer to only 10% the money to spend on such things, and that gap is closing rapidly. The poorest African countries these days still have a GDP in the low thousands per capita, and poorish central Europe trends to have low tens of thousands per capita. I could see 5 families in rural west Africa or something deciding to pool their funds to get one shared Starlink connection if they didn't have cheaper internet available some other way.

Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.

WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.

I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.

wodenokoto• 12 days ago

Outside of war, ships and planes, I agree with you, that their benefit doesn’t seem like all that.

But then again, I never thought WiFi would take over wired network cables, but now even my desktop is connected with WiFi.

I also didn’t think cellular would be a replacement for copper or fiber, but now my modem for the apartment is 5G.

Both ended up being good enough, easier and cheaper (!)

dartharva• 12 days ago

India? LOL, India has internet connectivity of scale the kind most other countries couldn't dream of. Though most of it, sadly, is IPV4 and concentrated in oligopolies (which for now are still "generous" enough to give us 5G for cheap).

rahimnathwani2• 12 days ago

How much did EU taxpayers spend to make that possible?

mrtksn2• 12 days ago

Very little, EU budget is minuscule - something like 500 euros per person per year.

petterroea4• 12 days ago

Starlink has its uses, but I really don't understand those who get starlink while living in built-up areas.

Starlink is just a re-skin of the "Wireless optic" thing a lot of ISPs are pushing because they would prefer not having to lay cables and instead have everyone use 5g routers. Of course, the service isn't comparable, but regular people don't necessarily know it. Fiberoptic is still king, and probably will be for a long time.

There's nothing comparable to direct fiberoptic cable, and anyone who says otherwise immediately outs themselves as being a sellout or having anti-consumer motives. In 100 years it may be different, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years, so...

holoduke2• 12 days ago

For war it is. Drones and other unmanned aircraft are the future of warfare. That's the whole reason why every country now heavily invests in low orbit sats. It's not about consumers. Also not for spacex. Defence contracts are zillion times more worth. Once you are in you reach the end level as a business.

inemesitaffia35• 11 days ago

Starlink has more suburban and urban users because there are lots of enclaves without service, reliable service or unlimited service.

rsynnott5• 11 days ago

I don’t see why it would be different in 100 years. The fibre might be slightly better (hollow core fibre will increase speed from 2/3c to nearly c), but, absent new physics, it’s hard to imagine anything beating _that_.

Maybe neutrino comms for long distance? :)

jofzar• 12 days ago

I have a friend who does not live that remote in Australia and his choice is either "satellite" internet or starlink.

It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.

skor• 12 days ago

seems like starlink is useful for armed conflicts

Leynos• 12 days ago

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, direct to cell feels like a good thing to me. Large swathes of Scotland don't even have sufficient mobile connection to send a text message (some people will tell you that's a good thing, but I'm not one of them).

onion2k• 12 days ago

Fibre is better if you have a static point on land like a farm. It works less well if you're in a moving vehicle or if you're at sea.

pcpuser• 12 days ago

I live in a major Indian city and 1 gig fiber up and down is $30. We've also got really good 4G/5G in most places. Also in the super remote areas WiMAX is (still) an option.

kakwa_• 12 days ago

Well, it has proven itself to be a very useful military asset in Ukraine.

The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.

And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.

If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment on land).

flanked-evergl• 12 days ago

I live in Norway. Starlink is cheaper than FTTH by a country mile. At the very least it's going to force down prices for fiber providers.

Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.

yxhuvud2• 12 days ago

I suppose one real upside is that in very regulated areas with only one operator this gives them some baseline regarding service that they actually need to beat.

mFixman• 12 days ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the EU and ISPs are funding fibre to remote locations _because_ of Starlink competition.

Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.

heyheyhouhou• 11 days ago

Starlink is a military project, but they dont say that in public.

nikvee• 11 days ago

How much did it cost to have fiber ran to your house from the road?

matwood3• 11 days ago

I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

You just said it yourself:

Then, only months later, but after years of planning:

Starlink is no replacement for fiber, but even all across the EU and the US there are many places without fiber access.

consumer45112• 5 days ago

But, are there enough? Generally, people live in high-density areas :)

Cthulhu_• 11 days ago

There's a market for it, think internet on vacation, on ships, trains, planes, and underdeveloped / remote areas (some of which skipped wired internet entirely and just have 3/4/5G).

But you're also showing a lot of bias and ignorance towards Africa and India and their financial means.

consumer45112• 3 hours ago

But you're also showing a lot of bias and ignorance towards Africa and India and their financial means.

OMG. I just finally scrolled through all of these replies, and yes! I was extremely dismissive about their financial means by at least one order of magnitude. Solid catch, and I genuinely apologize for my stupidity.

TheSkyHasEyes• 11 days ago

I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

Many in Canada have no broadband options. My gf has this because otherwise, no internet access. Even cellphone reception is spotty where she is in rural Canada.

rr8083• 11 days ago

I think in most markets the advantage SpaceX has is it isn't paying huge fees for Spectrum, the frequencies it owns were very cheap. Eg in the USA I think the providers spent nearly $100 Billion on spectrum where SpaceX can compete without that cost.

ktosobcy• 11 days ago

It's less about India and more about Usanai where urban sprawl is all the rage which makes wiring it impossible… and capitalist-driven-development doesn't help.

1234letshaveatw2• 12 days ago

Musk is nothing if not ambitious

ryandvm• 12 days ago

Eh, his promises are ambitious.

And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.

I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.

JumpCrisscross• 12 days ago

his promises are ambitious

First scalable launch system and scaled LEO constellation are more than promises.

cortesoft5• 12 days ago

And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless

You can certainly have a problem with Elon Musk, but the people who have invested money with him over the years have done quite well for themselves.

ggoo• 12 days ago

Soon enough these will start showing ads - I pray for our night sky.

prescriptivist5• 12 days ago

I spent last weekend under some of the darkest sky you'll find in the eastern US. Miles from cell service. I had a starlink portable with me and it was nice to get some service and stay in touch, but to watch the sky is to see satellites everywhere.

I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.

I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

rishikeshs• 12 days ago

Your comment was interesting.

i just read somewhere about spacex slowly destroying our dark night skies due to their satellite constellations. Thoughts?

porphyra3• 12 days ago

Starlink satellites are intentionally designed to be very dark, but they become more visible when the sun is about to come up or if there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby to reflect off of them.

prescriptivist5• 12 days ago

Yeah, I meant to point out there that there is a tension between the technology that I don't mind, but the infrastructure for it that I do mind. I don't really know what the answer is. I do know that we're probably not going to put this toothpaste back in the tube.

jazzyjackson• 12 days ago

It’s just that, while so much of the sky is static, it’s impossible to gaze at without your attention being grabbed by the moving flick of light, it takes active effort to ignore it. So it’s a totally different experience stargazing now vs 20 years ago.

panopticon• 12 days ago

I love being off-grid with just my slow inReach Mini 1. I can communicate in case of an emergency, but otherwise it's a great forcing function to not be hyper connected. I worry if I brought the portable Starlink with I'd connect much more than necessary.

Noaidi3• 12 days ago

I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.

Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].

[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/ [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock [3] https://gizmodo.com/russia-is-developing-orbiting-clouds-of-...

prescriptivist5• 12 days ago

If you wish to stop it, then stop it.

seydor2• 12 days ago

Is that because China applied to launch 200000 satellites?

askvictor2• 12 days ago

Applied to who?

seydor2• 12 days ago

the International Telecommunications Union

porphyra3• 12 days ago

One cool thing about Starlink is that it can potentially improve latency across the world. In optical fibers the light travels only two thirds as fast due to the index of refraction. But in space you can use a laser to send the data in a straight line in a vacuum.

wolvoleo4• 12 days ago

Um yeah but the transmission path is longer and the equipment and signal processing on each hop also adds latency. I really doubt it'll make much of a difference.

cortesoft5• 12 days ago

I doubt the transmission path is longer, fiber optic cables aren't laid in perfectly straight lines between all points.

downrightmike7• 11 days ago

basic math says light travels faster across the surface shorter distances than orbit.

arjie• 12 days ago

Boy it's going to be exciting when we can get Internet access literally everywhere. Excited for humanity's return to space infrastructure!

tarpitt5• 12 days ago

I feel like I already have internet access pretty much everywhere with cell towers, and even then if I went to the middle of alaska or montana I could already get sattelite internet before starlink with hugesnet which is fine as long as you're not gaming or something.

But at the same time I think the low-earth-orbit is pretty nice in terms of latentcy, it's a pretty innovative approach.

I just don't get the idea behind AI datacenter sattelites and moving all this non-comms equipment up in space.

singingtoday6• 11 days ago

Then you live in a developed country and do go off grid.

Your experience doesn't match most of the world.

croes7• 12 days ago

So SpaceX is just an overvalued internet provider?

tarpitt5• 12 days ago

Say what you will, but it's staying above cloud providers.

croes7• 12 days ago

Not for long because it needs replacement constantly.

Must be the most unsustainable way to provide internet

SubiculumCode• 12 days ago

So, at some point, will our devices connect to their corporate offices in any environment, even without providing access to your network, short of putting it inside a Faraday Cage?

0x592• 12 days ago

How could this not end poorly? I cant think of one realistic scenario where there world benefits.

NetMageSCW6• 12 days ago

You can’t imagine the number of lives saved with cellular access everywhere and Internet broadband where it has never been?

tarpitt5• 12 days ago

Probably not that many lives, maybe like a handful of hikers every year I would guess? I think what attracts hikers in the first place is the danger, and the idea that they're exploring an area that is "outside of civilization"

wpm2• 12 days ago

satcoms have been accessible for decades. I have a satellite phone. It's an iPhone 14 Pro. None of this is actually necessary.

