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I’m confused because band pass filters exist. Can they not add a filter to eliminate the frequencies that starlink uses?
Also, the starlink satellites use phased array antennas, guess that wasn’t a great idea either.
Yes, that completely destroys the information in that band. That is the point, the satellites are using these bands, overpowering what was already naturally there.
“Don’t worry, you can just build one on the moon. You can even pay me to use my rockets to get there.” - Elon
Capitalism!
Great. Musk is building a Sophon.
I’m sure Musk is perfectly willing to turn certain constellations off at specific times… For a price, of course.
Fuck Leon Skum
starlink wouldn’t have a leg to stand on (in the US, can’t speak for elsewhere) if isps were held to installing/maintaining/upgrading infrastructure that was already paid for by the federal government decades ago and then the isps just didn’t do the work.
That’s a nice thought, but
- Starlink has no old infrastructure
- Rural and remote customers are difficult to wire up
Even in the best case where US was close to 100% wired up like we paid for, Starlink would have a market in remote areas world wide, RVs, aircraft, ships
The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they’d paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.
If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn’t have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.
We managed to wire up large swaths of rural area for electricity back in the 1930’s
Somehow capitalism has become about more profiteering, self-serving, instant gratification
But also there were no choices. Starlink may be a valid choice and the infrastructure is already there
This, I’m both very rural and in an RV at the same time. Starlink is literally my only means of playing games. The only other even remotely viable option is LTE internet from something like T-Mobile but out here the towers don’t really have much capacity so I might be able to play the game fine and I might just start disconnecting Midway through a match randomly as the internet struggles to even load a basic web page
Welp, I guess we’ll all have to suffer the consequences so that Lordkitsuna can game in the middle of nowhere. Truly first world problems.
https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-reentry-ozone-depletion-atmosphere
I’m just saying blindly calling for it to go away entirely (which i see a lot of on stuff like this) isn’t helpful. Clearly they need to tone down emissions but it’s a useful service.
I work 10hr shifts at work and it’s 1hr 30 both to and from work, moving isn’t really an option for me atm. I don’t think it’s unreasonable I’d like to be able to stream my shows or play games with my friends to relax
lordkitsuna is the answer, dude. more people getting away from the grind of the big machine to live remote lives far from society is the answer. i don’t like starlink either but these networks are crucial for the modern nomad to exist.
Isn’t Starlink also too expensive because you have to replace the satellites every 5 years? As in you’d have to sell to basically everybody on earth to be profitable. And they charge 50Euros a month, almost twice as much as I currently pay, and I’m satisfied with my current provider.
50Euros a month, almost twice as much as I current pay
Wow Canada sucks in in our ISP choices
Cries in long island
I have one option that isn’t 4g wireless crap… It’s $110/month for 500mbps… It was $80/month but they felt the need to make more money by eliminating their lower tiers and “forcing” you to upgrade… I just suddenly had a 500mbps plan and $110 bill without asking them to change anything…
Their target market is people who don’t have a better option, not people who already have fibre to the door.
And those people are famously wealthy.
not exactly. many starlink users are not your grandpa in his $500k RV. it’s the digital nomad in their $5k RV held together by duct tape. some of us would do anything to get away from all the bullshit of modern society, and quite frankly i think the world needs more of us.
I was being sarcastic. I simply don’t believe that there’s enough money to be made selling satellite internet to support replacing a large constellation of satellites every 5 years. Especially since Starlink’s competitors use higher up satellites, meaning they don’t have to replace their satellites as often.
Yes, RV travelers, cruise lines, multiple militaries.
not exactly my friend.
Its their data thats worth money. Now its collectable.
Starlink is expensive, but it’s not that expensive.
And they’re running at a loss.
Don’t forget all the fun chemicals they leave in the atmosphere when they deorbit.
We’re so fucked.
In fact, increasing Earth’s albedo by pumping certain types of chemicals into the higher layers of the atmosphere has been proposed as a possible geoengineering solution that could slow down global warming.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire project was architected as a way to completely sidestep regulatory approval and test geoengineering theories before climate change really starts to pop. Elon and his fellow plutocrats are undoubtedly sociopathic enough to do that.
I think that’s how we end up in a train perpetually circling the frozen earth.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Is it weird I agree these are terrible and yet also hope this spurs the end of ground based observation in favor of a larger orbital presence?
exactly what i was thinking.
We could and should be doing both ground and orbital radio telescope observations. One really interesting idea I’ve seen floated is to put one on the far-side of the moon; it’d be shielded from all our radio emissions but, of course, it would be somewhat suspectable to interference from the sun for weeks at a time.
