7 ms·
We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionabl
by proee 3mo ago
We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionable value. In 100 years will the sky at night just be a massive grid of dots moving across the sky?
Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.
Edit: Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials. Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms (Making the case for wood satellites).
- s0rce 3mo agoThere is a legitimate concern with space junk hitting useful stuff or even manned spacecraft but I think space is big and the sky won't appear bright soon. Not all satellites are that reflective and they need to reflect the sun, they don't just glow visibly.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- TheJoeMan 3mo agoAt present, I don't believe there are industry standards / codes mandating minimization of reflectivity. My understanding is that SpaceX has engineered for this from their own internal requirements and "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback). As we anticipate a major scale-up of LEO in the future, it follows that "cost pressures" may (mal)incentivize players to skip this concern.
- ralfd 3mo ago> "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback) I hate this cynicism in everything. People didnt work there 10 years ago to be millionaires in a far away IPO, they worked there because they are Team Space.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoNonetheless, the company didn't start the whole non-reflective paint thing until well after the complaints started streaming in, significantly less than 10 years ago (DarkSat launched in 2020)
- birdsongs 3mo agoI think the cynicism is warranted when the CEO was instrumental in the downfall of democracy in the US. Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.
- TheJoeMan 3mo agoI'm not quite understanding, sorry if what I said was misconstrued. You don't think the engineering team considered reflectivity from a moral perspective? I am saying there needs to be some standards set out so that future engineers at unscrupulous companies have something to point at as a requirement.
- saganus 3mo agoIsn't that kinda how we got the plastic pollution problem in the ocean? At first, the ocean seems immense. So much so that dumping plastic and toxic chemicals makes no difference. But then we humans are great at scaling things it seems, such that at some point ocean plastic pollution became a real problem. I know that space is much much bigger than our oceans, but I wouldn't underestimate the ability of mankind to scale launches to the point where debris becomes a problem.
- Centigonal 3mo agoHank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help fund orbital cleanup and internalize the externality of polluting orbital shells. It's an idea that deserves more discourse IMO. Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos
- nba456_ 3mo agoAnd who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
- mukbangpervert 3mo agoThe video discusses this directly.
- LunaSea 3mo agoAny company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
- nba456_ 3mo agoWhat you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.
- jqbd 3mo agoUS can enforce US satellites, no?
- swiftcoder 3mo agoProvided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
- taneq 3mo agoIt’s already starting to be like that. If you get far enough out into the bush away from light pollution and watch the stars for a bit, you can see the grid of satellites orbiting. It’s kind of cool but also kind of depressing.
- bell-cot 3mo ago"Unobstructed view of the stars" will soon be how space tourism companies upsell their customers to higher orbits.
- nba456_ 3mo agoOh great the NIMBYs are coming for space now.
- umeshunni 3mo agoNot Above My Back Yard - NAMBY?
- Matumio 3mo agoNot a grid of dots, a ring! https://earthsky.org/human-world/kessler-syndrome-colliding-satellites/ https://earthsky.org/human-world/kessler-syndrome-colliding-... It's a tragedy of the commons situation. And given how well we are able to regulate those kind of situations globally, I'm rooting for the ring.
- m4rtink 3mo agoIn practice the lower cost of access to space had made it viable to star requiring people to at least deorbit their upper stages, something that was long a no-go, with the excuse being that the extra fuel and redundancy would eat too much into the payload mass. Nowadays it is generally frowned upon if you leave upper stages in orbit or if your satellite fragment spontaneously. There are of course exceptions (like some chinese launches leaving massive core stages in orbit that ten randomly fall back a couple months later) but AFAIK the situations seems to be actually improving due to the added robustness, that was only made possible by cheaper access to space.
- stuxnet79 3mo agoOn the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
- wuliwong 3mo agoThanks for reminding me, I started watching this and forgot about it!
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoI wish clearing out all the CO2 from the atmosphere became a meaningful contributor to global GNP.
- tonic_note 3mo agoSatellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoGravity was not a documentary.
- Lendal 3mo agoIt's already a massive grid of moving dots. You can see it from the ground in certain dark-enough areas, but in order to see it in space you have to get outside LEO, like Artemis did. They don't have lights but they are shiny and they catch the sun, making them easily visible from certain angles, which the Artemis photos illustrated.
- Mistletoe 3mo agoDark night skies will probably be one of the main selling points for the off world colonies. I can see the Bladerunner-esque ads now.
- Rover222 3mo agoIncredible how the first instinct is just to complain about progress these days. The degrowth mindset is really taking hold. There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.
- Grosvenor 3mo agoA major plot point in the Red Dwarf books is about Coca-Cola sending a fleet of space ships out to blow up stars so they can spell "Enjoy Coca-Cola" in the sky. One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
- Dig1t 3mo agoJunk yes, but think of the new science and industry it will enable as well. Microgravity experiments, new space stations, space tourism, new types of manufacturing in space, asteroid mining. Any technology is a double edged sword, but the benefits surely outweigh the drawbacks here.
- cptaj 3mo agoThis is on a similar scale to complaining about there being too many tennis balls on the surface of the earth. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
- notahacker 3mo agoNah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
- dguest 3mo agoI feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves". Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.