0x592• 11 days ago

Arguing that broadband internet saves lives reminds me of the argument that Jesus saves lives and the love of Jesus must be spread around the world.

spullara• 12 days ago

I think most of this thread is missing the part where this will also work for cellphones and give you truly global coverage.

onemoresoop2• 12 days ago

Do we really need that? Most of us are fine with relays. The coverage in remote parts could be handled by way fewer sattelites. 100k is a lot of sattelites. Seems that with 100k leo we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?

nomel2• 12 days ago

we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?

I think you misunderstand the maths a bit. If the goal is high bandwidth, which requires high density, for specific, randomly distributed, parts of the earth, then, by the fundamental laws of gravity and orbits, you'll also have coverage over the rest of it, whether you like it or not.

connicpu3• 12 days ago

Just coverage is already provided by the 600-something direct to cell satellites already in orbit yes, but you need more if you want it to be useful beyond loading text-only posts or sending SMS

roysting5• 12 days ago

It also creates a private internet on which “private enterprise” does not have to abide by the Constitution or any subordinate laws.

Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet?

It’s basically the similar playbook as the cable/copper phone network giving way to the internet and wireless and … whoopsie … you also have a tracking and permanent surveillance device on you with no ability to keep thousands of corporations harvesting your body for data and information.

kortilla7• 12 days ago

It doesn’t. The network is governed by the FCC and any other regulatory agency where they place RF on the ground.

tarpitt5• 12 days ago

Do ISPs have to comply with the 1st ammendment? My understanding was that they have some sort of common carrier law but net neutrality did not hold up.

kube-system2• 12 days ago

There are already zero private companies that have to follow the constitution, since it never applied to them, ever.

As another person mentioned, radio crosses international boundaries, but it is regulated by regulating ground equipment and people and organizations on the ground. You'll see some countries on https://starlink.com/map that are greyed out because of regulatory issues... for example, some countries such as India heavily control the use of satellite comms

asdff• 12 days ago

This would allow you to throw a flock camera up literally anywhere on earth. If we are being honest, we are probably only a couple years out from real Orwellian mass surveillance states, totally censored and mined communications, and general purpose compute restricted or made illegal I wouldn't even be surprised. All the incentives lead right to that and we are halfway there in many ways already.

mlindner7• 12 days ago

Do you think Starlink is somehow extraterritorial or something? They're no more or no less a "private internet" than any other ISP. People need to get a reality check. Hacker news is becoming one of the most luddite places on the internet.

Scroll_Swe6• 10 days ago

What changes from ISPs and phone companies?

dawnerd5• 12 days ago

* only when you’re outdoors with good line of sight and only in geographic areas they allow.

probablynotai• 12 days ago

Wifi indoors, starlink outdoors

bilsbie3• 11 days ago

I’m not sure if that’s true of these use cellular frequencies.

ThrowawayTestr10• 11 days ago

That's usually how satellites work.

dopa423652• 12 days ago

Internet works on phones?

The more you know.

downrightmike7• 11 days ago

I explicitly do not want that

tim-tday2• 12 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I wonder what spacex will be worth when launching satellites is impossible for a couple hundred years.

NetMageSCW6• 12 days ago

Stop trying to make Kessler syndrome a thing - it was never a thing, it isn’t a thing, it will never be a thing.

It is just pearl clutching by those too afraid of modern life. Gravity wasn’t a documentary.

micromacrofoot2• 12 days ago

I mean it might be a thing in 100 years but we're not even close now

serf• 12 days ago

a new hot take spotted : newtonian physics isn't a thing.

let's see how well the freeways work once we stop cleaning up after the accidents.

hackeraccount• 11 days ago

Hey! I think I saw you on Ars. Or maybe someone there copied and pasted this?

bell-cot3• 11 days ago

Back in the day, "Kessler syndrome" was a fairly good way to articulate the fears of many scientists - whose delicate one-off "flagship" scientific research satellites had huge costs and lead times, if things started going wrong up there.

And overall, today's space powers are much more careful about not making messes in orbit.

zwily• 12 days ago

Kessler is much less of a problem at their altitude (480km). Debris has too much drag and would get pulled down too quick to have a sustained Kessler situation. It's possible, but very very unlikely at that altitude.

dualvariable• 12 days ago

You could still generate a mess for 5-10 years at that altitude. Even if it self-clears you still destroy the constellation and deny access to LEO for years.

Polizeiposaune3• 12 days ago

It won't be centuries.

starlink satellites are in low orbits and will deorbit in a few years at most if bricked; to stay in orbit, they use ion thrusters to counter drag from the very uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.

https://ai-solutions.com/newsroom/why-starlink-is-lowering-s...

titzer• 12 days ago

When satellites smash into each other at high velocity, they explode. Some of that debris will end up in higher orbits and linger.

mlindner7• 12 days ago

Kessler syndrome relies on two key provisions:

1. Orbiting objects never try to avoid each other.

2. They're in high enough orbits that atmospheric drag is not a significant factor such that debris can last decades or centuries.

Starlink fails both as they constantly maneuver and they're in low orbits that are constantly cleaned by the atmosphere.

And I'd add that "kessler syndrome" is actually a statistical process, not a rapid sudden cascade of satellites crashing into each other. It takes years to decades for it to actually "happen". It's not something that can be caused by military action either.

dhfbshfbu4u32• 12 days ago

They’ll need this for their orbital data centers (aka Starmind) https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind

Elon really needs to drop some cash on Iain Bank’s family, if he’s going to keep stealing ideas/names for his empire.

walrus01• 12 days ago

I've read the entire series of Culture novels and don't recall seeing "starmind" as a term anywhere. Mind, yes, but used in a somewhat different context, as the minds are both sentient conversational AI entities with equal or greater intellect to a meat-based human or alien, and also semi-godlike AI powers (a single Mind has the capacity to have a 1:1 conversation with all of the residents of an Orbital if it wants to).

dhfbshfbu4u32• 12 days ago

Ok, Walrus.

zakki• 12 days ago

Will it make our sky "cloudy" most of the time?

drnick1• 12 days ago

Last time I checked, you couldn't get a public IPv4 through Starlink, let alone a fixed one. This makes it a non-starter as a backup link for self-hosters, a use case it is well suited for.

alexnewman• 12 days ago

i have one

lewi• 12 days ago

I'm using it for this purpose. You can just run a tunnel/tailscale net/dyndns.

Salgat2• 12 days ago

You do get a public IPv6 IP, which is fine for most people (and with a simple script on a cron can keep a AAAA up to date, not that it changes often). And like someone else said, if you insist, you can use something like tailscale to punch a hole in Starlink's global NAT.

mlindner7• 11 days ago

They do supply public IPv4 but only to the more expensive plans. https://starlink.com/support/article/1192f3ef-2a17-31d9-261a...

daniel_iversen• 12 days ago

Surely it’ll be an issue some day for other space activities with all the SpaceX kit up there? I know space is very large :) but surely it’d be hard to scan, calculate and control trajectories of millions of orbiting tiny things when you’re launching rockets and things? A spacex satellite almost crashed into the Chinese space station some years ago and the Chinese had to perform an evasive manoeuvre I believe

onemoresoop2• 12 days ago

Space could become so full of junk that it may actually harm operations.

arkensaw• 12 days ago

space is very large but low earth orbit is not.

connicpu3• 12 days ago

Satellites flying at 360km (the target altitude for starlink V3) deorbit very quickly without regular burns. Dead starlink satellites are guaranteed to come down within 5 years.

drak0n1c• 12 days ago

With modern automation and AI, tracking and adjusting paths is better every year. Also, anything with malfunctioning movement will quickly descend and burn up in the atmosphere at that very low orbit.

jraby34• 12 days ago

Yes and I'll become another space industry. Cleanup. Sort of like how (coal/ocean/etc) pollution is both a problem and multi billion dollar a year industry.

kome• 12 days ago

i want to see a dark sky at night

buzzerbetrayed2• 12 days ago

If you truly gave a shit, it wouldn’t be this you’re complaining about

duskdozer• 12 days ago

How do you know what the parent complains about other than this?

chasd00• 12 days ago

Starlink is going to become a phone carrier that doesn’t have to pay for pole or tower access. This is the real story, so long att, verizon, and T-Mobile. Starlink is going to beat them on price and availability. Just think, no international calling fees or hassle and cheaper mobile rates.

gsquaredxc• 12 days ago

Starlink is going to be a cellular company, except instead of maintaining cheap metal frames, they have to physically launch the antennas to space every 5 years.

vanshg• 12 days ago

How would it work indoors?

prescriptivist5• 12 days ago

A more accurate description would be that starlink will become the trunk, and possibly the service. Local cell services will own the poles but will essentially provide access for starlink customers. It's not a bad business idea, actually. People pay $30-40 a line for starlink cell service, starlink provides the big pipes so to speak and splits the bill with the local companies that put up the last mile towers.

In rural areas you can put up isolated 5G towers that have their own dish connection to starlink, no need to string a line to the towers anymore...

mparramon5• 12 days ago

Exactly. Elon Musk does things for (1) fun (2) revenue in order to fuel his real mission: derisk humanity by conquering Mars.

diddid2• 12 days ago

I think the end game is convenience. Nobody really needs anything more than 200mb/s. If the average person can have their entire family stream their favorite Netflix show at the same time then that’s good enough. “Now lil Jimmy can watch it in the minivan too!”

tarpitt5• 12 days ago

Eh, I've got 200mb/s fiber for cheap. It's pretty good and definitely bottlenecked by crowded wifi and upstream sources moreso than the ISP. Ethernet helps somewhat.