What I’ve never understood about Starlink is how it’s better than existing satellite internet beamed from geosynchronous craft… like, geosync is crowded (especially over North America and Europe), but it’s not so crowded we couldn’t put a couple more transponders up there. Objects in geosync rarely have the astronomical side effects that Starlink is apparently causing. It would even solve the Starlink issue of having to have an expense af receiver with active tracking… just nail up a stationary ku-band dish that doesn’t need to move ever. This is already solved technology.
The problem with geosynchronous orbit is that you need to be at a high altitude to maintain it. That increases the packet round trip time to a receiver on the ground. Starlink satellites orbit low enough to give a theoretical 20ms ping. A geostationary satellite would be at best 500ms. It’s fine for some tasks but lousy for applications that need low latency, like video calling.
Is there any way to improve that? Or is it a hard limit due to physics?
The geosynchronous satellites are about 650 times higher than Starlink satellites, so the speed of light is a significant limiting factor.
Geosynchronous orbit is 35,700 km (3.57 x 10^7 m) above sea level. At that distance, signals moving at the speed of light (3.0 x 10^8 m/s) take about .12 seconds to go that far. So a round trip is about .240 seconds or 240 milliseconds added to the ping.
Starlink orbits at an altitude of 550 km (5.5 x 10^5 m), where the signal can travel between ground and satellite in about 0.0018 seconds, for 3.6 millisecond round trip. Actual routing and processing of signals, especially relaying between satellites, adds time to the processing.
But no matter how much better the signal processing can get, the speed of light accounts for about a 200-230 millisecond difference at the difference in altitudes.
Unfortunately it’s a hard limit due to the speed of light. Theoretically you could use quantum entanglement to get around it, but then of course you wouldn’t need the satellites anymore.
no, you couldn’t. You can’t use quantum entanglement to send information. Only random noise.
Sorry, I meant theoretically as in “at some distant point in the future where we’ve figured out how to make it work.” I probably read too much science fiction.
In real life, all quantum entanglement means is that you can entangle two particles, move them away from each other, and still know that when you measure one, the other will have the opposite value. It’s akin to putting a red ball in one box and a blue ball in another, then muddling them up and posting them to two addresses. When opening one box, you instantly know that because you saw a red ball, the other recipient has a blue one or vice versa, but that’s it. The extra quantum bit is just that the particles still do quantum things as if they’re a maybe-red-maybe-blue superposition until they’re measured. That’s like having a sniffer dog at the post office that flags half of all things with red paint and a quarter of all things with blue paint as needing to be diverted to the police magically redirect three eighths of each colour instead of different amounts of the two colours. The balls didn’t decide which was red and which was blue until the boxes were opened, but the choice always matches.
Science fiction quantum entanglement is not the same as real life quantum entanglement. Science fiction has spooky action at a distance, real life doesn’t.
The speed of light is the speed of causality, the speed of information. It is physically impossible to send information at speeds greater than the speed of light.
it physically cannot work. ever. That’s just how entanglement works. We know that much.
In the past 6 months, Starlink satellites made 50,000 collision avoidance maneuvers. They now maneuver 275 times a day to avoid crashing into other space objects.
They use an on board AI to calculate the positions, but each time they course-correct, it throws off forecasting accuracy for several days. So a collision isn’t an if, it’s a when, and suddenly we’re in Kessler Syndrome territory. Or maybe enough people will eventually wake up and realize Musk was an actual idiot all along.
But until then, great, low pings for video calls. Hurray.
This is completely factually inaccurate. 2 minutes on Google will help you learn but seeing as how you’ve been spewing crap all over this thread I don’t think it’s worth my time to even bother helping you understand.
Can you debunk it for the rest of us?
Search the web for “star link Kessler syndrome”. It’s well documented. It’s also discussed elsewhere in this thread.
The scale at which we build radio telescopes on the ground simply isn’t possible in space.
Just to add, radio telescopes easily have diameters of several 10 to several 100 meters, you won’t put that easily in space. And even if you do, maybe one, not tens of them. And these are often used in network as well for interferometry to have higher spatial resolution, so that would be gone as well.
A couple of satellites can make a larger telescope than we could ever build on earth, and you avoid the natural interference as well as the the interference from other satellites (star link isn’t the only source of interference…).
Not easily, perhaps. But it’s certainly possibly. We already have space technology for unfolding small packages into large sheets. Not to mention, you don’t need a single 100m collection surface when you can accomplish similar things with many smaller surfaces spaced apart. See the Very Large Array.
Not with that attitude.
Or altitude.
It’s never been cheaper or easier to launch, ironically enough thanks in part to Starlink.
How about we check back in on your comment in say, oh, 5 years, when we become forcibly earthbound, victims of Kessler’s Syndrome? Because by then, a starlink satellite will collide with another creating a chain reaction of collisions, birthing an ever-growing cascading field of Elon’ space debris bukkake all over the Earth’s face.
But hey, Pocket Rocket Boy has got to have an excuse to keep launching so he can continue collecting his government welfare checks. $15.3 billion since 2003 and climbing.
