https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-rocket-launch-monday... ("A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink")
Musks influence into space seems limited, he couldnt prevent proposed budget cuts to NASA (and NASA is SpaceX biggest customer).
In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.
Progress in Earth bound astronomy has the downside of less satellite internet.
We can build better, bigger and more sensible telescopes but we can hardly use those new capabilities if they are impaired by satellites.
Space telescopes are expensive and harder to maintain.
hacker news poster says "my cheap fiber is working just fine, why does anyone need satellite internet", completely ignoring the literally billion people who can't access the internet reliably at all due to infrastructure failures
Of course it is. The next question is "is it a good thing to let a single owner completely control access to this resource?"
We've actually decided in the case of highways and rails, that no, it's not. There needs to be reasonable and non-discriminatory access to these resources otherwise the trade is not worthwhile. We actually have laws that are meant to enforce this.
> the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.
Define the "astronomy community." Do we do first come first served or do we have a priority list? How do we handle disputes? Is it just US citizens or do we need to offer this to the entire world? What if the vendor fails to make good on their concessions? What sort of penalties should surround this system?
There's really nothing "obvious" about this.
If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.
Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?
> people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a rational conversation about the trade offs of these large commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.
It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.
I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people likely fall into the same camp.
As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that the common person whining about "the poor amateur astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are, but "finding any reason possible to whine about billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.
Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not being served before that are now suddenly capable of accessing the internet now that these particular constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's current availability map shows how little you might actually care about this particular outcome.
Even so was this the most affordable and sustainable option for these countries? Was there absolutely no way to achieve both goals at once?
> I don't really care that much.
Noted. We're just picking sides today, I guess. Bummer.
The largest proposed ground observatories already use segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space, it's only a matter of launch cost.
Uh oh.
Anything like that would explain the secrecy...
And I have no clue what is doable with SAR, but I'd imagine multiple satellites following each other would enable some interesting features, as it essentially gives you a giant antenna.
This all was like 20 years go. 20. 20!!
Than I see my upper consumer grade canon camera, a r6mkII with 70-200mm lens (mk1, 20 years old) that is able to make a photo of some dog in high speed motion, with a 1/800 shutter with 200mm while its dawn and you are still perfectly able to zoom into the photo and see and identify a midget [1]
The prototype was called Gorgon Stare[1] and could surveil an entire city at once.
[1] https://www.sncorp.com/capabilities/wide-area-motion-imagery...
The kilogram in orbit is supposed to go down to $1000, and everyone’s joking that it becomes affordable to send a turd to space “for the lulz”. It’s literally the case.
Ariane 5G is already down to 10k$/kg, Falcon 9 is at 6500k$, pricing on https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ and you can literally click “Buy” and enter your credit card number.
I don't think a student is going to be able to afford that any time soon
https://globalnews.ca/news/9818771/university-of-saskatchewa...
https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/09/16/satellite-developme...
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/launch-its-first-satellite-stud...
etc
It’s just a physics problem. Rocket launches are expensive from an energy standpoint. These satellites will have a decaying orbit that requires replacement. It won’t look appealing to most net-importers of energy (which is most countries, but the whole EU might bear the cost for one network for strategic reasons).
Not to mention most countries just don’t operate enough military assets outside of their borders to justify their own network. Non-military applications will be just fine with E2E encryption over public channels. More localized military operations can have communication needs served other ways.
The curse of humanity is having a brain that lets us think too hard about what we want to be rather than acknowledging what we are which is a bunch of mortal animals with finite time spans that like to fuck, make babies, raise families and occasionally we come together and do shit together in the form of work so we can further those three other priorities.
This is just simply not true. For thousands of years, humans have done things that are meant to endure beyond our lifetimes - from building monuments like the the pyramids to conducting scientific research to creating art. Our ability to look beyond the here and now is actually one of the defining characteristics of humanity.
Try to be dead before you have to pay for it.
The "hacker ethic" has been redefined.
[1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-the...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#/media/File:...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Ozone_as_a_greenhouse_ga...
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/technical-summary/figts-0...
It's the negative-side, green (O₃) bar in the third row, "halocarbons". There's multiple human contributions to ozone I don't fully understand, but, *that* one's the stratospheric ozone destruction due to CFC's. (That's not to to say CFC's were good for the climate: as that same row illustrates, CFC's themselves are also ultrapotent greenhouse gases. If you trust the fancy graph, the CFC's direct heating effect slightly outweighed their cooling effect via destroying ozone).
I don’t know if the government implication is as big as you think, as the US government has been doing secure satellite communications for decades and has already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield. So undoubtedly Kuiper would love a piece of the action but there is already competition and Kuiper is a bit late to the game.
Many key things the government buys need to have more than one independent source. This way Kuiper may be just in time.
SpaceX has proprietary info in practically all of their comm layers, so interoperability is not easy. The government probably did not buy full rights to the protocols. So the first step to Kuiper getting a piece of the pie is convincing the government that it is worth paying to license SpaceX’s comm standards so Kuiper can use them. That is not an easy task.
There are a dozen hypothetical ways that Kuiper might get a portion of government programs, but the fact is that SpaceX has been embedding themselves into the US government’s space infrastructure for years without competition, and has used that lack of competition to build up a bunch of technical hurdles to purchasing services from other contractors. For the past several years there has been no reason for the government to spend money and effort to prevent these hurdles because there was no other contractor that might be able to offer a similar service. So SpaceX has got a pretty sweet position right now, and Kuiper is going to have to invest heavily before the government changes course.
Starshield is a separate constellation for the US government and select allies only, and is built and launched by SpaceX.
Metadata security and availability are different concerns.
That might change once lasers or extremely tight radio beams can be used for ground stations, but for the latter you'd still need to make sure that nobody can get reasonably close to your ground stations, which might be possible for remote military bases, but probably not for AWS data centers.
If you have a dedicated circuit, you can send dummy data 24/7 to mitigate any traffic analysis. Even if you don't, you configure each link to send dummy data, so eavesdroppers can't do any traffic analysis without compromising the node itself.
How so? I'd imagine the datacenter terminal side downlink to be much more easily tappable than fiberoptics.
There are advantages in latency and potentially availability, but even there I would imagine fiber to win in an adversarial active jamming scenario.
I suppose in any realistic scenario we should assume that the enemy may be listening to all our communication at all times. This is the assumption behind such daily things as WPA3, SSH, TLS.
Jamming is a much more serious concern.
In the field it's a completely different story, of course – you can't always pull fiber (although it does appear in unexpected scenarios, such as fiber-operated UAVs or torpedoes).
Destroying fiber with a backhoe or an axe doesn't stop interfering when you stop digging or chopping though.
However, it's very easy to cut a fiber in a way that is hard to repair. Fishing trawlers do this all the time. In that sense, fiber can be "jammed" (sabotaged) much more easily than radio/satellite.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spe...
And this is where accountability sinks distinguish two different kinds of people: some will (rightfully) realize that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, so they will do nothing. Others will see also see that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, but they will also see that it will become their problem regardless of responsibility or blame, and so they do something about it.
Unfortunately the latter is often not rewarded or even actively discouraged or punished in corporate settings.
9dev•13h ago
thinkingemote•11h ago
ghaff•11h ago