At the same time, I do kind of want more bandwidth just so I can download massive files like model weights quickly, host a web service out of my own house, seed torrents, etc. What might cryptocurrency look like if typical residential internet speeds were measured in gb/s? Perhaps bitcoin might be capable of more than 7 tps!

But to be fair, I am a nobody.

esperent2• 12 days ago

I remember ~20 years ago upgrading my house line to get something crazy like 0.5mbs and the sales guy telling me that I didn't really need it and was wasting money upgrading from my current ~0.2mbs.

Those numbers are fudged of course, I don't remember exactly how long ago or from what to what I was upgrading. My point is that we've always been having people say you don't need faster internet. And yet, I still want, and use, faster internet. 200mbs I would consider fine. But I'd still feel the difference at 500mbs or 1gbs.

andriy_koval3• 12 days ago

what you do to fill difference between 200, 500 and 1gb?..

diddid2• 11 days ago

I doubt you are the average consumer though. Now days I think the biggest average consumer use case is streaming and game downloading, with game downloading being the biggest “I want it now!” impulse. But do you need 1gb service to download that call of duty game every year? I even think most people could get by with 50mb/s and not even know as long as the latency keeps up. If it’s fast enough to stream Bluey the masses are content.

mparramon5• 12 days ago

Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM

senderista• 12 days ago

Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?

spongebobstoes2• 12 days ago

light pollution already means the night sky is largely invisible outside of remote areas

ofjcihen• 12 days ago

“You can’t see it most places so who cares if it goes away” is my most charitable interpretation of this.

switchbak2• 12 days ago

“Remote areas” make up most of the world.

tocs3• 12 days ago

I have seen both stars and satellites from suburbs and some urban areas. They are not very remote. There is a lot to see if you look. I do not like the light pollution but as it stands it is not the end of star gazing.

vjvjvjvjghv2• 12 days ago

If you don't take long exposures, the satellites won't cause you much trouble seeing the stars. Regular light pollution is the problem.

defrost13• 12 days ago

Sucks for regular astronomy then, where long exposures are the norm.

Equally sucks for radio astronomy where the bloody things leak into spectrums they (Starlink) pinky promised to keep clean. And successive generations have worsened the problem, again despite promises to improve.

vvanpo• 12 days ago

They don't stop you from seeing the stars, but I find them very distracting. Makes the experience of looking up at the stars on a quiet night less peaceful, I find.

mplewis2• 12 days ago

Well, yeah, but my problem is with the long exposures that I'm trying to get.

BurningFrog11• 12 days ago

Satellites only reflect sunlight when in sunlight. This only happens near sunrise and sunset.

The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.

defrost13• 12 days ago

You forgot about the radio spectrum pollution which affects the night and day sky right now .. and for the foreseeable future given the lack of progress in addressing that leakage.

ericjmorey2• 12 days ago

I've been watching satellites at all hours of the night for decades. You might want to double check with reality on that sunrise/sunset claim.

jws• 12 days ago

I may have blown the math, but the last time I calculated I figured there were about 35 Starlink satellites above the horizon at my latitude. Looking into the suburban early night sky I see zero, one, or two satellites with about equal probability.

I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.

So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.

colechristensen• 12 days ago

30 yard wide solar array from 300 miles away. There's a brief period of the day where they're visible but hardly a risk of making a dent in your view of the sky especially compared to ordinary terrestrial light pollution.

clumsysmurf2• 12 days ago

I'm in a heavily light polluted city (Phoenix) and even with all the air and light pollution, can still see satellites every moment past 2AM to the east. At least this time of year.

ecommerceguy• 12 days ago

At Farpoint Observatory, this is a major concern for those keeping an eye out for near Earth objects.

qntmfred• 12 days ago

go outside right now and look up. it's still there.

missedthecue• 12 days ago

It will be the first generation with widespread space travel. My children will have consumer access to a view that no one had seen until 1961 and only government employees had seen since.

atomicthumbs6• 10 days ago

this seems slightly delusional

0-_-0• 12 days ago

You can only see satellites during twilight when they can reflect sunlight. Don't panic.

atomicthumbs6• 10 days ago

You have never gone outside somewhere it's actually dark if you think this is the case. They're extremely visible after midnight.

jillesvangurp3• 12 days ago

Many people have never seen that properly due to light pollution.

openquery• 11 days ago

Also the last generation to not frequent space. See the night sky up close.

oxqbldpxo• 12 days ago

EM is an ignorant.

khazhoux• 12 days ago

The sky gets visually and physically polluted. Some parts of the world that haven’t mastered cables get faster internet. Elon gets richer.

Win-win-win?

horns4lyfe• 12 days ago

I’m shocked by the number of people here thinking you won’t be able to see the night sky because of 100k satellites. Is this site getting dumber?

maipen• 12 days ago

The mistake was thinking the majority was smart.

There’s a lot of Elon haters here;

Anything related to Elon will always have the dumbest comment section.

You know it’s dumb when they say things like “it’s not needed. We already have this. i don’t see the point in this new tech” .

Fraterkes• 12 days ago

People are complaining about their views getting polluted, they’re not saying they literally can’t see the night sky. If you’d like hn comments to be smarter, consider starting with your own.

elteto• 11 days ago

You can’t get nuanced, well thought out takes here on anything AI and Elon related unfortunately.

It’s frustrating because I often come to HN for the smart contrarian takes. But now I have to search really hard to find the opposite.

linzhangrun• 12 days ago

Commercially speaking, does Starlink really need 100x bandwidth?

Starlink's target market is limited. It is very good for ships, remote area, but not necessary in cities where most people live.

I am not sure whether the launch and maintenance cost of another 100k satellites is necessary for such a limited market, unless the cost of launch (Starship) and the satellites themselves drops greatly.

artisinal• 12 days ago

Europe alone has millions of potential customers:

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Connectivity_and_Secure_Com...

downrightmike7• 12 days ago

But they get internet on their phones for like 15 euros a month because they have competition.

tootie• 12 days ago

On twitter yesterday, someone posted a question about SpaceX/xAI making a poor financial decision and Musk answered saying SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of the Earth. His megalomania is really running wild so I would not put much stock in this. They are asking the FCC for permission to launch 100k satellites which puts this very much in the "aspirational" category. They neither have plans nor approval to do it. This is a combination of ego and signalling to SPCX investors because it's down nearly 10% from IPO.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:57vlzz2...

throw12345678913• 11 days ago

Maybe he literally means that Space X is wort to him more than the rest of Earth.

TheAdamist• 12 days ago

He really does want to speed run everything sci fi, Kessler syndrome here we come!

palisade• 12 days ago

right panic, wrong fear

starlink are too low to cause kessler syndrome... but his starmind might

sidcool3• 12 days ago

I understand no one here likes Elon. But does it mean we find justifications for our collective bias in everything his companies do?

kaliqt• 12 days ago

Yes, it would seem so.

mparramon5• 12 days ago

I like him! :D

sidcool3• 11 days ago

I don't like him. I don't hate him either. He's not a thing in my life. But the companies are, SpaceX etc. do impact me.

Basically I would hate to see HN become Reddit.

esperent2• 12 days ago

It's an American company polluting the night sky for the entire world, for a service that will ultimately be access gated by the US government/private industry. That's where the negative sentiment is coming from. Who cares which of the many equally shitty US billionaires/oligarchs is funding it?

gordonhart• 11 days ago

Do you feel the same way about Guowang and Qianfan, two very real very large constellations notably not funded by US billionaires?

throwaway1324482• 12 days ago

Why do you put the onus on everyone else to make excuses? It sounds very entitled.

sidcool3• 11 days ago

I did not get it. But may be the onus is to not have a collective bias?

lysace• 11 days ago

Relevant news from the past week:

"A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde":

https://theins.press/en/inv/294635

Basically Russia and China are collaborating in taking down Starlink. Leaked documents showing the plans.

They don't mention social media opinion shaping, but then again the leaked documents are from 2023.

N_Lens• 12 days ago

Fiber is just getting cheaper and cheaper, more resilient, and is faster too. Plus it has no value like copper so thieves dont steal it.

I don’t think it’s wise to pollute all of low earth orbit with Musk’s satellites, that area belongs to all of us collectively.

Rohansi• 12 days ago

I think the main goal is direct to phones rather than being an alternative to fiber. But it's also a very good option for people living in rural areas with poor service (shoddy DSL).

downrightmike7• 11 days ago

population crashing will have people concentrate around cities like what is happening in Tokyo because that is where all other services will be. Rural is economic poverty.

atomicthumbs6• 10 days ago

is it cheaper to build a cellular tower or a satellite

dtagames11• 12 days ago

I just finished a long RV trip and I can tell you it's hard to underestimate the importance of internet access (which also means Wi-Fi calling and access to maps and weather) across our entire, enormous nation.

It's important not only for individuals but even more for businesses. Despite cell phone company ads with handsome celebrities in the desert, cell phones actually do not work in many places. But people do need to live and work in those places.

mplewis2• 12 days ago

we should lay fiber about it, not do this wasteful atmosphere polluting bullshit

nazcan• 12 days ago

Just a choice of polluting the ground or the air.

rebolek• 12 days ago

If your trip to desert is worth polluting whole low orbit and high atmosphere is debatable. Same goes for hypothetical business there. Maybe building towers would be a better idea in long term.

up2isomorphism• 12 days ago

This is a very wasteful way of getting communications to somewhat compensate the lack of competition in US telco market.

refurb3• 12 days ago

It has nothing to do with competition. You could have as many competitors as possible and no one is going to put a cell tower up in a remote location.

stingraycharles2• 12 days ago

Eh, I think the economics of rural areas play a role as well, and this “wasteful” way is actually very well suited for serving that long tail.

jillesvangurp3• 12 days ago

The star link network is actually remarkably cost effective in getting internet access to rural areas. There's a reason that these areas still have poor connectivity: it's just not cost effective for anyone to build land based infrastructure there.