You don’t understand Kessler Syndrome. Starlink satellites are in an orbit that requires maintenance or it decays rapidly. These orbits are used on purpose as they are “self-cleaning”.
Kessler Syndrome doesn’t even mean that we can’t fly through an orbit, only not occupy it for fear of collision. Space is incredibly, ridiculously large, and the chance of a departing rocket being struck by debris is miniscule.
In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower. These things are designed to re-enter in 5 years even in normal service.
I live in rural Canada and Starlink is the only reason I’m able to post this. It’s been a tremendous asset to our lives, and as an aerospace enthusiast I’m all on board as well. As an astronomy enthusiast I’m less impressed but forsee a push into more, larger space telescopes.
In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower
Previous collisions have resulted in debris that intersected with higher orbits. While those debris themselves will decay, if they collide with something in a higher orbit, a significant portion of the resulting debris will be there for a very long time.
Look at the apogees resulting from a major collision in 2009 in fig 3 on page 2
You shouldnt use starlink because you can’t trust the company. Thats unfortunate you can’t get other service.
I’ve never seen an intelligent comment talking about Kessler syndrome, it’s something idiots seem to latch on to and prattle on about in the comments, until someone who has at least watched a YouTube video about it corrects them.
No it’s utterly pragmatic.
The future of space exploration is in space.
If it can interfere with large aperture ground telescopes… it would be a shame if those ground telescopes grew transmitters and started interfering back.
All worth it so lord Musk can push his shitty memes to remote tribes in the Amazon.
What’s up with some meme communities and people not posting memes on them?
This is not a meme community.
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts
It’s called microblogmemes
And? See the description of the community and don’t create fuss out of nothing.
You realize a meme is an image or anything else that’s shared right…? The second you post any image here, it automatically becomes a meme whether you intended or not.
Never miss a chance to milk some of those anti-Elon upvotes
Down em all then. We need a satellite with lasers to take out other satellites: whether it’s Russia’s, China’s, or Elon’s.
Is the majority of high detail astronomy done from earth or is it done with satellites? I’m struggling to understand the significance of this
Mostly from earth. You’ e probably heard of the big names in space astronomy. There’s like three.
Radio telescopes don’t need to be above the atmosphere. We’ll, at least they didn’t before…
Earth has natural interference, the moon, any other satellite…. so yeah they should have always been above the natural interference, they’ve always just “accounted” for it, but who knows how accurate that is. Obviously avoiding the interference is the better option. Any satellite also provides interference, it’s not star link is the only ones here… you don’t think that do you?
They’ve avoided spending the money putting radio in space, for what reason who knows, but there’s always interference here on earth, it’s odd you claim otherwise. There is actually radio astronomy in space, they point it towards earth instead, so take from this what you will, but it’s better away from interference than passing through it.
We don’t do a majority in space because of the absolutely massive size of the equipment needed… The VLA, for example, is 28 different dishes/antennas that are over 200 tons of metal a piece.
The signals that are being measured are absolutely tiny, so much so (and to your point about interference in the ground), that A microwave can cause issues.
The issue with the StarLink v2 is that; they are in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), they emit a lot more than other satellites, and there are a shit-ton of them - which means it’s harder to schedule equipment time around the interference theyre causing. And the problem is only getting worse.
Your comment is very disjointed though, so I’m not entirely sure what your point is.
Huh, the same is done in space, you realize that… yeah?
My comment isn’t disjointed and it’s extremely easy to comprehend, put this shit in space like they always should have been doing and avoid the natural interference, as well as the other interference from the thousands of other satellites, starlink isn’t the only issue and it’s not fixed by getting rid of them…
The same is done in space, you realize that…
No, it isn’t. The radio astronomy done in space is for Gamma rays, x-rays, UV and IR. Things the atmosphere blocks.
What’s done on the ground is for much larger wavelengths (+1m) which, again, requires massive equipment that is currently is not feasible to send up.
The fix isn’t to eliminate StarLink, I agree. The fix in my opinion is to have stricter controls from the ITU about how much interference a device can produce.
Put that shit in space like they always should have
So which is it? It’s already done in space, or that’s the direction we should go?
Even your explanation about your original comment being “extremely easy to comprehend” has two opposing statements.
We actually reserve frequency bands specifically for radioastronomy. No devices can get licensing to transmit on those bands, and anything passing regulations shouldn’t (usually) interfere with it. The bands are chose specifically because their use in detecting certain astrological features.
Well…yeah, but what about the “Fuck Elon Musk” initiative? YOU HAVEN’T THOUGHT OF THE “FUCK ELON MUSK” INITIATIVE YOU BITCH!!
This is the equivalent of the 5G panic, but it suits the perpetually online population better, so it’s totally not a conspiracy theory this time.
He literally came all over the planet and ruined it… More.