- thegrim33 3mo agoExcept everything in orbit is also moving at those same speeds, so the relative speed difference between any two objects is orders of magnitude smaller than that. (Of course, yes, there's outlier cases where that's not as true, but those are the rare exceptions to the rule; the constellations being discussed don't fall into the outlier cases).
- notahacker 3mo agoWell yeah, the relative velocity is what matters, but not everything is moving in perfectly circular concentric shells either. You've got many different inclinations and eccentricities (and drag profiles) within what's broadly construed as "LEO". The relative velocity of the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision involving two satellites in LEO was over 11km/s.
- QuiEgo 3mo agoLEO satellites are the size of a car and are spaced apart by the size of a state. They also all are in slowly decaying orbits and will fall out of the sky on their own accord in 10 years or less (they are designed with intentional structural weak points to break apart and burn up on entry). The concerns you have are valid and very real, and shared by the people designing these things.
- Dig1t 3mo ago>but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"? I find it extremely disheartening how much anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-progress sentiment I read about lately.
- proee 3mo agoPeople are not worried about the mass increase in the entire atmosphere, but very selective layers of the atmosphere (mesosphere and stratosphere). These are delicate layers that are highly affected by nano particles created from satellite burn-up.
- asadotzler 3mo ago>These are delicate layers that are highly affected by nano particles s/are/may be/
- ck2 3mo agohttps://satellitemap.space https://satellitemap.space
- seattle_spring 3mo agoThat map makes it look extremely crowded. Actual relative satellite size is many magnitudes smaller than each of those 1-pixel representations.
- thatoneengineer 3mo agoSpace is big and still very hard to get to. A kilogram of payload in orbit costs several times as much as a kilogram of silver on earth, even after SpaceX's aggressive scaling of capacity. No one's going to be spending that kind of money and effort carelessly. I was more worried about SpaceX becoming monopolistic, so I'm encouraged to see this deal. Don't project your worries about pollution on Earth-- which is a much bigger problem!-- onto space industry which is at a much much earlier stage. The "burning-up" thing sounds extremely speculative, like you're looking around for reasons to dislike this. Space is exciting and inspiring-- and yes, that includes commercial uses, since realistically we couldn't afford to expand science or exploration in space much otherwise!
- rekwah 3mo agoAs long as we can launch a big trash ball to knock the other trash ball away...
- panick21_ 3mo agoA gigantic amount of stuff from space hits the atmosphere. Most not made by humans.
- robocat 3mo agoCosmic dust influx estimates can range from 5 to 100 tonnes daily. SpaceX is launching say ~10 tonnes of satellites per day
- fredsmith219 3mo agoIsn't iridium already in orbit? So there would be no need for new launches due to this aquisition.
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- johnsimer 3mo agofor what it's worth it would take the equivalent of launching 60 trillion cars into low earth orbit to blot out the sky
- johnsimer 3mo agoand that's assuming they are all in the same concentric plane as each other. you could stack them at different distances from the earth
- marcosdumay 3mo ago> Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. That's not clear. There's no empirical evidence of it, and the computer models we have don't have definitive results. Those alarms are not really proper.
- wolvoleo 3mo agoIgnoring problems until they become too big to pooh-pooh away is how we got into the climate crisis. And some countries are still pooh-poohing it away.
- inemesitaffia 3mo agoevidence based alarmism.
- wolvoleo 3mo agoOh now even facts are alarmism. Right.. :X
- inemesitaffia 3mo agoThere's no facts here. I've actually read the paper everyone mentions
- bell-cot 3mo agoAsk a rocket scientist how many up-front tons of CO2 a rocket launch puts into the atmosphere, per pound of will-eventually-reenter satellite mass. This is kinda like how it's "rational" to pooh-pooh away the possible radon emissions from your rock-hoarding obsession, when your house's floor beams are starting to make loud cracking sounds.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- failuser 3mo agoWild that we already see “Kessler syndrome is a hoax” takes. I guess that should have been expected.
- glohbalrob 3mo agoYou are the equivalent person talking about apartment, app store, or website junk 10-20 years ago. and so, you going to invest or complain?
- h4kunamata 3mo ago>Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks. Normal satellites can already be hacked, they provide zero to no security at all. We are already full of ADs, this will be just another hobby for people into hacking. Imagine it displaying a gigantic pe** haha On a serious note, as everything standards, they are already interfering with observations. Wait until we can no longer tell if it is an atificial sattelite or some massive asteroid coming from the direction of the son. Humans are dooming their own existence lmao
- Waterluvian 3mo agoAliens made first contact this week and told us to “knock it off.”
- bilsbie 3mo agoSeems pretty negative and pessimistic.
- ninjagoo 3mo ago> Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials. Is this a huge concern? According to NASA [1], about 44 metric tons of meteors and meteorites enter the atmosphere daily, or about 16,000 tons annually, or about 35 million pounds. Of which 5000 tons is estimated to reach the ground. [2] [1] https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ [2] https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial-dust-fall-earth-each-year https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial...
- tomaskafka 3mo agoI asked Claude to visualize 1M proposed SpaceX satellites in the night sky: https://static.tomaskafka.com/prototypes/1m-starlinks/ https://static.tomaskafka.com/prototypes/1m-starlinks/
- throwpoaster 3mo agoLooks awesome!
- sieabahlpark 3mo ago[dead]