SpaceX spend a few billions on StarLink. But if you look at how much network operators have spent over the years on cables, base stations, etc. it's not all that much for a network that offers high bandwidth access all over the planet.

Adding 100K more satellites is going to make Star Link a direct competitor to many of these operators.

askvictor2• 12 days ago

Once upon a time, people did long RV trips without internet access. Or even (cellular) phone access.

jraby34• 12 days ago

They did and it used to take a lot of planning, using paper maps, getting lost etc.

Just like once people didn't use electricity or vaccines or indoor plumbing. For all its minuses the internet makes these long trips 10x easier.

throw12345678913• 12 days ago

Once upon a time people used to walk everywhere.

dtagames11• 11 days ago

Definitely! I was doing the observing during an RV trip, but my comment was about how it impacts business even more.

ThrowawayTestr10• 11 days ago

People used to die trying to cross the country

Scroll_Swe6• 11 days ago

Yes and people lived without internet. You should be one of those.

What an argument.

Internet access is good.

You can call your relatives and check in. That has been huge. My relatives traveled the US in the 80s and could call home maybe once a week? Month? Now intl calls are free.

You don't need to check everything everyime like social media apps brainrot.

croes7• 12 days ago

Do you know what also is important?

To know when a asteroid is on its way to us.

All that satellites make discovering them more difficult.

yalok• 12 days ago

Could star link add some cameras on the back of those satellites and make the detection actually much better?

weezing2• 11 days ago

Gotta be online 24/7 or what?

dtagames11• 11 days ago

Many, many businesses do, including ones we all like such as power and water and firemen, etc. Th thrust of my comment was about business and public infrastructure as a social good.

oatmeal1• 12 days ago

If they pay an appropriate tax for light pollution affecting telescopes on earth, I'm all for it.

danny_codes2• 12 days ago

LVT works just as well in space.

baranul• 12 days ago

At what point are people going to have a conversation about all the pollution and the consequences of so many satellites burning up (metals and other toxic stuff) in the atmosphere and fragments falling wherever.

100k... how much can we keep putting up and let keep falling around the world? Multiple other companies and countries want to do the same as SpaceX.

alden5• 11 days ago

The thing that's also not grasped is because of the low earth orbit nature of these satellites they eventually succumb to drag and only have a useful lifespan of ~5 years. Using that and 100,000 satellites that means the constellation will take ~54 satellites/day to maintain, they're also quoted as being 2 tons which about the weight of a Sedan/SUV. Reframing it it's like if Comcast had to crash 54 supercars into a brick wall everyday to keep their infrastructure up and all that material also got dispersed throughout the atmosphere. SpaceX is already making/launching ~10 satellites a day and metaphorically crashing them into a brick wall, the wall is just ~5 years away.

Humans have been around for a long time but also don't live very long, but to sustain this internet infrastructure for an average person's lifespan it'd take ~16 replacement cycles. In terms of human civilization timescales this infrastructure cant/won't be sustainable for very long. Personal opinion but I think we should figure out how to run network cables to remote places better, we managed to do it with gas and electricity.

gagabity• 12 days ago

And Amazon going to add their own 100k, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about

cubefox• 12 days ago

There are also several Chinese satellite constellations which will expand more quickly once several Chinese partially reusable rockets are online.

singingtoday6• 11 days ago

I haven't been helping up with the development, are they getting close?

Competition is going to be grand!

digitaltrees39• 12 days ago

I have started to see what I think are star link satellites at night on walks with my kids. It actually makes me sad to see that on person owns the night sky and is changing the literal stars my kids will grow up with. It feels different when it’s the government that theoretically represents people but when it’s one person that feels truly depressing.

dietr1ch3• 12 days ago

You'll be sad to know there's another mf trying to put a mirror to reflect sunlight near twilight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflect_Orbital

dietr1ch3• 12 days ago

To anyone thinking that 18m² isn't that big for how large the space is, please recall how bright reflective things shine during the day when you hit the right angle.

potamic• 12 days ago

Wut? This has to be some sort of a scam. There's no way you're going to be reflecting enough light from hundreds of kilometers away.

blackhaz• 12 days ago

I think this needs to be addressed with a crowd-funded projectile. This sort of stuff must be done on a planetary-scale consensus basis only.

throw0101d• 11 days ago

You'll be sad to know there's another mf trying to put a mirror to reflect sunlight near twilight

This has been approved:

* https://ca.pcmag.com/networking/16760/fcc-approves-reflect-o...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48866452

moomoo116• 12 days ago

buddy our ancestors didn’t even have light at night nor heat/ac.

life for our kin will only be better.

we will have space stations where you can visit and see all the stars you want.

there will be space tourism and that will be pretty cool.

that’s what i wanted as a kid and its cool to see it play out irl.

edit: dang didn't expect so many negative people

nalekberov4• 12 days ago

Granted “we” are billionaires.

Not only you didn’t get the point, but you still hold on to your delusions:

life for our kin will only be better.

Right? In this subscription economy? Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved? You can’t afford to rent the house you loved let alone buy it? (previous generations could afford) the list goes on and on.

Maybe stop spreading lies and see things more objectively?

pastel87392• 12 days ago

Why is that better? Because you read about it in a sci fi book?

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

That’s not how the curve of history has always bent. There were long periods of extreme inequality where most people were serfs and a few controlled the assets. That is the norm, the recent period of opportunity.

I have no problem with billionaires. Or trillionaires. I do have a problem with monopoly because it destroys the very ecosystem that creates the increased well being you describe.

esikich2• 12 days ago

I'm in northern Wisconsin right now and the sky looks fucking amazing. Stop being so dramatic.

beachy• 12 days ago

We live in a remote area with no surrounding lights, perfect for star watching.

It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.

mlindner7• 12 days ago

If you're seeing "strings" those are recently launched satellites. Operational satellites are below visual magnitude.

matwood3• 11 days ago

This is the same logic Trump used to fight a wind farm put in off the coast of one of his golf courses.

shevy-java2• 12 days ago

Agreed - I'd consider this public pollution caused by extremely greedy billionaires ruining the planet. They could only amass money because they did not care about social responsibilities prior to do so; any contrary statement made by them to this is only lies, lies and more lies.

Unfortunately you need a government that cares for the whole; in the USA oligarchs rule, so the general public are treated as paying slaves.

shusaku• 12 days ago

Blaming this on billionaires instead of “the whole” who are customers of space-x is asinine.

inglor_cz3• 11 days ago

"I'd consider this public pollution caused by extremely greedy billionaires ruining the planet."

This is such a weird framing, as if Starlink was a frivolous project for some rich person's fun.

There is genuine demand for orbital ISP from people, including people in poorer countries whom a better connectivity may help improve their incomes and lives, where an alternative is basically impossible (you won't get optic fibre in the Himalayas or Papua or the Andes anytime soon, if ever).

20 million people are now using Starlink and that number will almost certainly grow to maybe ten times as many, eventually. Ukraine uses Starlink to defend itself from being devoured by an aggressor. Sailors and other people in far away places use Starlink to keep in touch with their families.

Did you know that before Starlink, the South Pole Base had just 2x256 kB connection for everyone?

I get the "pollution" angle, but not the "hey, one guy is ruining the planet" angle. At the very least, all the customers are complicit, and I would add all the governments that don't seem to be able to build terrestrial connections for their own population.

stevenhuang3• 11 days ago

Billionaires are not responsible for this, we the people are. Market forces and society chose this.

You are emotionally disregulated and unable to think critically.

Oarch• 12 days ago

I wonder if (this part specifically) is a solvable problem? Is it their altitude that causes them to shine? Perhaps finally a commercial use for Vantablack?

ben_w10• 12 days ago

Their brightness is a mixture of a lot of things, including the huge PV arrays and the angle they have with the sun when they cross the terminator between night and day.

Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being deployed and while de-orbiting.

(Part of my still-expanding draft blog post about space data centres is to work out how bright a million much larger objects would look. If they were in the orbit with the most sun, that's a terminator-following sun-synchronous orbit, which is maximum brightness).

teamonkey• 12 days ago

Anything up there needs to reflect as much as possible to avoid building up heat. That which it can’t reflect is absorbed and needs to be emitted as efficiently as possible. Vantablack would likely make it absorb heat readily and glow in the near-IR.

saltwatercowboy• 11 days ago

This is a bit like suggesting we slather cars in vaseline to prevent traffic jams.

Maybe we could just blast Anish Kapoor into space on a one-man prison vessel instead?

langtonsuncle• 11 days ago

Counterintuitively, the best way to make satellites less visible for ground observers is actually to make them MORE reflective. You want the reflection off the nadir side of the vehicle to be as specular (mirror-like) as possible so that the light reflected from the sun only makes it to a single point on the Earth's surface.

You can see that SpaceX (and probably other LEO operators as well) are already doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJWli7YKPw

This video is a good visual illustration of that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

It’s not the visual that bothers me. It’s the evidence of a monopoly that is being built that will dominate humanity for the benefit of literally one person

holoduke2• 12 days ago

Russia and China are coming as well. Expect all big countries have hundreds of thousands of low orbit sats. It required in order to be a powerful military nation. Without it a country is doomed.

ozim3• 11 days ago

Undersea fiber is cool until someone sends a submarine to snip it or sends „not associated ship” to drag anchor over the coordinates of fiber cable.

