It’s so infuriating… I occasionally do astrophotography and it’s getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere… Fuck Musk.
I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.
Now I can’t look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.
You can actually see some in broad daylight. I was shocked one day looking up and seeing one (white dot in the picture, verified with sat tracking app).
This photo is AI!
Yikes. This was not a serious comment. I thought that’d be obvious because… it’s literally blue sky with a white dot.
This is how the night sky looks right now:
It’s crazy to think that all this will be privately owned by ultra rich techno-fascists that are beyond any democratic control.
This conversation is a waste of time no matter how much of a nazi Elon is.
This is what the sky would be like in the majority of science fiction. If you want space exploration, there will be space infrastructure, and as time goes on that infrastructure will increase both in amount and size, not to mention the traffic to and from.
It is like complaining about the clutter of the marina while wanting to explore the ocean.
Don’t fall for the clickbait reporting here. Musk has a history of making comically exaggerated claims. There won’t be a million satellites just like there wasn’t a 4000 km/h train, self-driving tunnel network, intercontinental rocket transport or Mars colony.
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
Down with the space clankers
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
While this very well might fuck up land-based stuff looking at space, people are often overlooking what this would mean to stellar photography from space.
If they can truly launch these million data center sats profitably, that means starship works. That means payload to space is relatively cheap.
That means we could also send large quantities of large telescopes into space on the cheap, and avoid the crazy expensive cant fail telescopes because the cost to get them up there isnt prohibitive and a technical failure in the telescope isnt a disaster.
Things very well might change, but it will also open up possibilities in the same area.
Elon will not make it cheap. Falcon 9 prices keep rising. He’s an exploiter and will enshitify his service once enough people are hooked on it.
We’re creating our own “Mini Kuiper Belt”. By the time we’re ready to make interplanetary space travel a practical thing (intriguing but doubtful given present circumstances and trajectory) there will be so much space shit that it’ll be as dangerous as trying to land a plane in the United States today!
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they’re certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn’t mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren’t environmental disasters anymore.
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware in a single satellite.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That’s all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Edit: so his power argument is mostly fine. Different components do dissipate different amounts of heat at the same power. Antennae will not run as hot as GPUs, the fact they radiate power by design helps here. However, even if you could use all a v2 satellite’s power generation for compute, you need 35 sattelites per MW of compute. So at the lowest estimate 35000 for a GW data centre. For 2024 data centre capacity (47 GW computed from 415 TWh used) you need around 1.6 million sattelites. Now you need to network a vast cloud to get reasonable inter GPU performance.
The required orbit would probably mean a whole strip of earth gets insane light pollution, due to the reflectivity of so many sattelites jammed into the narrow orbit. Note that each satellite is about as bright as a star visible to the naked eye.
Edit edit: The lifetime of a data centre GPU is around 1-2 years for serious uptime. The sattelites are meant to have a 5 year lifetime.
Which is why Musk had proposed putting into orbit a million plus sats
Right, but that’s just for present compute capacity in the most optimistic scenario. Neglecting anything realistic, and the fact that starlink cooling isn’t actually sufficient (the sattelites have low power downtime to cool). On top of that the GPUs still die faster than the sattelites and you can’t just walk over and replace them in the rack. Let alone the end of ground-based astronomy or light pollution.
It’s already sufficent to cool 20kw of compute.
When starship goes up it’ll be crazy cost effective to throw them up in orbit and do compute there then to waste the time, money and power on earth
If this actually happens, I will dedicate my life to getting the funding to create a laser weapon that can shoot them out of the sky from Earth.
Then we’ll play Space Invaders for keeps.
Won’t they just become space debris and remain in orbit?
They’d last as debris for about 5 years before falling. Atmospheric drag among other things causes orbital decay that cause them to eventually fall to earth without adjustments.
The unfortunate thing about debris falling from space is that it could hit you or me and we could get killed.
They’re too small and fast for that. They burn up in the atmosphere.
Larger space debris on a different trajectory can, but not LEO communication satellites.
Well there’s still chances it wouldn’t burn fast enough…
You’re not wrong. They’re designed to burn up completely but there have already been failures and documented cases of 2.5kg pieces hitting the ground. The FAA predicts at current trajectories we’re looking at about 1 person hit every 2 years by stray debris. And it’s only going to get worse the more they launch.
Billionaires don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we’ve all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
We’re just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There’s not that many of them.
I don’t see the beginning of anything to rein in the power they get from just being overrich assholes.
Ironically, the only countries on Earth that control tightly (some of) their billionaires are Russia and China. I rememer Vietnam also executed one for tax fraud. Something for which they are barely slapped on their hand in western countries.