It is harder to break satellite constellation in a concealed way.

andrepd• 12 days ago

You're not the only one: "Beyond the limit: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787042

Razengan• 12 days ago

Why didn't governments try making it?

The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?

advael7• 12 days ago

Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of those as well). SpaceX itself is an example of the primary mechanism of this: Diverting funding to private, no-bid contracts that remove both market forces and democratic oversight from those services while also ballooning their costs

DSingularity• 12 days ago

Once you notice the pattern of how these companies are started you will see that there is a hidden hand of government behind much of what we think is an independent, market driven, capitalistic enterprise. Whether it’s Facebook or Oracle or Palantir or SpaceX it’s all the same. Heck even the founding of Silicon Valley itself can be viewed to be government driven. The bottom line is national security is not going to be left to the whims of a market when the pentagon has a black budget that can eclipse all of VC spending with the stroke of a generals pen.

bell-cot3• 11 days ago

Why didn't the government try...

As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

Maybe because republicans spent generations claiming the government can’t and shouldn’t do anything.

londons_explore2• 12 days ago

There are various satellite finder apps. I suspect you'll find starlink satellites are mostly too dim to see - with most of what's visible being other older satellites

guepe• 12 days ago

You can see them very easily at dusk. It’s dark enough but they are still in sunlight making them very clearly visible. There is always one or more easily visible (by design).

IMTDb• 12 days ago

Which government ? And based on the past few month, if your are thinking of the US governemnt; I can assure you that it is actively being harmful to me.

I have no love for SpaceX but at least I can take a subscription or invest and the stock and pretend that those satellites are beneficial to me.

There isn’t a single US government owned satellite that is not actively harmful to me at the moment.

the_gastropod• 11 days ago

You use GPS?

cramer4next• 11 days ago

Its working for me. Have you ever thought of moving to a territory where your properly represented? If your in the u.s. i think you can still walk across the Canadian border.

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 12 days ago

Change is inevitable. I love seeing artificial objects in space, because it shows that we, humanity, are finally getting there.

Elon doesn't own space, he just happens to be the one who is currently best at making it reachable. There is plenty of space for everyone else, and others will get there, eventually.

I could eat myself up with envy over the money he's making from it... or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward (while also being an asshole), rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...

sevenzero• 12 days ago

Yea but it introduces a lot of issues for space travel and other satellites. The useful space in space we have is extremely limited. A single company shouldn't be able to just clutter space at will.

jneaty• 12 days ago

I wonder what you mean by "moving humanity forward". Just technological advancements without other considerations? In my opinion it should at least require reducing human suffering, and if ao he has done more harm than good

watwut• 11 days ago

or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward

Forward back to fascism. No thanks. He already caused astonishing harm.

newaccountman22• 11 days ago

I love seeing artificial objects in space,

Kind of fucked up lol

rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...

Your moral and ethical bar is Trump?

yodsanklai• 11 days ago

I love seeing artificial objects in space, because it shows that we, humanity, are finally getting there.

The problem is that nobody asked the other 8.3 billions people what they think about seeing stuff in the sky. For the benefit of 1/1000th of humanity (~10 million starlink users).

smrtinsert2• 11 days ago

Who is envious of his trillions? I'm certainly not. I am very annoyed at someone who buys elections, literally promising a million dollars for a vote, and then running in and gutting key portions of the US government, and playing fast and loose with our data - at a bare minimum.

We will be investigating him for decades and he deserves every second of it.

rglullis5• 11 days ago

We don't need to have space literally transformed into junkyards to make progress, and there is nothing going wrong with going a lower pace if it means reduced impact on the rest of society.

xandrius• 11 days ago

Change is inevitable but not all changes are.

bmitc2• 11 days ago

Getting where, exactly?

bluegatty6• 11 days ago

No, this is not really moving forward, it's just a traffic jam and pollution in an otherwise pristine space - for money.

It's just the money.

If we were actually going to Mars, then yes, but somehow he made himself the 'First Trillionaire' - without even so much as getting out of Earth's orbit.

This is NFT progress, in that, there is some plausible economic value in NFTs, but in reality, it's just a hustle.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

I didn’t say I am against change. I said I am against one man owning a monopoly on a common good.

If technological progress requires monopolies and the road toward serfdom is that really a path we want?

PowerElectronix2• 12 days ago

Think that the sky is one nuke away from being 100% clean at any given time.

ornornor• 11 days ago

How?

thegreatpeter2• 11 days ago

One person?

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

Look at elons comp package and voting share and tell me he isn’t the singular person driving the process and capturing the gains.

franciscop2• 11 days ago

I feel that way about street advertising, beautiful European cities with historical buildings all around and suddenly a big screen/panel asking you to buy whatever.

derrasterpunkt2• 11 days ago

That is an interesting take. Now I probably can‘t unsee it.

LtWorf2• 11 days ago

I had read that some municipalities in switzerland were banning them.

Me, I just do what I can and at least trash the ones covering the windows on public transport here.

goodcanadian• 11 days ago

I lived for a few years in Hawaii, where they have banned most outdoor advertising. Having seen the difference, I strongly support such initiatives.

agys• 11 days ago

São Paulo: Cidade Limpa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Scroll_Swe6• 11 days ago

Where in Europe have you seen this?

Don't want to doxx myself but no outdoor ads on the main street here.

Maybe Stockholm has some.

k12sosse3• 11 days ago

A slingshot is a worthy investment for opponents of outdoor video advertising

ecocentrik• 11 days ago

The first time I saw a giant floating tv billboard at the beach was the first time I felt the urge to sink a vessel. I found it offensive but everyone else seemed to just accept it as normal.

bilsbie3• 11 days ago

It’s adorable you think the government represents the people.

tonyhart7• 11 days ago

it is represent people, but its not which people think actually is

int3trap• 11 days ago

Comments like this always make me lol. It's a pointless comment. Do something about it if you think the government doesn't represent you. Or shut the fuck up.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

There is a lot to criticize about governments. And there are many bad ones. But structurally a corporation has no obligation to represent society, government does.

alansaber• 11 days ago

Oh I agree it's an aberration but it seems unavoidable

prasadjoglekar• 11 days ago

Also, get off my lawn.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

No. It’s more don’t buy all the lawns in the entire country and then dye the grass purple and then rent it back to me at 50% of my wages. Thats what happens in a monopoly.

fragmede5• 11 days ago

It's not one person though. If zero people were using Starlink, then it would be that one person's vanity up there, but since it seems people do find it useful, those satellite lines represent humans being able to connect with modern technology out in the Sahara or in the ocean. For sailors to keep in touch with loved ones and to have a less dreary existence on long ocean voyages. And not to fret, China's managed to land a reusable rocket, so soon they'll have their own constellation up there so it's not just that one particular person making a mess of things.

What we're seeing is humanity managing to become a space faring civilization. I look up and yearn to be up there as well. I'll never make it to space, but it would give me such joy if my children's children had the opportunity to.

koe1233• 11 days ago

It is one person who controls it, at his discretion who gets to share in the utility. What your saying can also be true without such an ownership model, right?

benjiro29• 11 days ago

those satellite lines represent humans being able to connect with modern technology out in the Sahara or in the ocean

Or basic locations in Europe, that can be as close to 20km from a big city. There are a ton of spots where you have at best spotty 4G coverage or no coverage at all.

Used to live where we had 1Mbit ADSL, and no cell ... Trust me, you feel the limitations of that. Keeping your PC running 24/7 to download/buffer, so you can use your day traffic for more important stuff.

Starlink is a insane deal in my eyes. Sure, it uses a lot of power but your paying the same as typical vDSL in Germany. And ironically, ... Starlink is faster then the fixed lines we have here in the "3th" biggest city in Germany.

People really underestimate how much underinvestment there has been in Internet connectivity even in rich countries.

sfn42• 11 days ago

We're not space faring. We just put up satellites. There's nothing for us outside of the earth. It would take months of travel just to get to the useless barren wasteland that is Mars.

Maybe some day we'll be mining asteroids near Earth or something. Maybe we'll mine the moon. Going to/living on different planets is pretty much science fiction though. It's hard enough to live on the earth, it's gonna be 1000 times harder to live anywhere else.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

What percentage of spaceX stock does humanity own? What about Elon?

Can the government shut off your access to GPS? No. Can spaceX shut off your access to their network? Yes.

Do you have rights to judicial review if government harms you? Yes. If spaceX does? Probably not because their terms of service create a contract not a legal right.

freedomben• 11 days ago

This strikes me as NIMBYism at a global scale. At least you've got yours right!

rr8083• 11 days ago

Its more the other way around. Its mostly used by the wealthiest few percent, the majority of the world has to pay for the damage it causes.

gus_massa• 11 days ago

It's hard to find hard numbers, but IIUC even ignoring Elon's Space Program:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/gx04-who-owns-the-most-s...

* Most satellites were private owned, for communications or resource.

* Most government owned satellites have military use, the people that is trying to spy or nuke you or your neighbor.

* A small part is used for science and altruistic activities.

delecti2• 11 days ago

More than 2/3 of all active satellites are part of the SpaceX/Starlink constellation, and it's a full 3/4 of those in LEO, which are the biggest contributor to the glints we can see in the night sky.

They're such an enormous part of the problem that it does a disservice to the problem to not metaphorically shine a spotlight on them.

I had trouble finding another source that summed up the data so nicely, but other sources did corroborate these figures: https://satfleetlive.com/blogs/how-many-satellites-in-orbit/

rayiner10• 11 days ago

It feels different when it’s the government that theoretically represents people but when it’s one person that feels truly depressing.

I worked on technology for years that the FCC effectively killed for stupid reasons. So it’s heartening to me that someone can still just do stuff and build things. It’s amazing. If you asked me 10 years ago I would have thought that getting something like Starlink off the ground would’ve been impossible due to red tape.

AlecSchueler4• 11 days ago

People can still "do stuff and build things" while having consideration for environmental impacts.

smrtinsert2• 11 days ago

What are the "stupid reasons"? Are they "regulations"?

gclawes• 11 days ago

Some people want to live in Star Trek, but don't want to look up and see McKinley Station in the sky...

rglullis5• 11 days ago

It is not because can do something that they should.

sucrosesucrose2• 11 days ago

Have you considered other people, the majority?

DemocracyFTW23• 11 days ago

except it's not so much about do stuff and build things, it's about literally raping the planet, extorting and exploiting everyone including retirement savings, and also to "move fast and break things" which we know understand better was really meant to mean "remove accountability for the richest people", a.k.a. remove public oversight. Taxes for the poor, and the money goes to multi-billion dollar corps. Vaccines? Red tape! Safety belts? Red tape! Environmental concerns? Red tape!

And by the way this guy is responsible for the death of multiple hundred thousands deaths according to estimates. Because he championed removal of Red tape and shutdown of that allegedly "criminal organization" (his words), USAID. Tell that your children.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

You might have thought they were stupid reasons but protecting a public good is a very important and challenging task. Unlike the FCC, spaceX isn’t accountable to democratic forces and can do antisocial things with the shared resource and there will be little we can do about it.

specialist• 10 days ago

I'm sorry for your loss.

Too late for your endeavor, FCC is now a pay to play racket.

Perhaps you should try again?

largbae2• 11 days ago

If you believe the hype, just wait until 2029 when it's not a person at all!

inemesitaffia35• 11 days ago

You can't launch or transmit without the government's permission.

Come off this nonsense.

The alternative is some company charging the government for the same exact thing.

poszlem• 11 days ago

You can say what you want about Musk (I personally think that he is an appaling human being), but Starlink represents everybody who pays for starlink to get access to the internet, not just Elon.

digitaltrees39• 9 days ago

Yes. But by allowing a monopoly to exist each of those customers has the risk of being forced off the service by a terms of service change, price gouging, or other predictable monopolistic behavior with no alternative. And this is avoidable by ensuring a competitive market or regulated utility.

BurningFrog11• 11 days ago

"I saw something I didn't like, so I assumed it was the fault of a billionaire I don't like" didn't use to be the top voted comment on HN.

Starlink satellites have low orbits and only reflect sunlight around sunrise and sunset.

RadiozRadioz• 11 days ago

Very untrue. Go somewhere with low light pollution and you'll see them in the dead of night. I was out in rural Australia and used a satellite tracker app to confirm what I was seeing - they are very distinctive and definitely visible.

They are not overwhelming, mind you, but I did notice them immediately. They stood out enough that I wondered what they were and started researching, that alone says something about the prevalence.

Edit: An LLM tells me that this is partly unique to how far South Australia is and the positioning of the sun in Australia's Summer. But I lack the physics knowledge to confirm that.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

What percentage of satellites are launched and controlled by spaceX? When is a market considered a monopoly? When does a monopoly cause harm. Those are the questions you should be asking because if you want to participate in the innovation process there has to be a market where you can participate and not be squashed by a monopoly.

ThrowawayTestr10• 11 days ago

what I think

Did you actually check with a satellite tracker, maybe show your kids and inspire them with what humanity can accomplish?

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

You are missing the point. It’s not that I don’t find technological progress inspiring, it’s that it is an emerging monopoly that will capture a common good with no accountability and permanently deprive people of a precious opportunity.

newsoftheday• 11 days ago

I'm the opposite, I feel more depressed when the government controls our lives instead of hard working people who've proven themselves in the marketplace.

estearum6• 11 days ago

You know the point of democracy is that the government is also run by people who've proven themselves in a marketplace, right? It's just one where having more money doesn't entitle you to vastly more power, which is, you know... one well-established failure mode even of private marketplaces...

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

The marketplace is distributed. A monopoly is not. You’re confusing the two and ignoring the harm the winner of market competition does when they escape competition.

You’re also ignoring that a government is accountable to people. A corporation is not.

burnt-resistor• 11 days ago

They'll also find a way to use LEO as a sky-based advertising platform.

throwaway87543• 11 days ago

China's Falcon 9 clone (long march 10b) is ready to go. Will you feel better when most of those sky dots are Chinese?

Scroll_Swe6• 11 days ago

If a different person made them you would say "wow so cool I can see sattelies" now you are soyposting about muh kids. Grow up.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

Take the trolling elsewhere. I don’t like monopoly. I don’t like monarchy. They lead to human suffering and stifling of innovation. Your playground insults about soy anything are unbecoming of HN.

amunozo• 11 days ago

Even if it's a government, you pollute the whole sky instead of one country's. This should be done only as a joint world effort, something that is not going to happen. It is very sad.

haakon• 11 days ago

It actually makes me sad to see that on person owns the night sky

SpaceX has many owners, especially post-IPO. You, too, can buy the sky and sell the sky.

7e• 11 days ago

Ownership means nothing without control.

csb6• 11 days ago

Laughable to imply that an individual retail investor will have any say or influence on a corporation as large as SpaceX in which Musk has a controlling stake.

randyrand• 11 days ago

Elon owns 80% of voting shares, and 42% overall.

sam1r2• 11 days ago

> SpaceX has many owners, especially post-IPO. You, too, can buy the sky and sell the sky.

Perfect, how can this not be a win win for anyone not involved?

An opportunity for everyone to become wealthy and scale our riches together.

Without Elon, how would so many of us .. “ever have made it”?

petilon2• 11 days ago

SpaceX has many investors, not owners. If you don't have any say in how the company is run you're not an owner.

SpaceX utilizes a dual-class share structure where CEO Elon Musk retains between 82.4% and 85% of the total voting power, despite only owning roughly 42% of the company's actual equity.

bmitc2• 11 days ago

I feel the exact same way after I saw a Starlink line flying over. It made me feel like any sci-fi movie where your entire environment has been purchased and is controlled by corporations. It was a sad feeling knowing even the sky has been claimed by someone now with zero repercussions.

scotty794• 11 days ago

Money is also a voting system. He can decide those things only because people voted for him with their money. The issue is, not everybody has same voting power in this system. But then again people who have more power were voted for previously by others. So it's kind of representative democracy.

bluegatty6• 11 days ago

Good, god, no, money represents the balance of power in a system, there's not thing 'representative' about it from a civic perspective, completely the opposite.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

Compounding interest means, left unchecked, the natural progression is the “voting” power concentrated until there is only a monarch.

A trillion dollars will accumulate $100 billion in passive wealth simply by existing

Dig1t11• 11 days ago

This is incredibly regressive thinking. Any technology or human progress changes the world around us. Do you lament the construction of new buildings or roads because they change the natural landscape? Would you prefer we never explore space or build anything new?

IMO it’s a marvel to look up at the sky and see man made objects flying through the sky, it’s incredibly inspiring to see the great feats of engineering that humans are capable of.

Also if you look up at the night sky you can still see ALL the stars, it’s just that you can now see a few extra tiny dots flying by, it subtracts nothing from the average stargazer’s view.

Your children will get much more amazing and inspiring sights from space telescopes and spacecraft that this new space industry will enable. They will benefit from new science and manufacturing techniques that are enabled by cheap access to space.

when it’s the government

The government had a monopoly on space access for the past half century and barely managed to put a handful of extremely expensive objects in space. They were never capable of creating reusable rockets or lowering the cost of access to space in a meaningful way. Maybe it feels nicer when governments do it, but cheap access to space will never happen if they are the ones running the show.

digitaltrees39• 11 days ago

I am a progressive. But ownership of the commons is something that requires careful policy decisions. The same applies to utilities, the open ocean, wireless spectrum.

We shouldn’t allow monopolies in the name of progress or the monopolistic rent seeking will stifle progress.

The government could have absolutely done all of this and more if there was any commitment to the investment. Instead nasa had its budget gutted.

My kids won’t have a future with any opportunity if resources are so concentrated that their bargaining power can’t have any effect in the world.

dash2• 11 days ago

By this logic we should also enjoy every time someone puts a motorway through woodland. Just look at the human achievement embodied in all that concrete!

noahbp• 11 days ago

I have a hard time blaming anyone other than the internet monopolists and the FCC for this. If we had similar regulations as the UK (you lay infrastructure that serves Internet users, you must also rent this infrastructure out at regulated rates to other ISPs), we could have had a much quicker buildout of high speed internet service, instead of regional monopolies which defeated even the great Google.

Starlink’s total addressable market is only so large because of these monopolies. As sad as it is that astronomy will never be the same, it is a strong net positive for the world that fast internet be available at an affordable price.

mlsu• 11 days ago

I went on a backcountry camping trip last year and was stargazing as one does. Kept seeing satellites. Was cool at first (used to be a rarity) but it got more and more annoying.

And for what? So that we can have more internet? Oh that’s just what we need. To spend even more time online. I’m sure Elon is quite excited for all of us, no matter where we are, we can be plugged into X just like him!

archagon2• 11 days ago

It's inevitable that at some point, a hostile nation will, ah, "disagree" with this laissez faire approach and start launching junk satellites at the Starlink constellation. That should be fun.

notfish• 10 days ago

you can’t see the majority of starlinks with the naked eye, what you’re seeing is either some other constellation or freshly launches starlinks that are still orbit raising. once starlinks are at altitude they actively manage their reflection angles to avoid bouncing light back at earth

rlt3• 10 days ago

You’d probably feel differently if you were one of the 10 million (and growing) Starlink subscribers who previously had worse (or no) high speed internet access.

digitaltrees39• 7 days ago

Most people missed my point. I am most concerned about a single person having a monopoly on satellite networks.

Vertical integration of launch capabilities and use of the satellites is an old monopolistic strategy.

Doubling prices over night is kind of an indicator of a monopoly.

https://www.corporatejetinvestor.com/news/starlink-price-ris...

ozgrakkurt• 12 days ago

It is incredibly stupid that this is happening instead of doing regular cable which works better and is cheaper

testing22321• 12 days ago

If you think cable can be run to the places where starlink is changing to world, you need to get out more.

I’ve seen it in the Canadian Arctic, remote Australia, right around Africa.

Before starlink these places had dialup, or nothing.

andriy_koval3• 12 days ago

Elon mentioned he is building army of robots. This likely could be a way to manage them.

inemesitaffia35• 11 days ago

Who's paying for this cable?

xinayder• 12 days ago

Can't wait for Kessler syndrome to actually become a thing.

cm2187• 12 days ago

Am I right to understand that it will do nothing to big cities, where you share the radio frequency with lots of users just like a wifi? What it the minimum radius where two satellites will not interfere with each others (chatgpt says 40-130km radius if not allocated more spectrum)?

If that understanding is correct it means the addressable market is countryside and transportation (planes/ships/RV). Which necessarily makes starlink at most a fairly modest size ISP in terms of valuation?

HackerThemAll2• 12 days ago

I can't wait until this junk starts to collide and blocks us from making any space flights. This has to happen and probability grows with the square of the number of orbiting satellites.

jillesvangurp3• 12 days ago

People seem to have a poor understanding of just how much space there is up there. It's just very empty up there. And these things are in precisely controlled orbits that are well documented, etc. Even if you simplify your thinking of orbits to a 2D (square area), it's a lot of space.

But that would be a mistake of course. Low earth orbit is three dimensional. Star Link uses several altitude bands of about 20-30km each. It's 330-360km for the v3 satellites. The volume of that is about 17 billion cubic kilometers. About 13x the volume of all the water in the oceans. Accidental collisions are not going to be a frequent thing. These things are going to be many kilometers apart.

lukeify• 12 days ago

Even if you simplify your thinking of orbits to a 2D (square area), it's a lot of space.

This is not a spatial problem. It's an intersectionality problem.

HackerThemAll2• 8 days ago

While you're correct when it comes to calculations, you certainly underestimate the ability for humans to destroy everything around them.

runako4• 12 days ago

My understanding is that Starlink can only service ~6-7 houses per square mile today. The US is ~95/sq. mile on average. 80% of Americans live in "cities."

Anchorage metro is ~15/sq. mile; Yuma, AZ is ~36. The Nashville metro is ~250.

Also, Starlink satellites spend ~70% of their time over the ocean. This will impact the utilization ratio of their gear and force them to launch still more satellites.

AgentK20• 12 days ago

Simultaneously though, those 80% of Americans that live in cities/within the typical commuting distance of a metropolitan area are also the ones that are usually serviced by at least one broadband or fiber provider. Because of this:

- Having slowly-increasing pressure on those often-monopoly broadband/fiber carriers because people have the option to swap to Starlink, adds competitive pressure for them to improve their service, reduce prices, etc

- The remaining 20% of the population that lives on the 60-80%+ of the land who currently have terrible options, but fit well within the density restrictions of current-gen Starlink satelites, suddenly have options

runako4• 11 days ago

Those are solid points. They also describe Starlink as a niche service with a structurally low TAM.

jraby34• 12 days ago

The new satellites are like 100x better.

runako4• 11 days ago

That's great, they still are bound by physics to spend ~70% of their time over the ocean. I would guess ~80%+ of their time is spent where there are effectively no people.

downrightmike7• 11 days ago

In developed countries ISPs and telcos have to open their lines up to competition and homes pay less and have much more choice. We don't need satellites when the fiber already exists, its just hoarded.

sdevonoes• 12 days ago

Always surprises me how people feel identified with progress they didn’t participate with. These satellites have nothing to do with you. You didn’t build them nor researched about them. These are the toys of a far-right asshole. It sucks

hulitu• 12 days ago

100k more – for 100x the bandwidth

I guess some things do not scale. The only thing that humans are good producing, is garbage.

defrost13• 12 days ago

Think of it less as a comms system with a small increase in bandwidth, and more as a radar system with a larger increase in resolution.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A

mparramon5• 12 days ago

Loving this, not loving the negativeness in this thread.

I wonder what the negativists will say about Reflect Orbital, which uses their Eärendil space mirror to light the world.

* https://www.reflectorbital.com/

bigyabai2• 11 days ago

Why do you see things as negativeism vs positivism? Do you not live in a world where good and evil are syncretic? That mindset is bizarre, to me.

My personal experience with Starlink is that it's an expensive LTE alternative. It's not a broadband replacement, the entire thing is pretty clearly a coverup for dual-use technology in low earth orbit:

    Starshield was adapted from the global communications network Starlink but brings additional capabilities such as target tracking, optical and radio reconnaissance, and early missile warning. [0]

Reality doesn't hinge around negativism and positivism. It's a mixture of both, it's unhealthy to pretend that technology only has positive uses and cannot ever have negative side effects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

mparramon5• 10 days ago

I choose positivity, because it allows me to live a happy life.

Regarding Starlink, I like it because it gives people free internet in flights. It gives a friend the possibility to stay in a rural home while being able to work. It gives tens of thousands access to information when there are catastrophes like the Venezuela earthquake.

It makes people being able to live a happy(er) life.

atomicthumbs6• 10 days ago

why do you think "lighting the world" is good in this case

shevy-java2• 12 days ago

I don't think Musk needs any more money.

testaburger• 12 days ago

I read that by syncing up several space telescopes, astronomers can use something called interferometry to make them work together as one large telescope.

I wonder it's possible for Starlink to attach small telescopes on each of these satellites, and if so, if this could lead to a massive PR win for them and a science win for humanity, while at the same time helping to combat any genuine concerns from the public about Starlink harming astronomy. Just an idea (again I don't know if it's possible).

yourMadness• 12 days ago

It's not physically impossible. But the engineering reality isn't promising.

You'd need micro-meter alignment accuracy across the constellation for optical observation. For radio observation it might be possible - but I'm not sure if it would be useful.

Launching complimentary ordinary space-telescopes would also be good PR.

christkv• 12 days ago

I’m more worried about the geo synchronous ones as they don’t degrade and burn up in the atmosphere

meindnoch2• 12 days ago

How much does this cost? Something tells me we could have covered the planet in fibre for the price of these Starlink satellites.

Y-bar• 11 days ago

And: What are the externalities of this? The current 10700 satellites are expected to have a lifespan of about five years. So, averaging these burning up in the upper atmosphere there will be one deorbit ever four hour.

If I were to ask my relevant government regulator if I were allowed to burn the equivalent of a few electric cars every day without capturing/scrubbing the pollution they would laugh me out of the room.

But ”in space” nobody can hold you accountable, so burning an order of magnitude more like this is somehow on the table.

MengerSponge• 11 days ago

It's horrifying. I don't remember acid rain or CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer, but I'm good enough at pattern recognition to see it playing out again.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...

inemesitaffia35• 11 days ago

SpaceX has spent under $30 billion for Starlink.

That's less than maintenance opex for mobile networks operators in the US alone.

meindnoch2• 11 days ago

And how many people each serve?

andyjohnson0• 12 days ago

I was surprised recently to read that the centre-point of the orbits of the starlink satellites doesn't actually correspond to the earth's physical centre. Instead, they orbit around the centre of Elon Musk's ego. As he moves over the surface of the planet, the constellation actually shifts its orbits in response.

alkyon• 12 days ago

I wonder if it would be possible for Starlink to use less reflective materials for their satellites so that the sky is less polluted for the astronomers.

ycosynot• 12 days ago

Sounds like a job for Vantablack

"University of Surrey is developing Vantablack as a coating for satellites in earth orbit, to reduce encroachment upon ground-based optical astronomy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

atomicthumbs6• 10 days ago

They claim to have done that already, with little result. They don't care very much about this.

phs318u• 12 days ago

So over 100K starlink sats and then another 50K mirror sats (see that other HN post). Leaving aside the very tragic destruction of the night sky for observers, I’m afraid for the day we have a cascade of satellite debris events that send us backwards an and pretty much destroy our spacefaring ability.

bilsbie3• 11 days ago

ITT don’t build on earth. Also don’t build in space.

Haven880• 11 days ago

He promised a lot. Really a lot. I doubt it will happen. Still waiting the SolarCity, Gigabattery, 4680, and CyberTruck he promised. Instead I get solar burst. CATL, CATL, recalled and finger cutting. And let's not talk about AutoPilot FSD. Waymo is way ahead NOW. Mars? I double down my invest in Shanghai exchange now.

nova22033• 11 days ago

Don't forget MacroHard

westurner3• 11 days ago

Hopefully LEO constellations can be made redundant with terrestrial comms.

Are there additional terrestrial signal propagation modes that could solve for the same needs as satellite data?

fragmede5• 11 days ago

Nothing with that kind of reach on licensed bands for that kind of money with that sort of bandwidth.

westurner3• 11 days ago

Metrics for comparison?

- dollars/gigabit/time

- dollars/bits/distance/time

gsky• 11 days ago

More trash in the space

j-bos2• 11 days ago

My mom lived with overpriced, underdeveloped, unreliable, and slow internet for years. Now she pays less for fast, reliable, sometimes improving bandwidth that doesn't go down for weeks after a storm. Progress is often gross, but it can be a lifesaver.

Waterluvian• 11 days ago

That’s great and I’m happy for her. Progress should be for all, not just the developed elite hanging out in tech circles.

Alas, Not In My Low Earth Orbit.

inemesitaffia35• 11 days ago

Progress isn't evenly distributed.

That's why we don't deny some access because we can't give everyone. Especially if the dispute is about method

j-bos2• 11 days ago

Dude, she pays for it herself on pension.

And besides:

Progress should be for all, not just the developed elite hanging out in tech circles.

That's... that's basically been the start of every generally available technology that exists today, to benefit of "all."

rayiner10• 11 days ago

A couple of billion people are doing to join the global middle class over the coming decades. They don’t have pre-existing cable and phone networks that have been in the ground for 50+ years they can incrementally upgrade to broadband. Rich countries spend trillions getting to the point where most people have some sort of wired broadband option. If newly middle income countries want to pursue the same route, it will take decades.

Starlink short circuits that process. It means newly minted middle income people my dad’s village in Bangladesh can get broadband now instead of in 2050. Replicate that story all over South and South East Asia and Africa.

stringfood• 11 days ago

but is providing access to internet for billions of people worth not being able to see the big dipper as clearly at night? I say yes, but only just barely

rayiner10• 11 days ago

That's a ghoulish thing to say.

singingtoday6• 11 days ago

This is unironically why I believe lights should be shut off at night. Entire cities.

I'd love to see the sky. Actually see it. Even the most remote places have light pollution, so it's impossible and likely will be going forward.

Maybe it's silly, but it makes me sad.

le-mark• 11 days ago

What percentage of humans are urban dwelling and don’t even see the stars at night? Related there aren’t many places on earth where you can still see the Milky Way. In that way a similar trade off has been made with no forethought whatsoever. Should this time be different? I think so.

gunapologist99• 11 days ago

Rather than deciding for them from your bubble of privilege in your fiber-connected utopia, you could just ask these poorer countries if it is worth trading global full, high-speed internet access for "not being able to see the big dipper as clearly at night".

Or just watch what they do when presented with the choice.

dom96• 11 days ago

What I don't understand is where are the Starlink competitors. Supposedly the UK government owns a stake of 10% in OneWeb and yet they are planning to use Starlink for trains.

Is it really just too hard to put enough satellites in orbit to be competitive with Starlink?

singingtoday6• 11 days ago

Starlink has an unfair advantage and is flown on the economically unbeatable falcons.

inemesitaffia35• 10 days ago

Three issues;

Launch costs

Terminal costs

Satellite costs

As for the UK, it's the devolved governments that are going with Starlink IIRC

SoftTalker5• 11 days ago

Literally building skynet.

l0ng1nu5• 11 days ago

We'll block all of the night sky, deal with it.

josephernest• 11 days ago

Please stop this.

How did we collectively accept that it's ok that a private company can forever change how our sky looks like (especially at night) for the generations to come?

This is so dystopian but it seems nobody cares. The most important thing is to have fast internet to watch cool AI-generated videos.

So depressing.

beanjuiceII2• 11 days ago

i think you need help

weezing2• 11 days ago

The death of astrophotography.

petilon2• 11 days ago

It is very important for an unstable/eccentric person like Elon Musk to be the new AOL and "own the internet", which is what could happen if he launches 100k satellites. Elon Musk will use his power to make political decisions.

Musk has acknowledged withholding Starlink Service to thwart Ukrainian attack on Russia. Musk had conversations with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict, so he made the decision to thwart Ukraine.

Right or not, such decisions should be made by elected representatives, not an eccentric trillionaire.

I am rooting for Blue Origin's Terawave: https://www.blueorigin.com/terawave

hunmernop• 11 days ago

Sign me up! Love the global internet and the tech behind it

guidoism• 11 days ago

I think this is cool and all, especially watching all of the launches, but I don't understand why we aren't all talking about the growing potential of a Kessler Syndrome and are inability to access spaces for a century or so. Maybe I'm completely out-of-touch but it seems like a massive downside for only a small upside.

tw04• 11 days ago

SpaceX needs to claim there’s a need for 100k more satellites to prop up unreasonable valuations. This is no different than Elon claiming Tesla owners would be renting out their cars as FSD taxis while at work (next year, we swear guys!!!)

In a functioning economy he’d have faced criminal charges for knowingly misleading investors and customers about a dozen times over by now. It’s one thing to set lofty goals internally to keep your workforce motivated and innovative. It’s something else entirely to state things publicly with a targeted date when you know there’s absolutely no chance it will ever happen.

odie5533• 11 days ago

I believe he said Teslas are meant to appreciate in value too because you get income from renting them out when you're not using your car. They'll just drive around and work as a taxi while you're not using it.

He's more sci-fi author than CEO at this point.

pstuart• 11 days ago

He's more sci-fi author than CEO at this point.

L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind.

torpid• 11 days ago

Turo (then Relayrides) partned with GM to allow you to rent your own vehicle out while you were at work or anywhere, so it's not science fiction, it was done back in 2012 and the concept was the same, your vehicle will help pay for itself.

Every mile logged by autonomous driving, every accident caused by a human vs autonomous vehicle where the human is at fault, will make insurance companies price risks accordingly. So far, autonomous vehilces doing very well in the cities where they operate.

It's inevitable these two concepts will merge, and it solves many problems with lack of access to affordable transportation especially for those who can't drive. Public transportation can't survive on fixed route, major infrastructure spends like rail and bus and meet the needs of the greatest number of people.

Dig1t11• 11 days ago

Apple announced AirPower and then didn’t end up shipping it. In a “functioning economy” should Tim Cook be indicted for misleading investors? Obviously not.

The only decent argument for the criminal case you are talking about would be if it was an outright lie with no intent whatsoever to deliver on the promise, but there’s obviously a huge effort to deliver on the robotaxi promise. Just ask any of the thousands of employees who work on the Tesla robotaxi and self driving software every day, just visit Austin and observe the ubiquitous cybercabs driving around the city.

They obviously haven’t realized the dream yet but it doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually, especially when you can physically see the progress first hand.

Your argument seems mostly driven by your disagreement with the founder’s politics instead of any rational argument against their technology.

xocnad• 11 days ago

As the comment you are replying to does not, on its face, seem to have a political bia you should be explicit about where/how you identified that bias. Without this you are the one injecting politics not the OP.

DemocracyFTW23• 11 days ago

disagreement with the founder’s politics

Are you talking about the guy who did a double-down Nazi salute to celebrate Trump winning the election?

mixdup• 11 days ago

AirPower would've been a fraction of a fraction of a single percentage point of Apple's accessory sales

Apple is facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit over Siri features it promised, that it would not charge for or make money off of, but didn't deliver

JumpinJack_Cash6• 11 days ago

> Apple announced AirPower and then didn’t end up shipping it. In a “functioning economy” should Tim Cook be indicted for misleading investors? Obviously not.

Apple doesn't have a history of having to pump the stock to survive. Also it's a pretty ubiquitous company and they delivered a pretty life changing product for all of us.

On the other hand Tesla has a history of lying constantly and also life and customer experience is pretty much the same in the sectors of the economy that they attacked , as a matter of fact a 2002 Mercedes (the year in which Tesla was founded) is better in many departments compared to a 2026 Tesla

Danox4• 11 days ago

No Lidar, no chance…

coffeemug• 11 days ago

Would you feel the same way if he attached good faith probability estimates to those claims?

VBprogrammer• 11 days ago

I think there would be no point in making the claim if the probability estimates were truly in good faith.

root-parent• 11 days ago

If Bitcoin...that has nothing behind it, can´t realistically be used for financial transactions, and is essentially just a virtual NFT... can hold at $60,000 for years, So then....SPCX that has nothing behind it, and realistically will never offer any business value that is even 0,01% of expectations...can then certainly hold at $150 for years...

idiotsecant• 11 days ago

Starlink is legitimately bandwidth saturated in a lot of places though. I think the need is demonstrable.

culi• 11 days ago

If you think that's concerning for the nightsky, wait till China's competitor, SpaceSail, tries to catch up.

This is the problem with a private or single nation creating a system like this and then politicizing it or using it for war. It forces other nations to compete.

The night sky shouldn't belong to any individual company or nation. We should all have a say on whether this is something we're willing to give up. Including the more-than-human world

seanhunter• 11 days ago

There is an accounting explanation for this (boring as it sounds). Stock analysts (who don’t want to use their brains too much) often use “EBITDA” (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) to compare companies. The reasoning is that those items can often be used in “creative” ways to make a company look better than it is so strip them out before comparing.

Starlink sats are launched into a decaying orbit so after something like 5 years they burn up and need to be replaced. It is very flattering to SpaceX’s financials to launch lots of satellites if you look at it from an EBITDA point of view because it basically looks like they have a lot of recurring earnings even though 20% per year has to be amortized because it burns up in the atmosphere.

archagon2• 11 days ago

Just as a reminder, Musk's actions lead directly to the deaths of (likely hundreds of) thousands of people in the third world: https://archive.ph/20250629012329/https://www.nytimes.com/20..., https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-f...

Enjoy your marginally improved connectivity!

saddat• 11 days ago

Related : how many days to Desaster https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/

nektro• 10 days ago

we let companies in space way too soon. only NASA should have satellites in the US

tim-tday2• 3 days ago

They should be required to take down one piece of space junk for every new satellite.

SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

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